Before we moved here permanently, this had been the location of long summer holidays. His room was still at the back of the house. Ten years previously, I’d find him in there, sleeping with his head at the foot of the bed so he could keep a closer eye on the door, and on me. Six years before that, I’d be summoned by the banging of a Fisher Price activity centre against cot bars. The past irretrievable, I paused and let myself imagine that the sunny infant Caleb had once been, or the eager boy he’d grown into then out of, might be behind that door.

But… the smells. The adolescent stench leaching vaporously around the doorframe. Body odour, dirty clothes, something male, young, offensive. It was six months since Caleb stopped resenting the man I was dating, Jack Laskin, and instead took Jack’s advice and volunteered with the Country Fire Authority. Today, Caleb would be with Jack and I’d be worried.

I pushed his door open and walked in, collecting discarded black clothing. Sometimes I found him moving his legs, restless as a dog’s dream of running, beneath the mess of bed coverings. His sleep was often unquiet. Today everything was as I expected – the sketches of his first girlfriend, Penelope, complete with long yellow and pink hair, a very short, full skirt above bare thighs and long white socks; Caleb’s laptop open to a Facebook page with the cover image of two dark-lipsticked girls in black lace dresses, headed Goth Chat – except that, for the first time in what would be a pattern, Caleb wasn’t there. His bed was empty.

Could he be outside? His window revealed an overgrown yard fringed with bush. That dry, hot morning, every plant was dead, kindling. Damper Creek traversed my view like a vein on the back of Caleb’s hand. This was Taungurung land, cleared in the nineteenth century by Gold Rush fortune-hunters, subdivided into town lots fifty years later. Gold dust is sprinkled over our lives here, mixed with the detritus of mining: mercury and arsenic poisoning the soil. If my former flame, archaeologist Marco Ossani, excavated here, he’d find creek bed beneath creek bed beneath creek bed, the lower ones transfigured into fossilised reefs that hoarded gold for millennia, awaiting discovery by heavy machinery or humble panning.

Just as hints of Caleb’s previous life existed in the young man he’d become (the limp from his accident, his knee scarred by primary school asphalt, his shoulder marked by chickenpox), the landscape contained traces of its history. His grandmother left an old Hills Hoist and a brick barbecue, now falling to pieces. The fossicker, our neighbour across time, left a few tools and a collapsed tin roof near the creek at the end of our garden. Cutting away the weeds, we saw the remains of a hearth where he kept fire tamed and safe. Caleb once found a spearhead, and remains of a rusty pan.

Here, the Earth had given us gold to mine, native trees to feed sawmills and nutrients for our orchards. We imagined the world exists for our purposes. Decades after the rush ostensibly ended, alluvial gold was still fossicked with spades, tubs and cradles. Even trees seemed purposeful: Eucalyptus globulus were cultivated for paper production, for pages in my files and Caleb’s sketchbooks. Last century, the Great Depression forced Melbourne men into jobs in deep-forest sawmills. Sixty-nine of those sawmills were destroyed in the Black Friday bushfires of 1939. My schoolhouse survived but was constructed of timber cut and milled by men who did not. Dozens of them, men who that year seemed destined for another kind of war, were killed.