So: the rifle, and the kangaroo. Some fresh meat for supper will cheer everybody up. But he misses, and swears, and the boys don’t react, and what’s the point of it all, anyway—this is settled country, he doesn’t belong here, he should be up north where things are wild, the way they were when he rode through with the Telegraph. My God, the Telegraph! That long shining wire reaching from Port Augusta to Darwin. Sullen Jimmy, quiet Billy—look at them! They owned the country for so long, and never once did they achieve anything a hundredth as remarkable as the Overland Telegraph. Port Augusta to Darwin, then under the sea to Java, and on and on to England. Though the idea of England produces a derisive grunt from Foster, who firmly believes that the future of Australia lies in its native sons: men like him, proud to have been born right here, beneath the Southern Cross. It occurs to him, as he continues to ride south after his failure with the kangaroo, that he could write a book called The Native Australian. For a moment, he’s full of eagerness, and envisions a preface that explains the distinction between the terms ‘native Australian’ and ‘Australian native’. The book will put forward a strong argument for a federal assembly of the separate colonies; it might also include a chapter on necessary limits to immigration, and another on the role of the police force in protecting pastoral interests. But Foster feels the idea slipping away just as quickly as it came. The thought of writing it exhausts him. The hawks are still circling up ahead—he’ll concentrate on them.

  The hawks, it turns out, haven’t found a dead body, but live sheep. Foster reaches the top of a rise and looks down at what Billy informs him is Thalassa’s northern run. They’re a long way from the homestead, but this is Thalassa land and those are Thalassa sheep. Men on horseback, aided by dogs, round the sheep into pens, where presumably they’ll spend the night before being driven down to the woolshed for shearing. Foster observes the placid lumber of the pregnant ewes; soon enough, the hawks that fly above them will dive for their newborn lambs. Dust rises in clouds from the horses’ hoofs.

  ‘Down we go,’ says Foster, more to his horse than to his men, and with a nudge of his heels he’s riding onto Thalassa. There’s a shepherd’s hut by the pens, and a shepherd’s hut is as good a place as any to spend the night, especially when there’s rain about. Also promising: a dray stands beside the hut, bullocks in harness, with a few men gathered around it. Perhaps something has been delivered. Foster recalls the heavy, amber taste of the Thalassa madeira. Across the paddock, the stockmen swear at the sheep as their dogs wheel and yap.

  Closer to the hut, Foster sees that the people standing at the dray are agitated about something. They’re looking into the back of it with concern, and a smaller figure behind them is speaking with wild gestures. Closer still, and Foster recognises the speaker as a girl—and, yes, it’s one of the Wallace girls, the belligerent one who tried to tell him, on the first morning of the search, that her brother was somehow unlike every other boy who’s ever wandered off into the Australian bush. As Foster approaches, followed by Billy and Jimmy Possum, the men around the dray turn to look. There are three of them, one black and two white, presumably Thalassa stockmen. The girl behind them continues to wave her hands about.

  Foster dismounts, ties his horse to a post, strides to the dray, and looks down at whatever is in the back of it: a body, scratched, filthy, not currently conscious, but definitely alive and certainly not that of a six-year-old boy. The Wallace girl seems to know more about the body than anybody else, but she addresses herself to Billy while the men try to explain to Foster what they know. Amid all the noise, he manages to glean that this is, indeed, the infamous vicar. The girl managed to walk him down out of the ranges (he was capable of walking earlier today, supposedly), but he’d lost his horse, refused to ride hers, and had collapsed some six or seven miles west of here. The girl, unable to lift him, left him where he fell and rode off looking for help (so where’s her horse? Ah, behind the hut, and apparently it’s thrown a shoe). She found these men when she saw their sheep, they went with her to collect the vicar, someone rode out to the road and found a dray on its way to Thalassa with a delivery of empty bales, the driver brought his dray here to the hut, they loaded up the vicar, and now the driver will take him down to the homestead. The girl wants him taken to town, but the driver is determined to go south: he has these bales, the shearing starts tomorrow (unless it rains, it looks like rain), and the bales are needed.

