And then Lucy had had another idea as to how she might be able to make amends. ‘Well, let’s look back through your family tree, then,’ she’d urged. ‘So many people don’t know that they have Aboriginal heritage in Tassie. Maybe you do, and you could, I don’t know, get excused on cultural grounds.’

‘Let sleeping dogs lie,’ was all Flo said in reply.

‘Come on, what can it hurt?’ Lucy urged, half wondering if Flo was hesitant for the same reason that so many people are unaware of their mixed heritage: wilful ignorance or wilful denial, born out of racist colonial shame.

‘It’s not my history.’

‘It could be, though.’

‘You’re not understanding me,’ Flo had said. ‘Even if it was my blood, it’s not my history.’

Lucy still didn’t cotton on. Instead, she said: ‘If it’s your blood, and your family have been mutton-birding for generations, it’s only you saying it’s not your history.’

‘Yes,’ Flo explained, increasingly exasperated. ‘It is me that’s saying it: I’m saying I haven’t been mutton-birding as an Aboriginal. So yes, I’m saying it’s not my history.’

It was only later on, when she was in bed, unable to sleep, that Lucy realised what Flo had been saying to her—realised that Flo wasn’t being stubborn, but on the contrary, quite insightful. Realised how narrow-minded and potentially racist she herself was being.

Harry hadn’t been there the next day either, when Lucy came around to apologise, and Flo had waved her away like it didn’t matter, then changed tack, and told Lucy that actually she was deeply troubled by Lucy’s lack of delicacy, and the only way Lucy could ever make it up to her would be if Lucy helped her stack the pile of firewood Col had just dropped off.

‘Course, Flo.’ Lucy had grinned. ‘But where’s Harry? Isn’t this sort of thing the point of having someone like him around?’

‘You’d bloody think so, wouldn’t you?’ Flo had grumbled. ‘But just as I need him he ups and legs it to town to do a month or two of labouring. And don’t think I didn’t notice that it coincided with the close of the cray season, either.’

‘Yeah been doing some labouring so haven’t really been about lately,’ Harry tells Lucy, now. ‘What brings you up to town anyway?’ He raises an eyebrow. ‘Let me guess: the chowder?’

Lucy laughs. ‘Do you know I’ve never actually had it before? But it’s all Kat’s been banging on about lately, so, you know, had to make it happen.’

‘You’ve never had the chowder before? How is that even possible. It’s a Hobart institution.’

‘Yeah, well.’ Lucy shrugs. ‘So I keep hearing.’