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already ? Look at the familiarity if you please. What was the world coming to, when the police force had no power over these people? Acutely embarrassed by his lack of progress, and overhearing the whispering behind his back, Truthful terminated the sideshow with a demonstration of Brisbane Valley cop briskness by saying he was arresting the first likely suspects to catch his eye. The bemused Council people crowding around, uninvited, huddling to avoid bodily contact with anything inside the Pricklebush home in case they picked up something quite dreadful, and having had an eyeful of poverty chipped at Truthful: Let’s take em and take em, get em off our backs, bloody mongrels are a prime nuisance to everyone anyhow. Send these two little buggers off to a reform school or something. That will show them who’s boss of this town.
    It is true that silence has a cloak because it covered all of those little tin humpies all day after the official people went back to minding their own businesses. Normal Phantom sat at his kitchen table glaring at Angel whenever she came into the room. Neither spoke. He knew what had happened. And she was not repentant, not one bit. There was no end of her fussing over her statue, cleaning it, looking at it, examining the cracks and chips, helping herself to the full range of Normal’s fish paints, making a pride of place for it in her bedroom. The day slipped into an even quieter night with no lanterns lit. The Pricklebush wore the total darkness of cloud cover.
    Once the dawn broke, Normal Phantom stepped out of his house to go down to the boat. It was then he felt the eerie quietness, a stillness he found difficult to place, where even the birds did not sing. And no sign of his bird.
    He was expecting retaliation, and he looked around up in the branches of the trees to find his bird. As he surveyed the surroundings, something struck him as being out of place, a surreal quietness: silence had replaced the noise of children’s crying, families arguing. The Phantom family was on its own. The other families had moved during the night. In complete and utter silence, they had picked up everything they owned, and moved to the other side of town. That was when the war of the dump caused the division, and people realigned themselves, Eastsider or Westsider, and that was that. The Phantoms lost whatever near and dear or distant relatives they had, except some old people who refused to move. No one else wanted to put up with another minute more of what they called Mrs Angel Day.
    The war of the dump burst apart the little world of the Phantoms and their related families. Everyone in the Pricklebush from elder to child, Eastsider to Westsider, injured and uninjured started bringing up their faded memories of the ancient wars, to be renewed with vigour and the hard evidence of all facts. Everyone now knew of someone in their families who had been assigned to make the long pilgrimage over their vast lands which occupied dozens of cattle stations, where they travelled in clapped-out vehicles, near and far within their tribal territories, to seek out their very old senior Law people. The old people were always elusive too, never being where they should be, when their relatives turned up.
    ‘Well! Where’s old White Whiskers?’
    ‘He must have gone that-a-way.’
    The challenge was to be always on the move, following the old ones travelling their country to at least a thousand sites they knew by memory. It was a test of how good they knew the country before they were able to find old White Whiskers waiting for them. Every family had to know the story of the past. Know, to go about their separate ways, by reclaiming land from fighting long ago.
    On the other hand, the townsfolk of Desperance could not make heads or tails out of why they were being sandwiched between Aboriginal people, not only living on either side of them now, but setting up two camps without even saying to anybody what they were doing. All