And the girl was still shackled, even if the manacle was back in the old gaol. Even if her body was free now, she was still bound, for she had nowhere else to go, her people rounded up by Old Drinkwater and his father and sent to the reservation down the coast, where they would be civilised or die. Drinkwater had even organised hunts for any straggler, and Ezekiel joined him. The last time Ezekiel had boasted of getting ‘two bucks and a doe’ Clancy had carefully not asked if his father had meant animals or people.

Was he as guilty of carefully not seeing as Flora?

He had met, liked and respected native men, like Sampson on Drinkwater. They made superb stockmen too — better usually than any white man, despite his father’s hatred of black skin. Sometimes Clancy wondered if convicts like his father — worked as slaves until their tickets of leave — needed to imagine beings lower even than themselves.

It had been a native woman who had shown the young Cecil Drinkwater where to find feed and water for his sheep. As a child, Clancy had watched their small neat fires, had seen how the grasses grew afterwards, the land left clear. Overflow had once had seventy thousand sheep, and yet the natives had speared perhaps half a dozen in all the time he could remember, even though the animals had taken the pasture of the animals they’d hunted. Somehow the land seemed not just lonelier but lost, with the laughter of the dark people gone.

But nothing he said could induce Ezekiel to tolerate natives. Ezekiel dreamed of a ringbarked land, clean of all but men and grass and sheep. Clancy was powerless. Wifeless. Childless, with Clementine lost to him in Sydney. That pained him more than all the rest, for his child was a joy. When they returned — and they would return, for Margaret was as resolute as Drinkwater in turning an already vast holding into a small empire — Clancy dreamed of teaching his daughter how to ride; how to track sheep among the timber; how to climb a bunya tree and use a stick to poke down the nuts, assuming that the trees fruited in the dry.

Dry. His life was dry. Nor could he see an escape.

Chapter 19

Chapter 19

Chocolate Peppermint Geranium Cake

Line your cake tin with peppermint pelargonium leaves.

Beat 185g butter with 420g brown sugar; add 3 eggs one by one, 190g plain flour and 70g SR flour, 80g cocoa, 250mL cream, 1tsp peppermint essence — or 2tsp if you don’t have the peppermint pelargonium leaves. You do need to add some either way because the leaves will only flavour the outside of the cake.

Pour in the pan; bake at 200°C for 45 minutes.

SYDNEY, 1980

SCARLETT