In 1853 Walter Ison noted in his journal:
There are persons hereabouts that wold take your life for an ounze of gold if you was not well upon your gard. One such blackgard goses by the name, Sydney Dan. I have nuggets to the weight of twenty pound strapt around my waist, over which I wear a blue serge shirt and a leather jerkin. I was fortnate in meeting with a compny of Adelaide men, who, like myself, are returning from Ballaarat to spend the Christmas. We have abundance of firearms at the ready, and watches by turn during the night. By day we march to a song, in militry fashion, at intervals firing a voley into the sky. I have a mind to lease another run in the Mid North but Hugo is desirous to increase our flock. I daresay that we soon at logerheads shall be upon this matter.
Lives of desperate loneliness and hardship, wrote Mr Wheelwright, in a copperplate hand, line after line filling the blackboard. Heads bobbed up and down like a sea-chop in the classroom. Pens crawled across the pages of exercise books. At least copying was better than dictation, for Anna liked to dream, and when she dreamed she lost whole sentences, whole facts. In 1875 a shepherd lost his son in Ison’s Creek. Anna, no one knows for sure who he was. Some say he was a ticket-of-leave pickpocket from New South Wales. Others will tell you he was a free man, born in Somerset, a shepherd all of his life. It’s also been said that he was from Maryland, a veteran of the American Civil War, or that he’d run with Joseph Storey and the Blackfaced Robbers, stealing cattle and raiding homesteads near Adelaide before it got too hot for him. Some of the squatters lived on the land; others were absentee landlords with grand houses in Adelaide. The term ‘squatter’ has been replaced by ‘grazier’ or ‘pastoralist’. The Strangways Act of 1869 alienated the large leases and so a pattern of closer settlement evolved in the mid-north, resulting in the small to medium-scale agriculture and grazing that we find today. Pens down when you’re finished. Anna’s father took to farming when the little family was forced out of Isonville. Peter Tolley had grown up in the town, where all he knew about farming was that farmers bought barbed wire, wool-clipping shears and raddle from his father’s shop. He joined Stock & Station when he was sixteen, sweeping, running errands, helping in the stockyards at auction time. He was taught to memorise the local brands and ear-tags; to part the rubbery lips of merino ewes and judge their ages by their teeth; to run his eyes over their haunches and his hands into their fleeces. By the time he was twenty he was doing the rounds with the older stock agents, assessing flocks, buying and selling skins, arranging clearing sales. That’s how your dad and I met, Anna’s mother said. He came around one day to look over some hoggets that your grandpa and your Uncle Kitch were selling, stayed for a cup of tea, and it was love at first sight. When Anna was seventeen her father seemed suddenly to clarify in her mind: A town kid, a newcomer to the district, mother taken by a shark, father gloomy, being ordered around the countryside by all those farmers. Did he envy the Isons? He didn’t look like a farmer, even when he bought the six-forty acres and dressed and worked like one. The legions of farmers. If not tall, scarecrowy dustbowl survivors, they were gnomish, glum little grey-gaberdined portly men belted high at the waist, with over-large greasy hats upon their skulls and tens of thousands in the bank. You couldn’t get a laugh out of many of them. Not like her father, tall, sinuous and graceful, always ready with a grin, always ready to pull over for a yarn on a back road. Then there were men like Lockie Kelly’s father, who ran a handful of question-mark sheep on a handful of mortgaged acres, drove the council grader and were married to wheezing large women given to braying, phlegm-laden laughter around wooden kitchen tables. Anna married into the Jaegers, farmers on the Terowie Road. On the day that Sam first drove her home to meet his parents, they climbed in low gear along a dirt track from the front gate and came to the lip of a gully. Anna looked down, upon feed sheds, tractor sheds, a stone house, a battery-hen shed as long as an ocean liner; upon gleaming metal roofs and squared-off garden beds and orderly fences; upon bulk fuel tanks standing on galvanised legs like machines for traversing the wastes of the moon. You’ll be working with the eggs, her father-in-law told her, shortly after her honeymoon. Collecting, grading, packing. There’s quite an art to it. In bed that night, Anna leaned on her elbow: Nothing was said about my working in the chook shed after I married you, Samuel dear. Sam winced; winced was the only word to describe his contortions: It’s kind of expected of us to all pitch in. I see. And how much do I get paid? He winced again. When Grandfather Tolley died in a room behind the Four Square Store in Pandowie, Anna’s father called a family conference: I’m quitting the farm. I have to confess, my heart has never really been in it. He looked at Hugo, at Anna: Your mother and I have decided to move into town and run Dad’s shop. Anna love, Hugo will take over the farm, but I want you both to realise you get equal shares of it, and of the shop, when your mother and I finally kick the bucket. But Anna was the last daughter on earth to get into a fight over inheritance: That’s fine, Dad, I understand. Hugo: I can’t pay you anything. Anna: I don’t want you to. In the kitchen afterwards, Anna’s mother whispered: It’s been wearing him down for years. Plus he and your brother are always arguing. Do it this way. No, do it that way. Spend money on this. No, spend it on that. Your Dad’s a bit too slapdash, really, whereas Hugo’s too careful—though I suppose that could mean he’ll make a go of it. Anna can’t leave the Showalters alone, a year after the collapse of their sperm-bank scheme and the loss of investors’ money. She snipes at them in her Chronicle column: Grazier. Doesn’t that have a nice solid ring to it? Once you’re a grazier you may paint your surname in broad strokes upon your rooftop and be seen from the air by buyers flying in for the field days. If you’re especially grazier-ish you can afford to renovate with Carrera marble and Laura Ashley drapes. I don’t know, Anna, Carl Hartwig says, shaking his head over her copy before press day. You’ll get me sued if I publish this. The bank will foreclose on Sam and Anna. Sam will elect to stay on as manager, a deal brokered by the bank and the new owner. Sam will say: What else can I do at my time of life? Where else can we go, Anna? He’ll argue with the new owner, a man keen to try angora goats, legumes and peas. He’ll say to Anna, late at night, perplexity and disappointment permanently knotted together on his brow: I mean, this is wheat and wool country. Anna will stick it out, and when Sam dies she will move south to the coast, where her sun-narrowed eyes in a nest of wrinkles will mark her out as a farmer’s widow.