‘No, she really did live here for a while. She was Grandma Blue’s long ago, from when she was in the circus. An elephant is interesting.’

‘But she’s not here to photograph now.’ Clancy looked at her seriously. ‘Things are happening, Mattie. Things people don’t know about in their smug houses with their TV sets and frozen dinners. I want to film what’s really happening, show the world.’

‘And there was the flood last year.’ The water had swirled logs and a dead cow about the house and Dad said they should all get up onto the roof, and Mum had said, ‘Matilda chose this house. It’ll be safe from flood.’ And it had been. She glanced at the scars on her arms, left in a much earlier flash flood, by the dog she’d loved who’d saved her life. She treasured those scars now. ‘Did you know the billabong is back?’ she asked.

‘Really?’

‘Well, it’s sort of a mess right now. But there’s water, and a big sandbank between it and the river. Mum says it’ll be a real billabong again one day. Then the ghosts will be able to return.’

‘Ghosts?’

‘And his ghost may be heard, as you pass by the billabong,’ Mattie sang, not quite tunefully. ‘I think Mum sort of believes in ghosts. The billabong ones anyway.’

‘Well, she’s a writer. It’s her job to imagine things.’

‘She says sometimes the best way to explain real things is to put them with imaginary things.’

‘I can say more with a photograph than a hundred books.’

Maybe, thought Mattie. But not the same things. Even at ten she knew that Clancy Thompson mostly saw life through his camera, which meant he saw what was there extremely clearly, better than anyone she knew, but not what had been, which explained why things were, and what would happen too. And nothing just outside the frame either.

Clancy would get lost, she knew, in that chaos of adventure he longed for now. But she would find him, just as she found him in the shearing shed when she was eight, or that time he’d fallen off his bike and broken his ankle, when she was six and he was fifteen.

She shivered, thinking about all the things that would happen to Clancy before they sat together by this river again. But it would work out. She was sure of that, just as Mum was sure the baby in her tummy was going to be a boy.