A baby brother would be good. She could show him the things Clancy had taught her, like how to skin a rabbit, and the Auntie Nancy things like following platypus tracks in the sand and how to smell a heatwave a month before the wind became an oven, and the Dad things, like building a wall from the right kind of rammed earth, and making squished-fly biscuits like Grandma Blue, or do calculus like Grandpa Joseph, and how to ride and listen to the sky . . .

‘And then we will all live happily ever after,’ she said firmly.

Clancy grinned again. She was going to miss that grin so much. ‘That’s how your mum always ends her stories. Happy endings.’

‘She says that is what a writer should do,’ Mattie said seriously. ‘Hard things happen in life. But a writer can choose where to stop their story. Mum says that you should always end with hope and joy.’

‘Come on, Matilda Rose. Time to go home.’ She liked that he was still the only one who ever called her Matilda Rose. ‘Hey, listen to that! They’re singing “Waltzing Matilda”. Want to waltz, Matilda Rose?’

‘I don’t know how.’

‘Me neither. Doesn’t matter. We’ll make it up.’ He took her hands. She laughed as they galloped across the sand hill, and he laughed too, that wild free Clancy laugh that she would love forever.

Above them in the paddocks the sheep bleated, the roos and wallabies sniffed the coming dusk, and the wombats, in the silence of the cool soil, slept the heat away, undisturbed by human frivolity in the holes below the shearing shed.

A wedge-tailed eagle balanced on the wind above them all, its telescopic sight seeing every rabbit, every wonga pigeon, every bettong nesting in a tussock. And the river slid between its sandbanks, never ending, like the stories of Australia, as Matilda Rose McAlpine waltzed with Clancy of the Overflow.

Author’s Note

Author’s Note

I learned the words to love my land from poet Judith Wright, Oodgeroo of the Noonuccal, who I knew as Kath Walker, but even before that, from the works of Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson that my grandmothers gave to me and read to me even as a baby.

Some of my most loved lines from Lawson’s and Paterson’s work are in this book. I hope they will forgive me, for it is not meant as plagiarism, but as tribute, to the men I venerate and whose work I still love so much.

About the Author

About the Author