When school broke up for the summer, the shearers came to town. They moved from one property to the next, dossing in sheds and staying a week or two as needed. This was also when Bea made the startling announcement that she would be away the following year, our final year of primary school, globetrotting with her parents and home-schooling on the road.

She gave me this news when I went over for a visit. Her parents were cooling their heels at home to prepare for the trip. There was her slight, elegant mother, and her father, a charmer in a battered Akubra. Spinning it on his finger, he regaled us with his stories over toast in the breakfast room in the big house, on his way out to help the men in the shearing shed. He boasted about how he used to fly light planes, zooming so low that the treetops all but stroked his fuselage. And he spoke convincingly of his plan to replant the riverbanks with native saplings. Especially ribbon gums, he said, as they were struggling elsewhere. The trees were mysteriously dying, turning bone-white across the district.

From a crowded shelf by my elbow, I picked up a pewter cup that commemorated Mr Noffey’s win in the 1968 Thredbo Ski Club Egg and Spoon Race. I could imagine his youthful self on skis, dashing over the finish line, extending his spoon before him like a fencer’s foil, but looking closer I saw that the engraved lettering read ‘S. Noffey’ – for the elder Mr Noffey. This was a surprise and a mystery. It was hard to picture Bea’s forbidding uncle engaging in the high silliness of an egg and spoon race in the snow. Yet the trophy showed that he had – and he’d excelled at it.

The elder Mr Noffey, the egg-and-spoon-race winner, ate in the dining room by himself. He was very fastidious, swallowing each mouthful without any sign of pleasure. No one commented on the fact that he ate alone. It wasn’t treated as unusual and no one wanted his company.

Before school started the next year, some strangers did show up in town. Not men, but women – three Filipina women. Together or separately, through methods unclear, each was matched with a man from our town to marry. Their children came to our school and the eldest, named Moses, took the desk next to mine. He was good-looking, had glossy hair, and smelt of lemon soap. With Bea gone, I needed a new friend and Moses was quick to ingratiate himself, copying the way I arranged things on my desk.