‘I’ll get it.’ Tilly hopped out, grabbing the hook from the bullbar’s winch, and towed the line out and looped the steel cable about the trunk. She stuck her thumb up at Luke, who engaged four-wheel drive and then, chin on shoulder, backed up until he reached a point where he could tow the fallen tree off the road.

‘That’s the second one,’ he said, shoving the low gear into neutral as she regained her seat. ‘Must’ve been a helluva big wind that came through here.’

‘It’s not a blow-down,’ she said. ‘I thought it had burnt through, but it’s been chainsawed.’

‘What?’ Almost as soon as the words left his mouth Luke was out of the cab, striding over to the blackened stump. He bent to examine it, then eyed the fallen bloodwood, scratching reflectively at his neck. ‘No hollows, so it’s not the traffickers. Damned inefficient way of getting birds anyhow. If it was young corellas say, or galahs, you’d be more likely to kill ’em in the fall.’

‘When was it done?’ Tilly had rejoined him. ‘Before the rains? There’s no sign of fire except on the stump.’

‘Not so long,’ Luke disagreed. ‘Weeks, maybe a couple of months. Looks like they built a fire beside it hoping the stump would catch and burn to disguise the saw work. Only it was too green. There’s shoots coming out at the back there, and that doesn’t happen overnight. Well, nothing we can do here, so let’s go.’

A kilometre further on, they left the vehicle and walked towards the forest of brilliant green vegetation that hugged the foot of the cliff. The dark trunks of the pandanus lifted their spear-sharp tops of vivid green above the duller clusters of sandpaper fig and myrtle clumps. Bare sheets of rock glinted ochre and orange in the early morning sun, seamed by cracks and shallow horizontal declivities, which were in turn intersected by the bare roots of the occasional stunted trees clinging to the face or top of the cliff.

‘See that big bulge over there just below the dead finish?’ Luke nodded to the right at the mass of flowering native boronia clinging to the rock. ‘There’s a heap of Aboriginal paintings under it. Hand prints mostly, but there’s barra, and wallaby, and human figures in corroboree. Very old – almost gone, in fact. The colours have faded back into the rock. Old middens too. You can see the bits of chert and the holes in the sandstone where they must’ve mixed the ochre. There’s a bit of an old fence – the station must’ve put it up, though God knows why, there’d have been nobody round back then. Maybe it was to keep the stock out.’

‘Can we have a look?’ Tilly asked.

‘Yeah, why not? But it’s something else that’d have to be protected if we opened the site.’