Prologue

Central Queensland, Australia

My name is Wallarie; I am a Nerambura man of the Darambal people, and you stand on the place of my Dreaming, where I lived for almost a hundred of your whitefella years.

I no longer hunt in the brigalow scrub for wallaby and goanna, but I am with the ancestor spirits as a light you whitefellas call a star. Sometimes I return to soar in the blue skies over the sunburned plains as the great wedge-tailed eagle, and I look down upon the people who now walk the red earth of my ancestors.

My blood flows in the mighty warrior, Tom Duffy, and his daughter, Jessica. Sometimes I visit Tom in the dark places of the night when he sleeps and dreams his nightmares of a whitefella war. I am saddened to see my spirit brother toss and turn screaming out the name of dead cobbers in the cold and lonely night.

There is another generation of the two families who know nothing of me and the Old Ones. The lands are now silent of the laughter of the people who were my people. They are all gone but the whitefella who are young do not see the storm clouds gather when fire will once again fall on them.