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was Pearl and Luana’s playmate, companion, leader and slave. Through jealousy of Marcus’s hankering after Pearl, always putting her first, Luana hated him, looking out from under her clenched eyebrows with a hostile need.
    Eventually there were just the two families left living on that lost branch of the Western Line, the Deases and the Milburns. Construction work was done – a stretch of line now bypassed them. Engineers, surveyors, gangers, navvies singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and standing on flatbed rolling stock drifted their goodbyes across the smashed-down bush.
    It left the place just for them, for a while, until they too moved away, feeling to Pearl, when she was still too young to be resentful through living an isolated life in a homemade paradise, that true paradise was always a little piece of broken bush with an unused railway line running through. As for Luana, she could hear the trains going past all night on the new section of line – snoring on the upgrade, squealing on the downgrade like pigs rooting in the lignum – in the place the Milburns came from, Inverarity Swamp, and went back to every year.
    The Swamp was far inland, taking overnight to get there and all the following day on the North-Western Mail, with its habit of creeping and stopping and jerking and shuddering. Swamp was a heedless name for paradise. A branch line led to Inverarity siding on a wide clay plain. There they unloaded tent canvas in heavy folds, crates with saucepans, billies and blankets. After a wagon ride they went in under trees to a bend of a river and lived on duck and wild pig, and yellowbelly, bony bream and Murray cod netted in the billabongs.
    Nothing was ever truly lost to the three friends if the rails led back to any one of them. Unpacking pots and pans grimy from New Killarney siding, Luana brought her finger to her tongue, tasting sour steel, coal dust and a sweet, oily substance akin to molasses, grainy as sugar, the sweat of the railways gathered in greasy droplets. Fiver, yellow crest rampant, stalked along, step by careful step, through the camp site like a queen dowered in white satin.
    A man approached on a horse. His name, Bounder Morrison, was unknown to the Milburns, but not to the Registrar-General’s department where land titles were kept. Much had changed in the year since the Milburns last came through. The cockatoo screeched a warning, flying back from the intruder in a crash of feathers, yet what did a cockatoo know about chains, roods and surveyors’ perches?
    It was a pity that Kedron Milburn did not take more notice of a bird’s wild calls so as not to be made a fool of by a man. In a poem Bounder Morrison had written and published in the Sydney
Bulletin
, the first of the Bounder’s ever printed, it was curiously stated:
    A lusty old cockatoo
    Gives cry that he knows
    That someone’s a fool
    Relinquishing the jewel
    In the crown
    But it’s how the world goes.
    Kedron signed his name with an indelibly pencilled cross and Bounder his with a gold-nibbed fountain pen. Their arrangement was worth more money than Kedron had ever held in his hand before, a sheaf of ten pound notes. And why not? He’d given nothing away, and yet got something for it. On the Swampland Block you would be out of your mind to doubt your depth of possession, your unspoken ancestral attachments, with those wattle seed, honey, fish and pig riches. Kedron Milburn never did doubt it, nor was he ever ungrateful for the bounty that fell to his horny hands by virtue of his being alive on this earth.
    An old system title, much amended, was locked away with an older parchment, the Milburn title, so-called by a forgotten few, tied with pink tape and lodged in a Sydney solicitor’s vault at Bounder’s behest.
    Nothing changed for the Milburns – they came every year. Except cattle came in, along with goats, sheep, windmills, turkey’s nest dams, fences and mazed, rutted, eroded tracks as Inverarity Station encroached on the