The Sunken Road Read online

  About the Book

  At the height of the Great Depression, with farmers walking off the land and the city’s creeks lined with kerosene-tin shanties, a young mother is taken by a shark in the shallows at Henley Beach. Her grieving husband flees north with his baby son to the town of Pandowie, far from the treacherous ocean. In time, the boy will have a daughter: the wilful auburn-haired Anna Tolley.

  Nominated on its original 1996 release for the Man Booker Prize, The Sunken Road is Garry Disher’s proudest achievement. This moving, powerful novel set in the wheat and wool country of mid-north South Australia is at once the story of a region, a town and a people—and of one of the most memorable characters in Australian fiction.

  Contents

  Cover Page

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Loss

  Settlement

  Beach

  Farmer

  Space

  Invest

  Rooms

  Obsession

  Shades

  Sunken

  Split

  Friendship

  Money

  Luck

  Wool

  Soil

  Washing

  Dogs

  Illness

  Drought

  Begetting

  Income

  Parades

  Home

  Hair

  Hands

  War

  Fire

  School

  Naked

  City

  Dress

  Running

  Christmas

  Trains

  Poverty

  Music

  God

  Names

  Films

  Cars

  Writing

  Siblings

  Sport

  Books

  Dancing

  Reunion

  Drunk

  Secrets

  Food

  Hate

  Water

  Stone

  Blood

  Funerals

  Patriarchy

  Waiting

  Flowers

  History

  Regret

  Love

  Author’s Note

  Extract from Peace

  Copyright page

  for Hannah and Lucinda

  Loss

  One sweltering morning in the worst year of the Great Depression, when kerosene-tin shanty towns were starving along the city’s creeks and the farmers of the northern highlands were walking off the land, a cruising shark snatched a young wife from the shallows at Henley Beach, compelling the stricken husband to flee inland with his baby son, to the main street of Pandowie, where dangers lurked above the ground. He never remarried but the son flourished, joining Stock & Station and marrying an Ison, an old name in the district, settling with her in the big house on Isonville and beginning a family of his own: Anna Antonia Ison Tolley, born in 1949; Hugo Walter Ison Tolley, born two years later. When Anna started at the primary school, it pleased her to come into Pandowie and see her surname above her grandfather’s shop: Tolley’s Four Square Store. Perhaps Anna resembled her lost grandmother—leggy, wilful, auburn-haired, always talking back—or perhaps Grandfather Tolley was reminded of how tenuous life could be, for when she sliced her knee open on the coils of barbed wire displayed in his shop window one afternoon after school, he panicked, staunching the blood with his vast khaki handkerchief, shaking her until her teeth rattled: You’re a wicked girl, Anna, unmanageable. The children’s other grandfather warned them to watch out for flash floods, which had been known to barrel down the washaways on Isonville in the blink of an eye. Bucketing rains, Grandfather Ison explained, indicating the pink-smudge Pandowie Hills, then he bent his well-fed back and slash-cleared the star thistles that collared the gravestone of the shepherd boy lost in Ison’s Creek. James Son of Geo. Taken by the Flood 5 April 1875 Aged Six Years and the Angel Sayeth Unto, the rest indecipherable, every carven S tilted forward as if straining against the waters. Anna and Hugo squatted nearby, their chins cupped in the palms of their hands. Anna was forever asking why: Why did the shepherd carve his S’s that way? Because, Grandfather Ison replied. When Grandfather Ison died of asthma, leaving Isonville solely to Kitchener, his son, the Tolleys found themselves living on borrowed time in the big house. Anna’s mother inherited nothing but a dusty sideboard from the will, and suffered a loss of faith in one of life’s certainties—the regard of a father for his daughter. The little family moved out of Isonville to a struggling farm farther along the sunken road. The school bus from Bitter Wash passed by the front gate, and it pleased Anna to sit where Lockie Kelly could peer along her slanting thighs. Anna was away at the university when the boys she’d known at school began to fall in a foreign war. Matt Heinrich was the first, and Anna heard the news on the day she skipped lectures to march down Frome Street to a subsidiary of the Raintree Corporation, a napalm manufacturer. She sat in the road, refused to move on, and when she got back to her room at Women’s College, paint-streaked and hysterical, there was a note under the door: Call home. Matt Heinrich, shot by a sniper at Nui Dat. Little Matt. Terrible, but still, a week later Anna found herself being jostled outside the US consulate, and a month after that some of her acquaintances were arrested on a loitering statute that dated from the 1700s. Oh, they were puerile. Then a second boy was shot dead, a third torn apart when he stepped on a Bouncing Betty. In Anna’s mind, those dead boys were transmuted into friends, not simply kids from Pandowie High who’d tried to touch her up in the scungy back seat of a car. All those beautiful boys. Of the eleven in Anna’s Leaving Honours class, the ballot had selected eight for service in the army. When a fourth drowned in a rice paddy and a fifth died of wounds, Anna began to tremble. She was trembling for Lockie. He’d been her one true love, a wild, laughing, beautiful boy, but she’d hurt him and now she trembled for fear that he’d be taken from her forever. Her luck was turning bad. She could not breathe. She stopped studying. She would not sing ‘Military Madness’ on the steps of Parliament House again. She had been little Miss Smartarse, the first from Pandowie to go to university, turning her back on boys who were content to be farm fodder, girls content with kids and a wedding ring. Well, Anna would not be thinking offhand unkindnesses like that again. She came back to Pandowie, where she belonged. Of Anna’s own children, Michael slept through the night and Rebecca struggled against her from the very start. Yet sweet, peaceful Michael it was who died, lost in a car wreck on the sunken road, and Rebecca developed the conviction that Anna might, through inattention, kill her, too. Whenever Anna negotiated the devil’s elbows, headlights burning in the roiling dust, she felt her daughter’s gaze settle upon her from the passenger seat, eyes like coals and ice in the little face. There’s been another foreclosure in the district, another farm lost to the banks, and the Showalter Park artificial breeding scheme has collapsed, owing the banks, taxpayers and local investors sixteen million dollars. The strain is showing: jobless sons are apt to shoot themselves, loved ones to aim their speeding cars at SEC powerline pylons, and last week a young mother ran exhaust gases into the family station wagon at the Showalter Hill lookout above the sunken road, asphyxiating herself and her baby daughter. Pandowie is suffering a loss of spirit, and Anna has argued so in her column in the Chronicle, arousing a string of bitter letters to the editor: Surely we deserve better than this from the very person who has been commissioned to write a book celebrating our 150th Jubilee? Anna is taking a thematic approach for the Jubilee history. Scratch notes: Death on the frontier. A hundred and fifty years ago we lost our loved ones to diphtheria, dysentery, scarlet fever, pneumonia, jaundice and typhoid. Snake bite. Spears. Even tar—according to the old r
ecords, a shearer on the Showalter Park head station tossed a Ngadjuri suffering from smallpox into a tub of boiling tar. Rebecca has announced that she and her lover intend to have a baby. Anna will watch her granddaughter grow. She’ll make a point of not hovering with nervy fingers. When her great-grandchildren come to visit, Anna will be pleased, and pleased to see the backs of them. She won’t offer advice. She’ll have none to give. A loved one may be lost to you in an eyeblink but Anna will not be the kind of old woman who says things like that.

