Siddon Rock Read Free Page A

high-pressure position in the capital. He had moved to Siddon Rock to avoid the stresses of city living and to indulge himself in his hobby of collecting moths and bush insects. He took the bar job because it was available when he arrived in town. Aseveryone knew that paying work was difficult to come by for someone not able to cope with the rigours of farm labouring, the discussion of suitability was dropped.
    When Kelpie’s passion for moths and insects became known, a town project was gradually formed as people brought any unusual-looking bugs to the hotel. But there were no invitations to view the collection, although Kelpie had been heard to say that he would, one day when it was complete, show the work in the foyer of the Council Offices.
    Now, as Macha marched down the street, Kelpie watched through the partly closed door. He admired Macha’s thin, boyish shape for a moment and then turned back to the unusually large crowd of drinkers at the bar.

    To reach her home from the town Nell followed a path that started at the tall, round wheat silo built into the base of the rock at the edge of the town. This path wound to the top of the rock, negotiating small canyons and gullies. It wandered past an occasional quandong tree or small patch of sandy soil where, in spring, pink and white everlasting flowers grew fragilely against the dark walls of the rock.
    The wheat silo dominated the town. No low metal and timber container this, it was built soon after the first wheat crop was harvested in the district. Modelled on the French lighthouses of the Atlantic Ocean, it stood tall and proud against the sea of bushland that surrounded the settlement. A veritable light in the wilderness, the early farmers and settlersdeclared. A silo to be proud of, to fill with golden grain for the European markets. The architect and builder – whose name had long since been erased from the dedication plaque by the sand-blast of summer dust storms – found the perfect site on the base of the rock. A good level area for the road and railway and plenty of loose stone for the walls of the silo was what he had looked for, and found. He drilled foundations into the rock itself and bound the building to it. He graded and smoothed a circular road for easy access. He designed and patented an unloading system that carried the grain to the top of the building from the carts and trucks that waited in line, and then poured it through a hatch into the vast belly of the silo. This will be here a thousand years from now , he said, and so still say the people of Siddon Rock, to this day.
    On the day Macha Connor returned from war, Nell was on her way home from the hospital when she heard the rifle crack. Impelled by an inherited memory of death by gunfire, she dropped to the ground, falling just as the bullet from Macha’s rifle hit the silo tower where she usually leaned to take off her shoes. The abrasion it left in the stonework shone like fool’s gold as the bullet ricocheted towards the town clock. There it bounced off the central clock face and dropped to the top of three wide steps that led to the lists of names engraved on the obelisk.
    Nell climbed higher up the path and turned to look down the main street. There she saw Macha marching towards her home at the Two Mile. Back along the railway line, in the setting sun she saw the dead fruit bats crisping in the coming frost and, much further back, dingoes shyingaway from the discarded uniform jacket hanging ghostlike in a tree. She looked at the pale figure in the street and understood that most of Macha had come home.

    When Macha marched into Siddon Rock she followed the narrow, gravelled road which gained shops on one side and the railway yard and station building on the other. This was Wickton Street. It continued past the Council Offices and hall, the silo, and a few sunburnt houses clinging to the skirts of the town; there Wickton Street once again became a country road as it