It was not Sydney; it was thirty miles from Sydney. A flock of noisy cockatoos swooped and circled overhead, sheep wandered in and out of the reception, and in a neighbouring paddock a mob of ten or twenty kangaroos had gathered at a dam to drink. The local landowners and the drovers and the squatters and their wives and children milled about eating ice cream and drinking great quantities of lemonade and smiling at one another and tipping their hats as though they had never before ventured outside in their best clothes except to go to church. They gazed at the minister from parliament but mostly they gazed at his wife, who had about her an ethereal and otherworldly quality they could not put their fingers on much less put into words—a grace, was it? an elegance, an aloofness?—and who wore a hat the like of which they had never seen in Penrith before. But for the most part they strolled about giving scant attention to the dignitaries seated at the table, their loosely swinging limbs, their louche expressions, clearly said, Do not come here from the city and offer us the World when you will surely hand us a stone. The talk was of the price of wool and very little else, and when they did venture to talk of the upcoming Federation referendum it was in terms of how it might affect the price of wool and some of the men thought it might affect it and some thought it might not and some thought this a good thing and others a bad. And when Mr Greensmith finally joined them, out of breath, red-faced and missing the handkerchief that had started the day in his top pocket, he did so just in time to be handed a small bunch of wilting grevilleas presented to Eleanor by a small, shy child in a grass-smeared white smock.

The lunch, great slabs of steaming grey meat cut from the carcasses of several sheep that had been roasting on spits all day, was served to the official guests seated at a row of cloth-covered tables, and those who were not official guests ate their meat with their fingers as they wandered about or stood in little groups and the juices ran down their chins and along their arms and onto the ground where the dogs lapped it up and whined for more. Eleanor ate very little. The sight of so many slabs of meat, so much juice running down the chins of so many people, shrunk her throat. The meat turned sour on her tongue. Her stomach shrivelled.

‘We make our own relish, Mrs Dunlevy,’ announced the lady mayoress. ‘It has junipers in it, of all things!’