Cowboy!

I can see the cowboy from my backyard and I look up to see him frequently. He is smarter and far more respectable a work of art than he comes across in the daylight hour when the sun is full on him.

Anyway, he's a bit of a secret I suspect up there and I wonder who his artist was. In the rays of a good evening's sundown, his aura glows. He sometimes glints like gold. I have seen him silhouetted as if he is silver.

When he is a charcoal outline against a blackening sky I think of the men who rode here and worked horses and he overlooks the reserve that was awarded the containment and care of the valuable police horses in the days when gold was sold in the street and the population bristled with activity, certainly news of riches other than sheep and their wool and fields for growing grain was prime time.

For many years before that police reserve, the poor copper over the road on the adjacent corner took pot luck and parked his most valuable resource at the end of the day, his horse wherever he could and hoped for the best.

Escorts of troopers interrupted their journey to Adelaide from the Victorian gold fields at this location to have a drink, a chat, to stretch their legs, to make a comfort stop and water their horses. Explorers, surveyors, government men and currency lads stopped here, vagabonds, travelling actors and snake oil salesmen, prisoners in chains, bullockies driving wool drays I wonder, flocks of sheep being herded.

The site is the Tatiara Hotel and Motel alongside the original woolshed of the Scott's brothers' Cannawigara Station, now the Woolshed Inn.

Likely that copper went inside the police station tourists can see the facade of where it is protected inside the Morning Loaf Bakery opposite, on the corner facing the cowboy, and wrote by the light of a candle yet another letter to the powers-that-were requesting he needed somewhere secure to park the horse. Dear Commissioner...

Featured on the street banner is the Hon Robert "Bob" Hawke, Prime Minister of Australia 1983 - 1991.