1 AMELIA

1 Amelia

‘It’s the freedom, isn’t it?’ Amelia said, raising her voice over the throb of the Cherokee’s engine.

It took a long minute for Gavin to pull his attention from the windscreen, where the coast of the Fleurieu Peninsula unfurled below them. The blue-green shade of the ocean was edged on one side with a narrow border of white sand, then spread to the horizon in ever-deepening shades of azure and cobalt. Amelia had kept an eye on the altimeter as Gavin brought them in low over the great rounded dome of The Bluff, the headland beyond Victor Harbor. With more than seventeen hundred beaches in South Australia, many of them wild, rugged and inaccessible, only a fraction had names. But Amelia had carefully plotted their route for Kings Beach, knowing the inaccessibility of the frigid waters in the bay would keep most water-level spectators out, giving them a better chance of sighting a whale, although October was late in the season. Not that the mammals looked at all impressive from the air, despite being twice the length of the Piper Cherokee. Even if she piloted the plane right down to the legal limit of three hundred metres, unless the whales were fin-slapping or breaching, there was nothing to give any sense of scale. They looked like grey logs, wallowing gently with the tide.

‘There’s a cow,’ Gavin exulted.

Amelia chuckled, rethinking her cynicism. To her, the whales didn’t look much unless they were performing, but this was the first time Gavin had been out whale sighting, and despite his years, he was taking to it with all the enthusiasm of a kid at the zoo.

‘Guess it’s not the kind of cow you’re used to spotting from up here, though, right?’

Gavin twisted in the small seat to look at her, although he only allowed his faded blue eyes to rest for a moment before turning back to the panorama. The plane banked right, and Amelia slid her gaze to the altimeter again. As Gavin was already flying unlicensed, there wasn’t much point trusting in him to maintain the legal altitude.

Like everyone else, Gavin assumed that because she hailed from cattle country up the far north of South Australia and had flown into town in her twenty-year-old Jabiru, Amelia was a stock musterer. But the Fraser Family Station had primarily used helicopters, so she’d been ground-based, serving her apprenticeship in the flies and the dirt: mustering by horseback, doing bore runs, climbing the tall metal windmills to make running repairs and re-wiring the fences that doe-eyed feral camels nonchalantly walked right through like they were made of cobwebs. Since she was fifteen, Amelia had been determined to learn every facet of the beef business so that she could one day take over the station. And, although that meant spending sunup to sundown in the saddle—and even longer days when she was rostered as camp cook, rising an hour earlier than the riders and unable to crawl back into her grit-filled swag until the last dish had been cleaned—she had never begrudged her seventeen-year initiation. Never complained about going without a shower for days on end. Accepted the blisters and calluses, the broken nails, and the red dirt ingrained into hands tough enough to pull the wire-like fronds of buffel grass without gloves. She hadn’t flinched at the realisation that, despite the constant presence of her beaten, greasy, buffalo leather stockman hat, the fierce sun was adding years to her face, the wind etching lines as relentlessly as it eroded the red boulders of the landscape. It had been tough carving a niche for herself among the hard-drinking, hard-working, hard-living men who, even when she’d hacked her dark hair short in a ragged crop, had been unable to look beyond the physical assets she hid beneath her loose denim work shirt. But for more than a decade, she hadn’t let on to the contract workers that she was the boss’s daughter. There wouldn’t have been any point: the itinerant labour force didn’t owe Dad any loyalty.

Much like Dad apparently hadn’t owed her any, she reflected, the twinge of bitterness only slightly lessened by the passage of time, although she’d grown adept at hiding it. There were far worse pains than betrayal.

‘Sure,’ she said in response to Gavin’s question about cows. She liked how comfortable she felt around the older man; each of them was prone to long silences and could take several minutes to respond to a comment, but their friendship was easy. Still, she didn’t disagree with his assumption. She never bothered correcting the speculation of the residents of any of her temporary hometowns. She hadn’t hung around any one place long enough to make it necessary, always careful to keep on the move so grief couldn’t catch up with her.

It was Gavin’s fault Amelia had stayed at the small South Australian town of Keith beyond the few months she’d intended, but her compassion for his situation wouldn’t lead to her opening up about hers. Talking about her history would make running away from it somewhat redundant. She had thought her life on the station isolated, yet it had proved astounding how many people she knew: that was why she’d had to leave. Despite the passage of months, eventually turning to years, the steady stream of sympathy had never dried up. Always the questions. The assumed empathy from those who could never know her pain.

