I come from a long line of farmer-folk.

My dad’s dad and his dad and his dad (and so on) have worked on the same patch of rough, quartzed Australian ground for a couple of centuries and so, in a small country town in southwest New South Wales, everyone has my last name. Or, if they don’t, we’re somehow related. Or they know my father from when he was a child. Or, they last saw me when I was the reach of their knees. That town is very interconnected.

I love Temora. It is full of family memory, that dusty old town.

My grandparents’ farmhouse is an old sandstone that was built just after the first war and there are many ancestors buried in the town’s graveyard with the glowing headstone. And my father’s old school is in a museum. I like to tease him with that fact – I tell him he’s so old that his school is historical. And that’s partly true: not the bit about my father’s age– he’s only in his fifties – but the school housed his father and his brothers and all their children and many other men of the district and so it’s become an institution. Combaning Siding School lived from 1911 to 1967 and over those years it weathered many snakes and fire-scares and long, crackling summers.

I visited it in the Rural Museum once. I sat on the old benches and felt the rough timber of the walls. I imagined I was my father, leaning hard against the rough belly of his desk, hungry for knowledge. I couldn’t believe my father’s real-life experience was history. I couldn’t connect the dusted distance of history and museums to the closeness of my father and his very much ‘aliveness.’

My parents and I went back to the old school site in the Easter holidays of 2010.

We’d left a wake of dust behind our car and there, in the middle of same-looking paddocks was a fenced-off section with a sign out the front declaring that piece of land’s educational history. All that’s left now is an old tin weather shed, the sign, and scraggy gum trees. I could hear the crows as I stood in the country-stillness, imagining the schoolhouse in the corner and the outhouse across the way in which kids were scared to expose their buttocks in case a King Brown was waiting under the seat. There were only nine kids attending by the time Dad was there, and he told me how they used to march every morning whilst he would play ‘God Save the Queen’ on the recorder. Ah, the thought of my little shaved-headed father playing the incongruous sounds of an imperialist land in the quaking, rugged landscape of his youth – I could just picture that irony as I surveyed what was left behind.

Temora still holds the bones of its history in its current day setting.

The buildings declare long-past years in their signs, their brick old and heavy. I drive through the old lanes around the town and my Mornie points out where relatives used to live and where famous family stories happened. We stand in a paddock towards the back of their property and she shapes the outline of their old farmhouse with the stretch of her arm. I can still find old tins and spoons amongst the stubs of quartz even now. I picture her raising my father and his three siblings amongst this expanse of grain land and crow-song, and it’s a beautiful thought. I think of the freedom of space, the way you could ride a motorbike for ages and still be amongst endless land. I think of the long days and eternal harvests, the heartbreak of raising sheep and waiting for elusive rain. It’s a hard land, a hard life, but it echoes of family and memory and beauty.