A potted history, Mr Wheelwright said, squealing a chalk line across the blackboard to represent the horizon, then humping the Razorback upon it. In shape, the Razorback suggesting a profit and loss graph, sharp growth followed by a ragged decline past the peak. Finally Mr Wheelwright faced away from the board, clapped one palm against the other, and began a dry washing motion: The plates of the earth rubbed together, creating oceans and forcing landforms like the Razorback to the surface. We’re talking millions of years, you understand. Unique plants and animals evolved, isolated from the rest of the world. Between fifty and a hundred thousand years ago, the first humans arrived, island-hopping from the north. Who knows when they would have reached here, where we’re standing now, but rest assured they’re not here now. All we have are the placenames the Ngadjuri people left us. Right, take up your pens: The richest copper lodes in South Australia were discovered by shepherds. When grass and water were plentiful, and attacks by wild dogs and Aborigines rare, the shepherd had plenty of time on his hands for fossicking. Besides, he would have been on the lookout for the rich colours of oxidised copper, following the accidental discovery of copper at Kapunda in 1843, and the offers of rewards by the mining companies. Who were these men, these shepherds? Many were ex-convicts or men fleeing from trouble in one of the other colonies. Most were old and reclusive, preferring the company of a dog and the comfort of a plug of tobacco to the society of other men. There were few women, you understand. Paid ten shillings per week, what did they have to spend it on but grog the next time they were near a shanty? In July, 1850, came the news of a promising lode on the Pandowie Creek, discovered by one George Catford, shepherd. There were shepherds on the Pandowie Creek as early as 1843. We know this from watercolour sketches of the area, showing shepherds’ huts, made by the colony’s surveyor, Colonel Frome, who was making the first northern surveys. These sketches are in the Gallery on North Terrace, next time you’re in the city. Anna paused, realising that Mr Wheelwright had made an aside. Then she bent over the page again: Of all the shepherds who discovered rich deposits of copper in the colony, none was so meanly rewarded as George Catford. No rent-free cottage, no shares, no allowance, no memorial in the form of a town, street, landmark or building named after him. George Catford was paid just twenty guineas for revealing the lode to the Adelaide syndicate who had ridden up to examine the site, and a further twenty by the South Australian Mining Association, whose shareholders were earning dividends of eight hundred per cent just two years later. And so a fine, long, local tradition of avarice and misanthropy had its beginning here on the northern highlands. A bit of a pinko, is he, your teacher? Uncle Kitch wanted to know. Anna sought out her other grandfather. No, he didn’t know the last name of the shepherd whose son had drowned in Ison’s Creek. The top face of the gravestone had long since flaked away, but the date was there, 1875, so it was unlikely that George Catford had been the shepherd. Anna’s father liked to shock and tease her. She once stood with him in Redruth Square to honour the dead: We grow not old as those that are left grow old. He waggled his tipless finger at her slyly: Here’s a part of me that will grow not old as the rest that is left grows old. Anna was studying in the city when Mrs Showalter and Mr Wheelwright formed the Pandowie Historical Society. They had meetings in the Institute, sought contributions of money and artifacts, wrote pamphlets and convinced the council to adopt a preservation policy and a restoration fund. Every time Anna came home there was a new plaque to see, a Cornish miner’s cottage restored on Truro Street, another item of lacework in the museum, the miners’ dugouts fenced off in Noltenius Creek, a row of ancient almond trees saved from the axe. Successive waves of tourists, film-makers and weekending QCs swept into the mid-north, laying claim to the quaint and the beautiful, leaving only long-abandoned huts and farmhouses for the city poor who came in after them. When Anna lay in Chester Flood’s arms she murmured: What was it like, living in the convent? He replied: It used to be a reformatory, did you know that? There’s a new plaque inside the front gate now, if you’re interested. Let me answer this way—from reformatory to convent was not such a big step. I breathed the same spiritless air in 1960 as breathed by some kid in 1860. Anna’s father-in-law died, leaving the farm to his wife and his son, Sam, fearful that his ageing mother would sign her share over to the Ascension Church, bought her out at seventeen per cent. He did not want the work of the generations of Jaegers before him to go down the gurgler, especially to a bunch of holy rollers—not your well-established holy rollers, mind you, but the Ascensionists, formed just twenty years ago, with no history or tradition behind them. Anna likes to say that she started in the dark ages of print technology, when the Chronicle was set by hand, then she passed through the offset period, and now she writes, cuts, pastes and designs on a computer screen. This week’s ‘One Year Ago Today’ column is interesting: Workmen gutting the interior of the historic Showalter Park homestead have found newspapers dating from the nineteenth century concealed under floorboards in the ballroom. Included was a perfectly preserved copy of the Chronicle for August 1877, where we learn that owing to the continuous flooding of the mine shafts and the high cost of recovering copper from the ore body, the Pandowie mine has closed, but that the district itself is expected to flourish as a centre for the colony’s pastoral industry. Anna’s Jubilee history is almost complete. She’s had enough of history. She has her memories, and memories are not necessarily history. Many years later, when she is in her eighties, Anna will read that a rare earthquake had hit the mid-north, dislodging a time capsule sealed in a unique stonewall fence used by the early settlers to pen their sheep. According to the Adelaide Advertiser, the capsule was inscribed with the words ‘Interred in the Year 2000 to Mark the 150th Jubilee of Pandowie and Environs’ and as such was considered too recent to be of interest to historians. The wall would be repaired and the capsule resealed in it. Anna will put down the paper and try to recall everything that Sam had collected for the capsule. The Showalter family memoir, a twist of wool, a copper wristband from the Tourist Office, wheat heads, old clippings from the Chronicle. Picking up the paper again she will see yet another edgy reference to Machholz 2, which may or may not be on a collision course with Earth. The last time a comet hit the planet, the force was sufficient to create the Gulf of Mexico and wipe out the dinosaurs. So why bother with time capsules?