The master of the homestead was unhappy to have his cook speared. He gathered his men. They rode over to Bromley Cairn, and they knocked on the door – ‘on that door right there, Anna,’ said Basil, pointing, ‘and our great-great-great-great grandfather Master Bromley opened that door to them, and he went outside and saddled up his horse, and he rode with them. As a gang, a posse, they travelled over the paddock and down to the gully, and when they reached that spot, the exact same spot we were sitting today, they raised their guns, and my ancestors leapt into the water to hide.

‘Imagine hiding there, beneath the surface, the ripples above you making the muzzles of the rifles pointed at you seem to waver but never disappear. And your lungs burning, bursting, clamouring for air.’

When the first man finally broke the surface to breathe, the master shot him.

‘Imagine that water there before your eyes turning red with your own brother’s blood, and knowing that soon you will have to break the surface too, to breathe, and to die. To die, Anna. Because you refused to be poisoned, eradicated like vermin. Because you tried to live as you and everyone you knew had always lived. Because you had a right to live.’

My face was streaming with tears.

‘Eight people were shot there, in that waterhole where we sat today. Eight of my ancestors. Each one as he came up for air. Shot by another of my ancestors. And yours, Anna. Yours too. So that this place, this house, all of these houses could be handed down through families, through your family; our family.

‘And what was there then for my ancestors to hand down? Everything changed. Everything was taken, and everything changed. And it could have been that the only legacy left to us, to me and to Mum, was pain and loss and want. But we’re better than that. We’re still here. And we laugh and sing and keep what we can and give what we can.’

I looked around the room with new eyes. The cosy room with the fire in the hearth, safe and secure, was also a fortress against all that was outside – designed specifically to protect someone like me. Designed specifically to keep someone like Basil out. And from the outside – the decrepit blank stare across the stripped landscape – the house still, in my mind, seemed beautifully gothic, but now its blankness seemed appropriate too, almost wilful: like the house actively chose to be blind to the altered landscape in which it stood; as if, in order to even continue to exist, it mustn’t see what it itself had been a party to.

But I wasn’t blind anymore. I would never again wilfully ignore the evidence before my eyes.

‘Thank you for telling me,’ I said.

‘It’s your story too. Keep telling it.’

‘I will,’ I said. ‘I will.’

I lay down and put my head on the pillow and pulled up my sleeping bag and stared into the fire in the hearth.