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will do anything to insist his lie is true—I let the snake run down my arm, across my trousers, to the ground.
    And there it should have ended, with the five bob slinking off through the grass. The pet declared free. A good deed done, etc. But Phoebe came forward and picked the damn thing up herself. She held the writhing, deadly twisting rope out to me. My throat was so dry I could not speak. I took it with a shudder and got it into the hessian bag and tied the top with binding twine. I had to shove my hands into my leather jacket when I’d finished. They were trembling.
    It was then that Ernest Vogelnest chose to make his entry, scuttling crab-style round the end of the good lower wing. He didn’t beat around. He launched into his conversation before I saw him.
    “How fast does it fly?” he said.
    He made me jump, speaking up like that.
    “Sorry,” he said. He was a funny-looking little coot. He had thin wiry arms, a red face with a walrus moustache that was far too big for it. He wore his moleskins with foreign-looking leggings. He smiled and ducked his head.
    “A very nice aeroplane, sir,” said Ernest Vogelnest, nodding his head to the young lady. “Very nice…”
    “I apologize,” I began….
    “No, no, no. It is very interesting.” He patted the air in front of my chest with the palms of his hands. There was so
little
of him. What there was was held together by dirt and sinew.
    “Where will you go now?” He patted the nose cowling like a man admiring a neighbour’s horse.
    “Nowhere,” I smiled. “It’s no good. Broken. Kaput.”
    As it turned out we had quite different ideas about the aeroplane. From the corner of his eye Ernest Vogelnest saw his wife come out of the shed with a shovel. She carried the shovel to the fence and waited. A shovel was not such a wonderful weapon. He should, perhaps, have told her to bring the fork, but it was too late now.
    “Kaput,” I said.
    “Oh no,” Ernest Vogelnest said firmly. “Where to next?”
    “We stay here,” I said.
    But Ernest did not want anything as strange as an aeroplane in his front paddock. It would bring crowds of people who would stare at him. He rubbed his papery hands together and saw them, in their teaming thousands, writing things on the road. They would think the plane was his. They would decide he was a spy. God knows what they would do to him.
    I misunderstood him. I offered to pay.
    “No, no,” he rolled his eyes in despair. “No, no money.”
    “I will pay three shillings.”
    “I will pay more,” Ernest Vogelnest said desperately, smiling and ducking his head. “Much more.”
    “He doesn’t understand,” Phoebe said.
    Vogelnest ignored her. “I will pay you, sir, one pound, if you push your aero across the road,” he smiled slyly, “into O’Hagen’s.”
    We shook on it. I had made a total of one pound and five shillings since arriving in Balliang East. My gross assets were now one pound nine shillings and tuppence ha’penny.
    Success always went to my head. I got too excited. I went from despair to optimism in a flash. And my day was only starting, because a dangerous meeting was about to take place.
    I.e.: Jack.
    There was nothing to protect us from each other. We were elements like phosphorus and air which should always be kept apart. But he was already standing up from his picnic and picking pine needles from his trouser cuffs, but even if Molly had somehow known, had seen the result of that fifty-yard walk across the road, what could she have done?
    Jack McGrath was a man with an obsession, about transportation. He could discuss the wheel as a wonder, and he could talk about it for hours in relationship to the bullock team, the horse and jinker, the dray, the cart, the T Model, the Stanley Steamer. He could talk about it in relationship to Australia and its distances. He never got sick of it.
    He had money in the bank. He owned a Hispano Suiza, a fleet of taxis, a racehorse, but none of those things made him