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Dedication

For Mark and Mary

ALL THAT WAS

Once, somewhere between the Coral Sea and the Indian Ocean but on the way to nowhere, there was a district called—oh, let’s call it Inglewell.

Now, of course, it is overlaid by the smooth, sturdy engineering of the mining companies—the towns and their histories have been dug up or made over. A few landmarks remain unchanged: the inevitable memorial to wars long ago and far away, the street names. But almost every town has just such a memorial, and many places have a Spicer Street or a Pinnicke Road. You could never be sure you’d arrived.

But not so long ago it was a cupped palm of country, pinned to time by its three towns: Woodwild, Carter’s Crossing, and Runagate, my own.

RUNAGATE—HEART OF INGLEWELL on its stone welcome sign. Thirteen streets, one remaining pub, never a bank. One grocery store with a comfortable bench outside and air-conditioning sighing through the bright plastic strips curtaining the door. A water tower patterned in white and rust and shade. Three churches, each smaller than a house. The clawing precision of hard-won roses planted in wire-fenced gardens on the buried corpses of roadside kangaroos. Geraniums hot as matches. The spice of pepperina, oleander’s poison-sapped glow, the hallowed death of angel’s trumpets as apricot as sunset. Showgrounds, handsome in dusty cream and pea-green paint; stockyards. A long low school smelling of squashed jam sandwiches, the heady scents of cheap felt-tips and novelty erasers.

Of Inglewell’s three towns, only Runagate still had a pulse. Woodwild was already nearly vanished; Carter’s Crossing had barely been. They held to each other by fraying ribbons of fractured, blue-black bitumen and cords of ribbed dirt, fringed with pale sand or beaded with blood-red pebbles (not stained by massacres, no, nor cursed, whatever people whispered about how the Spicer family first established Runagate Station).