Skye’s death hangs over me like a black cloud. I try to take solace in this moment, my new beginning. Neither Dad nor Mark will tell the police what they know. And we’ve had no more calls from Roberts or Doyle. I’ll talk to Mark the first day he’s back in Brisbane, to make sure he leaves the commune story alone. While he’s still in Alice, and I have no immediate fires to put out, I can focus on being a single-mother student. I can study law.

I hitch my denim book bag high on my shoulder and cross a road lined with parked Minis, Beetles, Holdens. Holden Premiers. An AC/DC song blares out an open car window. I walk through an archway into the court, still a work in progress it seems from the construction equipment and scaffolding, where imposing sandstone buildings – pink and cream and biscuit coloured – circle a large swathe of grass spotted with saplings.

I pass a group of students sitting on the grass and slow down to eavesdrop.

‘– handmaids of a fascist government.’

‘Told Charles Perkins he should call himself Mr Witchetty Grub.’

‘Dan and Carol are organising a rally for Friday. You’re going, yeah?’

‘Have you seen her new magazine? Interdisciplinary feminism.’

The students want change; they’re hungry for it. In other parts of Australia, people are struggling to keep up with change, feel like they’re hurtling into the future without helmets. But our premier has dug his heels in, and is resisting every attempt by the federal government to civilise Queensland. Petersen makes it clear he loathes students, feminists, ‘darkies’, ‘homos’ and ‘communists’. He laughs at the media, while he sells our state to overseas developers – every bit of beachfront and any land that can be mined – and looks away as heritage-listed buildings are bulldozed in the dead of night. It doesn’t seem to matter that he’s barely able to string a sentence together; he rules with iron-fisted resolve.

I head inside, where the air is instantly cooler, almost crisp. My plaited leather sandals squeak as I walk down a high-ceilinged hallway to the lecture room where I have my first class. The room is vast, with hundreds of chairs arranged amphitheatre-style around a small stage. I take an aisle seat about a third of the way from the front, not so close it seems cocky, not so far back it might seem I don’t care. Students file in, talking, dropping bags, clicking pens. There’s an air of anticipation and tempered eagerness. A man stands at the lectern and adjusts the microphone, which makes squeals of protest each time he touches it.

‘Good morning,’ he says. ‘You are here for the first lecture of Contracts 101. Should that not be the case, you’re in the wrong room and will want to make a discreet exit. I can assure you, no one stays unless they have to.’

Perhaps he’s jaded from years of teaching this class, but his mood is out of sync with the people in the room. He might have expected laughter, maybe even received it in years gone by, but it seems that I’m not alone in being keen to get on with this, bright-eyed and optimistic. I feel a rush of adrenaline, thrilled to be a part of something, in this room full of like-minded strangers. The lecturer clears his throat, recalibrates now that his joke has fallen flat. ‘Let’s begin,’ he says.