It is flat, featureless, a vast tongue of grass and scattered trees licking at the ocean. It is good country, or so Gavin believes: good for wheat, good for potatoes, good for sheep. When we first came to this continent ten years ago, with its heat and dust, its arid, enigmatic vastness, its scattering of white settlers and natives black as death, naked as air, he knew at once what he was going to do. From the moment he set eyes on this land he wanted it with an intensity that was, I now believe, closer to lust than love. He was determined to take it, by force if there were no other way; by force I would say was his preference: although why I should think such a thing I do not know. Certainly he has never used force with me, only kindness and consideration. From the first he made it easy for me to love him, this English giant who had himself been so strange to me when my father first took me from our home in western Norway to meet him.

My father was master of a barque trading between Britain and Norway. I was fifteen when I first accompanied him; eighteen when for the last time I travelled on his vessel to the sea town in north Yorkshire where I was to be married. It was strange to leave our wooden house at the head of the fjord where the still waters reflected the cliffs that rose vertically into the air for a thousand feet on either side, stranger still to come to this other land where the houses, the people, the very air were so different from everything I had known.

God knows what I would have thought had I realised that this preliminary foray into the world would be no more than the first step of a journey that four years later would bring me, no longer Asta Foldal but Asta Matlock, to a far country on the other side of the earth; a country so very different from the peat-dark waters, the mountains and white painted houses of home that it might have been in another universe. Not that it would have made any difference, whatever I had thought. In my father’s house I did my father’s bidding.

Things are not so different now, after all.

When we arrived in Australia my husband took a job with a surveying party at twenty-three shillings and sixpence a week: to spy out the land, as he put it. He spied to such good effect that within a year we had our own place on the outskirts of the city they called Adelaide, after an English queen. The land was fertile, although hot in summer, with flies and much dust. We grew wheat and ran sheep on the land we called ours but I knew from the first that we would not settle there. The presence of so many people a few miles down the road was a constant pressure in my husband’s head as, indeed, it was in mine. In north Yorkshire, as in Norway, there are few people and no dust or flies to talk of. How I missed that clean northern stillness. I said nothing, however: there was no going back. Besides, I loved my husband. At that time I still believed that love made up for all else.

My husband also had a hunger for the north but not my north, with its stillness and clean cold air: the interior of this new land drew him like a lodestone. I was frightened by its harshness, the sense of alienation that I felt whenever I thought of it. I would be lonely there, as lonely as only a woman can be in a strange land, pursuing a dream that is not, has never been, her own.

I would let no-one see my fear, neither Gavin nor my son Edward who had just turned fourteen and was as eager as his father to set out into the unknown. I would not let myself see it, burying it deep where I could deny its presence.

Ian Matlock saw it, for all my efforts. That man is a devil. Gavin’s cousin, five years younger, with the same yellow hair and skin baked the colour of brick by the fierce southern sun. He joined us at Gavin’s invitation two years after we first came out. I saw at once that he was as hungry for land as my husband, determined to seize whatever he could hold, whether he could put it to good use or not. He was acquisitive to the bone, and not only of land. I had met him only at my wedding; even then, I had felt the weight of his hungry eyes on me.

Like a fool I was relieved when, a year after my own wedding, he married Mary Hunter, daughter of a Whitby shopkeeper. I was even prepared to like him for a while until I realised that nothing, neither marriage nor anything else, would ever satisfy him.

We are as we are.

Here, in this southern land, his rapacious glare was a hundred times heavier than it had been in England.