Beulah is easy to hate, hard to love, Grandmother Ison said. The old cow. Anna gave the appearance of not listening, of absorption in her crayonned chimneys, smoke and hillsides. In the armchairs above her bowed spine her mother said: Don’t let her get to you, Mum. It’s eating away at you. Grandma Ison shifted her careworn, bony frame. It’s a trade-off, isn’t it? Beulah rescued us after your father’s breakdown and now she’s extracting her pound of flesh. Literally. Hateful old cow. Anna looked up. At once her grandmother said: Sharp ears. How would you like to dance the swords with me again, sharp ears? Four years later, when the old generation had died out and everything had gone to the son and nothing to the daughter, Anna’s mother said: I want to remember my father with love but it’s hard not to hate him. She said: I want to love my brother, but tell me how I can. If he would just give us something, release some land to us. Didn’t I count? Don’t I count? An unfamiliar harshness had entered her voice, as if she were edging warily through treacherous new emotions, hate and envy and a sense of deep, deep offence. Hate rose easily in Anna’s heart on her mother’s behalf. She treated Uncle Kitch, Aunt Lorna and her cousins with disdain. If they happened to inquire, in their side-door manner, how the house-hunting was progressing, the hate came back to bite her, sidling in on her flank when she least expected it. She came home from school one day and saw the dog stretched where there was no afternoon sun to warm his bones. Kip, she called. Kippy. He lifted his tail once and let it fall. He was disinclined to stand. Anna’s fingers flew over his fur, encountering blood, while his snapping jaws tracked her hand apologetically. Did Auntie Lorna do this to you? Bloody bitch. Anna’s quick mind aroused hatred. She was hated for experimenting with boys. She met the hateful sneers and curled lips face to face, silent and proud, and understood that envy breeds hatred. So did difference, so did fear, so did public display. Think you’re so smart, said the faces lining Frome Street. Think you’ll be allowed to do this when your slant-eyed friends take us over? Join a circus if you want to make fools of yourselves. There was bewilderment in her father’s letters: Do you really hate us? What did we do, for you to hate us like this? Talk to us, sweetheart, he said. Lockie said: You’re filled with so much hate. You spout love of mankind but it looks like hate to me, your face all twisted up. Anna put both hands to her cheeks, suddenly aware that he was right, that something like hate was wrenching her mouth into hateful shapes. She counted to ten and said evenly: What do you think you’re doing, learning to kill people, if it’s not hate? Lockie’s finger quivered: Quit it. Just you quit it, twisting words around. Must’ve been mad, thinking we’d ever end up together. Anna married into the Jaegers. Such hatred. It simply poured out of her father-in-law, a leaning-forward, voice-lowered, eyes-narrowed assumption of a common ground between them: You can tell by the nose if there’s a dash of the Jew. Crinkled hair, your black. The complexion—you can tell a lot from the complexion. A dash of the Abo—look for a thickness about the lips, the spread nostrils. Would he be Greek or Italian, that new bloke in the bank? Turkish maybe? Same bloodline. Sam hated Anna for a while when Michael was killed. He blamed her. He was too grieving and too polite to say so, but she knew. Hate need not be showy; hate may burn coldly, forever. At first, Anna didn’t hate Wesley Showalter. She allowed him a certain right to venture out at the wheel of the black Bentley that day, just as she’d allowed herself a secret elation from being with Chester Flood. And there were simply too many other factors involved for Anna to blame Wesley Showalter alone: water in her fuel line, the choking dust, the hungry sheep, the blind corners of the sunken road. But she did eventually learn to hate him. He had been born to rule, and no matter what tragedy or mistake he caused, he would never lose that assumption or the power it gave him. He’d never learn; he’d never truly be sorry. And so she felt hate; her frustration and her impotence bred hate. One day a stockman on a station property behind the Razorback entered the homestead with a hunting rifle and shot dead the manager and his wife. The district said instantly: Probably she wouldn’t sleep with him. Or she wouldn’t leave her husband. The papers printed his likeness: skin pasted to the bone. Half a day later, fear set in under the swift shadow of the Showalter Park Cessna and the beating rotors of the police helicopter as they crisscrossed the dry country behind the Razorback. The killer had been seen crossing the Murray, passing through Gawler, slipping among the quartz reefs on the Razorback itself. The women and children of the outlying stations began to drift into the town, making for Tolleys Four Square, where Anna’s father served free coffee and made them shiver and laugh. Crazy, they said of the killer; he was crazy with jealousy. That’s what love can lead to. But Anna thought it might have been hate. She imagined the cold, unloved, whitewashed walls of the stockman’s quarters, the yawning gulf between the stockman and the world inside the big house. Then someone found the man dead with the rifle between his knees in the property’s Land Rover on the bank of Ison’s Creek. He was coming to kill me, Aunt Lorna shrieked. Stupid woman, shut up, Anna’s father said. The stockman shot himself because he hated what he’d done, said the sages of the district, but Anna doubted that too. He’d got rid of the focus of his hate and left himself with nothing. Carl Hartwig is rubbing his gingery hands together over Anna’s latest observation in the Chronicle: Some of the Showalter Park workers have spent the greater part of their working lives on the stud. Is it any wonder that they felt intensely proud of its origins and heritage, the world-class reputation of its wool clip, its vital role in Australia’s merino industry? Now they are dismayed, as we all are, to see it go so rapidly under after almost one hundred and fifty years of hard work. And not only the workers. Many of us had a stake in the Park’s new technology and have lost our life savings. It’s as though an admired parent has shown us feet of clay. The excesses are hateful: the flights interstate, the frequent trips overseas, the wholesale gutting of the big house to make way for costly renovations, the lavish parties, the extravagant colour brochures, the annual Field Day circus. And how have the Showalters atoned for everything? By running a brokerage firm called Golden Fleece from an Edwardian mansion in the Adelaide Hills, leaving we here in the mid-north to pick up the pieces. The letters are pouring into the Chronicle: Does Mrs Jaeger hate us, writing these things about us? Maybe she hates Australia and should go and live in certain countries to our north where she can indulge her hate. What we want, in this lead-up to our Jubilee festivities, is positive thinking and selfless love of town and district, indeed nation. But I’m only pointing out, Anna begins, but Sam, or someone in the street, is always cutting her off, spitting hate in her face. So much hate. The locals listen to idealogues on talkback radio or on mail-order audio-cassettes, and Sam has invited a soapbox thumper to address a Save Australia rally on issues of moral decline, the right of citizens to bear arms, the immigration crisis. And so Anna admonishes herself: Keep your head down, your mouth shut. She will become a good hater. She will enjoy hating, learning that there is no profit in hating for personal reasons but plenty in hating for the common good. Politicians, posturing fools, people in the public eye.