Saturday Morning With Jack Tame

‘Paddy is a black sheep dog, but is no good for sheep. Daddy says we have spoilt him. We have a big bell near the kitchen; Paddy will jump up at it and ring it with his nose. The cook gets cross with him because the men often come for their meals before they are ready. We taught him to do it.’ My Dog Paddy was published in the Australian Correspondence School Magazine in 1935. It was written by an eight-year-old girl, living on a remote sheep station in the South Australia outback. The Magazine credited her as third-grader Barbara Kidman. I know her as Granny.  I spent this week with her in Adelaide, the first time I’ve been able to visit Granny since the start of the pandemic. The 8-year-old author of My Dog Paddy is now 94. And on my last evening with her, she fetched a plastic folder with photos from those early years way out in the middle of nowhere, a child mucking about in the red and the dust.  “I remember being scared when I heard rainfall on the roof,” Granny told me. “Just a normal rain shower. It w