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eyes. I took her hand and helped her up. She giggled like a young girl and her daughter was nice enough to say nothing of the third passenger: the king brown snake beneath her mother’s seat.
    When the Farman was safely behind the hall, I tied it to the fence on one side and lashed it to some heavy rocks on the other. The women stayed seated in the cockpit. Vogelnest edged towards the road, but seemed reluctant to make the journey alone. Jack wanted to talk about knots. When he began, tucking in his shirt over his strong man’s belly, I thought he was criticizing the knots I had tied. I missed the point—Jack liked the “idea” of a knot.
    “It is a great thing, the knot,” he said. “A great thing.”
    Vogelnest seemed to understand more than I did. He squatted on the ground and surveyed O’Hagen’s paddocks with a critical eye. As Jack continued the light grew mellow and the colour started to come back into the landscape.
    “What sort of fellow,” he said, “would invent the Donaldson lash?”
    “A fellow called Donaldson,” I suggested.
    “An astonishing man,” said Jack, mentally picturing the unsung Donaldson in some draughty shed alone with his ropes. “What a grasp he had of the principles. And what a memory. Two over, then back, down, hitch, double hitch and through. It’s a knot you need to practise for a week before you get the hang of it.”
    I never heard of the Donaldson lash before or since, or half the other knots I heard celebrated that afternoon while the sky lost its intense cobalt and went powdery and soft, and the grasses that had looked so bleached and lifeless now turned dun and gold, pale green and russet.
    Jack wondered out loud about the saddler’s bow and argued the comparative merits of the reef and the double latch. Phoebe stayed in the front cockpit with her hands folded in her lap. The late sun set her hair afire. Vogelnest saw me looking at her and smiled and ducked his head.
    “Ah,” said Jack who seemed, at last to have exhausted his subject, “I do like a good knot.”
    Everybody started to move like they do in a church when the bridal party has gone out to sign the registry. Phoebe yawned and stretched. Vogelnest stood and brushed his knees. Molly declared herself frightened of snakes and would not walk back through the long grass. Jack picked her up like a bride and carried here across the paddock and when they arrived, laughing, on the roadway, he refused to put her down.
    Molly squealed like a young girl and Mrs Vogelnest, still standing guard at the fence with the long-handled shovel, allowed a small smile to break up the unhappy lines Jeparit had engraved on her tiny clenched-up face.

8
    Ernest Vogelnest sat in his kitchen. His wife was in bed, asleep. He was finishing the last of the schnapps. He had been keeping the schnapps for five years and tonight had been the right time to drink it.
    He could hear the music, the piano accordion and the young girl’s voice. It drifted across the desolate paddocks from O’Hagen’s where the aviator and the picnickers had gone to explain the aeroplane. It was a party. He guessed, quite correctly, that there was dancing. He raised his glass towards the house where Herbert Badgery and Mrs O’Hagen were doing an Irish jig.
    Ernest Vogelnest had spent his pound well. He was not merely happy, he was overwhelmed by the niceness of people, the blissful absence of the aeroplane. It had been a quid well spent.
    When he saw the lights of the Hispano Suiza come bumping down the long dirt road from O’Hagen’s he extinguished his hurricane lamp and watched the car pass by his darkened window. He thought he saw the aviator in the driver’s seat, his face reflected in the glow of the instruments, and he raised his glass to him, wishing him well.

9
    I always had an aversion to hotel rooms, guest houses, boarding houses or anywhere else where a man was forced into giving up money for a place to stay. I always built a place of my own