The yellow-flowered yam daisy looks similar to a dandelion, but with wider spaces between its petals. The leaves are slender. The seeds are sown after fire by native women and can cover many acres. They are delicious baked, sweet and slightly salty, and make a most excellent soup.

NEW SOUTH WALES, 1887–88

CLANCY

Maria’s house was on a hill, patterned on the colonial Indian design, built long and with wide verandas to capture the breezes, though here it was to see the view as well, the wide stretch of river (so much water, sang Clancy’s heart, so much ever-flowing water), the trees fatter and fuller of canopy than the ones around Overflow. The road up the hill was carefully graded in a series of curves, so that even a single horse and cart could get up it. Big Red took it easily.

The hills behind Bear Hill were even taller, which meant Maria’s home had that almost-miracle: a hilltop with a stream. Halfway up the gardens began, not roses or other garden flowers, but bush plants, obviously deliberately planted as they grew in rows, and just as deliberately not grown for beauty, though some showed blooms of brilliant red and one a flagrant yellow.

‘Clancy!’ Maria had been sitting on the veranda. She lifted her skirts and ran to him. He slid off Big Red and hugged her, hugged her hard, saw her laughing, happy face, felt the chicken bones of her body, and knew that his sister, his darling sister, was dying.

They sat on the veranda. The cane chairs were comfortable, the cushions bright. Maria wore a dress of green silk, with an embossed pattern of unfamiliar flowers. He had never seen her wear bright colours before.

And she didn’t wear a veil. Instead she had a short hood of what looked like starched linen — green, to match her dress — that covered half her head and where her nose would have been, with a hole for her eye. It looked eccentric. It was also, in an odd way, pretty.

He had always thought his sister beautiful. Now he saw how others would judge her lovely too.

A maid brought them a jug of a long cool drink, something that had lemon in it and sugar and gin, and a bitter taste he couldn’t identify, but which quenched his thirst as the shanties’ thick warm beer never did. But then, that wasn’t why you drank beer.

‘How did you get it so cold?’ he asked, for something to say that didn’t pierce the heart.

‘A new machine called a refrigerator. It runs on kerosene. Ethelred organised one for us. You’ll have ice cream tonight.’