Once the afternoon’s destination had been decided upon, Mrs McKenzie and Rose vanished, riding like shadows through the trees, returning with whatever would be their meal that night: sometimes a possum, to be roasted, rather than stewed, or a few of the rabbits that were becoming serious competition for the grass, also for roasting. Their bags of native string bulged with weird roots too sweet and fibrous to be potatoes, but which tasted excellent baked.

A few times they came back with grains that the woman and the girl ground in a rock hollow, using another rock to make a paste to be smeared on the hot stones of the fire. The bread or biscuit, or whatever it was, was oily, nutty, curling up at the edges and, once Clancy had got over the shock of a new taste and texture, delicious.

Stews were for the days when they found good water and good grass, and so camped for a while. A boiled stew is spoiled stew, said Mrs McKenzie, quoting some long-ago Government House cook. Rabbit stewed with wild greens and strange sweet roots, or wild ducks half roasted first to drip off their fat, which was collected and used for a herbal liniment, for Tiger’s and McKenzie’s bones ached after a day’s work. The liniment stank, but it also seemed to work, for the men were limber the next morning.

Sometimes when they saw smoke trickling on the plains below their route McKenzie or Clancy would ride down to the cockie’s hut — wattle and clay walls, a stringybark roof, barefoot, dusty kids that hid behind their mother, but always a garden of sorts filled with pumpkin, pumpkin and more pumpkin, and usually prickly pears, grown for their fruit if you were patient enough to pick out the prickles, sometimes a hardy pear, plum or medlar tree, a persimmon or apple, and lemon trees as they travelled further north.

Husbands were always ‘down the back paddock ringbarking, but they’ll be back soon’ — the assertion a testament to the constant terror of a woman living alone with her family in the bush. McKenzie or Clancy offered coin for whatever food the women could spare — usually pumpkin, sometimes prickly pear jam or, if they were lucky, corn, potatoes, a few eggs, once a rooster, or even plums or apples. Rose was especially good at harvesting wild fruit as they passed, but none of it was sweet or juicy, and much of it had the faintest hint of turpentine. A pear or an apple was a luxury. The pumpkin . . .

He hated pumpkin. Always had. Just like Clementine . . . He began to thrust the memory away, then took it out and lingered over it instead, finally able to remember his daughter with joy as well as sorrow.