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them, then drove out of the block and once more headed north.
     

CHAPTER FOUR
    IT was only some hundred kilometres to the next turn-off, which was Mannering Park. The first turnoff from Come Again had been Rudhill, and because there were no branching roads prior to it, none in the distance as far as Gemma could see, she wheeled with confidence into the much smaller but still sealed way when it occurred an hour later. Twenty minutes later again the road lost its tar, grew narrower and branched a second time, but at that precise moment Harriet set up a moo of protest from the back seat, either for sustenance or exercise ... Gemma decided to give her both .. . and by the time Gemma had halted the car she was past the branch and the sign with the two arrows, one to Mannering Park and one to a place called Boothagullagulla.
    When she set off again, Harriet having been duly finger-dunked and duly skipped, Gemma was unknowingly on the way to Boothagullagulla.
    It was a charming track, and she found her spirits rising. There were a few gurgling streams, legacies from the Wet, and a few large puddles of leftover water with pelicans sailing on them. There was also a sense of sea, somehow. Gemma even stopped the car to sniff and to listen. It was ridiculous, she knew that, but there was still that sensation of blue water.
    She drove on.
    Half an hour later... how very large were these properties . . . Gemma knew she was coming to something. She went through a first gate, taking care not to commit that cardinal sin and not shut it carefully behind her, a second gate, a third gate, and was wondering whether one could ever train a calf to perform these little tasks when the homestead surprised her. Delightfully surprised her. It was a typical Australian one-level sprawling building with a colonial encircling verandah like the wide brim round a college hat.
    Gemma loved it at once.
    She loved it even more as she. pulled up. The shallow stairs to the front brim of the hat were wide and inviting and on each rise was a tub of scarlet geranium. There were deep comfortable chairs waiting, and from one of them rose a barely middle-aged man, a man with greying hair and matching, very friendly grey eyes. He threw down the paper he had been reading and at once came down the steps to greet her Before Gemma could do so, he opened the car door, then extended his hand to help her out. He raised his brows at Harriet, but he did not seem at all put out.
    “Hullo, girl,” he said to the calf, then he turned and included Gemma. “Hullo, both girls. Welcome to Boothagullagulla.”
    “Bootha— where?” asked Gemma in dismay.
    “It is rather a mouthful, isn’t it? Aboriginal, of course.”
    “Bootha—”
    “Gullagulla. Boothagullagulla. And, as I’ll show you presently, Miss? Mrs.?—”
    “Miss Glasson.”
    “As I’ll show you presently, Miss Glasson, very apt.”
    “Boothagullagulla?” she queried. “But—but aren’t I at Mannering Park?”
    “Mannering Park belongs to the Mannerings. I’m Christopher Mitchell. Chris.” The pleasant, barely middle-aged man looked expectantly at Gemma, and Gemma told him her first name. He was the kind of man, she knew instinctively, with whom you would want to be on first-name terms at once.
    All the same she added pleadingly: “But where is Mannering Park?”
    “Mannering Park lies over there.” Chris pointed. “A long way over there. We, the Establishment and I, share the same boundary fence and the same track in from The Bitumen. Only, and I think this is where you made your mistake, another twenty miles from the highway there’s a fork, and you forked to here instead of to there. I’ll have to check up on the fingerpost. I haven’t been down there for months. Perhaps it’s overgrown or even blown down. Or even faded out from our rains. Did you hear about our rains?”
    “Yes,” said Gemma.
    “They were unprecedented, but” ... knowledgeably . .. “there are more yet to