Jarribong

Jarribong is a small town Frances encounters on the road to Tranquillum House, first as a desolate landscape glimpsed through a car window and later as the setting for Jan’s new romance. The contrast between Frances’s bleak impressions and her friend’s story makes the place a compact counterpoint to the charming small-town fiction Frances has been writing.

Arrival and first impressions

As the countryside passes, Frances reaches a sign welcoming visitors to Jarribong and announcing its pride in being a tidy town. She slows to the fifty-kilometre-per-hour speed limit, which feels almost absurdly slow after the open road. The sign’s civic cheerfulness sets up a sharp contrast with what she sees next.

A town against the imagined village

Frances studies a row of ordinary businesses: a Chinese restaurant marked by a faded red-and-gold dragon on its door, a service station that appears closed, a red-brick post office, and a drive-through bottle shop that appears open. There is also a police station, which seems unnecessary in a town with no one visible on the street. Jarribong may be tidy, she thinks, but its emptiness makes it feel almost post-apocalyptic.

The place prompts Frances to reconsider the small town in her latest manuscript. Her imagined village is nestled in the mountains, with a warm, busy café that smells of cinnamon and a bookstore implausibly making a profit. Jarribong offers a grittier alternative to that inviting, possibly twee picture. Frances imagines reviewers recognizing the unreality of her setting, though she expects the manuscript may not be reviewed at all and says she never reads her reviews. Her brisk farewell to the town turns the encounter into a dry joke at the expense of both idealized village fiction and the bleakness before her.

Jan’s story of Jarribong

Jarribong returns later through Jan’s account of how she met a new police officer there. He had been bored while sitting on the roadside conducting random breath tests, and the two began talking as he waited for another car to arrive. Their conversation lasted two hours. Frances, who knows Jan well enough to find the duration difficult to imagine, nevertheless recognizes the meaning in Jan’s laugh: Jan has newly fallen in love. Frances responds with happy tears and takes the romance as a reason to believe that love is not dead.

The two appearances give Jarribong contrasting narrative functions. To Frances, it initially seems empty and dispiriting, a real place that exposes the artifice in her fictional village. In Jan’s memory, that same town becomes the setting for an unexpectedly long conversation and the beginning of a romance. The shift does not erase Frances’s first impression; instead, it reveals how a seemingly negligible roadside town can hold a private turning point invisible to a passerby.