McKenzie hesitated. ‘I wasn’t going to. I’d asked if she wanted to come with me once before, but she’d refused. Stuck in my craw, that a black girl could refuse a white man, a man with a job too, even if he had a few more years than her. But she knew I hadn’t meant marriage then. Oh, I’d have taken care of her. But I wouldn’t have made her my wife.

‘But all beat up like that? Couldn’t take her back to my lodgings. Told myself if she wasn’t dead, she soon would be. Then she opened her eyes and looked at me and said, “Please.” Just that one word. And suddenly I saw a woman, not the colour of her skin.’

‘What happened then?’ asked Clancy quietly.

‘Gave a milko a shilling to go and get my swag. You can always trust a milkman. Bloke who does the same thing every night for forty years won’t let you down. Took her down by the harbour and set up camp. Lived on fish and what an old duck who lived in a big house just round the headland sent down to us — Mrs Sheldon. She’d been sketching and demanded to know what I was doing. I told Mrs Sheldon I’d found her beaten up on the street and was trying to nurse her back to health. She sent her boot boy to us with a loaf of bread, a billy of milk and a pail of leftovers every morning.’

They rode in silence for a while. ‘I wondered why you didn’t have kids,’ said Clancy at last.

‘They tore something inside her. Don’t know what. Anyway, never touched her that way in all our years of marriage,’ said McKenzie.

‘You mean you’ve never —’

‘We get by,’ said McKenzie shortly. ‘I been thinking — ought to send the word out that we’re hiring. Cattle mostly look after themselves. But sheep . . .’

‘We’ll need men to cut feed for them till it rains too,’ said Clancy.

Neither man mentioned the attack on Mrs McKenzie again.

It was early August when Rose pointed to a turtle slowly but purposefully heading uphill. ‘Rain in ten days’ time,’ she said.

‘Good,’ said Clancy, his back aching from carting in loads of kurrajong and she-oak slash. The cattle’s ribs showed; the sheep staggered. But mostly they’d survived.

And it was only eight days later when she brushed at some intrusive flying insects — not moths, more like winged ants: ‘Rain tomorrow night. Probably not much.’