It was a meat-and-potato town that Rosemary Cole grew up in. Winifred, Carney County, up around the middle part of Queensland’s coast, beyond the theme parks and koalas and the dry ginger stretch; through the sugar cane, and past the smelters and rum distilleries.

It was a pretty town when I knew it. At its centre was a wide lake, a tidy park running around its reeds, peppered with picnic benches and four or five coin-operated barbecues. Children fed ducks from the sandy lip of a playground, though there was a sign that told them not to.

Winifred may have changed since I was there, but I doubt it. I expect you would still find the buildings on the main street crackle-white from the sun—the post office, the police station, the library that doubles as an information centre. There is a small cinema with slung chairs, and a stretch that holds (or held when I was there) a cafe and a clothes shop and a chemist. The nicer houses fan out from the lake and are painted pastel colours: apricot and tangerine, lemon and lime, caramel and toffee. Colours you can almost smell and sort of taste, like when you look out at the ocean on a scorching afternoon and think of mint and cool and wet, but not of salt.

When I was a child, my grandmother used to read aloud at bedtime from a thick, cloth-covered storybook with pages the colour of cheese. Stories set in litter-free streets, where apples shone on trees and jam tarts cooled on windowsills. Cooks were fat and ruddy-faced, and boys and girls wore buckled shoes and long white socks that were never dirty or fell down around their ankles. The farmer’s name was Mr Pod or Barley, and the baker was a Sally Bun or Treacle. I always felt the town of Winifred would have settled well, between those pages.

The butcher’s name—as if he’d made it up (although I know he didn’t)—was Tom Lamb, son of Thomas, son of Thomas Senior. They were all Lambs, and they were all butchers. Men were expected to follow their fathers and their fathers’ fathers. Women were expected to follow the men.

The local paper made news out of nothing. People slept soundly, and safer than they imagined they would in Brisbane or Rockhampton or Mackay. (Except for a while, when Jessie Else went missing. Locks started turning then.)

It was nothing like the town where I grew up, where grass grew way past windowsills, houses weren’t painted at all, and yards were packed with rusted hulks of cars and stoves and hide-and-seek refrigerators.

But I would not have left it if I could have stayed.

God’s own country, my grandmother called it, and she’d come a long way to find it. Travelling all by herself on a steamer full of post-war refugees, welcomed in New Zealand for their willing hands and hips. A Catholic, of course, with a trunk of shame, an angel on her shoulder and a life led in the torchlight of an all-seeing God.

‘He’s watching you,’ she used to say, ‘every minute of every hour of every day and night,’ until my brother and I were too afraid to steal or lie or take our clothes off.

It rained often where I grew up, and the rain came down cold and sideways. It fudged the sky and stung like bees—not like the rain that fell on Rosemary Cole. The rain in Carney County is soft even when it’s pouring down, even in February when your tank fills time and time and time again. The Wet, Australians call it. In New Zealand it’s just the weather: the earth takes it all and everything grows. In Carney County, the earth takes its time and muddy brown water spills through the town. Then comes winter, with its blue-sky mornings and sharp-lit afternoons, its pelicans and its butterflies, its months of mangoes and avocados and lilac-golden sunrises.

At the edge of Winifred, on the far side of Lake Carney and hidden by trees, is a chocolate factory grown up from the milking shed it was in the way-back when Winifred was a simple dairy farm. At the bottom of the high street, what was then a farmhouse is now a pub, though they call it Carney’s Grand Hotel. Named after Nathan Carney, who built the dam they call a lake; who bought and raised the cattle and built the now-a-chocolate factory. Tourists order battered lunches from a chalkboard on what began as Nathan Carney’s porch, and locals sit and sip and chatter in the same pink light that I imagine Nathan Carney must have sat in, back in his day, in a rocking chair perhaps, smoking a long and spindly pipe, and looking out across the water to his milking sheds. He could have seen them then, before the council planted trees to hide the buildings; years before the barbecues and picnic tables, before the town was a town with a name at all.

