I jump about a metre and spin to face the lady who spoke. I didn’t hear her come in. A quick sweep and I have her pegged as one of the local property owners, but I don’t know who. She’s doing the same sweep as me. Silver-blonde hair pulled back in a bun, she is the age of a lot of my white mates’ mums, around her fifties, wearing a pair of too big Wranglers and a button-down blouse with boots. The only concession to the heat is her thin sleeveless blouse. The office probably has air-con. And she’s staring at me like I’m some stray dog that’s tumbled in through an open door.

‘Umm, I was just … umm, doing a school assignment on the history of Eidsvold, so …’

My silence and stammering response are forgotten as the woman gives me a big grin.

‘Well, you’ve come to the right place! Are you doing a general history or are you focusing on a special time? We’ve got a lot of things from the mining times.’

‘Actually I was interested in when white people first came here.’

‘Ah, the Archer brothers, the first to discover this place. You know they set up Eidsvold Station?’

This one seems nice enough so I decide to go for broke and see what happens.

‘Well yeah, but I was sort of more interested in how the whitefullas and blackfullas got on and what happened.’

Her enthusiasm drops to the floor along with the smile on her face.

‘Oh. Well, I umm … we’ve got some artefacts …’

‘Really? That’d be cool.’ I feel kind of bad for her. It isn’t like she’s being nasty or anything, she just doesn’t seem to know what to make of me. Her smile comes straight back up.

‘It’s all on that table over there if you wanted to take a look.’ She takes me to the far right corner and shows me a carefully catalogued group of stones with sharpened edges and petrified wood that looks oddly shaped. I don’t know what I’m expecting but it isn’t that. Each of the tags list the property where the item was found.

‘These have been donated to us over the years by many of the locals. We’ve had an anthropologist in to have a look and he thought it was a good record of what the local Aborigines were like.’

I have to bite my tongue hard before I ask her what she thinks I am.

‘We can only guess what some of it was for. This one here,’ she says pointing to a bit of petrified wood that doesn’t look like anything but a branch to me, ‘might’ve been used by women to gather food.’