The chicken run and aviary had been set up in the shade of the trees at the bottom of the garden where the bush slowly encroached on the settlement and the feral goats grazed. The pens beside the runs were for the injured and orphaned animals that people always seemed to be bringing her, and she spent hours every day cleaning them out and tending to them.

There was a lorikeet with a broken wing, a pair of orphaned possums, several lizards of various types and with various injuries, a rock wallaby recovering from a nasty abscess and a wombat joey that had been born, unusually, during this long drought, and which would have died of starvation if she hadn’t found him cowering in the abandoned burrow.

The lorikeet was almost ready to be released, and the possums were thriving. The lizards were asleep in their hollowed-out tree branches, so it was difficult to tell how they were, and the tiny rock wallaby’s abscess was healing nicely. She nodded with satisfaction, glanced about her and realised Wally, the wombat joey, had escaped from the burrow she’d made for him under the veranda. No doubt he was around somewhere, getting into mischief – just like young Danny.

She fed the chickens and stood in the shade of the overhanging trees, relishing the brief respite from the sun as she regarded her surroundings. Morgan’s Reach might be isolated, the population scattered – but it was a tight-knit community that had not escaped the dark, tragic clouds of two world wars.

Two generations of young Australian men had heard the call to arms from England – the land they still considered their ‘mother country’ – and they had rushed to enlist, eager to fight and prove their courage. They’d left the rural stations to the women, their Aboriginal stockmen and those too old, too young or too unfit to be drafted into the services, trusting that there would be something to come home to when it was all over. But, like Rebecca’s Adam and Amy Blake’s John, many had not returned, and their loss was still sorely felt by everyone.

She experienced the now familiar pang of sadness, but didn’t allow it to linger for it did no good to anyone, and turned her attention to a much earlier past. Morgan’s Reach had grown since she and Rhys had come here all those years ago, and Gwyneth’s lips twitched with a wry smile as she remembered how shocked she’d been to discover Rhys’s paradise was in fact a ragtag collection of ramshackle wooden houses, dubious tin shacks and wattle-and-daub humpies.