May 14

Walking up to this outcrop with Great Grandmother has become a daily habit. I help my friend in the morning. We shake the bedding, wash the children in the lake and prepare some food for the day. But the afternoons are for her. My friend is happy to see us together. She does not want her wandering off alone.

​ I ask Great Grandmother what memories have stayed with her from those summertime gatherings up here among the rocks.
 
‘Of course in those wartime summers we mainly talked about our daily concerns – sicknesses or injuries, the condition of the herds, our saddle sores.

But as I looked back in later years on those summers I realized that something quite different and more important had begun to root. Simply because we were managing by ourselves up in the summer pastures, over the course of those summers we women came implicitly, without putting it clearly into words, to challenge our traditional place and role’.
 
‘I don’t think that the elder women realized how much my generation of young teenage girls absorbed this sense of questioning of what had traditionally been a masculine dominated world.

​For the older women the direction of their lives had been already set. But, for us younger girls a question had been seeded in our minds that would never leave us’.