I saw Mr Noffey, Benny’s dad, years later. In fact, I saw him twice, both times in Sydney. The first time was on a bus in the inner west, and he was helping a guy who was freaking out on ice, verbally abusing the female bus driver. Talking the youth down, Mr Noffey kept saying, ‘Now son, now son,’ as if soothing a frightened cow. His manner was so gentle, so caring, that I was struck by the difference between this man and his younger self. Now son, now son. The tenderness of it somehow made me feel like crying. Before he could see me, I got off the bus at the rear door. This was something that Moses had shown me, years ago: that it is easy to disappear in the midst of a commotion.

The second time I saw Mr Noffey he saw me first. I was back in Australia partly to do a story: the newspaper I worked for had sent me to all manner of countries, but now my boss wanted me to write about Australia. He wanted a story of the country as a harbinger of climate change, the canary in the coalmine. Something gripping, I was told. Fires, storms, floods, trauma and grief. My background reading got me thinking about the drought years of my childhood, precursors to bigger droughts to come. I read that those years marked the point when, in the language of the scientific papers, ‘the human fingerprint emerges above natural variability and can be clearly detected through climate models that compare worlds with and without greenhouse gases’.

With these words in my head, I thought back over events. I thought of those dying ribbon gums, turning white against the sky, and of the river on the Noffey property, wending its dry, cracked course below the stony ridge. And now here was Mr Noffey himself, the man in the flesh, at the bottom end of King Street in Newtown, near the auto repair shop.

His face lit up when he stopped me. He took out his earbuds – he said he’d been listening to something on Radio National – and told me he lived nearby, in a flat with his son. He took care of Benny, who had a disability pension, but he got a break on Tuesdays when the Samaritans woman came.

He asked after my parents, remembering their names. I didn’t ask about his wife. I don’t know if she was helping to care for Benny or was in his life at all. I knew by then what his property had come to: the sale of parcels of land in a piecemeal way at first, then finally the last clutch of fields with the houses. He’d been freed from one duty to assume another.