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trouble,” Uncle Henry grins. My father grins back. They return to the car with confident strides and determined, rebellious spirits.
    â€œOK Granny,” sings Dad, “which way?”
    Granny stares out across the adjoining field directing the car onward.
    â€œKeep going,” she mumbles, her hand sweeping in a forward gesture, as though she is chasing away a fly.
    Granny’s directions form a trail through the scrub. She signals the way over dry waterholes and through thorny bushes, the low tree branches scratching at Dad’s new car. He starts to become agitated.
    â€œAre you sure this is the way?” he snaps.
    â€œKeep going,” Granny commands, unmoved, gesturing onward.
    â€œI’m sure there must be a better way than this.”
    â€œKeep going.”
    â€œI hope you know what you’re doing.”
    â€œKeep going.”
    My father silently fumes as a branch snaps his ear-phone aerial. It hangs limply across the back window.
    â€œShe always goes the long way,” says Uncle Henry, sensing my father’s rising fury. “She avoids Temperance Creek.” Granny shoots Uncle Henry a sharp look as he utters the place name, then resumes her vigil at the window. “That’s where that massacre was,” he continues. “Rounded them up like cattle, old and young, and shot them. About four hundred. And then they named it Temperance Creek.”
    Granny speaks in her stony whisper as the branches continue to thwack the car. “There were only two young ones left, a boy and a girl. The boy they took to Milroy in 1881, and I think the girl was there too.”
    Dad nods gravely, the aerial long forgotten. I feel the chill crawl up my spine and I move in my seat to shake it off.
    The party in the car is silent until Granny speaks again. “Here. Stop here.”
    Dad stops the car and we open the doors. The breeze drifts through the vehicle. I get out and walk around as Danielle prepares to move Granny from the car to a blanket in the paddock.
    As I walk around the field I notice, beneath the tall blades of grass, the scars of the old camp, rust-eaten metal, old tins and broken glass. Everything seems still and silent, even the insects.
    â€œOver here,” my father motions to me. I walk to the spot where he is standing and look at the ground where he points.
    â€œThis is where your grandmother lived before ...” Dad’s voice trails off as thoughts flood his mind.
    I stare at the soil, trying to find some sign in the dark blue and emerald-green pieces of glass and the piles of sticks, wanting something that will have meaning, but the ground stands mute. The warm wind sweeps across the knee-length grass, across my legs, like the breath of contented, sleeping children.

Through the years

4
    1918
    G ARIBOOLI STOOD AT THE TRAIN STATION in the corner of a small room, looking down at the heavy shoes that had been pinching at her heels. Her crying had ceased, replaced by a numbness that struggled with her anxiety as she thought over what had happened to her in the last day.
    Yesterday, when the policemen had brought her to town, she was placed in the police lockup for the night while someone from the government could be organised to take her into their care. Garibooli was kept in the prison cell reserved for drunks and she had almost vomited from the sharp smell of urine and bile. She was not able to eat the bread and water that had been left for her. Nor was she able to sleep. She felt little soothed by being told that she would be collected in the morning by the welfare woman. This turned out to be Mrs Carlyle who now had charge of her.
    Instead, Garibooli had sat on the cold iron bench that doubled as a bed for those too drunk or despondent to feel its hardness against their spine. She watched the outside light turn to darkness and, as the shadows drew up the wall, she waited the many hours until the lightness crept back again. All the while she sat