“He came into prominence through his proficiency in sport, which he had acquired, as it was subsequently learnt, by contesting with natives and half-castes, first in the Marist Mission at Anchor Bay, where he was reared, then in the Aboriginal Prison Settlement on Buccaneer Island, where he had served a sentence of three years.”

“"I've seen hundreds of half-castes just as fine of face and form as you. And I reckon they'd've all been as smart in the 'ead if they hadn't been treated like they was half-bred dingoes. Look--down Anchor Bay there was a full-blooded Binghi workin' as a missionary. He was a parson, a full-blown one with a B.A. and all. And there's another in Bulimba is a lawyer's clerk. Yes--and there's a half-caste boy what someone took out of a camp in Cooksland, got the Rhodes Scholarship, went to Oxford, came back a full-blown engineer."”

“That part of the coast called Yurracumbugna by the Aborigines, which lay about one hundred and fifty miles to the east of Port Zodiac, was first visited by a whiteman in the year 1885. By that time the inhabitants, having only heard tell of the invaders from survivors of the neighbouring tribe of Karrapillua, were come to regard the whitemen rather as creatures of legend, or perhaps more rightly as monsters of legend, since they had heard enough about them to fear them greatly.”

“Ned Krater wished to establish a base for his trepang-fishing on a certain little island belonging to the Yurracumbungas and called by them Arrikitarriyah, or the Gift of the Sea. This island lay within rifle-shot of the mainland and was well watered and wooded and stocked with game and sheltered from the roll of the ocean by the Tikkalalla Islands, which lay in an extensive group along the northern horizon. The tribe used the island at certain times as a Corroboree Ground.”

“When he met Krater again he learnt that he was on the eve of returning to his camp on the island of Gift of the Sea, or, as he had renamed it, Flying Fox.”

“If Mark and his companions had had the energy to execute the plans with which they went to Flying Fox they might have turned the fair place into a township and themselves into bumbles. They planned to build houses, stores, curing-sheds for the trepang they intended to bring in by the shipload, and a jetty, and a tramway, and a reservoir, and--this was inventive Mark's idea--a dam across the mouth of the saltwater creek and a plant connected with it for drawing electric power from the tide. they did nothing much more in the way of building than to erect a number of crazy humpies of such materials as bark and kerosene-cans, into which they retired with lubras to keep house for them. [...] The humpies were set up on the isthmus between the creek and the sea, among a grove of fine old mango trees and skinny coconuts that Krater had planted. In these trees lived a multitude of the great black bats called flying foxes, the coming of which when the mangoes began to bear was responsible for the renaming of the island. Back some little distance from the settlement lay a large billabong, screened by a jungle of pandanuses and other palms and giant paper-barks and native fig trees. The billabong provided much of the food of the inhabitants. Yams and lily-roots grew there in abundance; and it was the haunt of duck and geese, and a drinking-place of the marsupials with which, thanks to Krater's good sense in helping the natives to preserve the game, the island abounded”

“A storm of the type called Cockeye Bob in Capricornia, which had been threatening from sundown, burst over Flying Fox in the middle of the night, beginning with a lusty gust of wind that ravaged the sea and sent sand hissing through the trees. Then lightning, like a mighty skinny quivering hand, shot out of the black heavens and struck the earth--CRASH! The wind became a hurricane. Grass was crushed flat. Leaves were stripped from trees in sheets. Palms bent like wire. Flash fell upon flash and crash upon crash, blinding, deafening. Out of nothing the settlement leapt and lived for a second at a time like a vision of madness. Misshapen houses reeled among vegetation that lay on the ground with great leaves waving like frantically supplicating hands.”

