‘We use a solar pump to feed tanks on the hills and run pipes down to troughs for the different paddocks. Part of the workload is to check the fences and gates, and especially troughs to make sure they’re full and the solar pumps are working. We check every three days or so, or maybe less often when it rains and there’s surface water.’

‘So that will be all part of your registered tourist business.’

‘Yes. Jock’s drawn up a list of all the duties and it’s an ongoing discussion. That’s my mother’s baby. She’s an excellent cook and manager, and she’s devised a program of “experiences” that we’re trialling from this muster.’

‘Like me?’

‘Mum suggested including you, yes,’ she told him, ‘as long as you’re healthy enough. We’ll have safety briefings. Granny Mim’s pretty good at keeping people under control.’

‘I’m terrified of her already.’ His voice dropped to a dramatic whisper.

‘Be very afraid.’ Her voice dropped too.

‘So tell me about a muster. What does a muster mean for you?’

‘For me?’ She thought about that. ‘Holidays from work. And hard work. Muster involves more than rounding up cattle that have spread far and wide. It can take days or weeks, but usually around six days for us. That’s working from dawn till dark. You don’t want the cattle upset, so it’s slow and steady, walk them in and sort them into those to go onto the trucks and those that will return to the paddocks.’

‘Do you hire the trucks, too?’

‘Yep. The vet comes in to check them and give any treatments, we do branding and then loading, and cattle-drive the rest out again.’

He was watching her and she smiled at him as she slowed for another cattle grid. He looked genuinely interested and that was a plus. She drove slowly over the noisy grid.

‘It’s easy when you know how,’ she told him, before she sped up again. ‘Do you ride a quad bike?’

She caught his smile before she turned back to the road. ‘I did have a motorbike in my misspent youth,’ he said. ‘Though not for long once I started medicine and the attraction of skidding along asphalt using my skin as a brake was lost for me. There were too many skin-graft examples in the emergency department.’

Ava nodded. She’d seen that. ‘I know what you mean. Though that’s riding in the city for you. Here we get speed accidents and just pick up the pieces and bury them.’ A small silence followed that heavy statement. ‘Sorry. That was morbid.’

‘A bit.’ She could see he got that, because he had also seen too much. ‘The nature of our professions,’ he said. ‘There are many temporary Australians out there living on the edge of good sense.’