Kanga Creek Reunion

The Ruddocks arrived first, because Aunty Prue had never been late for anything in her life, including, the family said, her own birth.

Mara saw them from the front verandah of the Kanga Creek Hotel at a quarter past two on Thursday afternoon: a white hire four-wheel drive coming in off the Quilpie road in a long plume of red dust, much too fast for the gravel, with the windows up and the air conditioning so high that when Uncle Trev opened his door the cold came out like a fridge. It was forty-three degrees in the shade, and there was not much shade. The flies found Trev before his second foot touched the ground. He swatted at them with his golf cap, and said a word that a retired school principal's husband should not have known, and Aunty Prue, climbing out the other side in a linen dress that had been white in Brisbane, said, "Trevor," without looking at him, the way she had said it for forty-five years.

Then she looked up at the pub, and saw Mara, and her face did something it did not often do, which was soften.

"Rosie's kid," she said. "Look at you. Come here."

Mara went down the steps and was hugged, hard, in a cloud of expensive perfume and red dust. Aunty Prue always hugged like that: once, firmly, as if signing a document. Then she held Mara at arm's length and looked over Mara's shoulder, up and down the empty main street of Kanga Creek: the pub, the CWA hall, the police station, the roadhouse, the closed bank, the dog asleep in the middle of the road.

"Are they here yet?" she said. "The others?"

"Not yet."

"Good," said Aunty Prue, and went inside to complain about the air conditioning.

Mara helped Uncle Trev with the bags, of which there were eleven, for three nights.

"Don't ask," said Trev, hauling out a set of golf clubs. "She packed for every possible weather. In November. In Kanga Creek." He looked round at the red plain shimmering away to the horizon, and the single sad gum tree by the war memorial. "Is there a course?"

"There's the airstrip."

Trev considered this seriously, and Mara realised he was not joking. Then he lowered his voice. "Listen. Is Merv coming? And Ainslie? All of them?" Mara nodded. Trev breathed out through his nose. "Thirty-seven years," he said. "Thirty-seven years, over a ute. You'd think they'd have got over it." He hefted the clubs onto his shoulder. "I've never even been told what happened. Not properly. Every one of them tells it different."

The Birtleses came in at four, from the west, in a dented Land Cruiser towing a caravan the size of a small house, with Aunty Ainslie at the wheel in a singlet and a big hat, Uncle Wal asleep beside her, and two twelve-year-old twins in the back seat already fighting. They had driven from Perth. It had taken four days. Ainslie climbed down, kissed Mara on both cheeks, looked at the white hire car parked out the front, and said, "Oh. She's here, then," in a voice that could have dried a dam.

And the Kellaways came in at sunset from Gidgee Downs, forty kilometres out, in Uncle Merv's old station ute, Merv driving with one arm out the window, Aunty Narelle beside him with a pavlova on her knees for the weekend, and in the tray, sitting in a cane chair lashed to the tray rails, with a sun hat tied under her chin and a stubby holder of lemonade in one hand, the reason they had all come.

Dorothy Kellaway. Nan. One hundred years old on Saturday.

The ute pulled up outside the pub. The whole of Kanga Creek, which was most of the pub, came out onto the verandah to look. Nan surveyed them from her cane chair: Prue on the top step, very straight; Ainslie by the caravan, arms folded; Merv getting out of the ute without looking at either of them; Trev and Wal and Narelle and the twins and Darren, Merv's son, who ran the station now, all standing about trying to look as if they were not waiting for something to explode.

Nan looked at the three of them, her three surviving children, who had not been in the same place at the same time since 1987.

"Well," she said, in a voice that carried to the roadhouse. "Isn't this nice."

Nobody said anything.

Then she found Mara, in the doorway of the pub with a tray of cold drinks, and winked.

Mara had organised this party. For six months. The pub, the CWA ladies, the cake, the bunting, the invitations, the phone calls, the very long phone calls, the promises that nobody would have to sit near anybody. Rosie, Mara's mum, Nan's youngest, had been the only one of the four who never took a side, and when she died she had left Mara her place in the family: the one they all still talked to.

Now the three branches stood on the main street of Kanga Creek in the red light of the setting sun, not looking at each other, while the flies circled and the dog in the road woke up, looked at them all, and went back to sleep.

It was going to be a long weekend.