Always with us, like the poor, her father sighed. It was just an expression, applied equally to droughts, punctured tyres, bad-penny types like the clerk of the council who’d been caught with his hand in the till, but Anna fixed on that word ‘poor’. She pictured an ordained society, clean people going about their business, except that among them were the tolerated poor—ten per cent or so—who could be identified by the dark cast of their faces, their grimy hands, their air of shuffling helplessness—if the people around her were to be believed. Just an expression, yet Anna took it seriously. Did her father mean that the poor could not help being poor, and it was therefore pointless for the rich to help them? What of George Catford, discoverer of the Pandowie copper lode, left destitute and unacknowledged apart from his twenty guineas? She’d heard Grandfather Ison, Great Aunt Beulah, Uncle Kitch and plenty of others say that it was their own fault, the poor. No elbow grease, slack bootstraps and something inborn. But, as Grandfather Tolley observed: You can afford to say that if you’re born to rule. I advertised for a shop assistant when I came here at the height of the Great Depression and over two hundred people applied. You can’t tell me it was their fault they were poor. The Isons and the Showalters, they’ve always had a cushion under them. Anna knew of one genuinely poor family. When the Floods moved into the district, people drove past for a look. The Floods rented a house where the Terowie road intersected with the railway line, a redundant railway ganger’s house a car’s length from the level crossing, so that the thundering goods trains broke in upon their dreams. A dark-haired, thin, unsmiling father, a broad-beamed, lardish mother, and nine torn-skinned, restless, grimy children. They struggled. Grandfather Tolley paid Mr Flood to unload the weekly deliveries and the Showalters paid him to clear weeds and stones from their landing strip. Mrs Flood took in sewing. The boy Chester was composed of fleshless cheeks, hard, angular, dusty bare legs and arms, and hatchet-trimmed straight black hair. The smell of him leaked from his gappy pants and holed shirts. Until he got wise to everyone he’d dive for a dare through the fences at school or plunge impossibly from rail to rail down the monkey bars in sharp, black intensity. The father and the children looked half-starved. The mother’s bulk was the bulk of white bread, child-rearing and possibly cheap sherry, although no bottles were found in the ditches at the end of the town, and the family was never seen in the Bon Accord Hotel. The Tolleys were among the few who saw good in the Floods—Mr Flood might have been threadbare but he was always decently turned out, Mrs Flood finished Anna’s ball dress beautifully, and the children were not deliberately bad or stupid, simply reeling from ten schools and towns in seven years. And those children were fast on their feet: if not for them, Pandowie would have come last in the school sports. But the Floods were lightning rods for calamity. Mr Flood was decapitated by a crop duster’s propeller on Showalter Park, and Mrs Flood died soon after, possibly of a broken heart. The children were suddenly grown-up and wary before their time. The government stepped in and placed them with strangers. Only Chester and Violet stayed in the town, wards of the convent. Anna went through the next few years blind to them, until a department car one day came for Violet, and the district buzzed: She was doing it with shearers and shedhands for a shilling a time. When Grandfather Ison died, leaving Anna’s mother nothing and no house to live in, the Tolleys began to enact a life that was like a rehearsal for poverty. The six-forty acres was no Isonville, and now there was a mortgage to boot. Then a second mortgage. No more casual trips to the city; no more little gifts just to say I love you; a second-hand school uniform for Anna, dry-cleaned but still inhabited by a stranger’s body; a vegetable garden; a rickety desk for Hugo from Pandowie Collectibles. For ten years Anna’s father made do with the little Austin. He patched boards as they broke on the tray, replaced bare tyres with worn tyres, decoked the valves himself, let the registration lapse. Once as sleekly black as the Showalters’ Bentley, the little truck faded to the mossy greys of the hillside rocks. He liked to say, after Anna had run away from her school in the city, that he hadn’t known how he was going to afford her fees anyway. But they were not poor, merely careful, and occasionally living on a knife edge. Anna learned more about poverty from Lockie’s family. She was sixteen when she met them and by the end of the summer knew these things: you stole a little—a sheep here and there, a battery out of a car, a can of petrol siphoned from a neighbour’s bulk drums; you let things ‘go’—fences, bores, engines, tyres; you bought on the never-never; cash deals only, no cheques or receipts to bother the tax man; you shot rabbits and pigeons; you did not read, did not travel, did not hope. But still you knew everyone’s business and were afraid of no one, as you smoked and winked and took the mickey in the thick hours of evening, seated around the gouged pine table where family life was lived. Strategies, in other words, not only for putting food in your belly but for seeing you through times of emptiness, when things are apt to look skewed against you. When Anna married Sam it was not only material poverty that her father-in-law forced upon them—ensuring that they would not fritter away all that he’d achieved by the sweat of his brow—but also a poverty of the spirit. If the Jaegers ever laughed, it was grimly satisfied laughter. They wouldn’t allow themselves to spend much in the way of love. Whenever Anna wrapped Michael and Rebecca in hugs and sloppy kisses, she heard disobliging sniffs high above her kneeling body. Sam had inherited his parents’ emotional thrift, but he tried, at least he tried, snatching hugs and pecks from the children when his parents weren’t around. The Jaegers would have robbed the children of wonder and magic if Anna had not been so vigilant. She sang with them on her knee, filled their heads with stories and nonsense, and encouraged them to step into the pictures in their bedtime books. She wanted richness in their lives. In a recent article for the Chronicle, Anna has written: We must recognise and help the hidden poor in our midst. Now she can’t walk down the street without someone staring hotly: I’m not poor, how dare you. Anna wants these people to see their situations with fresh eyes, but she’s fighting a losing battle. Even the most desperate would rather get behind the 150th Jubilee celebrations than be informed that they need not accept their plight. The old-timers say it’s sad to see an Ison turning her back on the district, as though they believe that Anna thinks she’s better than anyone else, and the kids who hang about on the footpath outside the cheerless Community House seem to thrust their lower jaws at her as if to say: What would you know? When Anna retires to the city she will become accustomed to the motionless shapes of homeless men and women. They will be there in the sand dunes, under the jetty, on the leeward side of the breakwater, in kiosk doorways when she goes on her early morning walks, each one uniformly brown-blanketed or grey, their heads hidden, silent as she passes at a respectful distance. Another of her father’s expressions will come back to her: There but for the grace of God, et cetera.