Explore "A Rough Shed" by Henry Lawson on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
A hot, breathless, blinding sunrise -- the sun having appeared suddenly above the ragged edge of the barren scrub like a great disc of molten steel. No hint of a morning breeze before it, no sign on earth or sky to show that it is morning -- save the position of the sun.
A clearing in the scrub -- bare as though the surface of the earth were ploughed and harrowed, and dusty as the road. Two oblong huts -- one for the shearers and one for the rouseabouts -- in about the centre of the clearing (as if even the mongrel scrub had shrunk away from them) built end-to-end, of weatherboards, and roofed with galvanised iron. Little ventilation; no verandah; no attempt to create, artificially, a breath of air through the buildings. Unpainted, sordid -- hideous. Outside, heaps of ashes still hot and smoking. Close at hand, "butcher's shop" -- a bush and bag breakwind in the dust, under a couple of sheets of iron, with offal, grease and clotted blood blackening the surface of the ground about it. Greasy, stinking sheepskins hanging everywhere with blood-blotched sides out. Grease inches deep in great black patches about the fireplace ends of the huts, where wash-up and "boiling" water is thrown.