This wouldn’t be a problem for long. Half the country was looking for work. Meanwhile, thankfully, Clancy agreed that Overflow was badly overstocked. Clancy, Tiger and McKenzie — the old man refused to be left behind for what might be his final spree in a city — took two-thirds of the stock to Sydney. By some miracle they even had a bit of fat on them, enough to see them to Sydney and still look good at the sale.

Two days after they had left two men turned up, Zebediah and Big Moses, on horses with protruding ribs. Their skins were the same colour as her son’s: white fathers, Rose reckoned, and black mothers, though she did not ask. They’d been stockmen for old Drinkwater, but had heard that the new boss at Overflow would pay coloured stockmen wages as well as handing out rations.

Rose hired them, subject to Clancy’s agreement, which she assured them he would give if they’d worked well.

They did. Within a week, the kitchen was knocked down and burned as an irretrievable hovel. O’Hara — who even spoke some of her true language — took the cart to Gibber’s Creek to purchase necessities, paid for with the money in her bank account, which could be accessed by a white man with her bankbook and a letter of authority, even if no bank manager would have allowed her through the door.

Meanwhile Rose and Mrs McKenzie, and Zebediah’s newly installed wife and older daughters, scrubbed and washed. The cart returned. Zebediah and Big Moses painted the walls: hilarious at first, for none of them had ever done such a thing, though they had seen it. Rose was going to have green hands for weeks, or months maybe, and a pale blue streak upon her leg, while Big Moses was going to keep the yellow nose, painted on him as a joke, for an embarrassingly long time.

Now and then Rose took out Maria’s magazines, the ones Ethelred had given her, to make sure she was doing it all right.

A new kitchen was built of poles cut on the property and corrugated iron. It looked ugly, but was clean and would be fire-proof. A stove, with an oven and kerosene refrigerator, just like at Dirty Butter. Luckily Big Moses’s wife, Jane, had been a housemaid at Drinkwater and knew cooking, as well as what a kitchen needed to turn out a decent meal. Rose could learn how to carve up a sheep into the bits that could be baked, grilled or stewed, but she never got the hang of a sponge cake, or even a damper that didn’t weigh as heavy as a rock.