  Foster quiets them all, leans into the back of the dray, and inspects the vicar. Foster isn’t fond of vicars. He’ll tell anyone who asks him that missionaries and men of God cause trouble in these remote places—they interfere with police work by being idealistic and impractical, and by lodging puerile complaints.

  ‘His colour is good,’ Foster says. ‘All things considered.’

  The driver nods. ‘That’s what I said. Didn’t I say so?’

  ‘Let me confirm,’ says Foster, and turns to Billy. ‘This is the man you were tracking from the boy’s boots?’

  ‘Yes,’ says the Wallace girl. ‘My father wasn’t happy.’

  ‘In which case,’ says Foster, as if the girl had never spoken, ‘I have some questions for our vicar.’

  ‘Questions for him?’ asks the Wallace girl.

  ‘And you too,’ Foster says. ‘I’ll want a statement from you. We’ll accompany you to the Axam house.’

  Now the girl objects, and once again it’s Billy she addresses. She wants to go home, and she wants Billy to take her and her lame horse: Denny isn’t found, the vicar is an idiot, and they’re wasting time. Foster looks at the girl and says, ‘You’ll ride in the cart. You look worse than he does. Jimmy, walk round back and get her horse. Yes, miss, you’ll get in the dray or we’ll put you in it.’

  The girl appeals to Billy, who’s still in the saddle. She puts one hand on his boot—as if he has any authority here!—but he moves his horse, gently, until her hand is off.

  Billy says to her, ‘I’ll go with you to Thalassa.’

  The girl’s skirts are dirty, her hair is snarled. She looks dog-tired. She turns her back to Billy and climbs, with childish dignity, into the cart.

  The driver is seated and ready, the bullocks lift their heads in the yokes. Here comes Jimmy walking back with the girl’s horse, and he’s not handling it well. Ah yes, this horse, the ridiculous red mare, which slid and skittered over the plain two days ago. Jimmy, with his useless arm, can’t manage it—the horse pulls at the lead rope, she pins her ears and switches her tail, and all Jimmy does is follow.

  Foster looks up at the huge, hidden sun, and sighs. ‘I’ll take her,’ he says. He jogs over to the horse with his hand out, takes the rope and tugs her forwards. She bares her teeth. Behind her, the driver raises his whip, ready to flick it over the backs of the bullocks—he’s waiting for Foster’s signal.

  Now many things happen at once. Foster does or doesn’t give a signal, which the driver does or doesn’t misinterpret; the whip cracks; the bullocks bellow, lower their heads, and begin to pull; and the girl’s horse, startled, leaps away and kicks out a hind leg. Jimmy is standing right there to be kicked. He’s knocked back and down. He stands and falls again, groaning. Foster makes quick calculations: it’ll be a hit to the thigh, hip or groin, and almost certainly serious. Did I give a signal? When did the driver crack his whip? He must keep track of all of this. Billy is off his horse now, on the ground beside Jimmy, keeping Jimmy’s leg still. The stockmen and their dogs continue to bark at the sheep. The girl is white in the back of the cart; the cart’s moving. They’ll have to stop it, calm the horse, examine Jimmy, lift him and his cloak into the back of the dray beside the minister, make their way down to the homestead at Thalassa—hours away, two injured men. And who will have to write this up as a comprehensive report, who will have to swear by it and be held accountable? Foster will, because Foster is in charge of this situation, and the one in charge is the one who must report. It’s these endless reports that prevent him from writing books.

  Jimmy rolls in pain on the ground and a hawk lands on the roof of the shepherd’s hut. When Foster takes off his hat to shoo it away, he feels the first spits of rain hitting the top of his head.

  FIFTH NIGHT

  At one point during the night, the rain is so heavy that even Mary is woken by the sound of it on the iron roof at Undelcarra. She rolls away from Lotta in the bed, looks in at the girls’ bedroom, and goes out to the parlour to check for leaks. Then she takes a lantern to the verandah and sits a long time with it, Mopsy on her lap.

