Rose sat mending a bridle as Mrs McKenzie made dinner, kangaroo stew with dumplings. She planned to make fried pies with leftover stew inside them that the men could take in their saddlebags to eat tomorrow.

The men. ‘You’re not going in to town?’ she asked Mrs McKenzie, though she knew the answer already. In all her time with the McKenzies, there had only been one community Mrs McKenzie had felt safe to visit. But there was always the hope that maybe, the next might be different. This was Rose’s first visit to Charters Towers.

‘No.’ Mrs McKenzie shot her a glance. ‘Best you don’t either.’ They spoke English together. They’d long ago established that even though each could make out the other’s language, with many words in common, they should speak the new language now, not the old.

All the way there Rose had watched for signs that her people — her kind of people, ones with dark skins — still inhabited the land. Mrs McKenzie said there had still been many, even ten years back. But the scars on the trees were long healed. Any smoke spires belonged to huts, or drovers like themselves. The land was being forcibly emptied so cattle and sheep could fill it.

It no longer felt strange knowing that most white people wanted her and her people gone, all evidence of their existence in the country destroyed, from the food sources so carefully tended to the places of importance changed so deeply that the duty towards them, on which life was based, was impossible. What did feel strange was the knowledge that only a few generations earlier all this land had been theirs. She was a shadow person and knew it, safe only while she kept to the isolated tracks where they took the cattle.

Tiger sometimes brought back tales from the shanties he had visited along the way, of poisoned food left out, or massive ‘drives’ to take dark-skinned people to reservations, or even of massacres — though he only told McKenzie those stories when they thought she was asleep.

Rose appreciated Tiger’s kindness, but it was a soured gift. She needed knowledge to stay safe, stay free.

Mrs McKenzie mixed her dumpling dough with quick fingers. Too much mixing, she said, made them heavy. ‘Cattle sale means money. Money means drinking. Drinking means men get drunk as a goanna after eating rotting peaches. And drunk men . . .’ Mrs McKenzie shrugged.

‘Wouldn’t I be safe enough as a boy?’ She still did look boyish when she bound her breasts, a nuisance kept for the few times they met other drovers or camped near enough to a house where others might see them. But she had no real desire to go into a town . . .

That wasn’t entirely true, she realised. She had seen Sydney and had no reason to think this would be better: only hotter, more dusty and more drunk. But there would be shops.