For most of its length the Bitter Wash Road, like any road, scribbled across the landscape in plain view, but for a short distance—linking Showalter Park and Isonville—it wound along the bottom of a gorge. The best-preserved sections of stonewall fencing in the mid-north stood on this section of the road. The locals liked to say that the early Showalters, for whom the road was built, could not tolerate losing good grazing land and so the road was trained along the stony gorge, which was useless for anything else. In Anna’s mind it was the sunken road, a name she’d absorbed from the cradle. Everyone on Isonville called it the sunken road. She saw that it sank from view and supposed that that was how it got its name. But when she took the sunken road into the wider world, she met snideness and incomprehension. Fiercely she defended the name, and cried in frustration: They laughed at me. Her mother swung her on to her knee: Ignore them, sweetheart. It’s just a name Grandpa brought back from the war, after a trench he dug to fight the Germans. The road began at a T-junction on the Main North Road, between the Redruth Gaol ruins and a row of miners’ cottages built for the Cornish Jacks in 1856. First it passed through a region of undersized farm blocks, ten- and twenty-acre patches of erosion and helplessness, fenced tiredly with rusted wire and rotting posts, where clamorous quick families, the Kellys among them, spilled out of fibro houses and balding hens scrabbled among the car parts buried in the dead grass. Between Showalter Park and Isonville the road sank from view, appearing again through an area of small farms, alienated by the Strangways Act into lots of up to six hundred and forty acres. It finished at Bitter Wash, a collection of stone ruins somewhere behind the Razorback. Muddy in winter, corrugated in summer: these were the two constants of the sunken road, no matter how often the district council ran a grader over it. Road signs warned of hairpin bends and rockfalls, but the untried, the careless and the trusting continued to scrape their cars against the stony edges or spin out on the gravelly corners. Everyone had a sunken road story—a cracked windscreen, a blown tyre, a lost hub cap, a near miss, a kangaroo skittled at sunset. The dust boiled thick as talc in the summer months; you’d drive with your headlights on for safety. Sometimes you could sit for an hour by the side of the road and not see another car. One day Mrs Mac made the school-run. She collected Anna and Hugo from the shop at four o’clock, passed the time of day with Grandfather Tolley, said: Home, James, and at four-fifteen felt the rear tyre blow and shred and throw Auntie Beulah’s car from side to side in the gravel banked at the road’s edge. Phew! That was exciting, she said. She got out, looked critically at the tyre, and rummaged in the boot. When was the last time anyone checked this car? she demanded. No wheel brace, and the jack was seized up with rust. Anna and Hugo said nothing, feeling obscurely ashamed. The minutes passed and Mrs Mac began to tap her fingers on the steering wheel. I could do with a drink. Half-past four, a quarter to five, five o’clock. Godforsaken country. I need my head read. She snorted: Her ladyship won’t be pleased. She’ll be wanting her tea in a minute. Anna’s ears burned to hear Auntie Beulah talked about like that. She looked out. A rundown house stood a short distance back from the road. As she watched, children began to drift into the yard from the house. The Kellys. She knew Lockie from school. The Kellys were quick, funny and risky, but that day they stared and she stared back at them and there was no movement in the landscape until the stud manager from Showalter Park found them, thirty minutes later. Vegetation grew thickly on the broad verges of the sunken road—rye grass, wild oats, Salvation Jane, dandelions, soursobs, lucerne, and wheat, barley and oats sowed by the grain-spills from passing trucks. It was understood that a man whose paddocks had been eaten to the bone may take his sheep on to the sunken road and so keep them alive for another day. A welling kind of love rose in Anna’s breast as she read her father’s letter: My darling first born. How are things at the varsity? Your old man’s sitting in the ute again, pad propped on his knee, minding the sheep in glorious spring sunshine. We could do with a good soaking rain (where have I heard that before, I hear you ask). The feed at the side of the sunken road isn’t going to last forever. Anna read through to the end and his voice was in her head, the smell of sunbaked earth and air in her nostrils. She went to the college payphone in the corridor outside her room: Mum, I’m coming home for the weekend. Can you pick me up at the station? She called another number: Mrs Kelly? Tell Lockie I’ll be up for the weekend. When Anna’s son was killed on the sunken road, Carl Hartwig wrote in the Chronicle: It’s time the Council did something—sealed it, straightened the bends, put in guardrails, anything to stop these senseless deaths. But what were you doing on that part of the road anyway? Sam wanted to know. It’s miles out of your way. It was a fair question. Anna supposed that she deserved it. Wariness in her daughter’s eyes, reproach and suspicion in her husband’s. The sunken road is to be sealed soon, a gift from the government in the lead-up to the town’s 150th Jubilee celebration in the year 2000. Money talks, Anna says. Do you think funding would have been approved by junketing MPs if our application had gone in after the Park and all its millions had gone belly-up? But Sam is jubilant: This is a feather in our caps. We could time the opening ceremony to coincide with the Jubilee Parade. When Anna visits from the city in the years to come, she will drive along the sunken road and be struck by how broken-down it’s become, the bitumen holed, buckled and unloved now that the Showalters are long gone and the Council is strapped for cash. She will be blasted off the road once or twice by tour buses heading back from photographing the wildflowers around the claypans on the dark side of the Razorback, and feel her heart leap into her mouth again, no fun for an old woman.