His eyes probed for the body beneath my clothes, pricing it by the quality of skin and flesh and hair.

Availability was irrelevant. It was not physical possession that interested him. He summed me up, knew and understood me, had me pinned like a specimen to a board. There were no secrets from those pale eyes. Being stripped naked would have felt less shameful.

I was helpless, of course. He had done nothing. But I knew and he knew that I knew. That was the worst thing of all, the sense of violation compounded by helplessness.

A year after Edward’s birth Mary had a daughter. They named her Alison after Ian’s mother. By the time our two families moved north in 1846 she was twelve years old. In those years before the move, we had both had other children, I two, Mary one, but none had lived. No more of that.

On the day of our departure Ian sought me out, as I had known he would.

‘An adventure,’ he said, pale eyes smiling at me. ‘Nothing to be afraid of.’

‘Then it is fortunate that I am not afraid, is it not so?’

He knew the truth, of course, and made sure that I saw he knew, but said nothing. Just as he never mentioned how I had never learnt to speak his language as casually as my own, yet with him I was always conscious of it as I was with no-one else.

I have Gavin, I thought in self-defence. And Edward. But Edward, my joy and consolation, was too young to understand and Gavin, my protector and my husband, saw nothing.

We headed north up the eastern shore of the St Vincent Gulf. We passed many drays bringing ore south to Adelaide from the recently opened copper mine they called the Burra Burra. Each dray was drawn by a team of bullocks and guided by two drovers. The noise of their whips and voices filled the hot air as did the dust churned up by their passing. The sounds passed but the dust remained; a chalky film that covered our skins, irritated our eyes, filled our lungs. At times the sun itself was obscured, an orange disc peering through grey mist. Gavin was exasperated by the unexpected presence of so many men. He craved solitude as much as space and as soon as we reached the head of the gulf we turned westwards across the range and so came into the land that we were to claim as our own.

Our company consisted of the two families, a forty-year-old farm supervisor named Hector Gallagher and his son Blake; and three shepherds, one black, two white. We brought cattle, sheep and horses and the guns and implements we would need to establish ourselves and survive in the wilderness.

There were no creeks, no surface water, but Gavin said nothing about turning back.

‘Look at the grazing,’ he said. ‘Hundreds of miles of it. There must be water underneath the soil. Or a good rainfall.’ And gazed speculatively at the cloud-free sky.

From time to time we saw parties of blacks, as remote and mysterious as the land through which we travelled. We made ready our guns but they did not trouble us, not then. It occurred to none of us that we were intruders in a land they considered their own, nor would it have made any difference had it done so. We were here to take the land and take it we would.

We settled at this place, a point rather more than halfway down the peninsula and close to its eastern shore, in a fold of land that we hoped would protect us from the worst of the hot north wind.