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    “I'm famished,” Braden announced. It was after eight.
    I agreed.
    “Don't worry, son, you'll get a good feed here,” Matt Riley told me. “Trust Miss Appin, eh, Jem?”
    Like most of the older members of the party, Matt Riley had been stopping here for nearly forty years.
    Suddenly in a storm of dust a dozen or so guineafowl darted out from under the house, which stood on three-foot stumps, and got between our legs and began to peck around the tyres of the trucks. There was a clatter of hooves, and a young nanny goat skittered down the stairs from Miss Appin's dining room, with three more guineafowl at her heels, and behind them Miss Appin herself flourishing a tea towel in her fist.
    “Morning, Millie,” Henry Denkler called across to her, and took the hat from his stack of white hair and made a decent sweep with it. “Mornin', Millie,” Wes McGowan echoed.
    “Drat the thing,” Miss Appin shouted after the goat, which had propped in the yard ten paces off and with its wide-set, sad-looking eyes stood its ground looking offended.
    “Garn,” Jem told it, and at something in his unfamiliar growl it started and fled.
    “Good on you, lad,” Miss Appin told him. Then, reverting to her role as hostess, "It's all ready, gentlemen. Eight of you—is that right?”
    I knew about Miss Appin. She had been described to me a dozen times by kids at school who had been out here and known what to expect, but had still, when they came face to face with her, been startled.
    Forty years before she had been a beauty. Her family ran the biggest spread in this part of the state. She was one of those girls that a young Wes McGowan or Henry Denkler might dream of but could not aspire to. The best horsewoman in the district, she had been to school in Europe, spoke French, and had been “presented” at Government House in Brisbane.
    But at twenty, in a single moment, fate had exploded out of a trusted corner and turned her whole world upside down. A horse had kicked in all one side of her face, flattening the bony ridge above her right eye, shattering her cheekbone and jaw. Over the years, the damaged side of her face had aged differently it seemed from the other, so that they appeared to belong to different women, or to women who had lived very different lives. Only one of these faces smiled, but you saw then why a girl who had been so lively and pleased with herself might have chosen to live in a place where she saw no more than a few dozen people each week, and most of them the same people, over and over.
    Miss Appin was responsible for changing the points on the line, and had turned her front room into the station buffet, where twice a week, while the two-carriage train waited and took on water, she served freshly baked scones and tea out of thick white railway crockery, and in winter, breakfast to shooting parties like ours that called up beforehand and put in their order.
    Two tables with chequered cloths had been laid for us. Otherwise, the small neat room was a front room like any other. There was an upright piano with brass candelabra and the walls were covered from floor to picture rail with photographs of Miss Appin's nephews and nieces, all of them known, it seemed, to Henry Denkler and Wes McGowan and even, though he was shy to admit it, to Matt Riley: family parties on lawns, the ladies with their skirts spread; young men with axes at wood-chopping shows or looking solemn in studio poses in the uniforms of the two wars; other boys (or the same ones when younger) in eights on a sunlit river or standing at ease beside their oars; five-year-olds in communion suits with bow ties, or like baby brides in a cloud of tulle. Three or four guineafowl crept back, and flitted about under the tables. There was a smell of bacon.
    “Come on now, Braden,” Miss Appin jollied, "and you too— what's-your-name—Angus, was it?—I need a couple of willing hands.”
    She ushered us into the little blackened scullery and we