garment and textiles by dheborah
I shared a house with one of the local doctors while living in a small mining town in my first few years in Australia. One of his chickens became worryingly ill and simply stopped walking. The other chickens bullied her and pecked at her constantly. Someone at work advised me to try red cordial so I asked my house-mate to get me a large bottle of red cordial and I tried it.
Each morning, I would walk up the orchard hill with the chicken under my arm and place her in the shade under one of the apricot trees with a large bowl of cool raspberry cordial. I would then collect the chicken in the evening, sometimes in the dark, and carry it down the hill with a bucket of chicken feed. The others would follow me down the hill and settle for the night in their boxes. The sick chicken began to improve after about eight or nine days and she was soon able to amble up the hill herself. From then onwards, every day I would find a small brown egg in her nest box.
Whether it is true that red cordial is great for sick chickens…I don't know… I never asked her and she never told me. For the mere price of a bottle of red cordial, we always had her beautiful eggs in the fridge. She didn't die of old age, though - a few year's later, the owner came home from work to find that a neighbour's dog had spent the afternoon chasing and tearing up the chickens into bloody, feathery pieces ... none survived.
