‘It’s a beautiful old house,’ Clancy said at last. ‘It’s good to see it alive again, for a while. Tom wants to live here when he gets back from Agricultural College,’ he added. He grinned. ‘Though it won’t be like the old days. You know the WWOOF Scheme? Willing Workers on Organic Farms? They work for free in return for learning about the land and the chance to stay on farms. Tom reckons he’s going to fill the house with them to run Drinkwater.’

‘But it’s not organic,’ Mattie pointed out.

‘Don’t tell Mum and Dad yet. Tom wants to run cattle on the Drinkwater side. Sheep are more difficult to manage organically with fly strike and worms, but he can do it with beef. I can’t see Mum ever agreeing to give up her sheep, of course, not after keeping the bloodline going through so many droughts. Overflow will stay a sheep farm.’

‘I’m going to live there one day,’ said Mattie.

He smiled tolerantly. ‘Are you? What does Mum say about that?’

‘She won’t mind. Because you’re going to live there with me.’

‘I probably won’t,’ he said.

‘Yes, you will. We will be married.’ She spoke with the confidence of a girl who always spoke the truth, just like her mother, and who sometimes knew what the truth was going to be too.

Clancy laughed. ‘I don’t think my kind of life is going to fit being married.’

‘It will when you’re very old,’ she informed him. ‘Thirty maybe. I’ll be twenty-one then, so it’ll be just right.’

He grinned at her, refusing to argue.

‘You’re not going to England really, are you?’

‘I’m flying to London. After that . . .’ He grinned again. ‘Afghanistan sounds interesting. The Russians are fighting a group called the Taliban there. I reckon if I can get some footage there, it’ll pay my way to . . .’ he shrugged ‘. . . wherever next.’

‘Somewhere dangerous,’ said Mattie matter-of-factly.

‘Maybe. Life is too . . . too safe here. Nothing happens.’

Mattie considered. As the daughter of a mother whose life’s work was chronicling all that had happened there both before and since the landing of the largest long-distance fleet to ever cross the world, where some of their ancestors had founded a colony and others had been disposed of or lost their lives and others had found a way to keep the heart of who they were and what their country was alive, Mattie knew that quite a lot had happened on their country. War and murder, love and circuses, starvation — in the past two hundred years alone, not to mention an ice age millennia back . . .

‘Did you know an elephant used to live in this paddock?’

‘Really?’ There was no disbelief in his voice. He too knew that Mattie always spoke the truth. ‘Someone told me, but I thought it was a joke.’