‘No,’ said Basil. ‘They built their house on mine.’

Basil was keeping up a pace, which made me think that maybe he wasn’t quite so cavalier as he sounded about walking around on someone’s property. We struck across the expanse towards the cluster of trees a few hundred metres north of the homestead. I felt hopelessly exposed to anyone watching. But it seemed that no-one was watching. The landscape felt empty.

‘This used to be a wetland,’ said Basil about the rubbly cropped land beneath our feet. ‘See how it’s low here, next to the creek? It doesn’t flood here now, though. Water course has been changed to protect the house, channels at the end to drain it.’

‘Okay.’ I was a bit over the lecturing tone. ‘Thanks for the hydrology lesson.’

Basil didn’t say anything, but led me into the copse of trees: shadowy peppercorns mixed with sugar gums. We were at the back of the small silo. We walked around it and into the last of the sunlight.

‘Don’t turn around,’ said Basil, and physically stopped me when my immediate instinct was to do so. ‘Just wait, Impatient Anna,’ he said. And he walked behind me with his hands on my shoulders, marching me forward and away from the silo. ‘Don’t you trust me? Haven’t I shown you good things today?’

‘Yes.’ And it was true. The shimmering leaves, the organic ocean. ‘You have.’

‘So trust me and just wait.’

He marched me further into the far paddock, towards a tree trunk dropped on its side. The paddock had been cropped all around the fallen log, I could see by the furrows that eddied around it like ripples. ‘Okay,’ Basil said. ‘Close your eyes and turn around and sit.’ I closed my eyes and he sat me down and sat next to me. ‘And . . . open.’

I opened my eyes.

We were sitting some distance from the silo, which on this side had been transformed into a work of art. An enormous pair of birds, four times the size of a person, had been painstakingly sketched and shaded and painted onto the concrete side of the silo.

‘Holy shit,’ I said.

‘Pretty good, eh?’ said Basil.

The birds seemed real. Long-legged and elegant, one stood erect with folded wings while the other, wings out, pranced before me.

‘Brolgas,’ said Basil.

‘It’s amazing. Who did it? Why is it here where no-one can see it? Wouldn’t it have been better in town?’

‘You can see it from the other road,’ Basil said defensively as he pointed away further across the paddock. ‘And besides, that’s not the point. The brolgas used to breed here, on the wetland. So it’s to remember them.’

‘Did those people do it – the people in the homestead?’

‘What? Fuck no. My mum’s family did it. This is our land. This is my mother’s country – my country.’

‘Were the owners mad?’

‘Don’t know. Don’t really care, to be honest. Anyway, it’s there for as long as it’s there – that’s all we can hope for. It was my dad’s idea. They all used to come swimming at the reservoir over there when they were teenagers, Mum and Dad, and your mum too, before it got drained. And then after the wetland got fucked up Dad remembered the silo was here and with Mum and my family they all made a plan to paint it.’