‘Then start your own,’ said Matilda crisply. ‘A dear friend of mine in Sydney used to run a school. You wouldn’t mind having a female teacher?’

‘No, of course not. But would a woman with those qualifications and that experience want to come to Overflow?’ He didn’t add, ‘And teach pupils with dark skins as well as white ones?’

‘Several, I think. Women are employed teaching young children, but rarely anything more demanding than basic reading and writing, and they must give up their profession if they marry. You’d want someone who could teach advanced mathematics, geography, history, Greek and Latin to students from five years old to ones who might wish to go to university.’

‘If any of the students wanted it. I doubt that they would,’ he added honestly.

‘They might not know they wanted it until they had a good teacher. They’d need Latin, at least, to do medicine or law.’

The children of stockmen and cooks becoming doctors or lawyers? Well, why not? he thought. Many of the stockmen he knew were more intelligent by far than the squatters they worked for.

‘I’ll send the letter tomorrow,’ said Matilda. ‘You can provide a cottage? The kind of woman I am thinking of would probably like to live independently and not with you. And a schoolhouse? And a salary of course.’

‘Yes,’ said Clancy. He didn’t ask how much the salary would be. Whatever it was, he could afford it. They could build a classroom and a house for the teacher. And if it meant schooling for his son — good schooling, better by far possibly than R. Hoffernan, Principal, could have given him — he’d double the woman’s salary in a year.

He stood, slightly dazed. ‘We’d better see that shearing machine, if you don’t mind, if we’re to get home before the storm hits tomorrow and the river rises.’ It still took a cart two days to get from Drinkwater to Overflow, but if the river was low enough to ford just past the billabong, you could ride there in a few hours. A bridge or two would mean you could get there in half an hour or less, he realised, thinking of the pattern of the river. But he doubted he’d see those built in his lifetime.

Matilda donned a broad-brimmed hat — straw, decorated with dried flowers and with a most fetching gauze veil — to visit the shearing shed. She might spend much of her day outdoors, but she still obviously cared for her complexion. He and Rose followed as she strode through the garden, in those elegant but so practical boots, her linen skirts swishing, then led them into the dimness of the shearing shed. He sniffed the familiar scents of lanolin, trod on the wood polished by fifty generations of sheep.

‘Look, Dad!’ yelled Benjamin, running over. ‘There’s thirty-two of them! Please, Miss Matilda, can we turn on an engine?’