Alf Jones

Alf Jones anchors a stretch of Riverina travel, his paddock a known refuge where the narrator's horses remember the grass as well as he remembers the man's music. The narrator's easy indifference — better for Alf if gone, better for himself if not — quietly exposes the casual, self-interested calculus of a man without official hopes or fear of the sack. He matters as one of the small fixed points that make the vast, wind-scoured plain navigable, a name that turns open country into a route.