Cross-country race.

The road out of Melbourne rose to Ballarat through smooth green saddle-back hills like giant rearing horses embedded in the landscape. Shafts of sun pierced the clouds, setting the hills off in an eerie luminosity. 

We turned off halfway to Ballarat, heading for the cross-country running race. The course was in a vineyard which sat south of the freeway on a flank - several flanks - of the rising hills. Vineyard is misleading; it was of several hundred acres.

The turnoff twisted left and hairpin-bent for a kilometre, and then we turned right - ‘cross-country race’ read the sign - into a small valley with vines stretching up and away into the distance. Tents had been pitched and a generator-powered inflatable arch - the finish line - had been set up and roped off. Small triangular orange flags on metal spikes marking the course curved away and disappeared tinily over a hill. Bang. They still start these things with a gun.

In the colours I had worn in a race at Ballam Park nineteen years ago, when he was six weeks old and had his first outing, William charged off and disappeared over the hill between those tiny fluttering flags, the hundreds of runners leaving a veil of dust shot through with gold from the afternoon winter sun.