Flour and sugar and tea. A recipe for illness and malnutrition.

For small rations, their lives changed from inhabiting the land and everything it offered them, to working on it, for someone else.

The master of that homestead with the tall palms hired some of the Dja Dja Wurrung people to help on his station. But when he decided it was time for them to move on, the cook mixed plaster of Paris in with their flour.

‘Do you know what happens when you ingest plaster of Paris?’ Basil asked me. I shook my head, and so he told me how plaster of Paris is moisture activated. How, at first, when it hits the moisture in your intestinal tract, it heats up. It can reach 60 degrees Celsius. ‘You can slow-roast a piece of pork at that temperature.’ And then the plaster of Paris sets hard. Luckily for them, those Djaara men were alert to the fact that the flour was tainted – they were luckier than many other families who were given flour mixed with arsenic. Men, and women, and children, who died in pain, who never got to face their murderers. Who became simply a ‘problem solved’. Who never took another sheep.

‘Mixing plaster of Paris with flour was used a lot as rat poison at the time,’ Basil said. ‘It still is, but it was more common then, a great way to get rid of pests – never mind how cruel it was. And those men, our ancestors, Anna, treated my people, my family, like pests.’

Basil told me how those few Djaara men set aside their poisoned flour and went back up to the homestead with the tall palms and went into the kitchen in the outbuilding. The cook was there, preparing a slaughtered sheep for the master of the house and his family. He must have been surprised to see them. He must have been imagining them somewhere else, doubled over in pain, knocking on heaven’s door.

So they speared him and took the lamb.

They brought it to the gully. To their place by the water. The place they had always come. Where they had always cooked, and eaten. And they cooked it and ate it.

Hearing the story of these places I knew, I saw myself on their continuum: part of the place, part of the story, part of the passage through time. I saw the group of men, working for the white men of the homestead. I saw them collect their rationed flour – their adulterated flour – I imagined them realising the trick with horror and fear. I saw them cooking their lamb in the gully, the gully where I had sat bleeding. I feared for them. I feared where this story was going. Basil continued.

The gully was the one bit of permanent water in the landscape. It was a sunken pool, a chain-of-ponds river that sometimes flowed after high rainfall, but when it stopped it left deep, basalt-lined pools of cool green water. And even then, in the height of summer, there was water – the birds used it, cormorants and herons wheeling up from messy reeds and rushes.