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Healesville, Cobram, Balingup!
    ‘Just goes to show,’ the old woman was saying, ‘you can pick anywhere you go in this land of plenty! You can keep that book if you like, love. Course,’ she added, ‘that’s just the big crops, like, the basics. On top of that you have all the specialist stuff – avocadoes and asparagus, tamarilloes, kiwi fruit and figs, even herbs now that cooking’s gone posh. And since this bush tucker craze, they’re setting up plantations of lilli pilli and what have you. And then of course’ (she winked) ‘there’s always the illegal . . .’
    Liv stared across the top of the holly tree.
    ‘Oh yes, I’ve been asked to pick that marijuana more than once in my life, love. Did it too, on one occasion, when the engine of the old bongo van blew up and I was stuck with no money in the backside of the universe. Course, those Mafia types like little old ladies. They know we won’t nick the heads. Oh, I’m not proud of myself for doing it but I don’t lay awake at nights over it either, mind. I mean, if you’re going to think like that, how many alcoholics have I helped by picking grapes? Eh? It’s people’s own decision what they do with their lives, I reckon.’
    As for now: ‘I’m waiting on the cherries down in Young. They’ll start soon. And seeing as I was in the area, I thought I’d drop in on my old haunts.’
    Liv was reeling. Could only start with what was nearest at hand. ‘How do you think they got here? The poppies?’
    ‘Oh?’ The woman seemed to have forgotten them. ‘Brought by birds maybe. Amazing how birds will spread a plant. Perhaps some bird lived up in that Golden Triangle or whatever they call it, Thailand, somewhere like that, and this bird ate a seed, and carried it down here in her belly, then done a poop and Bob’s your uncle.’
    Liv reeled even more. To imagine a piece of Thailand (she remembered a TV documentary: water buffaloes and golden Buddhas; rice fields and refugees) here in Lithgow!
    For a moment, the hills that surround the town receded, and Liv’s landscape opened up to include Mareeba and Marradong, Kyabram, Kakadu, the Golden Triangle, the World.
    ‘Course, she had to get married,’ the old woman said.
    (Who? Liv was baffled by the sudden shift in the conversation.)
    ‘She was C of E of course, while all us were Presos or Methos or even worse, tykes. Menie Wilson that was. Oh and all la-de-da, you wouldn’t credit it! As a kid she’d be dressed in white broderie anglaise of a Sunday, with pale blue ribbon pulled through the eyelets in the cloth. Her mother used to copy the patterns for her dresses from what the princesses in England were wearing. She’d copy them from the magazines, and Wilhelmina Wilson used to tell us that she was a princess! And the cream of it was, she thought it was true!’
    Liv blushed for her own fantasy: but at least it had just been a game for her. (Hadn’t it?)
    ‘And her dad working across here at the blast furnace like my dad, and everybody’s dad,’ the woman went on. ‘Least, while they had work. Ha! And meanwhile, for all the posh clothes, she mostly never took any lunch to school. Now, we didn’t mind sharing, it was share and share alike here in Lithgow. But the Wilsons, they used to share when you had it, and not share when they did, see? That’s why we called her Menie. We’d share our lunch and she wouldn’t.
    ‘And then, when we girls grew up a bit, we’d share our dresses for the dances, and we’d share our beaus too. We didn’t like to leave a girl standing as a wallflower, just cause she was fat and plain, like Menie Wilson was. So we’d tell our partners: go and dance with her.
    ‘And they would. And she’d steal them. Out the back of the hall and never come back.
    ‘Now there was some who said Menie Wilson was no better than she should be, though I for one never believed them, I mean, Princess Wilhelmina in her broderie anglaise and all! But then one day it was announced: