Within a decade, there was no shortage of apprenticeships for any of the children of the small bush school, for in 1915 Matilda O’Halloran married industrialist Tommy Thompson, who was as keen as she was to give opportunities to the youth of the district, whatever the colour of their skin. Clancy wondered if anyone would ever write a history of electricians, as they did so often about wars, and if they would mention that Sidney Smith was the first Aboriginal Australian to qualify as one.

Clancy liked Tommy Thompson. He and Rose and Benjamin were invited to Matilda and Tommy’s wedding, and he liked the man even more when he found the new groom in close conversation with Benjamin about the latest model radios.

The war was all about them, even at the wedding, in absent faces and anxious eyes, or in the latest letter carried proudly in a pocket to read out to anyone who had not heard it. Both Big Moses and Zebediah enlisted as soon as the armed forces were desperate for any able-bodied men. Clancy hoped they found acceptance by their comrades in arms before both were lost in the final Battle of the Somme.

He felt deep guilt at their deaths, for he lost nothing except friends and neighbours in the war, but gained much. The Crimean War and its demand for wool for uniforms had made Ezekiel rich. The Boer War had made him rich once more, despite the drought. World War I restored the Clancys to comfortable wealth, the kind that could be invested to bring in income, even over thirty years of drought.

Nor did Clancy lose his son. Like too many young men, Benjamin sought his parents’ permission to lie about his age and enlist. Clancy did not grant it. He tried, and failed, to convince his son that Overflow needed someone to manage it after he was gone. The boy pointed out, correctly, that the surname of that person did not need to be Clancy.

Clancy did not give permission when Benjamin turned eighteen either. By the time Benjamin was twenty-one and could enlist without a parent’s authority, the war ended when he was mid-Atlantic. He returned home after a mild case of influenza and a long quarantine at Albany in Western Australia.

Drinkwater’s manager, Mr Sampson, had lost all but one of his sons to the trenches. His surviving son, Pete, returned with one leg and a French wife. Seven young men from Overflow and Drinkwater had died, two from typhoid, three from ‘injuries received’, one as his aircraft burned around him and one ‘missing, presumed dead’, a classification that never changed, despite the anguished hopes of his parents. Benjamin had seen enough to understand why his father had put the safety of his son above the demands of the nation.