‘POPPEEE!’ came Mother Hangtree’s voice from below. ‘You are to come down immediately. Do you hear?’

‘Not unless you let my brother out of the Darkling Cellar,’ Poppy replied.

Through the leaves Poppy could see the schoolroom below and hear the children practising the chorus of The Bellbird Song. Their clear voices sounded like the wind rustling through the eucalypt forest at night.

Mother Hangtree spoke again. ‘All right,’ she said crossly. ‘I will let Augustus out. But you make him promise never to run away again. He is a bad influence on the other children.’

Poppy smiled. ‘I will, Mother. I’ll tell Gus.’ Then she scampered down from branch to branch as nimble as a brushtail possum.

‘Do be careful, Poppy,’ Mother Hangtree said, anxiously stretching out her arms. ‘I need you in one piece for the concert.’

‘Stand clear!’ Poppy yelled and jumped to the ground.

Mother Hangtree brushed leaves and dirt from Poppy’s pinafore. ‘Goodness me, where are your shoes and stockings, child?’

‘You can’t climb trees in shoes,’ Poppy said.

Even on the hottest days, when the hens lay panting under the bushes and the cows kicked refusing to be milked, Mother Hangtree made the children wear lace-up shoes and stockings. ‘It is not proper, running around like little savages,’ she would say, making a sour face.

She untangled a piece of bark from Poppy’s hair and sighed. ‘Go quickly now. The children are all waiting.’

Poppy picked up her shoes and stockings from behind the tree and skipped to the schoolroom. When Blossom saw her she rushed up and grabbed her best friend’s hand. The other orphans gathered around, full of questions.

‘Is Mother letting Gus out of the Darling Cellar?’ Daisy, the smallest, asked.

‘It’s the Darkling Cellar, not the Darling Cellar, Daisy,’ Bartholomew laughed.

Daisy looked hurt.

‘You should have seen her,’ said Poppy, grinning. ‘She was so mad her face puffed up like a bullfrog and turned bright purple.’

The children roared with laughter, then quickly turned silent when Mother Hangtree entered the room with Gus following behind.

He looks tired, Poppy thought.

Gus was tall and slender with a mass of thick, dark brown hair. At fourteen, he was the oldest child in the orphanage. Everyone looked up to Gus, especially Poppy.

He flicked a lock of hair out of his eyes and winked at her as he took his place in the back row of the schoolroom. Poppy couldn’t wait to talk to him.

‘Come along, children. Don’t stand around gawking at Augustus. Let us continue our rehearsal,’ the Matron said sternly.

The annual concert was very important to Mother Hangtree. This was the day government and church people from Echuca were invited to Bird Creek Mission to hear the children sing. But Gus said the real reason they came was to see if Mother Hangtree was doing her job properly. These people gave her money to run the orphanage. Still, it was an exciting day for everyone – hardly anyone visited Bird Creek, except the bullockies who dropped off supplies of flour, sugar, tea and other necessities.

Mother Hangtree tapped her stick on the floorboards and sat down at the harmonium. ‘Ready, Poppy?’

Poppy nodded.

Mother Hangtree played the introduction to ‘The Bellbird Song’ and Poppy began to sing.

After the rehearsal the children marched off to lunch. The kitchen where they ate their meals was attached to the dormitories. There was a long wooden table with benches on either side, and a big stove. Alice, the cook, had made a pot of soup with vegetables from the garden and loaves of crusty bread.

‘Did the strapping hurt?’ Bartholomew asked Gus as he sat down. Bartholomew was often in trouble, too, for wandering into the bush in search of wild animals. He loved all creatures and would save even a tiny ant if he could.

Gus shook his head. From the look on his face, though, Poppy could tell he was acting brave.

‘Next time I run away, I’m gonna make it out of here,’ he whispered to her.

‘But Mother Hangtree said she’s going to lock all the doors and windows at night so nobody can escape ever again.’ Poppy glanced across at the matron sitting at the head of the table.

Gus leaned towards her. ‘That won’t stop me. I found a secret door, Kalinya.’

Kalinya was Poppy’s Aboriginal name. It meant ‘pretty one’. Gus’s name was Moyhu, which meant ‘the wind’. When each child was brought to Bird Creek Mission they were given an English name. The girls were named after flowers; the boys were given names from the Bible. What Mother Hangtree didn’t know was that sometimes Poppy and Gus still used their Aboriginal names even though it was strictly forbidden.

‘A secret door! Where?’

‘In the Darkling Cellar. I’d never seen it there before because it’s hidden behind some old sacks. I was moving them around so I could lie down. That’s when I saw light coming in through a crack.’ Gus noticed Mother Hangtree glaring at them. He put his head down. ‘Tell you more later,’ he whispered.

After lunch, the children marched back to the schoolroom. The lesson was arithmetic, and while Mother Hangtree wrote numbers on the blackboard Poppy looked at Gus in the back row. He was scribbling something on his slate, which he handed to Bartholomew, who handed it to Blossom, who then passed it to Poppy.

When Mother Hangtree turned to face the class, Poppy quickly hid the slate on her lap under the desk.

The message was in secret code, a code Gus and Poppy had made up themselves.

Po3 Po1 D2 Ka6 D2 Pl4 Pa6 Ka6 E1 E1

Poppy was proud of her idea to use the names of animals. It had taken weeks to learn the list off by heart:

Echidna

Dingo

Possum

Wallaby

Kangaroo

Platypus

Weevil

Emu

Quoll

Wombat

Crow

Parrot

Galah

Koala

Lizard

Frog

Poppy smiled as she deciphered the message.

Po3, third letter in Possum ‘S’

Po1, first letter in Possum ‘P’

D2, second letter in Dingo ‘I’

Ka6, sixth letter in Kangaroo ‘R’

D2, second letter in Dingo ‘I’

Pl4, fourth letter in Platypus ‘T’

Pa6, sixth letter in Parrot ‘T’

Ka6, sixth letter in Kangaroo ‘R’

E1, first letter in Echidna ‘E’

E1, first letter in Echidna ‘E’