The children constructed a banner, ‘Harvest Thanksgiving’ picked out in scissored silver-foil letters glued to a length of castoff velvet curtain. Their mothers dressed them in white tunics fashioned from bed linen and they wore leather sandals upon their feet. Crowns woven from straw, daisies and green crepe paper capped their skulls. Clueless, dutiful, faintly Roman and pagan, the children of the Sunday School waited for Mrs Morehead to strike the first chord on the pedal organ. They heard a wheezy blast of air, the snicker of the unoiled pedals, then a stately hymn full of weighty flourishes rattled the windows, and someone, the minister’s wife, nudged Anna to lead the others down into the body of the church. Her feet glided, her back was like a reed, her hair crackled in the electric air. She sensed the vast spaces under the ceiling beams, the foolish, melting faces watching from the pews to her left and her right. In her cradling arms she carried counter-stacked sheafs of wheat, oats and barley. The boy behind her carried a bundle of loaves, Maxine behind him wedges of butter and cheese on a tray. Hugo carried honey, another kid a basket of eggs, others jars of jam, pickles and stewed apricots. Anna paraded to the front of the church, paused at a tier of planks decorated with butcher’s paper, and stacked the sheafs of grain in a golden sunburst pattern against the white, exactly as instructed. She stepped to one side and took up her position beside the display. She watched the other children file down the aisle toward her. They were trampling one another’s heels. It was not that they were unused to parading—they did it every day, marching into class to the beat of a slack pigskin drum—but they were unused to parading slowly. The first television set in the district was installed at Showalter Park. An antenna tower twice the height of the chimneys shone like a galvanised Eiffel Tower next to the stone cellar at the rear of the homestead. The invitation was for children under twelve. Anna sat at the back, the polished floorboards cold under her thighs, and stared out above the heads of the little kids. A bit snowy, said Mr Showalter, fiddling with knobs on the side of the cabinet. The floury images on the screen sharpened a little and he stepped back from the set. He stayed for the duration of the Christmas Pageant broadcast. In fact, Anna saw the gardener, the overseer, the stud manager, a few mothers and the cook standing behind the rows of children slackjawed on the floor. She turned her attention to the screen again. Floats, clowns, a pipe band and marching girls paraded past the cameras: Anna could feel her feet high-stepping, pointing, toe-spinning along the streets of the city. Only thirty people turned up for the march on the Raintree Corporation. It was a bad time of the year: October rains, examination blues, the risk of getting roughed up. The thirty paraded in a tight bunch, five abreast, along the centre line of Frome Street. Some carried banners attacking the government, others supported the National Liberation Front. Anna’s banner read: ‘Join the army today. Travel to exotic, distant lands, meet exciting, unusual people—and kill them’. The wind howled down Frome Street and twisted the banner in her hands. She saw unmarked police cars draw up beside and behind the demonstrators. There were vans at the mouth of the street. An amplified voice broke up in the wind: ...an illegal gathering... the street... or arrested. When her children were toddlers, Anna liked to walk with them to collect the mail at the end of the Jaegers’ long, rutted drive. They made slow time, the children ranging restlessly off the track or squatting to peer at ants and flint-chips gleaming like diamonds in the dust. One day their little procession met another one, a small back-blocks circus grinding past the gate. The children froze, their arms shot out: Look! A lion and an elephant in painted wooden cages, a couple of rusty cars, a lorry stacked with canvas and poles for the big top, four caravans jerking and hunting like tethered whales at the tow bars of three station wagons, and a converted milk van. The circus creaked by so slowly that the dust failed to stir, and Anna and the children saw clearly the expressionless profiles of the dark and fleshless secret people who run circuses. Anna collected Rebecca outside the high school gates and drove her to her cello instructor’s house in Clare. She parked the car in the street, watched Becky enter through the side gate, and opened the newspaper over the steering wheel. They did this twice a week. Becky was Conservatorium scholarship material, according to the woman who instructed her. Today Anna was fidgety. She put down the paper, unfastened the catch on her daughter’s satchel. Becky wrote with a small, precise hand. She did not doodle on her covers or in the margins. She gave nothing away to snoops. Anna sighed, pulled out one of Becky’s textbooks. Becky had flagged an illustration: ‘Wellington’s troops on parade, Busaco’. Or perhaps she had flagged the accompanying text: English maps showed the sunken road but the French maps did not. From such discrepancies battles may be lost or won. The Iron Duke moved his troops unseen along the sunken road and in time was victorious in this stage of the Peninsula War. There have been eight Pandowie Showalter Lustre rams produced by the studmaster at Showalter Park. Lustre 7 sold for $60,000 in 1985. Anna saw Wesley Showalter lead Lustre 8 in the Copper Festival’s grand parade around the town oval last year. Ram and owner looked topheavy. Broken blood vessels mapped the skin on Wesley Showalter’s face and the blue and gold prize ribbon around the animal’s shoulders had slipped and was dragging in the mud. They led the parade and were slow, too slow, so that a utility from the Holden dealership stalled, horses pigrooted and the high school band concertinaed into the rear of the float entered by Tolley’s Four Square Store. There won’t be a Pandowie show this year, now that Showalter Park has collapsed and the banks are trying to find buyers for the frozen straws of semen from Lustre 7 and Lustre 8. The 150th Jubilee Committee is clear about one thing for the Year 2000 festivities: the town will stage a procession along the Main North Road, starting at the railway station, passing through the town and finishing at the oval. Period costumes to mark the generations. Anna will drive up from the city and watch the parade from the verandah of her mother’s shop. At least she will do that.