‘Never. Every birthday is going to be better than the last,’ Nancy predicted calmly. ‘Or at least more interesting.’

‘True,’ said Jed.

Outside, she could hear the sounds of her daughter, laughing delightedly, and young Clancy’s voice, explaining the technical challenges of his photos. Clancy of the Overflow.

This letter had changed the lives of so many people . . . No, she thought, it hadn’t changed their lives one jot and that was why it mattered. But Jed needed time to focus on it, try to feel the emotions of the person who’d written it, the people who’d read it.

My dear Friend . . .

Nancy sat quietly while Jed read it, then read it again, then silently handed it back to her.

It had felt strange to hold a letter written by a poet she not just admired but loved — or loved his work perhaps, for the work was not the man, just part of him. The poems she had loved most as a child had been by Paterson and Lawson, nor had that love diminished.

She had known Banjo Paterson had written to Clancy, begging him not to ruin his life by marrying a native, offering to introduce him to women of his own class and colour. But to actually read it . . .

‘Are you going to put it in your book?’ asked Nancy quietly.

‘No. I thought I was, but . . .’ She tried to find the words. ‘Today it would be read as racist. A horrible letter. But it isn’t. It’s by a friend who truly knows how hard a life can be for a white man with a black wife. It’s a kind letter, by a good man. A man with the values of his time.’

Nancy nodded. ‘Hoped you’d say that. Had to give you the choice though.’

‘Thank you for trusting me with it.’

‘Well, you’re family too. That letter belongs to the family.’

Nancy had never put it into words before. Technically, Michael was Jed’s half-great-uncle, but she was far more family by choice than family by blood.

‘May I read it one more time?’

Nancy nodded and handed it to her. Jed made a note to find out how to preserve it properly. But she didn’t read it again. She didn’t need to. She simply held it, looked at the copperplate writing, browned now, the link to so long ago.

She already knew how the letter had been sent to a property down on the Lachlan, Scanthorpie, so similar to ‘Stanthorpe’ that Paterson must have misread the name and assumed Clancy would be back where he had last met him. It had been forwarded to Overflow, where the couple had found it among Ezekiel’s papers and at last read it, many, many years after their wedding.