The girl who was now Rose even to herself — for it hurt too much to think of her real name, which belonged to her real life — sat behind the shearing shed and watched the black shapes between the stars slowly move across the sky.

Days in the white family’s house were a dream that did not make sense, governed by laws that had no meaning, but must be obeyed, for she had seen what guns did to those who did not obey the people with the strange pale skins, pink or off white like the new bark on gully gums. But when the lantern and the candles dimmed, the nights were hers. She only had to wait a finger’s breadth of star journey around the sky before everyone in the household and the workers’ quarters was asleep.

On her first night of freedom she had gone no further than the creek that dribbled its way towards the river. She waited. The night seemed to wait with her, the frogs silent; even the cicadas lost their shrill.

At last it came, its wings blotting out the moon and stars, till it perched on a branch above the creek. It didn’t speak — this was not the season for the powerful owl call. It simply sat and watched her. Even when she moved back towards the house, tired, it did not fly away.

And so Rose knew. Stay, at least for now. Do what mistress and master told her, even if that meant ‘go to Sydney’, a phrase she did not entirely understand, except that it made mistress happy to say it and Master Clancy deeply uneasy.

For there was nowhere Rose might go. She didn’t need to listen to the conversation at the table to know that her people were gone. Some had been hunted by men from Drinkwater with guns. Others had been taken away in carts to a country called ‘reservation’, which she did not know. It was certainly far enough away for there to be no smell of campfire, no spire of smoke, no footprint, however smudged, to show her family was near.

The land was emptying of all she knew; it was crowded instead with men in trousers and women in long skirts and sheep which cleared the land more dangerously even than a hot fire so that, when the sheep had passed, the yams no longer grew again nor many of the other foods she had depended on most of her life.

Those in the white skins’ house ate so strangely, not when they were hungry, but when that clock box had its hands (that were not hands at all) in the places that said it was a mealtime.