She craned forward. ‘Hey, look, the calf’s a lively one! Do a circuit to the right, Gav, and you’ll be able to drop a wing to see her.’ There was a certain kick that came with spotting one of the babies, who were born and would remain in the pristine coastal waters for three to four months before their mothers took them south to the feeding grounds in the sub-Antarctic. While it would be around three years before the mother would be spotted off Victor Harbor again, there was a good chance her calf would come back to the warmer waters to breed or give birth.

Gavin shook his head. ‘Nah, that’ll see us right for today, love.’

Amelia switched her gaze to him. ‘You’re looking a bit grey about the gills, Gav. Feel okay?’

Gavin lifted a freckled hand from the controls to flick away her concern. ‘Don’t tell me that’s your best pickup line?’

‘We’re three hundred plus feet above the ground—how much more picked up do you want to be?’

‘Given that she’s my plane, I’d argue that I’ve picked you up. Obviously batting well above my pay grade.’ Gavin grinned as he mixed idioms.

She didn’t mind his flirtation; Gavin had more than forty years on her and seemed to be very much in love with his wife, Hannah. What he didn’t have was a current private pilot’s licence, thanks to a ‘funny turn’ a few months earlier.

‘You’re just saying that because you have to be nice, me being the pilot and all.’ She waggled her hands in the air, well clear of the dual controls.

‘Not a CASA spy, are you? I’d be digging out my wallet in that case.’ Shot through with grey, Gavin’s faded red eyebrows bristled over his eyes. It was the Civil Aviation Safety Authority who had revoked his licence a few months earlier.

‘Pretty sure they don’t stoop that low,’ she said, though no pilot had any love for the regulatory body. ‘But I figure no witnesses, no foul.’

‘Fair enough.’ Gavin chuckled. ‘Reckon Hannah would have your braids for braces if she knew you weren’t just taking me up for a joy flight, though.’

The microphone attached to Amelia’s earpiece bumped her chest as she nodded. ‘It’s impossible to explain to someone who doesn’t fly, but it’s pure joy, isn’t it?’

Gavin had been one of the first members of the Keith Airfield Amelia had met when she’d flown in last autumn. The airstrip was on the outskirts of the town, and he had given her a ride the fifteen clicks to the caravan park, along with intel on which was the better of the two bakeries and where to grab her morning coffee. Keith’s red-brick council office, where she’d taken a short-term admin job, was two minutes’ walk from the gum tree–studded caravan park. The business district covered three short, parallel streets, linked by a cross-hatch of stubby sideroads.

Accustomed to the station—where the homestead, manager’s house, pair of workers’ cottages and various other buildings were scattered across almost a square kilometre—the town was larger than Amelia found comfortable. Although the population of almost fifteen hundred was spread across the vast Tatiara grain and stock region, and the streets featured the same rural outlets she’d seen in so many small towns over the last three years—Landmark, Elders, Nutrien—there was also a hotel–motel, a hardware shop and, almost directly opposite the council office, an IGA. A little further along the street she’d been surprised to find a quaint book shop, Beyond Words, whose warm welcome felt like stepping into a favourite auntie’s lounge room, begging Amelia to find time to curl up with a book in one of the comfy armchairs.

But finding time was something she studiously avoided; time on her hands would mean the devil in her head. Memories would be unboxed, the pain uncontained. Far better she stay busy. So, when she discovered through the town grapevine that the farmer she’d met at the airstrip had lost his licence but could still be found at the aerodrome, spinning yarns with the other rec pilots while waiting for the Flying Doc to come in, or cleaning—yet again—his meticulously maintained Cherokee, it hadn’t been too out of left field to offer to take him up for a flight when she was killing time one weekend.

The first couple of flights, they’d gone up in her small Jabiru, but it hadn’t taken long for Gavin to suggest she pilot his more robust four-seater. It had been very shortly after take-off that he’d casually mentioned he could take over the dual controls, give her a break. Amelia had understood. Flying was freedom.

‘Joy, freedom, you can call it what you want,’ Gavin said. He tapped a thick index finger against his temple. ‘All I know is that when I’m flying, I’m so busy thinking about what I need to be doing, my brain can’t wander anywhere else. I’m focused. And that’s relaxing. You know what I mean?’ He fastened his faded eyes on her. ‘Up here, all the background chatter is cut out. It’s just you, the plane—’ he leaned forward to stroke a hand over the high dash that sat level with Amelia’s chin ‘—and the big, beautiful sky. Nothing like a view into forever to make you realise how transitory your problems are, is there?’

How she wished that was true.