A STRANGER RODE into town only it wasn’t a stranger, it was Kerry, come to say goodbye to Pop before he fell off that perch he’d been clinging to real stubborn for so long. Cancer, Ken reckoned, never mind cancer, ya couldn’t kill the old bastard with an axe. But ah, no good. The call come last night. Get yerself home, chop chop.

Kerry dropped into second as she cruised past the corner store, clocking the whitenormalsavages, a dozen blue eyeballs popping fair outta their moogle heads at the sight of her. Skinniest dark girl on a shiny new Harley-Davidson Softail, heart-attack city, truesgod. So let’s go for it, eh, you mob. Let’s all have a real good dorrie at the blackfella du jour. Kerry resisted the urge to elevate both middle fingers as she rode past the astounded locals, past the produce store. Past Frankie’s Mechanical. Past the vacant lot with its waist-high weeds hiding a generation’s worth of fag ends, torn condom wrappers and empty bottles. Past the landmark pub which hadn’t changed in a century and wasn’t about to start now, thanks very much all the same. And when Kerry had made it to the other end of Main Street, that was about it for Durrongo (‘Place of Centrelink fraud,’ according to Ken), population 320. Now, as ever, if you wanted anything more complicated than a beer, a bale of hay or a loaf of last week’s bread from Kath at the general inconvenience store, you had to make tracks for Patto, half an hour up the highway.