I start by clearing one end of the field, the ground where I plan to put up a shack, a house, a home. Dig up rocks, move them to form a boundary. Cut down small shrubs, roots, throw them into a pile, a pile that gets bigger and bigger. By late afternoon me able to lay out the shape and size of it, place wooden logs I spent many weeks cutting down and collecting. Lay them in a broad square, divide the square into four, deciding where to put the windows, doors, before nailing together a three-by-six shell of a doorway, two uprights with a beam between them and put me feet down in the middle of it.

I been working from just before dawn. Hurrying to lay things out before the sun dip and hide himself away. Leave the sky to turn black, fill up with pinpricks of light. Been a day of work. A day of sweat. Work done with me own gnarled hands, broad back, strong arms. Work done, for me alone. A good working day, and I feel a good tired.

In the quiet of the evening, I light the fire, put on the billy to boil, sit on me favourite stump to wait, to listen, to look out cross the paddock, pass the wooden fence and further. The silver leaves shimmering in the distance, they are ironbark, and those hippity, hoppy brown-skin animals nibbling grass close by, they are roos. The big bats circling overhead are flying foxes. Red ones, and they heading south, looking for a nightly feed. Only sadness is that every evening when I sit for tea, the trees, the bats, the roos also keep whispering this land is not the one me born into.

When I first got here, everywhere I looked was a wild terrain, made up of bush and bramble and tall, thin swaying eucalyptus. A land untouched by any hand I knew. Was like a marker of a new life, and it didn’t take long before I started to shape and bend it. Noticed the ins and outs of it, bowed down to what it had to offer.

I no longer work for the kind master and mistress. Fever took me for nearly a week, but I got better. Eventually left them, soon after I got me conditional pardon. They was sorry to see me go. Found plenty work in Goulburn, though, doing anything that was asked of me, since many a family abandoned the town, joined in the rush hoping to find gold. When I saved enough, I went to visit Archie Wilson, a government man, the one in charge of selling land.