Free Gatherers and Hunters by Thomas Shapcott

true, in more recent times it has gone over the odds, but we’ll get to that. What I was telling you was how it all sort of grew on us, almost so we didn’t notice. Woke up one morning, and there they were, trying to run the place, acting as if they owned it.
    When young Ibrahim went on the local Shire Council I think we all gave a bit of a cheer and that’s the truth. Good to see a local make good. Good to see the lad show some civic spirit also, he was a hard worker, that one. And at that time nobody could have foreseen that I’d be the last of our line, and of the Weatherheads too, I’m the very last one.
    My kids, when they went to the University down in the capital, well I knew the professions were the way to the future, the drought years and the flood years come in cycles but they come all right and both my sons said they were jack of that. Don’t blame them, really.
    And of course the three girls never intended to stay up here, out of it all; their mother made sure of that and they knew perfectly well Roger and Tim would inherit the place. If they wanted it. Only Nessie ever grumbled and whinged about her share and it’s true, I had a soft spot for her and I guess I had led her to expect some part, after all she was the only one came back willingly on holidays, right from boarding school, and seemed genuinely interested in things. She was mad on horses, that one.
    But she was the one who nagged me into the irrigation, while I was still dithering about the cost. Best investment I ever made. Her mother always said she was more a Weatherhead than the Weatherheads but she was my secret favourite.
    Oh, the boys did all right for themselves, all of that. But I’ll still remember the way they mooched around the homestead those last holidays, couldn’t get them out into the sun even, the pair of them.
    Tim’s high in one of those accountancy agglomerates now, I suppose you know that. Spends half his life in Singapore, hope he finds it fun, I didn’t the one time I was there. Yes, Roger’s the one with the dental practice on the Gold Coast, oh rolling in it.
    So I was telling you about Ismael Ibrahim in that dirty big compound of his. That’s what I called it, a compound. And if you’d’ve seen his wife when she was young you wouldn’t believe how pretty she was. Petite, you know, and those big black eyes. Well, after fourteen kids, yes that’s what I said, after fourteen of them, one each year like the Irish used to do, well who’d recognise her now. Hard as nails she is, she was the one that beat me down – not him – over the block of shops in the side street; she fair wore me down, and I still don’t know how she knew before I did about Caffertys Coaches and their planned interstate comfort stop right in the village centre. Beat me down forty per cent on my asking price AND I thought I’d got a bargain, they’d all been empty since the newsagent shot through owing me rent on the corner one, and that would have been two years before. Well, will you look at them now!
    No, I don’t hold that against them. Not really. And after all, the other block of mine on the main street has done very well out of the Caffertys Coaches and their stopover. Real money spinner, matter of fact. And my god, she is a hard worker, though the whole tribe are out there like a pack of demons, day and night almost.
    1970 I think it was, but a lot can happen in the space of a decade or so.
    I think it was only when Tim came up here with his kids two years ago that it dawned on me just how the village has changed.
    â€˜Will you look at that!’ he said. ‘Eighty percent of the shops have got foreign names, some even in Arabic. Eighty percent.’ He counted them. ‘And there’s even a mosque. In Pristina, a mosque for Christ’s sake.’
    I think he was more indignant because it sort of crept up on us all, but he came to it fresh and it