  Mathew, who has already picked up chaff and flour from the Fairly mill and is heading north with it, shelters under his dray and thinks that the rain is bad for bootless Denny but good for the wheat and for filling the tanks. There’s no bargain here that he could make with God.

  Robert, unimpressed by Sergeant Foster, has formed an independent search party with some local men and is spending the night out on the plain. He’s used to bush patrols and is able to sleep, despite the weather. While sleeping, he needn’t reflect on the terror he felt last night when he arrived home and Minna wasn’t there. Even though he heard, from the Baumanns’ groom, that she stayed with her mother, he can’t shake the idea that she might never return, or that, if she does, he might prove to have no control over her.

  Minna, in Robert’s bed, doesn’t sleep. She’s hungry, because Annie Bell hasn’t been sent with food—Mama, apparently, is sulking. Minna lies buzzing in Robert’s bed, listening through the rain for the sound of him coming home.

  Camped out in the Druid Range, Constable Wooding and Copper Bob agree to give up the search. ‘He’s not come this way,’ says Wooding, miserable in wet wool; and Copper Bob agrees with him.

  At Thalassa, the shearers hear the rain, turn in their swags, and think of the long and stinking stretch of hours without work tomorrow, crowded in with other men. The sheep that have already been brought to the woolshed huddle together in its pens; the rain will keep the fleece on their backs at least one more day. Bear wakes and thinks how much he’d like to piss if he weren’t already falling asleep again. The rain wakes Joanna, and among the many predicaments that occur to her—the shearing, George’s temper at the weather, the missing boy—she wonders if the possum-fur cloak is keeping its wearer dry. Nancy, in her room beside the kitchen, stretches her aching legs and notices that the rain seems to be leaving a greasy residue on the windowpanes. Tal broods in his shelter at the depot camp, having lost at cards to a man from Murray Bridge. Soon he’ll hear the sound of a dray and bullocks, and that will be Foster, Billy and Cissy, all of them soaked, heading to Thalassa homestead with their patients.

  Bess and Karl, dry and warm in the empty house at Wilparra, sleep through the rain. In the damp, the empty house releases its older smells of food and fire and bodies. Bess and Karl remain asleep as Denny drapes a blanket over his head, opens the front door quietly, and hurries away from the house. Outside, in the gums around the spring, the cockatoos spread their wings and shake their heads; they swing upside down from the branches in order to wash the undersides of their bodies. The frogs sing on the surface of the earth. The rain falls through the night and on into the morning.

  CONFESSION OF THE GERMAN PROSTITUTE

  I’ll be right with you, if you’ll give me half a moment—it’s been a busy day. A lot of customers, and each one brings me news of the missing boy: the laceless boots, the handkerchief, the fire in the hills. The story has run on down the railway line, so even men from elsewhere are coming to me with schemes and theories. I’ve been asking myself, why does this feel so familiar? Then I realised—I’m thinking of the goldfields: the feeling that we’re close to something very precious, that nobody can find it, but that everything might change at any time.

  On the goldfields I was French. I saw in Melbourne the way the French girls were favoured, so by the time I got to the diggings I called myself Odette. There was never once I told a lie beside my name: never came up with some family story, never tried to speak a word of French or change my voice to sound the part. It was enough, out there, to be known as Odette. There was money to be made and I made it in whatever direction.

  And I met Nikolaj. Now, Nikolaj was a Dane, a sailor who jumped ship to come south for gold, the biggest man I ever met, all brown and wide, with a great flat nose. He could work eighteen hours a day at digging, and the only money he made was what his wife earned by selling rum and cognac on the sly. He had a genius for sinking shafts in unexpected places and finding just enough gold to get other people interested. They’d offer to buy him out for hundreds, he’d hold on fast, and a day or two later the seam would run right by and miss him by a yard.