  Settlement

  Absorbed by Anna from the cradle: The first Showalter had come from India, the first Ison from Natal, and both from the Home Counties before that, and so their occupation of the redsoil country at the edge of the rain shadow was driven by notions of rural England and the hazardous frontier. They placed their sheep in the care of shepherds, marked their boundaries with stonewall fences, employed blacksmiths and scullery maids, drew water from boarded-over wells, fired carbines from the saddle, warned off the wretched Ngadjuri who camped on the banks of the dividing creek, and at the day’s end sat erect in cane chairs on their cavernous verandahs, watching the sun settle upon their pastoral runs. The hard ground was not entirely flat. The Razorback sat like a chiselled city on the grassy plain, small, pink, wind-humped hills marked the horizon, and the dusty roads dipped unexpectedly through sandy creekbeds. In 1869 the Strangways Act opened up the land to yeomanry, and among the farmers who sowed their six-forty acres with wheat and barley were the Jaegers, the Hartwigs, the Heinrichs and other Silesian Germans. Shopkeepers and publicans followed the farmers, staging tiny dazed towns every twenty miles or so across the newly cleared grazing land. They measured the breadth of their streets by the turning circle of a bullock-drawn wagon, and erected a pub, a general store, a bank and a post-and-telegraph office at the four corners of the crossroads. Houses straggled behind these hubs of commerce. In winter the streets were churned mud, in summer iron-hard, deeply rutted under a layer of dust. There had been huts along the Pandowie Creek as early as 1843, when Colonel Frome was surveying the northern reaches of the colony, but no town until 1850, the year that George Catford spotted traces of copper oxide in the local stone. South Australia might have foundered if not for Pandowie and its mine. Twenty years later the shafts were depthless blue pools of water that defeated the pumps, and the Cornish Jacks migrated to other towns, other mines, but not before the hillsides and flatlands had been denuded of trees, the timber consumed by the boilers or stacked against the pressing earth deep within the mineshafts. Great Aunt Beulah Ison had learned some of these things at her grandfather’s knee. She waved her papery hand over the treeless plains: Anna, dear, this used to be scrub for as far as the eye could see. The shepherd boy had drowned ten years before Beulah was born, but she knew for a fact that the father was the last man transported to the colonies and the mother was a riverbank gin. The etymology of the owie suffix in Pandowie, Terowie and other placenames was quickly forgotten if ever it was known, the children of the mid-north—including Grandfather Ison and his five sisters—meeting their first blacks in the pages of their school primers. Grain and high-grade merino wool poured into the whistlestop railway towns in heaving, topheavy wagons until the 1920s, when spoke-wheeled Ford lorries replaced the bullocks and horses and the whip-lashing, cursing men who drove them. By now Pandowie was a pastoral town in the shade of the stony Razorback. The main line pushed northward through spinifex, bluebush and saltbush country, where a hillock might be named Mount Misery or Mount Remarkable and the topsoil conceal rock-bound traces of silver, lead, zinc and radium. In a few days you were in Darwin. The traffic was all one way in 1942, all guns and soldiers. General MacArthur stood on the Terowie platform and growled: I have come out of Bataan and I shall return. Grandfather Tolley’s shop prospered with the town, and the wool boom meant plenty of work for stock agents like Peter, his son. The Showalters and the Isons did well out of the Korean War: all that soldiering in icy winds and snow, all those woollen coats and scarves and gloves. It was said that old Leonard Showalter carted clover hay for his stud rams in the boot of his Bentley at the time; certainly he did not bother to deny it. It was generally known in the district that he’d played polo with governors, colonels and visiting earls, and that the Princess Royal had stayed at Showalter Park when Showalter was a baby. But he was a bony, chin-damp wreck and close to death when Anna assembled with the other kids to hear him address the school on Empire Day: Mr Showalter is a link to our past, children, and Anna watched the old man hawk and spit and shuffle his feet, his mind beginning to cloud, a look of panic settling over his stretched white features. I remember, he said, and abruptly stopped, his gummy mouth snapping closed, mute and defiant in the gathering silence, while the children breathed, sulphurcrested cockatoos screeched in the nude dead gums behind the Chronicle office, and a car passed through on its way somewhere east or west. Old farming couples too old for heavy work retired to Californian bungalows in the town, where they grew roses and sweetcorn in soil nourished with sheep droppings raked from beneath the slatted floors of woolsheds and soaked with river water pumped overland from the Murray. They raised money and built a clubhouse, and rolled and seeded and mowed a couple of bowling links between the almond trees on an unused block behind the Copper Lode Tearoom. But still they felt half- useless. They longed for the merino-stud field days in April; they took the Women’s Weekly tour to London; they meddled in the affairs of their married sons. Their bones ached. They wore wristbands of beaten copper that had been mined last century from the ground beneath their feet. On Saturday afternoons, when the last wobbling ball had been bowled, they wandered off to the Bon Accord Hotel in Market Square. Anna liked to drink there with Lockie and Chester whenever she came home between semesters, the three of them seated in the tiny lounge, close to the open fire. The sticky walls were dark with photographs of Showalter Park stud rams, the biggest and most valuable in the world, ribbon-draped at the Royal Show, the studmaster’s hand inches deep in the wool upon the heavy back of the latest champion, Pandowie Showalter Lustre 4, which had sold for $30,000 in 1969. Anna said: You could refuse to register for the call-up, you know. Go underground. There are people who would hide you. Lockie and Chester looked at her humorously, searching for the joke. I mean it, she said, ignoring their mates, who were calling off-colour jibes at her through the serving hatch, ignoring the angular, eruptive high school boys, who were slamming billiard balls off the tiny corner table and across the cracked floor. You been listening to too many stirrers, Anna. For her Chronicle column this week, Anna writes: The old ways are disappearing, turning upside down. A Saudi Arabian conglomerate has bought Showalter Park, there are no jobs for the young ones, and there’s more money in angora goats than in merino sheep, in legumes than in wheat. Anna will settle in a house by the sea after her husband dies. Whenever she returns to Pandowie to mark the changes, a voice, a gait, a peppercorn tree, a sun-warmed verandah post will take her back, pleasure and pain in complicated doses.