“When Mark and the other men left Flying Fox, Ned Krater stayed behind, congratulating himself on having got rid of a set of pests. The pests had been gone about a month when, taking advantage of the mild weather following the Equinox and the end of the Wet, he set out in his lugger, accompanied by six natives, to fish for trepang among coral reefs that lay some twenty miles to the east of the Tikkalalla Islands. One still starry night, while the Maniya, with captain and crew sound asleep aboard, lay at anchor among the reefs, a cockeye bob, as violent as unseasonable, roared down from the north. Before her crew could bear a hand she snapped her cable. In a moment she was engulfed in mighty seas and whirled away like an empty box and smashed to pieces on a projecting reef.”

“Ned Krater had been dead about nine months when mark and Chook returned to Flying Fox. They had heard that Krater was dead from a friend of his who had gone out to visit him some time before. They found the island deserted. The natives had gone to the mainland.”

“At length he and Chook departed. Soon afterwards they secured a contract for transporting cypress pine in the lugger from a mill that had been set up on an island near Port Zodiac. Another year passed. Then Mark and Chook returned to Flying Fox with the intent to take up trepang-fishing in earnest.”

“The years passed, as the years will, even in places like Flying Fox, where their passage may go long unnoticed. Mark passed from youth into manhood, while spending half his time at Flying Fox and the rest in Port Zodiac and other easy-going places, and so without acquiring much more understanding of moral values than he had never had, which was perhaps no less than that possessed by most folks. His son spent all his time roaming with the Yurracumbungas, growing up half in the style of the Tribe and half in that of their dogs.”

“Flying Fox was washed by a vigorous tide, which was capable of rising during spring period to a height of some twenty-five feet. Hence the mouth of the salt-water creek was usually surging like a mill-race, but wasting its power--or so it had been--on transporting such things as jellyfish, leaves, and crocodiles. This waste had been the cause of great irritation to Mark [...] he had dammed the mouth of the creek and cut a culvert through the isthmus, causing the water to flow through a quaint-looking machine that sucked out kinetic energy and turned it into electric power.”

“Such was the advanced state of Civilisation in Port Zodiac when the brothers Oscar and Mark Shillingsworth arrived there. They were clerks, quite simple men, who came to join the Capricornian Government Service from a city of the South that, had it been the custom to name Australian cities after those who suffered the hardships of pioneering instead of after the merely grand who ruled the land from afar, might have been called Batman, as for convenience it will be called here.”

“Tim O'Cannon was one of the people. He was then ganger of the district, for the Caroline length had been linked to that of Black Adder by the economical nincompoops as a result of the tragic reduction of the local gang.”

“The children were regarded by the law has half-caste. Tim had long since ceased to argue that they were white quadroons and had concentrated on a far more practical way of whitewashing them than with his tongue, namely by enriching them, making them owners of a huge combination cattle-station and cotton and peanut plantation, a hive of industry and centre of envy that he hoped to have built up at Black Adder Creek before he should die.”

“He trundled on, up grade and down, through dripping cuttings where golden catch-fly orchids grew in mossy nooks and tadpoles wriggled in sparkling pools, over culverts where smooth brown water sped over beds of grass, past towering walls of weeds that stretched out leaves and flowers to tickle his face and shower him with dew and touch him--as though he were a flower to be fertilised!--with blobs of pollen. He trundled on, up grade and down, keeping one eye on the permanent way, the other on the telegraph--the Transcontinental Telegraph, strand of copper linking Australia with the world, shimmering plaything of the sun and wind, live-thing humming as if to occupy itself in loneliness with repeating gossip of the hives it linked--keeping one eye on that and the other on the per-way, looking for defects but not so sedulously as to miss any passing fancy.”

“Tim rushed into the house, snatched the baby from the mother's arms, to have it turn up its little toes in his own. He was amazed. Death at Black Adder was something that affected only goats and horses and bullocks and niggers.”

“The O'Cannon Garrison fell weakly before the advance of one Julius Derkouz, a German prospector whom Tim had hounded during the war. He said there was gold to be found at Black Adder, and proved there was, though without digging holes in the earth.”

“Black Adder Creek, as soon as abandoned, became a verdant paradise. Grass grew there luxuriantly as nowhere else; or so it seemed to Mrs McLash and Frank and old Joe Steen, who stocked it with one hundred and fifty head of cattle.”

