Yet pumpkins and beans would not grow overnight, and Sally was growing, and so was the child in his wife’s womb, and they needed money. Mustering wasn’t his choice of work but neither, he’d come to realise, was the life of a rouseabout. The work was backbreaking, the sheep were permanently terrified, and the smell of lanolin to Ned was cloying and inescapable. Nor was tree-felling: his time killing the White Knights had left him with a permanent stickiness to his hands and a reddish wound in his soul. Mustering mostly involved sitting on a horse, and it paid well.

Ned had heard about the job from a cousin who wasn’t known for exaggerating. He explained it all to his wife. She gave him the look—the bold frankness that still arrested him—and asked what he was waiting for. In the morning he drove northwest.

For the best part of a day he rolled along the coast road, farmland to his left and blue water to his right. Orchards were soon replaced by the churned red soil of potato paddocks. As the world became greener these spud paddocks gave way to vast pastures of grass, used for dairy and beef farming. Ned wondered at the reliable wetness of this place, at rainfall that could be predicted to the fraction of an inch. Where the land was steep he skimmed the remnants of ancient forests. The further he drove, the more prominent these forests became. He knew that if he kept going he would reach the rounded tip of the island and be forced to head south, down the rugged west coast, where the great forests still dominated and the winds were so strong it was rarely possible to get a boat out of harbour. Ned felt a temptation to take this road. To see a white-smashed ocean that stretched all the way to India. To feel the drag of those violent winds.

He pushed on until he found the turn-off, late in the afternoon. It was a coastal property bisected by a river that featured prominent sandbanks and flats near its mouth: the work of a vigorous tide. The river emptied into the same sea that had been on the right of Ned’s window all day. Rising from it, a couple of miles from shore, was a flat, green island.