[ In the late 13 hundreds a curse placed on a wretched widow is transferred to a sacred stone. The stone becomes lost through the ages. Somehow it wound up in the grounds of a convent on the banks of the
Yarra near a swimming hole popular with some spirited local boys. ]
Secret of the Widow's Stone
The local boys had formed a gang of daredevils and silvertongues forged in ordeals of bravado and courage, based mainly around a perilously high bomba rope tied to a gangly limb of a stringybark gumtree that overhung a lazy riverbend, far from the eyes of the silent and frowning nuns. For one of the boys the tree held a secret from long, long ago. Years ago before he had to leave, one of the boy's fathers had shown his son an epigram of a heart with his mother's initials inside. Another secret he and his dad didn't know was that on this accursed tree, in colonial times, a gallows pole and occasional jibbet, had hung his very own great grandfather and great grand-uncle for stealing four pints of rum and a pair of boots. Innocent now in summer sunshine and pastoral in autumn mists, the tree, now at a strange angle and barely alive, bore a yard-long chain from a forbiddingly high limb spliced with a thick rope. Ideal for swinging over the cool brown swirling waters on hot Melbourne afternoons in January. A few feet below the mud beneath the perennial innocence of swimming children lay the skeletons of cruelly treated and harrowed exiles and convicts from our heritage - a hideous and stupid past. Fenced off from the local kids, the temptation was too much for some and despite hiring a grumpy groundskeeper, the nuns couldn't totally stop romantic couples or sneaky boys from taking to the river bank.
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