At the end of a wide road shaded by a straggling stand of old eucalypts brooded an ancient red brick building looking in on itself; darkened windows behind massive cement-rendered arches. The gloomy old hulk stood far enough back from the road to look sad and menacing. Regarding it from a chair on the stoop outside my motel room across the road, I supposed it had once been a convent.
It had been a long drive; lunch for five sitting in pale warm sun at a table outside a takeaway place in Marong (name: ‘Marong Takeaway’; special: two toasted sandwiches and coffee, $10) that was as good an on-the-road meal as you’d find.
Back on the road out of Bendigo-outer-suburb Marong through the green, pretty elbow of Newbridge, sleepy Tarnagulla and into St Arnaud’s narrow winding main street. Gold town, obviously. Narrow main streets mean no provision for the farmer's horse and drag turning around; just enough width for the gold-laden coaches to scream on through towards Melbourne's safe haven.
I pointed the car out of there, north by northwest, into the vast flatlands of the Wimmera wheatfields where, under a shining blue sky hanging over the flaxen fields, you wonder at the astonishing notion that your parents, as children, grew up, hale and hearty, on the sustaining grain of this promised land.
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