  Beach

  Three hours from Isonville to the Delmonte Hotel, where inland families holidayed for the summer. On Boxing Day every year, the Tolleys powdered along the sunken road, braked at the Main North Road intersection, and emerged nose-up on the bitumen for Adelaide, a corner flap of tarpaulin sounding their progress, snapping in the wind above a roofrack top-heavy with suitcases, a beach umbrella, beach toys in a string bag. They rode high through a land of silos, sidings, sharefarmers and country towns, the railway children staring after them, and two and a half hours later were slowing for the Gepps Cross stoplights. They jerked and crawled through the baking tiled suburbs, Anna’s father tapping the temperature gauge from time to time, his ear cocked to the muttering radiator. Anna saw a seagull on a bus shelter. That was the first sign. Suddenly they were in a tunnelling street, advancing upon a sea flash at the end of it. Anna remembered the little square: clock tower, palm trees, kiosk, milkbars where proprietors whisked away the tracked-in beach sand, sparse buffal
o grass, the jetty poking like a stubby finger into the sea. The breakwater, the boat basin, the winking shallows, the pale sand, the kerb outside the Delmonte, where her father angled the Stock & Station Holden, the chrome bumper resting against a salt-scummed verandah post. An airliner banked above the water. The engine ticked. Anna’s father said: Here we are again. He said it every year. Every year he said: There were no trips to the sea when I was growing up, and until she put two and two together—the shark in the shallows, Grandfather Tolley’s retreat to the dry country—Anna assumed that her father and his father had been too poor for a holiday at the beach. She looked up, shading her eyes, then grinned and waved. Two men and their wives were shouting from deckchairs, waving glasses of beer and shandy. Anna’s father saw them and he flourished an arm and bowed deeply. Her father was loved and remembered from the previous summer and all the summers before it. He was an eye-glint charmer, a man who joked and raised the stakes, whose laughter ringed the hotel for three weeks every January. Women looked at him covetously and were compelled to rest their fingers on his forearm, occasionally on his chest. And Anna saw that her mother was desired. She saw a man parade by on the baking sand later in the week, his stomach tucked painfully in, while her mother lay utterly still, her eyes possibly open behind her black lenses. When Anna felt her body begin to change, when acute cramps crippled her every thirty-one days and the doctor prescribed the Pill to control it, she became secretive and elusive, infected by a drowsy kind of appetite for the flat brown planes of the boys on the beach or in the Delmonte’s corridors. You could never find her. She missed meals. Her mother examined her lips for stubble rash and her neck for lovebites. She was on the spot when the authorities drained the boat basin and sent a line of police cadets shoulder to shoulder through the car tyres and mud. The people crowding the rail were avid for bodies—small, abducted, anus-torn—and failed to notice that the boy clasping Anna around her middle, his chin on her dreamy shoulder, had slipped three fingers inside the elastic at her waist, deep enough to brush her groin and unlock her. The Kellys had never taken their children to the coast. Lockie’s parents were too narrow, too embedded, too poor. Lockie had to wait until Anna lived at Women’s College before he saw the sea for the first time. They’d make love in her room, then head for the beach. Lockie would say: Take away these houses, give me a clifftop, and I could live here, looking out at the water. They lay face to face on broad blue towels, watching the minute workings in one another’s eyes. They were so close that Anna’s cocked hip concealed her hand inside his bathing suit. He felt hot and alive in there, still crusted from their lovemaking. Two years after Lockie was killed, Anna met Sam Jaeger. She liked him for unexpected reasons: his comforting bulk, his shyness, the way he sent up his parents’ church. The Ascensionists, he said. I wish they’d rise up and disappear. Anna didn’t love him when she married him, but she wanted to belong to the community again, she’d put her wild past behind her, and he was companionable, so surely a kind of loving would develop over the years. But love needs a generous climate. Poor Anna, poor Sam. It was quickly made plain to them that they should value frugality. Mr Jaeger told Anna: Shearers don’t need icecream. A holiday? The missus and I haven’t had a holiday in twenty-eight years and it never did us no harm. Anna put her mind to work. She talked long into the night to Sam, low and hard and coaxing, occasionally placing her cool, dry palms on his anxious cheeks: We’ll tell your parents we’re going to a friend’s wedding, somewhere at the back of beyond, we’ll be away five or six days. They’ll never know. Sam looked anxiously over his shoulder at the shadows in their bedroom. She turned his face back to hers: Sam, don’t chicken out on me now. And so they told a lie and took themselves off to the Grand in Victor Harbor and let the waters wash away the cares of their penny-pinching marriage. Anna was certain that she felt Sam’s climax one morning when the sun beat against their curtained window, and sensed that there would be a baby. When Michael was up on two legs she loved to see his tiny spine and wing-bud shoulderblades crouched absorbedly over an upended bucket in his moated, turreted sandpit. It has been many years since she saw the sea, not since the Chronicle sent her to cover the Isolated Children’s Federal Conference in Port Lincoln in 1985. But the sea is there in her head—and Lockie, sun- and water-splashed, warm, smiling and fine-boned. If he had not been taken from her, would they be together in a house on a clifftop, looking out to sea? Anna is obsessed with the notion of a house beside the sea, a flat or a unit in her declining years. She will live alone, calm and contemplative, having put many ghosts to rest inside her. She will babysit her granddaughter from time to time, turning the child’s small plump feet in the water from her garden tap to wash away the sand. She will walk twice a day, before lunch and before sundown, no matter the weather, just to remember, and wait for the end, and smell the seaweedy air, just like any old leathery retiree with a replacement hip.