“This is confidential information—do you know what that means? It needs to be kept secret. If you tell anyone, I’ll be very disappointed and won’t trust you again, is that understood?”

I nodded again and Luca sighed once more.

“Yes, they’re coming here—some of the Kosovar refugees from the evening news.”

“That’s a good thing, right?” Luca didn’t say anything, so I prodded again. “In class we talked about how the national anthem says we have boundless plains to share and Mr. Khouri said that was right, and . . .”

Luca waved my words away. “Yes, it’s a good thing—but it won’t be easy.”

I kept looking at him and Luca shook his head. “These people will have been through a lot, Freddo. Where they’re coming from, and what they’ve seen . . . it’s worse than most of us could ever imagine, and we’ve got to look after them.” He shrugged. “I’m not so sure we’re well equipped to do that over here, or where they’ll be staying.”

“At the Quarantine Station on Point Nepean?”

Luca looked at me sharply, then back to the road. “I mean it, Winifred, you can’t tell a single soul about this.”

I nodded again.

“Yes, at the Quarantine Station. It’s run-down and very isolated. That’s why they built the station at Point Nepean in the first place. Because there were no towns nearby and it would be hard to escape.”

In class when Mr. Khouri pinned up the map of where we live, he showed us how Point Nepean was the most westerly point of the Mornington Peninsula. We’d been there on field trips just about every year of primary school—we’d seen the limestone cliffs and the old cement artillery batteries at Fort Nepean. Point Nepean was mostly a skinny strip of cliff edging out into Port Phillip Bay, and behind it was all thick bushland making up the national park. But we’d never seen the Quarantine Station before. The first I knew there was one was when I overheard Luca say so to Anika the other night. . . .

Luca kept talking. “The old authorities wanted to keep the immigrants coming into Victoria away from everyone else, until it was clear that they weren’t bringing illness and disease with them. That’s what it means to ‘quarantine’ someone.”

“It wasn’t a very nice place?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No, quarantining had to be done for the safety of everyone, but I doubt it would have been a nice place, or a very happy way to come to a new country. And then for a long time, until only a few years ago, the army took it over and made the station a cadet school and teaching hospital, for soldiers in training.”

“Like the police academy you went to?”

Luca nodded again. “Just like that, but the army’s version.”