Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I lay awake trying to picture what it would be like if I suddenly get transported back. Would me old eyes return as well? Be able to see the brightest of colours? Flowers the blackest red? The yellow and green of the canefield them swaying, rustled by a gentle breeze. But they is only memories and memories always seem richer and brighter and greener than they really is. So I scatter those old memories to the wind. Watch as they settle down into the earth, bury them deep, let them give rise to new memories. Memories coming out from this earth, this land, and flavour them with me own sweetness.

A few times I have taken the long ride back into Mullins Creek, a small shanty town of a place, much smaller than Goulburn, but me able to get supplies there. The shopkeepers think me mad, buying way out here in the bush, ‘where the savage natives live’. But me not afraid of them. Why should I be? After all, we share the same skin. When I first arrived, laden down with the slim pickings of me belongings, several of them came snooping round. Sat at the edge of the field, watched me every move as I hammered in the wooden sign that said ‘Welcome’. A sign perhaps they couldn’t read, or maybe they didn’t believe. It took them a long while before they came closer. Soon they came right up, looking to exchange some of them possessions for some of mine, till they saw I was just as poor.

One day one of them, an old half-blind man, built a humpy under the patoo tree beside the track going up to me gate. I figured he and that patoo going get along fine, be good protection. It turned out to be the case.

When I learnt to speak a little bit of their language, I found out the land Archie Wilson sold me was where the old fella came from. Got forced away long before I arrived and the tribe decided to move on without him. He told me he wanted to die on the land he was born on. Was a wish I truly understood.