This funny, jouncy old goggle-eyed truck was called a buckboard. Anna liked the sound of it: buckboard, buckboard. At the bottom someone had printed, in scratchy black strokes with a broad nib: ‘Setting Out, October 1920’. The children wanted to know where Grandfather Ison was going, posed like that with one foot on the running board of his buckboard. He was unrecognisable, every feature leached from his face by sunshine and over-exposure, and the photographer—Grandmother Ison?—had caught her own shadow in the white foreground. Anna traced her forefinger over his supplies, a number of boxy tarpaulin shapes heaped on the tray top together with coils of fencing wire, a crosscut saw and axes. He had hooked a corked jute waterbag beneath a bulbous headlight. Must have been quite a journey, Anna said, and saw her mother’s eyes lose focus and swim down the decades to a time of pain. The children strained to hear her: Something terrible happened. Your grandpa was very bitter after the war, felt he’d been cheated out of his rightful inheritance. He took up a block in the mallee country, sight unseen, and was supposed to send for us but he never did. No town, no post office, no one to inquire on our behalf. The weeks went by. My poor mother: she bundled Kitch and me together and we took a train to Pinnaroo, borrowed a horse and cart, and drove off into the scrub, looking for him. He was deranged when we found him, almost out of food and water. It was awful land and he just lost heart. He felt he’d failed us and was too ashamed to come home. Anna sighed. The leaves of the album were cardpaper the colour of charcoal, and she prowled through the years. Grandpa Tolley, looking tall, thin and high-strung, one hand propped on the bonnet of his wartime gas-burning Austin; the family’s new Zephyr roofracked with cases, beach balls, buckets and spades; Hugo overflowing his pedal car on the side verandah at Isonville. The main street of Pandowie was one big verandah to Hugo, that’s why Anna always clasped his fingers tightly. He yanked, she yanked back, almost wrenching off his arm, just as Mr Showalter blared by in his glistening black, snout-up Bentley, drunk again, missing them by inches. The Showalters were loved because of that car and hated because of it, often in the same breath. When the Redex Trial passed through the district, two cars rolled on an elbow bend in the sunken road, leaving angry paint scars on the cutting wall and an impression in everyone’s ears of glass splintering, metal peeling open. One by one the girls in Anna’s class turned sixteen and one by one they began to ride in the passenger seats of their boyfriends’ utes, falling naturally into an easy, sleepy, casual acquiescence as if they belonged there and had never not been there. Anna loved the smell, compounded of sun-baked vinyl, grease and Lockie himself. She would not be two seconds in his passenger seat before she bared her legs, propped her bare feet on the dashboard and planted her hand on his thigh. They both loved the liberated, elastic, half-zed of her legs. Later, whenever Anna drove a car, she noticed that a man would never settle comfortably in the passenger seat. She drove Lockie’s ute to the Wirrabara Dance and he crossed and recrossed his legs, folded and refolded his arms. She drove the tutor to the Law Revue and he rode as though in alien hands, as stiff as rope. One of the many things that Anna’s father-in-law controlled was the cost and type of car that she and Sam would drive. Mr Jaeger would come to her, waving a list of figures in her face: According to the speedo, you’ve driven three hundred miles since last Tuesday, two-ninety-five the week before that. How come? Where would you be going, to clock up that sort of mileage? Surely not your job at the Chronicle? Young wives, they shop three times a week when once should be enough. Always dropping over to see their mothers. Do you think we’re made of money? I’ve a good mind to padlock the bowser. Anna told him that she had a good mind to padlock the car so he couldn’t spy on her. Showalter Park has gone to the wall now and the receiver is selling off the property’s vehicles. Trucks, utes, vans, station wagons, all in good nick. Unfortunately, however, even despite a fresh paint job, the Showalter Park logo seems to persist, like a bad memory, on many of the driver’s doors around town. Anna has seen her mother delivering groceries in an ex-Showalter Park pick-up, faintly embarrassed and faintly defiant, as if to say that she hadn’t circled in at the kill when the Park went under the hammer, but so what if she had?—the Showalters had brought a lot of the locals to their knees. Anna will drive along the sunken road after it has been newly sealed, its elbows straightened out, and find herself braking unnecessarily sometimes, bad old hazards and memories still haunting her. Was it here that I had a blocked fuel line, just when I needed to accelerate out of danger, or was it here? She will continue to run a car until, at her annual driving test, an examiner shakes his head over her hearing, her eyesight, her response time, her stiff neck. Her granddaughter will drive her around after that, Anna marvelling at the girl’s languid wrist-flick turns, her easy windmilling style. Shopping will be a cooperative effort for Anna and her neighbour. One will reverse the car, the other will guide her: Bit more to your left, straighten up, mind the tap, whooh! ‘Woman, 84, Killed. An 84-year-old Henley Beach woman was knocked over and killed yesterday when her neighbour, 87, was attempting to reverse out of the driveway of her home’. Three lines at the bottom of page three and it could well be Anna.