Explore "The Black Opal" by Katharine Susannah Prichard on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Darling pea was lying in purple and magenta patches through the long grass on the tank paddock when Sophie went with Ella and Mirry Flail to gather wild flowers there.
Wild flowers did not grow anywhere on Fallen Star as they did in the tank paddock. It was almost a place of faery to children of the Ridge. The little ones were not allowed to go there by themselves for fear they might fall into the waterhole which lay like a great square lake in the middle of it, its steep, well-set-up banks of yellow clay, ruled with the precision of a diagram in geometry. The water was almost as yellow as the banks, thick and muddy looking; but it was good water, nothing on earth the matter with it when you had boiled it and the sediment had been allowed to settle, everybody on Fallen Star Ridge was prepared to swear. It had to be drawn up by a pump which was worked by a donkey engine, Sam Nancarrow, and his old fat roan draught mare, and carted to the township when rainwater in the iron tanks beside the houses in Fallen Star gave out.