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is a vast impoverished terra incognita out there.’
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    Stanton rode off into the night, found a dry sandy spot, wrapped himself in his blanket and went to sleep in the bushes. Joe’s staple of wool burned warm under his vest and tickled his armpit with its presence.
    In the middle of the night he woke, the dome of the heavens sparkling overhead, his nose very cold. Every star cluster was a shred of shining fleece hanging in the sky.
    Later he heard a horseman approaching, and raised himself on an elbow. Two horses went past, one a saddle horse and the other a packhorse outlined against the stars. The rider sat forward in the saddle, huddled in a greatcoat. It was the bearing of a military campaigner. Nobody came after.
    Just before dawn Stanton woke with dried gum leaves in his hair, crusted sleep in his eyes. There was dirt on the palms of his hands, ants in the folds of his shirt, a scorpion in his boots. When he knelt to pray he kept his eyes open wishing for the rider, his night’s passing companion, to step forward from between the trees. That would happen soon enough, he decided: he was armed for that rider now by a weapon of wool.
    It was his very man, he was certain, and only lacked a name, that greatcoated apparition. For there was no reason for an officer to be riding south into unoccupied lands except the suspicion that Kale and his cohorts awaited him. They were not perished, Stanton reasoned, or walking to China — as the ignorant contended — but through feasible possession of maps had possibly doubled back this side of the biggest river, and found a way on, in the direction of wastelands, swamps, rocky ridges, and reedy coarse uplands known since the beginnings of settlement as a scramble of frigid dessications not worth the trouble of exploring.
    â€˜Not worth the trouble of exploring’ — now there was a phrase that hooked in Stanton’s brain.
    These were, he remembered well, the words of a pestilential man who came to the colony some fourteen years ago, under letters of credence from Sir Joseph Banks. He was Stanton’s fellow Yorkshireman George Marsh, a former blacksmith and weaver, who, by heeding herbal cures for sick horses, had come to studies of botany in a large way, in his home village by the moors, with a strong enough opinion of his self worth to gain a patron’s appointment to Botany Bay.
    George Marsh’s influence had been strong in this particular: holding that while New South Wales rivalled North America in size, the only part worth cultivating was the circle of land out from Parramatta. The rest was only interesting to science, damnably rough and dry, realm of the hardscrabble black man and his bride. For many years until now it was truly sufficient land as it was, and Stanton himself had the pick of it (though he wanted more). Of the broken, tumbled sandstone country Marsh trekked, ringed to the north, ranged to the west, banked obscurely to the south, the best he claimed was that it was ‘like walking on rooftops’. Botany Bay accordingly was a pastoral prison, where sheep might safely graze inside those wider crumbled prison walls of New South Wales.
    George Marsh had held the government post of naturalist, bird fancier, and explorer manqué for around five years before decamping back to England after completing his botanical collections and vain explorations. He had irritated Stanton extremely with his manners.
    One day Marsh’s cockatoo attacked Stanton’s whippet, when all lived in disharmony at Parramatta, and the fellow had the arrogance to curse Stanton for keeping such an imbecile pencil-thin-headed dog. ‘If Marsh was a gentleman he would have been shot in a duel,’ Stanton liked to say. Although married, Marsh had amours: it was said he left a child in the colony born to a convict Jezebel. Dolly was never able to find which one.
    Then Kale, to crown Stanton’s annoyance, finagled assignment as