Absorbed by Anna from the cradle: The first Showalter had come from India, the first Ison from Natal, and both from the Home Counties before that, and so their occupation of the redsoil country at the edge of the rain shadow was driven by notions of rural England and the hazardous frontier. They placed their sheep in the care of shepherds, marked their boundaries with stonewall fences, employed blacksmiths and scullery maids, drew water from boarded-over wells, fired carbines from the saddle, warned off the wretched Ngadjuri who camped on the banks of the dividing creek, and at the day’s end sat erect in cane chairs on their cavernous verandahs, watching the sun settle upon their pastoral runs. The hard ground was not entirely flat. The Razorback sat like a chiselled city on the grassy plain, small, pink, wind-humped hills marked the horizon, and the dusty roads dipped unexpectedly through sandy creekbeds. In 1869 the Strangways Act opened up the land to yeomanry, and among the farmers who sowed their six-forty acres with wheat and barley were the Jaegers, the Hartwigs, the Heinrichs and other Silesian Germans. Shopkeepers and publicans followed the farmers, staging tiny dazed towns every twenty miles or so across the newly cleared grazing land. They measured the breadth of their streets by the turning circle of a bullock-drawn wagon, and erected a pub, a general store, a bank and a post-and-telegraph office at the four corners of the crossroads. Houses straggled behind these hubs of commerce. In winter the streets were churned mud, in summer iron-hard, deeply rutted under a layer of dust. There had been huts along the Pandowie Creek as early as 1843, when Colonel Frome was surveying the northern reaches of the colony, but no town until 1850, the year that George Catford spotted traces of copper oxide in the local stone. South Australia might have foundered if not for Pandowie and its mine. Twenty years later the shafts were depthless blue pools of water that defeated the pumps, and the Cornish Jacks migrated to other towns, other mines, but not before the hillsides and flatlands had been denuded of trees, the timber consumed by the boilers or stacked against the pressing earth deep within the mineshafts. Great Aunt Beulah Ison had learned some of these things at her grandfather’s knee. She waved her papery hand over the treeless plains: Anna, dear, this used to be scrub for as far as the eye could see. The shepherd boy had drowned ten years before Beulah was born, but she knew for a fact that the father was the last man transported to the colonies and the mother was a riverbank gin. The etymology of the owie suffix in Pandowie, Terowie and other placenames was quickly forgotten if ever it was known, the children of the mid-north—including Grandfather Ison and his five sisters—meeting their first blacks in the pages of their school primers. Grain and high-grade merino wool poured into the whistlestop railway towns in heaving, topheavy wagons until the 1920s, when spoke-wheeled Ford lorries replaced the bullocks and horses and the whip-lashing, cursing men who drove them. By now Pandowie was a pastoral town in the shade of the stony Razorback. The main line pushed northward through spinifex, bluebush and saltbush country, where a hillock might be named Mount Misery or Mount Remarkable and the topsoil conceal rock-bound traces of silver, lead, zinc and radium. In a few days you were in Darwin. The traffic was all one way in 1942, all guns and soldiers. General MacArthur stood on the Terowie platform and growled: I have come out of Bataan and I shall return. Grandfather Tolley’s shop prospered with the town, and the wool boom meant plenty of work for stock agents like Peter, his son. The Showalters and the Isons did well out of the Korean War: all that soldiering in icy winds and snow, all those woollen coats and scarves and gloves. It was said that old Leonard Showalter carted clover hay for his stud rams in the boot of his Bentley at the time; certainly he did not bother to deny it. It was generally known in the district that he’d played polo with governors, colonels and visiting earls, and that the Princess Royal had stayed at Showalter Park when Showalter was a baby. But he was a bony, chin-damp wreck and close to death when Anna assembled with the other kids to hear him address the school on Empire Day: Mr Showalter is a link to our past, children, and Anna watched the old man hawk and spit and shuffle his feet, his mind beginning to cloud, a look of panic settling over his stretched white features. I remember, he said, and abruptly stopped, his gummy mouth snapping closed, mute and defiant in the gathering silence, while the children breathed, sulphurcrested cockatoos screeched in the nude dead gums behind the Chronicle office, and a car passed through on its way somewhere east or west. Old farming couples too old for heavy work retired to Californian bungalows in the town, where they grew roses and sweetcorn in soil nourished with sheep droppings raked from beneath the slatted floors of woolsheds and soaked with river water pumped overland from the Murray. They raised money and built a clubhouse, and rolled and seeded and mowed a couple of bowling links between the almond trees on an unused block behind the Copper Lode Tearoom. But still they felt half- useless. They longed for the merino-stud field days in April; they took the Women’s Weekly tour to London; they meddled in the affairs of their married sons. Their bones ached. They wore wristbands of beaten copper that had been mined last century from the ground beneath their feet. On Saturday afternoons, when the last wobbling ball had been bowled, they wandered off to the Bon Accord Hotel in Market Square. Anna liked to drink there with Lockie and Chester whenever she came home between semesters, the three of them seated in the tiny lounge, close to the open fire. The sticky walls were dark with photographs of Showalter Park stud rams, the biggest and most valuable in the world, ribbon-draped at the Royal Show, the studmaster’s hand inches deep in the wool upon the heavy back of the latest champion, Pandowie Showalter Lustre 4, which had sold for $30,000 in 1969. Anna said: You could refuse to register for the call-up, you know. Go underground. There are people who would hide you. Lockie and Chester looked at her humorously, searching for the joke. I mean it, she said, ignoring their mates, who were calling off-colour jibes at her through the serving hatch, ignoring the angular, eruptive high school boys, who were slamming billiard balls off the tiny corner table and across the cracked floor. You been listening to too many stirrers, Anna. For her Chronicle column this week, Anna writes: The old ways are disappearing, turning upside down. A Saudi Arabian conglomerate has bought Showalter Park, there are no jobs for the young ones, and there’s more money in angora goats than in merino sheep, in legumes than in wheat. Anna will settle in a house by the sea after her husband dies. Whenever she returns to Pandowie to mark the changes, a voice, a gait, a peppercorn tree, a sun-warmed verandah post will take her back, pleasure and pain in complicated doses.