The plantings were the first thing you noticed in Canberra—a carefully chosen mixture of native and exotic, deciduous and evergreen, arranged conceptually in parks, around buildings and in public places: new trees that so far gave slender promise of what was intended. Plan and potentiality were everything. Manured and well-watered with taxpayers' money and the energies of many, the city was a precocious, anxious, shallow-rooted ideal. Like a spaceship that had landed in a particular corner of earth and failed to lift off again, it was making the first mutant utterances of a new language. Its means were vernacular: three-bedroom brick house, clothesline and barbecue in the backyard, ordinary shops, sprawling car-yards, young families, transients. Blink and the national capital was any old country town, except that no country town would have gone in for such ordered frenzy of tree-planting.

When advice came through supporting a land claim, Cleve got in his car and drove to Canberra.

He drove from the business centre across the bridge to the parliamentary triangle, parked and walked to the national art gallery which was filled with a jumble of art from all over the place. It was what visitors wanted to see. Then he walked to the immense glass palace that was the High Court and marvelled how long that grand institution had taken to think about justice for Aboriginal Australia. [...]

Cleve walked through the rose garden to the Tent Embassy that still stood in protest across the road from the old parliament house—a tent, a fire to cook a meal on, a rusty drum for rubbish, as in any outback town, and the Aboriginal flag flying from the flagpole, red, black and yellow against the grey Canberra sky. The Tent Embassy stood where it had gone up in the early defiant days of the Land Rights movement, facing off the grand entranceway that swept into the white wedding-cake building, as a mocking envoy for all those who refused to disappear.

On the far side was a shallow basin, a saucer, a great flat dish of caked pink mud dotted with bluebush and saltbush that stretched for miles into the distance. It was bounded by a shimmer of white, broken into bands, like a mirage.

Elspeth pointed. 'See those hills in the distance,' she said. 'We call them the Walls of China. They are the finest sand.'

'What about in front?' asked Cleve.

No one knows for sure. It's called Lake Moorna.' There was no water in sight, only the dry glitter of the sunken plain. 

'Does it ever fill with water?'

'It's below sea level. Water sometimes lies on the surface after heavy rain. They say it's been dry since the last Ice Age, 15,000 years ago. We can drive across it if you like. It's not salt.'

A truck cut across the middle of the depressed plain to reach the wall of sandhills on the far side. [...] Then, reaching the base of the sandhills, she and Cleve got out and walked. 

The white surface had been eroded where the wind sliced the hills open into gullies. Within the gullies were further, deeper gullies and crags. Beneath the surface the sand shaded in layers from pale buttery cream to darkening orange and red. A few bushes grew in the mounds of loose sand. Mostly the surface was hard crust. If they had ever been greater, the hills, reduced by time, were now neither high nor steep. On each side they extended for miles in an eroded body and where the erosion had formed small cliffs, the strata of past terrains became visible in rifts of white clay and red ochre that cast up fragments of bone and shell.

[...] 'Why is it called the Walls of China?' Cleve asked her.

'That's what it looks like from a distance. It's a bit of a local tourist attraction if you know how to find it—miles off the beaten track.'

The hints at Lake Moorna were littered over the surface too. Middens of shells, one hundred miles from the nearest river, five hundred miles from the sea, petrified firewood, teeth and vertebrae of extinct megafaunal wombat and emu and kangaroo.

With Elspeth's permission, Kincaid and Vogel made tests and took samples, preparing to corroborate a theory back in the lab. Before the last Ice Age that great prehistoric lake had contained fresh water for possibly ten, twenty or thirty thousand years. Its shores, fringed with reeds, had been rich in mussels and shellfish, its surrounds lushly pastured and forested; its hills may even at times have been capped with snow. Here, in what was now a flat, parched, barren landscape, people could have lived a pleasant lakeside existence abundant in fish, flesh and fowl.

Then, towards the end of their dig, the discovery was made that Kincaid and Vogel scarcely dared hope for. They did not attempt to remove anything at first. Kincaid insisted that they should record as many details as possible while leaving excavation for a later, better prepared expedition. They were curious and impatient, however, and eventually conceded, each weighing the question with the other, that some small samples could be removed temporarily for laboratory examination. It was thus from one or two carefully isolated bones of a skeletal body left in the sand that she was found. A young woman, cremated, her burnt bones marked with red ochre for subsequent burial. And if there were rites of burial, there was the evidence of human consciousness creating meaning beyond itself: a story of dying as the completion of a process that began with birth and continued in an afterlife for the dead or the bereaved, in this world or some other. That was the message of the creature they named Moorna Woman after the lake where she had lain for thousands of years.

'[...] The ripples are still going round the world about these finds at Lake Moorna. They make us the earliest recorded site of human civilisation.'

Alex squinted. His long nose hung down sniffing. 'Is "civilisation" the right word, Professor?'

'The ochring of the skin. The cremation procedures. It makes us the first known place where death had meaning. [...]'

During the elaborate dig another figure had been found nearby, a younger partner named Moorna Man. His body had been coated in red ochre before he was laid in the ground, uncredited, a stretched-out corpse. It was another ritualised burial.

It was hot and muggy in the jail. You could almost feel the yachts out on the blue water, the bodies cavorting in the waves at the beach, the end-of-year parties all around the city, while inside Long Bay men wasted themselves in darkness.

You were out of bed at six a.m., ten seconds after the wake-up alarm sounded, seven days a week. You stood by your bed while the morning officer came past with 'Good morning, Daniel.' On the order 'March' you went to your locker with your stuff, put your night things away and changed into your gym clothes. On the order 'March' you went outside and did your exercises. On the order 'March' you fetched your night can, emptied it, rinsed it and went for a shit. Breakfast followed, at seven a.m. And so by the clock and the rules, every day exactly the same. There was an understanding at the Home that you better clean yourself up by the time you turned seventeen, otherwise you went straight on to adult prison without ever having another chance to try your luck.

The Home was on a hill top. The road wound up from the roadside gate through paddocks where sheep grazed, through orchards and vegetable gardens, to a red brick archway with high gates of iron. Beyond that main entrance stood the historic main building, its brick glowing in the sunlight, as if it were the Kingdom of Heaven. That was the last picture Danny painted there, the snaking black road, the arched gate, the red building, and the Cross of Jesus hanging from the sky above. He asked the teacher to write the name on the picture for him: The Prison on the Hill.

There were parts of the straggling, divided town where he could walk without anyone worrying and parts where he was not welcome. He knew the minute he set foot over the line. Yet he could see through all those things. It was only the address of the house where Rhonda lived that had given him a destination. Outside of it the town with its strange, pompous grandeur was a meaningless place for him. He walked past the jail with its crenellated turret, and the honey-gold church with a clover-leaf cross perched on top. He remembered that squat church from childhood, the stained-glass lights moving over the white walls and shiny floor and over the heads of the people, magic coloured spangles, making you feel safe under the protection of the holy shepherd. He remembered the feeling of that world. It was a reminder of the cup he must drink as he stood on the dry verge outside the church.

He headed back along the river with a deep tow of concentration. He found his father asleep on a blanket down by the river and sat down beside him, then after resting his legs for a while, he turned right round and walked back to Wentworth again.