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twenties: men, in my eyes. Marcus was usually silent: a stocky man with flat black hair and a private smile. Ken and Cliff were fair-haired, friendly, and talked a lot. At tea with them all in the kitchen on my first night there, I learned about another of the house’s prohibited zones.
    John Langford, at the head of the table, cleared his throat.
    I don’t know whether Michael’s told you this, Raymond—but you’re not to go near the pickers’ huts, he said. Some of those people are pretty rough. They’re here to work, not to be made friends with.
    He had a soft, precise voice that made everything he said sound official, and he was shorter than his three grown sons; but he appeared big because of his powerful shoulders and upright posture. The sleeves of his clean khaki shirt were rolled above the elbows, and his tanned forearms, planted on the table, were heavily muscled from hard work. But the head was scholarly: large, bald and tanned, with a few strands of darkish hair, oiled and slicked back, a narrow nose and a very thin mouth. He wore sinister rimless spectacles, and had the potential to become frightening.
    Across the table, Ken looked at me and winked, swallowing his glass of hop beer. Big and lean, with his father’s long, narrow nose and with thick, lank hair the color of rancid butter, he sat very straight, and his eyes had an amused gleam. He’d just come back from the war in New Guinea, which he’d volunteered for, while his brothers had stayed on the farm. He worked about the place now in the green Army trousers he’d worn for jungle fighting, and his broad-brimmed AIF Digger hat with the badge removed—getting some wear out of them, he said. He’d been decorated for bravery on the Kokoda Trail, and Mike admired him uncritically; if there was anyone on whom he modeled himself, it was Ken.
    Better do as Dad says, young Ray, Ken told me. And another thing. When you go out in the bush, there’s a funny-looking crit ter you might find wandering about. Whatever you do, keep away from it, because it’s dangerous, and no good to anyone. It’s called a Politician.
    Cliff, smaller and curly-haired, seated next to Ken, gave a snort of laughter. That’s right, son, he said. Steer clear of it. It’ll tell you a whole lot of lies.
    I was puzzled; I’d never heard of a Politician. But then Ken gave me the wink.
    Don’t tease the boy, Cliff. He’ll never go out in the bush, if he listens to you.
    Ingrid Langford’s voice was deep and slow; she spoke seldom, but when she did, all the men listened. Her lips were pursed now, as she surveyed her sons, and she wasn’t smiling; but then I saw a gleam in her eyes that I guessed to be amusement.
    She was a tall, big-boned woman whose straight blond hair was faded, and tinged with gray. Her firm jaw slanted sideways, and her large, deep-set eyes seemed often to be staring at something in the distance. Before her marriage to John Langford, she’d been an Olsen, from Moogara: one of a clan of Norwegian-descended timber-getters famous throughout the island. Many of them were champion axemen: her father and then her brothers had won Australian wood-chopping titles at the Sydney Show for many years running. Ingrid Langford herself would split wood for the kitchen stove like a man, wielding the axe at the wood-heap by the barn with cold precision. She was, up at six each morning to milk a small herd of cows that seemed to be her responsibility, and she kept a large number of fowls that ran free about the yard: the usual mixture of black Orpingtons, white Leg-horns and bantams. She gave them names, and when I’ve remembered her over the years I’ve usually seen her standing in the yard in one of her faded, short-sleeved print dresses, serious and monumental as a Viking matron, scattering wheat to her hens from a battered tin saucepan. While Mike and I watched, she would frown judiciously, distributing the wheat with long sweeps of her serious white arms, the