There it was. Alan was seventeen. James was supposed do whatever he said, like almost sixteen wasn’t almost seventeen. He ignored his brother and sat at the other end of the carriage while the train rattled through dry uplands to an isolated station. Here, in sight of machines cutting endless wheat fields, they waited an hour for a very late, single-carriage railcar to arrive from the north, unload nobody to connect to Newcastle, and collect only the brothers for Kippen.

The familiar final leg across the vast, harvested plain did nothing to settle James’s rising panic at having come a very long way only to end up nowhere. When the carriage eventually slowed to cross the bridge over the gorge that split Kippen in two, he looked down and saw the surface of the river far below in the shadows.

Even before they trundled to a complete stop, Alan left James to his mood and ran to find Dad. James lingered, not wanting this dumb holiday to begin, but Cousin Tony suddenly popped his bright, blond head through the carriage door and smiled so broadly it made James feel like laughing.

‘He’s in here!’ Tony shouted, filling the doorway with his big frame and scooping up James’s backpack. ‘Your dad’s on night duty until the wedding so you’re staying with us now,’ he added, stepping back onto the platform and marching off with giant strides.

There was no end to the cousins’ inside information about the entire Brandt family. Their long shadows stretched out to James across the empty car park by the huge timber structure that marked the very end of the line. Leaning against the familiar white station wagon, parked in the deep shadows cast by Kippen’s enormous concrete water towers, Alan was already showing off to Tony’s sister Yvonne, and Aunty Doris was brushing away blowflies.

‘Hurry up,’ his aunt said, getting in and starting the car. ‘I have to telephone your mother and let her know you’re both here in one piece.’

After the crossroads, the way out of town took them back across the bridge, past the motel and the abattoir, and gradually climbed into higher country.

James made eye contact with Aunty Doris a few times in the rear-vision mirror, while she nodded at whatever Alan was saying about his school reports and the gun club. Yvonne sat quietly on her brother’s lap in the front seat while Tony kept up the questions about life in the big city.

As the sun levelled with the horizon, they approached Brandt Lane and James stopped trying to keep up with the conversation.

First, he looked for the three white drums on their timber posts; letterboxes mounted in a row for three family farms. That’s how you knew where to turn off the long, straight Kippen Road, between stretches of the same knee-high yellow grass that ran for miles.