  His partner in all this was a Chinese, Li Longwei, almost as big as Nikolaj—the tallest Chinaman I ever saw, shoulders like a bullock, and the two of them together were a rare sight out in Castlemaine, that shithole. The goldfields made for peculiar friendships, the kind you’d not see elsewhere. Nick spoke no Mandarin, Long no Danish or German, both of them hardly any English, but they had their own language made of exhaustion and drink and optimism. For all their strength, they were such sloppy bastards: their shafts were always filling up with water and they’d spend a week or more bailing it all out; the beams they fitted would slip and half a tunnel would fall in; the seam ran by them like a golden train and they just shrugged and found another place to dig. Long had a dreadful fear of going underground, so he ran things up top while Nikolaj worked below. At night they went back to Nick’s tent and drank rum till they were tight—which took some time, they were both so big—while Nick’s wife cleared up around them, taking shirts to wash or scraping mud from boots. Their big drunk friendly voices were a way to explain the men who went into that tent every night, just to greet old friends, pass the time of day with those two lunatics, say hello to Mrs Nick. If the visitors left with a billy full of contraband rum, a flask of cognac, well, who’s to know?

  Once a week Nick’s wife would send him on to me. She was a receptive woman, Mrs Nick, in the sense that babies planted in her right as rain, but she’d never brought one out alive, and she’d had well enough of losing kids. And Nick had needs—she understood. She also knew I wouldn’t cheat him, I wasn’t too young, I was an independent operator. I was busy out there in Castlemaine; there were women around, but they were mostly someone’s wife or daughter, so I had my pick at the height of things and even then I preferred Nikolaj to the rest. Some of the blokes out there had rubbed their own pricks raw before they got to me, but nothing ever made Nick mean. Other men were horniest not when they’d found gold, but when someone else nearby had struck it rich. I think sometimes the only things that got them out of those mineshafts were their cocks. And even then, I’m willing to bet that there were men down there who whittled holes and fucked the rock itself, probably imagining their tips were touching gold. But Nick was solid, steady, and I appreciated that. There was no wounded pride to work on, no mess, no tears, he didn’t take too long, and he was never over-rough.

  Like all the miners, Nikolaj had bad lungs—too long underground—and every couple of months he’d be laid up with pneumonia. Then his wife would ask me to nurse him for a bit, since she was busy. She paid for this as well. Now, I liked Nick’s wife—she had her head screwed on. She would have been down the shaft herself if she thought that it would pay. I don’t know where she got her rum, which wasn’t rotgut but good stuff; I do know which troopers she paid off to make sure she wasn’t caught. One of them bragged about it to me, so I squeezed his balls tighter than he liked and suggested he keep his mouth shut.

  But Nick and Long were an unlucky pair, right to the last. Long fell, one night, into a disused shaft, and though he called and cried and sang enough to get pulled out, he’d broken both his legs and died six weeks later from infection. And the next summer, when the creeks and waterholes dried up and dysentery ran through the goldfields, Nikolaj was one of the first to go. Now, I’ve seen people die—my own mother and sisters, for example—but watching a body that large go out was another thing entirely. I sat on his left, his wife sat on his right, we all held hands. I cried as much as she did. Not long after, she started up in fright after looking at the fire and said, ‘Did you see it? The Devil chasing Nicky through the flames.’ I never took her for the superstitious kind. Two days later she’d packed the tent and was away, only the stone chimney left to say that they were ever there, and a box for me with two things in it: a sailor’s dictionary and thirty pounds.

  I had a comfortable few years on that money in Melbourne. Good living suits me: I fill out, I get a little lazy. Butter on bacon, my granny used to call it—I like things nice. But where I’m careful on a shilling, I’m stupid on a pound. And as Granny also said, money’s quick, it’s made to get away. So here I am again, too old now for the cities, and South Australia this time. I came out with the railway. I won’t hang about in Fairly for much longer—the farms round here are failing, there’s too much sorrow and more coming, and the railhead’s moving further north. That family could find their boy and still lose everything. But for now I’m here, and while I’m here I’m German. Well, why not? What would the men of Fairly know to do with a French girl? But call me Odette if you want to, or call me Inge Schmidt, it doesn’t matter. Inge was Nick’s wife’s name. Actually, my name is Florence. My granny called me Florrie. Call me anything you like.