Take 250mL fresh juice, 105g sugar, add two eggs, well beaten, 120g butter and 1tsp cornflour mixed in with the juice. Heat in a saucepan as slowly as possible, stirring all the time till it thickens. Bottle and seal and store for up to six months in the fridge. This is a strong and tart butter — add more butter if you like a blander mixture.

GIBBER’S CREEK, DECEMBER 1980

JED

She drove through a coloured land, rejoicing at its brightness, even if they were drought colours, with all that they entailed: red dirt marked into rectangles by fences, thin tan tussocks, ghost-trunked trees, branches dropped and almost bare of leaves.

‘Hadn’t realised things had got so bad,’ said Sam in the seat beside her, slurring only slightly. Sam, finally coming home! He sat propped up by pillows, his walker in the back seat, for he was still unable to stand for long unaided. But he would.

Sam McAlpine has come a long way from death to be with his family, she thought. He will not stop the journey now. A hard journey, just as the trek through this drought was hard. But Sam was coming home. And one day, the world would be green again.

Meanwhile the last dust storm from the west had covered what was left of the grass, as well as the washing and even Maxi, sleeping on the veranda, who had been rust red when she woke. The river pools had shrunk further, rimmed with algae, slimy with droppings.

Every morning now Jed collected the bodies of animals that had stumbled tens or even hundreds of kilometres to finally reach water, then died, starved and heat exhausted. She dragged dead roos, wallabies, wombats to the pit Michael and his tractor had dug for her, then covered them with dirt. No goannas, foxes, crows or quolls bothered to dig them up. There was enough carrion for all now.

She put out water feeders, dishes of lucerne pellets, hung wild birdseed from the orchard branches. It was not enough. She could not feed them all. No one could feed them all. Even if every person in Australia tried to help, the drought was stronger than them all.

A few spinebills and other honeyeaters survived on the salvias she watered from her and Mattie’s bath. Even snakes seemed to have vanished. Only the insect eaters, like swallows, thrived. The veranda was littered with flies’ wings under their nests.

But Sam was coming home. And one day it would rain.

Past Drinkwater, the tall English trees almost leafless, though Nancy said they had survived droughts before and would this time too. Probably. Past what they still called the billabong turn-off, even though the billabong was gone. A roo stared out from skeletal gum trees, almost a skeleton itself, the colour of dust, with the dazed look of an animal that has gone too long without food.