Out to water your last mob goes,

Kicking the dust towards the sky,

As you slip behind, we say goodbye.’

And to those who are precious

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Sneak Peek: The Shearer’s Wife

Prologue

The three men slipped through the trees, ghostly in their night-vision goggles, white police procedure overalls and masks.

From the outside, they all looked the same: men dressed for a forensic examination of a murder scene. If there were security cameras in the clearing, no one would be able to tell them apart. But inside the overalls one man was large, with a receding hairline and pot belly. Another one was tall, slim with ginger hair and beard. The third was thin, agile and clearly in charge.

They stopped at the outer rim of the clearing, looking around and listening to make sure none of the employees were still present. Earlier, from their hiding spot in the bush, they had watched the cars leave for the day, but they couldn’t be certain someone hadn’t been left behind to protect the equipment.

The three men had done this before. They believed animals should be safe and forests left unlogged. The natural world needed to be protected. Otherwise their children and grandchildren would inherit a planet that could not sustain itself. The men would never understand why the logging company had been granted a licence to knock down the trees growing within the Gippsland forests, but they knew for certain that the people who were ruining the environment had to be stopped by any means possible. Not only was it the beautiful trees they stood to lose, but the native flora and fauna. These forests were home to the tiny marsupial, the Greater Glider, which were listed as vulnerable. And, although not a threatened species, the trees were also the home of the red-wattle bird and yellow-tailed cockatoo. Of course, there were the more common native animals like kangaroos—they needed to be conserved as well. Even though the men’s group focused on animals—that was what they called themselves, Voices for Animals—they extended themselves to stopping logging because it hurt animals in the process. In their minds, the two causes crossed over.

The men’s plan was to disable all the machines so the logging wouldn’t be able to get started in the morning. The delay would hopefully be long enough for their urgent application against the state government to be heard and a temporary injunction put in place to prevent the logging. They hoped. But even if this didn’t eventuate, at least the machines wouldn’t rumble to life tomorrow morning.