Wide streets, slow talk, visible horizons, unhaste, drinkable coffee, air you can’t see, first prize in the Trap Shoot a ham (second prize two chooks), courteous people, a main street monument to Glenn McGrath, traffic slowing to circle the cenotaph that recalls the one-hundred-year dead, terrain so flat a granite mound (250 metres) is a mountain)*, forty eight social, sporting and cultural clubs (including Writers’ Inc – contact Mrs Shirley Todhunter**), a nursing home full of smiling nonagenarians, churches of wood, the CWA***, a beauty queen crowned Miss Beef…

I like the town.

Walking down the sunblazing main street on a Friday afternoon I pass by three girls slim enough to sit side by side on a single doorstep. All three meet my curious gaze, two smile, one speaks: ‘Good afternoon.’

‘Good afternoon girls.’

Three smiles. These girls, just at the threshold of puberty, haven’t been taught to fear. They smile like their great-grannies who greet me at the nursing home.

I like the town.

In the hospital I treat too many for alcoholism. Ice floods the town, destroying minds, ravaging families. I feel a pang for the three small smilers who did not fear to smile at a stranger.

I come as a gap filler for the doctor who left last week after twenty years of service. The town is in mourning. ‘Will you be staying, doctor?’, the townsfolk ask me.

I don’t like to say no: I like the town.

* Mount Foster.

** I did contact her.

*** If you don’t know the CWA (Country Women’s Association) you have probably never eaten a cream-filled passionfruit sponge cake. If you haven’t eaten a passionfruit sponge, move to a small town and do so.

nevertire of eenaweena

never beenta eenaweena

you’ll never tire of nevertire

when I’ve beenta

eenaweena and nevertire

i’ll have beenta elong elong –

grong grong and matong

were nearer my home town:

I’ve eaten meringue

in wulgulmerang –

in betweena hell,

booligal as well

a long time ago,

in eulomogo;

been alone in quambone

felt at home in gulargambone

done algebra in egelabra

and once in gilgandra

reclined on veranda

and free from hungery

in eumungerie

with grub o from dubbo

found peace, release, ease

at least in burrumbuttock

never felt foreign

in a small town like warren