“Although that northern part of the Continent of Australia which is called Capricornia was pioneered long after the southern parts, its unofficial early history was even more bloody than that of the others. One probable reason for this is that the pioneers had already had experience in subduing Aborigines in the South and hence were impatient of wasting time with people who they knew were determined to take no immigrants. Another reason is that the Aborigines were there more numerous than in the South and more hostile because used to resisting casual invaders from the near East Indies. A third reason is that the pioneers had difficulty in establishing permanent settlements, having several times to abandon ground they had won with slaughter and go slaughtering again to secure more. This abandoning of ground was due not to the hostility of the natives, hostile enough though they were, but to the violence of the climate, which was not to be withstood even by men so well equipped with lethal weapons and belief in the decency of their purpose as Anglo-Saxon builders of the Empire.”

“They had learnt their business in the stony-hearted cities of the South, into which it was imported from those slave-camps the cities of Europe. But they could not wield their whips to terrify in this true Australia Felix, Capricornia. No--because the sack meant here not misery and hunger, but freedom to go adventuring in the wilderness or on the Silver Sea.”

“Hopeful as the Shillingsworth brothers were of improving their lot by coming so far from home, they had no idea of what opportunities were offering in this new sphere till they landed. In the ignorance of conditions of life in Capricornia, they came clad in serge suits and bowlers, which made them feel not only uncomfortable in a land but ten degrees from the Equator, but conspicuous and rather ridiculous among the crowd clad in khaki and white linen [.]”

“At times he loved it best in Wet Season--when the creeks were running and the swamps were full--when the multi-coloured schisty rocks split golden waterfalls--when the scarlet plains were under water, green with wild rice, swarming with Siberian snipe--when the billabongs were brimming and the water-lilies blooming and the nuttaguls shouting loudest--when bull-grass towered ten feet high, clothing hills and choking gullies--when ever tree was flowering and most were draped with crimson mistletoe and droning with humming birds and native bees--when cattle wandered a land of plenty, fat and sleek, till the buffalo-flies and marsh-flies came and drove them mad, so that they ran and ran to leanness, often to their death--when mosquitoes and a hundred other breeds of maddening insects were there to test a man's endurance--when from hour to hour luke-warm showers drenched the steaming earth, till one was sodden to the bone and mildewed to the marrow and moved to pray, as Oscar always was when he had had enough of it, for that which formerly he had cursed--the Dry! the good old Dry--when the grasses yellowed, browned, dried to tinder, burst into spontaneous flame--when harsh winds rioted with shocking dust and the billabongs became mere muddy holes where cattle pawed for water--when gaunt drought loafed about a desert and exhausted cattle staggered searching dust for food and drink, till they fell down and died and became neat piles of bones for the wind to whistle through and the gaunt-ribbed dingo to mourn--then one prayed for the Wet again, or if one's heart was small, packed up and left this Capricornia that fools down South called the Land of Opportunity, and went back and said that nothing was done by halves up there except the works of puny man.”

“The people of Capricornia took little interest in the European War at first. Not only were they about as far removed from the seat of it as it was possible for anyone to be and almost utterly ignorant of the cause of it and virtually unconcerned in the issues, but they were out of range of the propaganda of those who would have had them become as frenzied as most of the rest of the world was at that time.”

“It was officially stated that a railway would be built to link Port Zodiac with the Southern city of Churchton, or, to quote from a rhetorical article written on the subject in the leading paper of that city, To bridge with steel the terrene gulf, twenty-five parallels of latitude wide, that divides the Austral Ocean from the Silver Sea.”

“When he came out with it one day down in the railway yards before the station-master and the engineer of the mail-train that ran once a fortnight between Port Zodiac and Copper Creek, he was laughed at and told he was a queer fellow for One of the Heads.”

