When Gino joined the train, the woodcutting zone was thirty kilometres from Gwalia. He was lucky, because in that area it was fairly easy to reach the sixty tons a day minimum. In a different area a couple of months earlier, he was told, the men had had to work really hard to achieve it. In fact for several days the contractors had pushed for that particular stretch to be passed over, but subsequently things had improved and the line continued without any gaps.
For the mine, any kind of timber would do. But there were only a few types of trees growing in the area and most of the wood came from the mulga tree, which didn’t grow very tall: in fact it was almost a bush, with a thick tough trunk characteristic of the region.
While they were cutting Gino found some animal skeletons, mostly ka
