Are you in with the sheep yet?!?!?!

Love,

Anna Panda

UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES
Sydney, NSW 2052

11 January

Dear Ms Krause,

We are delighted to offer you an admissions place to study Undergraduate Medicine at the University of New South Wales commencing February of this year. You have qualified for a full offer. If you wish to accept this offer, please visit the website listed on the attached page and enter your acceptance code, also on the attached page, no later than 5pm 21 January.

Congratulations again, and welcome to the University of New South Wales.

Vice-Chancellor

A note from the author

While the setting of this novel is fictional, it is very closely based on places in and around the Moolort Plains area of Central Victoria.

Permission for use of the Dja Dja Wurrung words in this novel has been kindly given by the Dja Dja Wurrung Aboriginal Clans Corporation.

The massacre described in this novel is based on a real massacre that happened on the plains at Glengower in Central Victoria called the Blood Hole massacre. You can read about it at the University of Newcastle’s invaluable interactive colonial massacres map, which can be found at https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/map.php. It is a remarkable truth-telling resource.

The memorial pamphlet excerpts in this novel are direct quotes from an existing souvenir booklet that marked the official opening of the Pioneers’ Memorial Tower in Maryborough in Central Victoria on Sunday, 16 April 1933, published by the Pioneers Memorial Committee. It can be found in the State Library of Victoria’s Digitised Item collection, and can be accessed through its catalogue entry, or through this link: http://handle.slv.vic.gov.au/10381/119767.

Acknowledgements

Endless thanks to David, who makes everything possible. And to Wendy and Graeme, for understanding about ‘the office’ and for being proud of me.

Miriam Sved, Natalie Kon-yu and Maggie Scott are, I think Nat said it once, like oxygen. The best writers’ group/online support/cheer squad/family-of-choice in the universe, I would put money on it. And special thanks to Miriam Sved, who has always been there for my words and everything around them.

Thanks to Stuart Winser, for being such a surprise brilliant intervening angel for this manuscript.

I am lucky to be working with Claire Craig and Brianne Collins and the excellent team at Pan Macmillan, such talented, rigorous and smart people who don’t let me get away with anything less than my best.

I am indebted to Aunty Kerri Douglas for keeping me in line over the representation of Djaara people in this book, and who applied her expertise and sense and smarts and herself to this whitey’s work. It was no small thing. Likewise, The Koorie Heritage Trust and Kath Coff of Nalderun Aboriginal Services Castlemaine gave me the opportunity to just sit down, shut up, and listen – this may have been a different book without that opportunity.

I am endlessly grateful to the Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation for their permissions, advice, help, and their spirit of generosity.