“Scanning the map, he observed that the railway ran through what appeared to be a chain of hills. This was the backbone of the Willnot Plateau. He wondered why it had not been built along the Lonely River, knowing enough about the country to suppose that little difference would be made to the cattle-industry, the country's only staple one, if the road ran anywhere to east or west within fifty miles of the position chosen. What he did not know was that the Plateau was about the only part of Capricornia of much extent within three hundred miles of the sea that was not completely flooded in Wet Season. The Plateau extended from Port Zodiac to the Leichhardt Tableland, a distance of three hundred miles, and was, on average, some thirty-five miles wide. He had descended from it when he rode away from the settlement at Tatlock's.”

“When he again asked Oscar if he might apply for a further three months' leave, promising, in return for permission, to scour the Lonely River country for strayed stock and to draw up plans for a part-hydraulic-part-steam electric power-plant before going to the Melisande, Oscar agreed, not readily as he had it in his heart to do, but with a show of reluctance to save his face for having formerly disagreed.”

“Having in the last few hours lost all desire to go home, he was reconsidering the idea of riding to the Melisande, this time was following a route that appeared on the map to be much shorter than the railway, that is, the course of the Lonely River, of which the Melisande River was a tributary. According to the map the Melisande joined the Lonely at a point about fifty miles above Tatlock's, and the railway bridge was no more than thirty miles above this point. Thus he was now but eighty miles from the construction-camp, a three or four days' quiet ride, whereas at Purruwunni Creek, which now lay forty miles to east of him, he had been one hundred and sixteen miles from it.”

“The grassy space was actually the river's flood-bed. The western flood-bank was the distant bush-grown ridge. The vegetation hedging the river's normal bed comprised such semi-aquatic growths as banyan, swamp-mahogany, leichhardt, paper-bark, bamboo, and pandanus palms. A cataclysm could not uproot such growths. But for all their sturdiness they never could have lived a week in earth so dry as that in which the common gum-trees grew in the Dry Season. The grassy spaces flanking the river were strips of no-tree's land, being too wet in the Wet for eucalypts, too dry in the Dry for aquatics. The fact that they were treeless was significant. Norman considered it merely fortunate, since it made travelling easy. The fact that he saw no kangaroos in the vicinity, whereas he had seen hundreds on the banks of watercourses on The Plateau, was also significant and also lost on him. There was no sign even of the almost amphibious buffalo.”

“Blossom roused him because a special train was coming down that day and he must run the length before it on his section. It was a train bringing material for the extension of the road from Copper Creek to the Melisande, which was under construction.”

“Now that the railway had been extended to the Melisande, a distance of fifty miles beyond Copper Creek, there was a mail-train every week.”

“It was beginning to look as though the land itself was hostile to anyone but the carefree nomads to whom the Lord gave it, when a man named Brittins Willnot found the site of what came to be the town of Port Zodiac, the only settlement of any size that ever stood permanently on all the long coastline, indeed the only one worthy of the name of town ever to be set up in the whole vast territory. Capricornia covered an area of about half a million square miles This site of Willnot's was elevated, and situated in a pleasantly unfertile region where the annual rainfall was only about forty inches. Moreover, it had the advantage of standing as a promontory on a fair-sized navigable harbour and of being directly connected with what came to be called Willnot Plateau, a wide strip of highland that ran right back to the Interior. When gold was found on the Plateau, Port Zodiac became a town.”

“The site of Port Zodiac was a Corroboree Ground of the Larrapuna Tribe, who left the bones of most of their number to manure it. They called it Mailunga, or the Birth Place, believing it to be a sort of Garden of Eden and apparently revering it. The war they waged to retain possession of this barren spot was perhaps the most desperate that whitemen ever had to engage in with an Australian tribe. Although utterly routed in the first encounter, they continued to harass the pioneers for months, exercising cunning that increased with their desperation.”

