There were already homesteads dotted around the countryside. Sheep runs allocated by white men who stepped out onto the land, pointed their fingers at what they desired, saying, ‘This is mine, and this is mine, and this and this,’ and putting up fences to underline the point. Bromley Cairn was there, built by my and Basil’s great-great-great-great grandfather, as was the other homestead Basil had shown me – the homestead with the leaning palms and decorated silo, the homestead that had overlaid itself on the brolga’s breeding grounds.

The homesteads were built, the grasslands fenced. And the settlers ran sheep.

The sheep were precious to the settlers, Basil told me. To mine and Basil’s settler ancestors. The sheep were fenced and fed and watered. They were protected and defended. The waterholes were claimed for the sheep; fenced and controlled. The river banks became pockmarked and compacted with trampling hooves, and the water fouled with droppings. The native grasses that had clothed the waterhole, that held the edges of it firm, were all cut up by the hooves, and the banks began to collapse. Rainbow-feathered bee-eaters could no longer burrow there. Water rats lost their homes.

But the Dja Dja Wurrung people, still using their old route, kept using the place, and the water. It was their place, their water.

But it got worse and worse. And up on what had been the grasslands, now the paddocks, the sheep had eaten out all of the native grasses that those Djaara people had been tending for millennia. There was no longer any food for the native animals there, and so the kangaroos and wallabies and bandicoots and bettongs all disappeared. There was no good water anymore. There was no good meat. The native plant foods that the Djaara people had worked hard to ensure could always be found in the grasslands and swamps were replaced with European pasture grasses. These were grounds that had always been managed with the idea of reciprocity, for sharing with family, with trading partners, with animals, with the land itself.

So that was the situation that Basil’s ancestors were faced with. They were hungry. Their children were hungry. The sheep were driving out all of their food. On the other hand, the sheep were food. And they were just strolling around grazing on the Djaara’s hunting grounds. So the people took the sheep – they removed them from the land they were damaging, they hunted them, and ate them. It was a logical solution.

But as far as the settlers were concerned, it was theft. So all across this area of Victoria men and women and children were hunted and killed for eating those sheep.

After a while, though, the settlers figured out that hunting and killing men and women and children in retribution wouldn’t actually bring the sheep back, so they began to provide the people with rations, hoping they would eat those instead of the sheep. They gave them flour, and sugar, and tea as a reward for abandoning the hunt and slaving on the farms instead.