The boy politely did not say that a career as a shearer would be even less notable in the ‘Old Boys’ Achievements’ list than that of a solicitor’s clerk.

‘I like the life,’ said Clancy, answering the question not put. He looked at his hands ruefully. ‘Not the shearing, though it’s a living.’ Plus the hard work, the endless leaning over sheep, the repetition of each stroke, the focus on what the next stroppy ewe might do, meant that he slept, he who would not otherwise sleep. ‘I’m not cut out for an office. The bush . . .’ He hesitated, but something in the boy’s face made him continue. ‘Sometimes it’s as if the bush itself is a friend. As if the kookaburras laugh just for me, the river murmurs my name.’ Clancy laughed at himself. ‘You probably think my brain’s gone soft from shanty grog.’

‘No,’ said the boy simply. ‘I wish I didn’t have to go to an office either.’

‘Why don’t you go on the land then?’

Andrew Paterson shrugged. ‘Drought. We lost our place.’

Clancy nodded. The country was slowly emptying, like the creeks and even rivers. And despite his words to the lad, he was getting sick of dust and, he realised, possibly tired of shearing too. He just hadn’t thought about it till now.

Red dust, grey dust, orange dust: red sheep, grey sheep, orange sheep. Men whose bodies ached so much they lived only for the short oblivion brought on by alcohol after the shed was over; children wide eyed from starvation, dressed in rags, because their fathers drank the money that might feed them or give them the rudiments of an education and future beyond the land.

The lad closed his book. ‘You said the Overflow. Your family property?’

‘Yes. Which is about all Overflow is, property, until the drought breaks.’ He wondered if the boy had considered finding a job on the land, even if his own family’s estate was gone. But Andrew Paterson was too young and inexperienced to be a manager, or even a foreman; he didn’t have the muscles to make it as a shearer — he’d be a tar boy or put to sweeping up — and even to be a gun shearer was a social come-down for a boy of good family, which this one obviously was. Or seemed to be, thought Clancy. After all, his own accent and manners had been bought by his father, courtesy of tutor, school and wife.

It was no longer agony to think of Flora, though guilt ran through him like ants in a sugar bag, and his thoughts were just as bitter. But Clementine . . . he still could not bear to think of Clementine. He’d be reading poems to her to learn by heart now: The Lady of Shalott, The Highwayman.