“So slow was the settling of the Port Zodiac district that in the year 1904 the non-native population numbered no more than three thousand, a good half of which was Asiati, and the settled area measured but three or four square miles. But the civilising was so complete that the survivors of the original inhabitants numbered seven, of whom two were dying of consumption in the Native Compound, three confined in the Native Lazaret with leprosy, the rest, a man and a woman, living in a gunyah at the remote end of Devilfish Bay, subsisting on what food they could get from the bush and the sea and what they could buy with the pennies the man earned by doing odd jobs and the woman by prostitution.”

“The only permanent water on the Station, except that in two or three billabongs whose contents at the height of Dry Season could be dipped out with a bucket, was the Caroline River, which became towards the end of the Dry a mere chain of muddy holes whose fertile precincts had long been denuded of grazing. Hence the stock must constantly be driven back and forth from southern grazing to northern water in Dry Season, which was more than their strength was equal to. And not infrequently if the blasting Trade blew overlong or the Wet was late in setting in, even the pools of the river dried. Then the stock, the best of it that is, had to be watered meagrely at the homestead from the stock-tanks. On account of the floods of the Wet it would have cost an enormous sum of money to dam the river; and even if a dam were built, it would still be necessary to water-shift the stock.”

“Steggles had often hinted that he would like to visit Red Ochre; but as his company had previously been useful only in town to Marigold, his hints had been practically ignored. To her Red Ochre had been merely uncomfortable when pleasant to see. She had long since grown tired of doing the things that guests like Steggles would want to do. The place had become simply her means of support, the means by which she had been able to act as the beef-baron's daughter; and because she had less interest in the means than in the acting and practically none in station-life, she had spent much of her time in town.”

“A few minutes after noon that day, Norman was walking up the hill, returning to the house from the native camp to which he had gone to bully life into one of his stockboys who were supposed to be dying from having been wished mortal evil by an enemy. He had covered about a third of the distance when he heard a subdued commotion in the camp, and glancing back saw the natives, among them the dying man, plunging in a body into the jungle. It was an unusual sight to see at Red Ochre, though not an unfamiliar one to Norman, who had seen the like of it many times in his travels. It was the flight of timid or cowed people at the approach of an unpleasant stranger.”

“The gallows at Red Turtle Bay had been used but once, when the hangman was imported.”

“He was Timothy O'Cannon, ganger of the railway, a soldier born, his birth-place being the garrison at Southern Cross Island in Cooksland, where his father had been a sergeant-major and he himself had served some little time.”

“Two low fellows took him ashore at Southern Cross Island and at his expense showed him more than all the first-class passengers together would have seen in a stay there of a month.”

“The first white settlement in Capricornia was that of Treachery Bay--afterwards called New Westminster--which was set up on what was perhaps the most fertile and pleasant part of the coast and on the bones of half the Karrapillua Tribe. It was the resentment of the Karrapilluas to what probably seemed to them an inexcusable intrusion that was responsible for the choice of the name Treachery Bay.”

“When New Westminster was for the third time swept into the Silver Sea by the floods of the generous Wet Season, the pioneers abandoned the site to the crocodiles and jabiroos and devil-crabs[.]”

“Tumbukka Island was about twenty miles to the east of the mouth of the Jinjin, one of a group of low sandy isles that lay so close to the mainland that some of them, including Tumbukka itself, were part of it at low water in spring-tide times. Such a tide was running when Ket came up the beach from the mouth of Yalgah Creek on his way home from his encounter with Norman; but it was running in. There was no sign of life on the island, nor indeed of human habitation. The houses were built on the ocean side and the lugger kept there in a bay. The fact that it was inhabited was concealed deliberately.”

“Thus Civilization was at last planted permanently. However, it spread slowly, and did not take permanent root elsewhere than on the safe ground of the Plateau. Even the low-lying mangrove-cluttered further shores of Zodiac Harbour remained untrodden by the feet of whitemen for many a year. It was teh same with the whole maritime region, most of which, although surveyed from the sea and in parts penetrated and occupied for a while by explorers, remained in much the same state as always. Some of the inhabitants were perhaps amazed and demoralised, but still went on living in the way of old, quite unaware of the presumably enormous fact that they had become subjects of the British Crown.”