Signs

The sign is gone.

Nothing marks the spot of a cattle station where my husband lived in his youth.

Steve got out of our black Land Rover and poked around in the sandy dirt with the toe of his boot, hoping the sign was just down and forgotten. The post it hung on is still there. His work-worn hand patted the top of the post as he scanned the ground. The fading white paint of the wooden sentinel was chipped and peeling to show the silver-gray wood of an aged gum tree.

In the 1960s, Shipley Downs, north of a town called Keith in South Australia a couple hours east of Adelaide, was a thriving cattle station of a few thousand acres and a few hundred cows. Today, standing at the crossroads where a school bus deposited him and his older sister and younger brother, the wind shifts sand through scrub. The air is filled with the bleating of hundreds of sheep.

"I used to hear nothing but cattle," Steve said, looking at the dirty, woolen creatures staring at us from a paddock of knee-high, browning grass.

Steve stood on the burnt-orange colored dirt road, squinting his eyes against the late afternoon sun. It's springtime in October. The light dodged in and out of towering, black, empty storm clouds. A little further up the road is the main entrance to Shipley Downs.

The cattle grate is the same, he said, as we drove through the entrance, and remembered riding a horse over it. But the winged side gates are dilapidated and aged, not the way it is in his mind.

Driving down the well-worn track, his mind rewinds to 40 years ago. Big cypress trees where he hid under sheltering branches and let his imagination run are still there. He sees an early morning cattle round-up, feels the horse beneath him and the growl in his stomach as he helps his dad, the station overseer, before 8-year-old Steve heads off to breakfast and then to meet the school bus for a 45-minute ride.

As the Land Rover slowly travels up the long driveway, the house he lived in comes into view. In the mid-1960s it was brand new. Lacy curtains hung in the window then, vegetable and flower gardens thrived. The grass was mowed regularly, and a stockyard was within walking distance of the back yard.

On this day, it appears that no one is home. Dirty, unkempt drapes shield the front windows. The landscape is dusty and dead. Paint peels from the eaves under the roof, but a shiny new dirt bike is propped up against a wall in the carport. The leaf-shaped plot of grass Steve remembers barely resembles the one his mother carefully tended. The old, corrugated metal rain tank is still perched on its stand above the roofline of the house. It looks hardly big enough to keep a family of five watered and washed.



Other memories crowd to the surface of Steve's mind: he's a little red-haired daredevil on a bike too big for him, careening around the sloped corner of the road in front of the house, then jumping off in the front yard and letting it fly and hit the rain tank stand; staying with a family down the road while his parents were away a week in Adelaide; long bus rides to and from school while tormenting a teenage boy who was assigned to sit next to him and keep him in line..."wild bush kid" is how Steve describes himself; going on picnics with his family to large sand and dirt hills and jumping off to roll in the dust; letting his big sister sleep past the bus stop on the way home from school while he and his younger brother got off. He grins as he recalls how the bus abruptly stopped near the top of a distant hill, and an angry little speck of a person emerged and started stomping in their direction. He and his brother ran the nearly full mile to the house, in the front door, drop the lunch bags, out the back door to get lost in the land and far away from an angry adolescent female. "Hi mom. Gone," he said. Even now there's a sparkle in his eye at the memory.

Steve also noticed powerlines strung on poles like marching sentinels across paddocks and hills. In the days he lived there, power didn't reach that far back into the land. The only power to be had was by generator, which was installed at the "big boss's" house a little further up the dirt track. At 9 p.m., it was literally "lights out" for the day. Sometimes Steve would forget on late night trips to the loo and would flick the light switch. The distant warning "chug chug" of the awakening engine urged him to flick the switch off quickly before he got into trouble.

We travel no further down the road than his old abode. He slowly turned the Land Rover around in the driveway and we backtrack, undetected. His eyes scan the property, noting aloud what's still there and what's been removed.

I look at him, this South Australian by birth, who is my husband. I study his face and note that underneath his manly, rugged profile a little worn by passing years, there is still a glimpse of the red-haired, freckle-faced little boy with a mischievous glint in his blue eyes.



He turns to me with a smile and a wink. Not everything changes.

The signs are still there.