Hirsch paused to tear down one of the Fullers’ Have you seen Kip? posters and entered the foyer. A shock of transition from heat, dust and diesel fumes into a hushed, echoing space. Polished wooden floors, wooden half-panels on pastel blue walls, high pressed-tin ceilings. A gleaming staircase on one side of the foyer, a corridor leading to meeting rooms on the other. Passing a series of 1920s and ’30s photographs—town councillors and prize-winning merino rams—he stopped at a door marked Conference 1.

He knocked. Went in.

The room was bare but for a massive mahogany table, several chairs, a sideboard under a curtained window and a photograph of the young Elizabeth II on the wall. Hirsch glanced at his watch: 9.35. That’s what you get for efficiency, he thought. Twiddled his thumbs. Paced the room; left it to pace the corridors, then explored the ballroom with its gleaming floorboards, a stage at one end. The whole building seemed deserted.

He returned to the meeting room and straightened the Queen in her dusty gilt frame and idly opened sideboard drawers and doors. ‘Huh,’ he said.

Stacked at the bottom, their labels faded and chewed by silverfish, were three old film canisters. A Night to Remember, 1958, starring Kenneth More. The Back of Beyond, 1954, made by the Shell Film Unit. The Shiralee, 1957, starring Peter Finch. Hirsch shook each canister. The reels were missing. Lost? Archived somewhere? Was there an old-timer in the district whose job it had been to thread dreams through a projector on Saturday nights?

On a shelf above were two ancient-looking bound journals, musty and friable. Hirsch lifted one out and rested it on the table. The powdery binding leather coated his fingers. The title, handwritten on a label, read: A History of Keirville Station in the Hundred of Whyte, the Colony of South Australia, by Mrs Elizabeth Keir, Volume the First, 1839–1869.

Hirsch tingled. There was a Keir Road south-east of the town but no locals named Keir, to the best of his knowledge. No farming property named Keirville. Sold off and renamed?

Mrs Keir had used a medium nib and her penmanship was precise, if crowded. Hirsch had no difficulty skimming through the story of her husband, a Scottish carpenter called Douglas Keir. Quoting liberally from his daily journal entries, she related how he’d arrived in South Australia on board the Palmyra in 1839, worked in the colony for some years then, in 1851, trekked overland to the Ballarat goldfields. By the time he returned two years later—nuggets to the weight of twenty pound strapt aroundmy waist, for there are persons hereabout that would take your life for an ounce of gold if you was not well upon your guard—Hirsch was hooked.