Aborigines caught shoplifting. Drunk blacks abusing white women outside Hyland’s butcher shop. Women throwing stones at cars that drove past the Tip, the shantytown near the dump. Teenagers lighting bonfires that spread onto farmland. A carload of Aborigine men doing laps of Main Street, terrorising innocent white women. But I didn’t see any of it. Not when I rode to work and not when Barry sent me into town to buy toothpaste and bars of soap for the small shop in the caravan park office. And it wasn’t just Nan full of it. I heard the rumours everywhere, even in the caravan park toilet block. Sure, I saw a few Aborigines around town. A woman and two children walking hand in hand down Main Street to the grocery store, and when I left work yesterday two old men in a car, but that was all. Maybe I was too busy to notice. Since Christmas the work at the caravan park had doubled. Bins to be emptied, lawns to be mowed, gravel to be swept off paths and weeds to be pulled. Not that I was complaining.
