Illywhacker

The horn blared and he jumped. He saw the car as the brakes squealed. He stood back from the road, his heart beating. The car then turned and lurched into the parking place in front of the Balliang East Hall which was opposite his house. He watched it. The people got out of the car and then passed out of sight behind the pine trees.

Ernest Vogelnest went back to his house. He climbed up on his tank stand from where he could see that the people in the big car were pretending to have a picnic.

It did not seem credible.

5

Phoebe could not believe her mother and father were not acting out a charade. They must know the A. D. Collinses would not come. They sat in the dead shadow of the pine trees. They had a good view of the rusted water tank lying on its side in O'Hagen's paddock, and a collection of assorted rocks with a sheet of roofing iron lying across it. The north-easter occasionally picked up the sheet of battered iron and then put it down again. They could also see an old rock fence, and, running parallel to it, a new barbed-wire fence. The paddock was half full of thistles, the white flowers from which drifted before the wind and one had lodged in Molly's hair. Her eyes had pouches, and she had a tendency to jowliness but the hair was splendid, young hair, just like her daughter's.

Molly talked on and on. She could not stop but her face was colouring and she started to complain about the heat.

Phoebe sat on the wooden steps of the Balliang East Hall, in front of its single door, beneath the peeling sign that read balliang east hall.1912. She felt desolate.

"I wonder what has happened," her mother said. "Unless there has been an accident."

Phoebe sighed, just at a moment when the iron was not rattling and when everything, even the ewe caught in O'Hagen's muddy dam a quarter of a mile away, became silent. And Jack, sitting twenty yards from his daughter, heard the sigh.

He was a plain man. He had a large, thick-necked, jut-jawed head. He had big square hands and a big square backside. "What you see", people said of him, "is what you get." But he understood his daughter's sigh exactly. It slipped through his defences like a knife and made him feel small and foolish -Jumped-up Jack.

"Can't you see?" he barked at his wife. "The snobs have cut us."

It was at this moment, as Phoebe turned to avoid a painful scene, that she saw the aeroplane. It appeared, clear as day, between two branches of a pine.

She stood and walked quickly to the road, her pale yellow silk scarf floating behind her. Ernest Vogelnest, still on the tank stand, called his wife to watch.

The aeroplane was completely silent. It hung there, its propeller lifeless. She could see the struts and crosswires between the two wide wings. The pilot was suspended in a cockpit between the wings. The craft was sandwiched in the cobalt sky like a dragonfly in amber. A magpie sang, its notes as clear as glass. The craft came lower, became bigger, and still there was not a sound from it. It seemed to fly towards her. It seemed it must fly straight into her. She did not flinch, and then it paused, hovered, dipped, and just before it came gently to rest against the fence of Vogelnest's front paddock, she heard a voice utter two words.

"You cow," I said.

6

The problem in that area is the rocks. It's not what you'd call Bad Land. There are few trees. You can get down in almost any of these paddocks. But there are rocks, and that was what I was thinking about as I kicked the rudder bar, and shoved the stick over. Frigging rocks!

There was a lot of low-level turbulence over the ploughed land round Bald Hill, and the nor'easterly was starting to gust as I brought the Morris Farman around into it. I was cursing Mr Farman for only putting one magneto on an eight-cylinder engine when he should have used two. I cursed myself for buying the damn thing. I cursed the damn public who would no longer pay the sort of money they had for a joy ride. I used to get five pounds for half an hour above Melbourne, and then it dropped to two quid in Ballarat. And now the best I could get was four and tuppence ha'penny from a lanky cyclist who wanted to look at the gravel pits at Commaida from the air. Four and tuppence bloody ha'penny. It was all I had, that four and two pence ha'penny, including the four threepences with old plum pudding still stuck to them. I flew him for half an hour and he complained about the bumps. Bumps!

I had just enough benzine to make it to Barwon Common in Geelong. God knows what I was going to do. I forget. I would have had a scheme. I always had a scheme. But when the magneto went I was in a mess.

I owed the RAAF five hundred pounds for the plane and parts.

I owed the publican in Darnham over twenty pounds.