Landtakers: The Story of an Epoch

In five years the face of the valley has changed. At rising and setting the sun pricks out of the grey scrub the windows and roofs of distant homesteads. To the north-west, only ten miles away, lies Cheviot, the McFarlanes', and due west, but half as far again, the still-primitive head station at Winbaggery, where Dirk Surface lives. Ten miles beyond is Nick Jardine's place at Narrow Gut, where the hills begin to draw in, and to the south the Bellamy homestead at Black Rock. Eastwards, just visible above the trees, which press them closely on every side, rise the eccentric gables of Colonel Barton-Darvall's mansion, Ningpo. Every inch of river, from the Three Sisters on the western to the Bottle Neck at the eastern end of the valley has been taken up. What remains is heavy scrubland and the stony foothills of the ranges.

A tape of white, dusty, rutted road climbs out of the valley and winds away to Pyke's Crossing. Nine years ago it was only a single pair of wheel-tracks, curving to avoid a stump or patch of bog, skirting the scrub in one place, plunging blindly through it in another. Even where stump, bog and scrub have given way to the settler the road keeps its curves and twists, each a record of some daring or enduring moment in Cabell's early days.