‘Happy?’ asked William again. She grinned. She’d been keeping this for the honeymoon, because it was a bit early yet to tell all and sundry. But she couldn’t wait . . .

She reached up to whisper in his ear, ‘Want to know a secret?’

He nodded.

‘We’re going to have a baby. July next year.’

And William gave a wild yell, lifted her, twirled her, shrieking, laughing, whirled her in a froth of rose-embroidered skirts through the air.

Click!

Chapter 64

Chapter 64

Waterproof string to make a basket, a fish trap, or to bear your weight as you climb a tree

When the wonga blossom blooms, strip a hand’s-breadth of bark from the stringybark trees that have both yellow and red flowers, the ones that grow on the ridge with the kurrajong tree at its base on Moura. Pull long, thin fibres of the inner bark. Plait six together. The plait should be thinner than a match. Pull each plait through the tip of a flame till the sap bubbles, and the string becomes taut and even thinner. Your string will now last four lifetimes.

DRINKWATER, 1988

MATTIE

Matilda Rose McAlpine, ten and three-quarter years old, sat on a sandbank, careless of any possible stain to her yellow silk skirt, while Clancy snapped various distant angles of the reception and of the old house too, a commission from a house and garden magazine — his last, before taking himself overseas as a freelance photographer.

‘Could you put up the tripod?’ he muttered to her. ‘And get the Hasselblad from the bag?’

She handled the camera carefully. It was second hand, but he’d still had to save for three years to buy it, the money then matched by his parents.

Click! Click! At last he turned and took a final picture of Mattie, back sitting on the sandbank. He grinned. ‘That’ll be a good one. I might take that one with me.’

It was a strange friendship, born of a small boy babysitting a toddler while their mothers sat and talked in the hospital. Somehow, even when her dad was back home, it had continued, despite the nearly nine-year age gap, afternoons after school swimming in the river or yabbying down the creek, made even closer camping with his family.

Mattie had been the first person Clancy had taken for a drive in his ‘new’ ute. She had been the last too, the ute sold to fund his trip overseas, a trip his parents accurately suspected would not only involve photographing historic homes and castles for magazines. He carefully packed his cameras away and the tripod, then sat next to her. They let the sounds roll over them: the bleat of sheep, the song of a magpie, the laughter and music from above.