The faces of the hundreds of mourners who attended Broderick McGovern’s Outback funeral showed genuine sadness and a communal sense of loss. There was no trace of mixed emotions anywhere. This was a sad, sad day. He had been a man of power and influence, but incredibly he had gone through life without attracting enemies. The overriding reason had to be that he had been a just man, egalitarian in his dealings; a man who had never wronged anyone and had never been known to go back on his word. Broderick McGovern had been a gentleman in the finest sense of the word. All the men and most of the women, except for the elderly and the handful of young women who were pregnant, had elected to make the long walk from the homestead to the McGovern graveyard set down in the shadow of a strange fiery red sandstone monolith rising some hundred feet above the great spinifex plain. The McGovern family from the earliest days of settlement had called it Manguri, after one of the tribal gods. The great sandstone pillar did, in fact, bear a remarkable resemblance to a totem figure, only Manguri was the last remaining vestige of a table-topped mountain of pre-history.
