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Marsh’s servant for Marsh’s great (but unsung) expedition to the south and south-west. They went with a native companion and guide, named Mun’mow. It was under a governor’s mandate to allow Marsh to search for government cattle gone wild and bred up in the vicinity of Aleppo Mere, one of a bundle of names Marsh gave to untamed places that made them impossible for anyone to find later, and if they were found again, as these particular cattle swamps were (Stanton coveting them for his own grazing) the names were changed back to something more sensible.
    But Marsh went far beyond those swamps, for certain knowledge — he was away two months. He came back fairly subdued, you might say, tired and starving. But smug. Vainglorious. His black-fellow, Mun’mow, he took along with him when he returned to England, with the hope of making a gentleman’s valet of his attentiveness.
    If Marsh had ever the decency to pass any discoveries around instead of holding them to his private self when he returned to England, he might have made profits. Stanton might have been his friend. If the heroics of settlement were ever to be written, Marsh’s name might stand tall among them. Yet the most lasting consequence of Marsh’s New South Wales life was the grinding suspicion that he’d gone many more hundreds of miles farther inland than claimed, and that Kale kept his secrets. So if there were maps, Kale knew about them, but of maps Kale had never spoken: a league of whips hadn’t unscrolled maps out of him. Indeed about the one action Stanton liked of Marsh’s was his declaration, over some matter of dispute, that Kale was an incalculable rogue, and had taken liberties disobeying decisions Marsh took on their meanderings, and had to be sent home.

    When Stanton completed his ride to Laban Vale after his night in the bush, stumbling into his house stiff-jointed, dazed, but more than illuminated, it was still early frosty dawn. Dolly and their daughter, Ivy, and Titus their boy, and their convict servants, numbering five and twenty including bond stockmen and convict shepherds locked in the barrack rooms’ sheds, were still asleep. Stanton bundled in beside Dolly, worked his arms around her, shivering from what he knew, from what the staple of wool would lead him to, if he trusted it, in its close readable wriggles. Let wool be his maps and damnation to maps on paper.
    Dolly was aware he’d been gone all night, as he pressed closer for a warm touch of her. She trusted his absences, for when he slept in the bush, making his busy way through the wide country, it was to be getting on with his preaching and magistrating, his disputing over land and livestock. Bold enterprise made the two of them stronger.
    There were plenty of reasons for being fearful, yet Stanton was never too afraid to lie down and nuzzle the stones. Let there be grunts, scratches, howls and shrieks alarming others. Night in this country was God’s invitation to meet the Devil. Let escaped convict malcontents know that every shadowed log or lump of boulder might be their minister. Let their nights in the bush drive them mad with thinking of him. Likewise the native populations, till they found God.

UGLY TOM RANKINE WAS NO stranger to the game of riding out from Parramatta past the sleeping farms with their spike-collared guard dogs and man traps set for miscreants. But this was only Rankine’s second time in full danger, counting the ride he made with Kale, Moreno, and the sheep, after the freeing of Kale.
    There was a feeling of breaking free of oppression past Stanton’s Laban Vale into the starry bigness of the south. There Rankine found he could breathe better, his heart calmer in his chest.
    He rode with his packhorse on a short lead, setting a good pace. Saddlebags bulged with salt, sugar, tea, flour, small sacks of corrosive sublimate, sulphur, and bluestone — and strapped across that load were