She laughed. ‘For a few minutes, but I don’t have a sheep with enough fleece on it to shear just now.’ She turned to Clancy and Rose. ‘A three-horsepower engine will run sixteen machines, but there’s a handle for each. The shearer grabs his sheep, brings it to his stand, then pulls the handle when he’s ready to shear. Not that I get to see them in action,’ she added, amused. ‘It’s still “ducks on the pond” if a woman comes onto the board. Work stops immediately.’

‘I remember. So I can throw away my hand shears?’ His hand ached even at the memory of them.

She looked diverted. ‘Sadly, no, we still have to use them for dagging, or any work out in the paddocks. But the profit isn’t just from having the whole fleece rather than pieces. The men are happy, as they can shear more in a day and so make more money, and a happy shearer is a more careful one. And a badly injured sheep doesn’t give the same wool the following year.’

She cared for her sheep, Clancy realised, and not just as a source of income.

He turned one of the machines on for a delighted Benjamin, felt the vibration of the new shears in his hand and realised what a revolution this was.

Matilda insisted on their taking a picnic ‘basket’ — a hessian sack that could be fastened to their swags — with more lamingtons, mutton and pickle sandwiches, a flask of barley water and a vast wedge of pumpkin fruitcake that he hoped tasted more of fruit than pumpkin.

She waved to them as the horses clopped down the driveway. The curtains twitched in one of the rooms above: Old Drinkwater, probably, watching them go. Clancy had a feeling that the next time they called in — and he was sure there would be a next time — Drinkwater might even be there to shake his hand and accept Rose sitting on a brocade chair in his drawing room.

Matilda looked so small suddenly, there on the veranda in her green linen dress, and so young, the big house behind her, the vast property around her, the responsibility all on her shoulders. Yet she looked as if she thrived on it.

And Clancy saw like a night scene illuminated by lightning what his life might have been if he’d met a Matilda O’Halloran all those decades back. A woman who could bridge all the worlds he loved — the bush, the farming, the deep native knowledge of this land — but also still be part of the white community he had cut himself off from by his marriage.

He didn’t want to go to Sydney to the theatre or a ball, or even to a dance in town. But he did not like the knowledge that he could not, if he’d had a mind for any of them. Or that his son could not either . . .