After harvest the main street was filled with teams and their whip cracking bullockies.
Out of her pages rise a parade of characters, each with a story to enact: a Bolshoi ballet mistress, morning magpies, the odd cousin, unborn children, a retired BBC reviewer, a bullocky, the Queen at her coronation.
Often on such occasions the bullocky's dog would sit guarding its master's tuckerbox and possessions while he was away seeking help.
As a result of the large and continuous amount of traffic it did not take long for a hotel and store to be opened at Edeowie in 1863, to cater for the thirsty bullockies and other travellers between Port Augusta and Blinman.
The bullockies, and from 1853 Spanish muleteers from Uruquay, travelled in long convoys, and where they made camp for the night little inns sprung up and around these small townships grew, each about fifteen kilometres apart.
It is that afterthought - a sort of half-dotty intentness on completion such that an alternative river has to be provided to receive the delinquent bullocky - that imbues this observation with its ironic momentum.