Late afternoon.

The sun was hard west and sinking. We - being me and ten-year-old football-in-hand daughter - strode through the back streets, deserted apart from kids on rattling skateboards.

We found the town's memorial gardens a few blocks back from the main street, set behind a classical wrought iron fence with an ornate arched and marble-pillared gateway at one corner. The gateway opened on a maze of pathways and garden beds and behind all of this, in the centre of the block, sat the town's heritage football ground ringed by another fence of wooden pickets. Today's football stadium is its own glass and steel architectural phenomenon; this earlier incarnation was like a post-Victorian zoo set in a gardens, the zoo being the football arena. It even had its own name, Anzac Park.

An original solus grandstand loomed majestically on the north wing of the east-west oriented oval. Next to it, within handy reach of spectators, sat the Molly Taylor Memorial Kiosk - the very name of which conjures images of mid-twentieth-century fare served by long-gone mothers gazing anxiously fieldwards, lest their sons fall in battle. The kiosk, a big oblong of white-painted timber about the size of an army mess hall, sat calmly on its capacious foundations as if dreaming dreams of afternoon teas lost in the mists of time. 

The grassy oval caught the late sun. I was in the east-end goal square, and she was kicking the ball to me, but the sun was between the goal and point post at the other end, about the height of a McDonald-Tipungwuti snap goal, and it was blinding. You could imagine the home team winning the toss and kicking west so that the opposition would be staring into the sun, blinded, in the last quarter. I wondered if the designers aligned these ovals with that strategy in mind.

Twilight. We went back out through the gates, the marble pillars of which served as the town's first world war memorial. Names were engraved, and well-maintained, in gold leaf on the marble pillars. Of the hundred or so surnames, several were repeated. Some families lost more than one son. I noticed three Hancocks. Brothers? Someone in the town would know.

We crossed the road. The house directly opposite the gardens was a time-warp 1950s brick affair with period shrubbery and pristine garden beds behind the neat, low front fence. An old woman in gardening clothes, hat and gloves was doing some late supervision, lest a leaf had fallen or a weed appeared during the afternoon. She nodded good evening as we passed, as she probably had done for the last sixty years. The skateboards were silent now and the aroma of cooking was in the  air.