‘Murgatroyd. You think you’re the only one who likes to keep these things a secret?’

‘You got a middle name?’

‘Benjamin.’

‘His name is Benjamin,’ said Clancy, gazing at his son.

Chapter 51

Chapter 51

A bush bed

Dig four forked branches into the ground, with two cross pieces and a couple of old sacks or blankets strung in between to make a hammock. Put your mattress on top. You can also use this structure as a table with a slab of wood or bark across, or as a seat.

NEW SOUTH WALES, 1900

CLANCY

Rose recovered swiftly. She carried the baby in a sling, in front first, then on her back, but by the time he was two Benjamin rode behind her on a specially adapted saddle.

Clancy began to dream of home.

At first it was the river and its channels, those strange byways carved by floods as the river spread over the plain before narrowing again as the hills grew higher. Then it was the song of the powerful owl, that deep bong bong on winter nights. He even dreamed of the homestead, not just at night, but as Big Red — getting old now, but still capable of her twenty miles a day — plodded alongside the cattle.

Despite this, he was surprised when Rose said one afternoon, the two of them slipping away from the others to swim, Mrs McKenzie tempting Benjamin with damper soaked in milk, ‘I want to see my country again.’

‘Overflow?’ he replied cautiously, for that was where she had been captured. He had learned enough about the native nations of Australia by now to know her own country was larger than one property.

‘From where the river starts to where it joins the Snowy.’

‘We can go back. But we had better stay off Drinkwater and Overflow.’ He’d heard rumours in the shanties — and hoped Rose hadn’t — that Drinkwater shot any native who somehow had not been gathered up for the reservations, except for those who worked for him or his neighbours and called every white man Boss.

‘Good,’ she said.

It was McKenzie who heard that the Dirty Butter property was for sale. Dirty Butter was further out from Overflow, a failed dairy farm, only viable when the owners had been able to sail butter and cheese downriver to sell to the Gibber’s Creek gold-miners before the rush ended. But it had six hundred acres and river frontage, even if that river was only a series of pools now, as well as some of the ‘overflows’ that kept their grass through the dry. Dirty Butter wouldn’t make them a fortune, but it would give them enough to live on, using skills the previous owner lacked.