‘They leased it,’ he corrected. ‘It actually belongs to the Crown. And mining rights take precedence over grazing. It’s not all bad though, we use some of their roads – the station probably did too. On the other hand, they make it dead easy for the traffickers. Without these tracks they couldn’t get around half so well.’

‘So, a mixed blessing then.’ Tilly winced as the front wheel fell into a hole and her elbow banged against the door. ‘You sure you don’t want to go back? There’s bound to be bumps you missed.’

‘Very funny. We’ll collect ’em on the way home.’

The springs, Tilly learnt, were at the foot of the escarpment, in a gentle vale whose southern side rose to the rugged cliff face of fragmented ochre rock. Some time in the distant past, large sections of it had collapsed, forming a broken ridge of slabs and boulders through which a scrub of wattle, ironwood and grevillea had sprouted.

‘It doesn’t look awfully safe,’ she said, eyeing the rockfalls. ‘Isn’t this the same cliff we were working on with the path?’

‘Yeah, but that’s back where it parallels the river. Nobody’s got plans to scale this lot, and you’ll notice the track keeps well clear of it, mainly because the ground’s so boggy. The water spreads underground for hectares here. We’ll have to walk in. Basically, the whole area is one big spring, it’s just that the actual water’s only visible here and there.’

‘So why don’t we let the campers come here?’

‘Too difficult to set up facilities and control it. It’s fragile country. A lot of the vegetation is unique to the springs, and it’d be tramped down, the ground would compact under foot traffic because people’d want to swim . . . Sophie’s got plans for supervised day visits, but the road has to be upgraded first and some sort of fencing done, maybe a boardwalk to protect the flora. There’s all sorts of wildflowers too. The WPA mightn’t be willing or able to fund that much infrastructure. It’s not as if we get tens of thousands of visitors to pay for it.’

‘We got over four thousand last year,’ Tilly pointed out.

‘Mmm, and what do you reckon a kilometre or two of boardwalk would cost? Not to mention labour and the freight involved getting it here.’

‘I see what you mean. With that and the road . . .’ As she spoke, they encountered another fallen tree across their path. Luke pulled up. ‘No way we can drive around with that gully blocking the side. We’ll have to clear it.’