No one knows what became of Nathan Carney in the end. One year there came more rain than any other and the flooding was so great that history left it capital letters. The Great Flood of 1936 changed kilometres of coastline and sent his cattle slipping and a-sliding. Leathery legs were broken, and when the skies cleared Mrs Carney woke to find her husband gone and only a scatter of cows in an early morning mist, on a carpet of brown where sweet points of grass may have been only days away from thrusting through. Still in her nightdress, she wandered out among them and put a bullet through the roof of her mouth.

But the Carneys left the makings of something to be built upon—the wash of a county, paddocks, barns and milking sheds, a farmstead and a chapel, a willing if thinned workforce—and after a while (after the war) came Winifred, a rich Scottish widow with a knowledge of chocolate-making and a business plan that evolved into Winifred’s Finest. You will have seen it in your local supermarket, in its plum-coloured boxes with curls of gold. Dark and milk assortments, soft centres and truffles, hollow rabbits past Australia Day, and Santas come September.

People were proud to say that they were Winifred born and bred. It was a claim that rode in on a full chest, tipped hats, and lay a trail of breadcrumbed expectation that fathers would be followed, as the butcher had followed his father, who’d followed his own. But times change, and on the butcher’s wide window the arc of Lamb and Sons was shortened. A single letter taken first, when the eldest moved away, then Son scraped off completely when it was clear the youngest would not take the road expected.

A cousin followed, in the end. The son of a brother of Mrs Lamb, so not a Lamb, but a son of the town, and family, Tom was quick to reassure his customers. It was the son of a son of a sign-writer who re-stencilled the window—Lamb & Coulter Quality Butchers—and I imagine it was the son of a panelbeater who resprayed their big refrigerated van.

Eddie may not have wanted to be a butcher, but he remained ‘the Butcher’s Son’, and though Rosemary Cole became Rosemary Lamb the day she married him, to the town she would always be a Cole. Every peg had its place. The Butcher, the Baker, the Troublemaker. Winifred’s storybook pages were rarely turned. It was a town of known beginnings, but it was not a place for beginning again.

It was a plate of meat-and-potatoes expectations that rested the bitter barrel of a gun on Mrs Carney’s tongue, I think. Her husband left her somewhere she never would or should have found herself without him: lost and all alone, in a place she saw no path away from and with no way of continuing on as the woman those around expected her to be. Without a farmer, without a farm, how could she go on being the Farmer’s Wife?

‘You can leave, you know,’ I would have told her. ‘You can go somewhere else and start again. There are other ways. There are other places.’ And there are other people. There are people like Rosemary Lamb, without whom I might still be in my own once-green field, with my own shotgun-of-a-sort, reading books and canning pears and talking to Mrs Robinson but no one else.

She was a kitten when I found her staggering along the high tideline of Marlow Beach, where I’d gone to watch the turtles lay their eggs. Robinson, after Robinson Crusoe and the Swiss family. Mrs, just because she was a she. I wasn’t thinking of the song, or of the woman in the film.

It was past midnight, but the moon was full, and I couldn’t have missed her. There were no turtles that night, only this shivering mess of matted fur that I scooped up, along with string and seaweed, to wrap tightly in a cardigan I held close to my chest and filled with warm breath every sandy step back to my car.

It took us a long time to get home. The highway was blocked for a stretch by flashing blue lights, and the zippered bag of an accident I must have missed by minutes as I’d headed north an hour before, and I drove very carefully, keeping her as comfortable as I could in a nest on my lap.

Maybe someone threw her in the water at Milligan, where the Barra River runs into the sea and there’s a boat ramp people use for odd things at night. They found a German tourist once trapped in a tangle of rope and rubbish, pale and bloated and half-eaten (the papers didn’t say by what). With enough air, and a tight enough knot in a plastic bag, a kitten would have had a better chance.

I wasn’t a cat person particularly. They say you either are or you’re not, but I wasn’t, and then I had this small helpless thing to take care of. Its being a cat made no difference to me. That she was tiny and helpless, that I could help, was what mattered. I kept her in the pocket of my apron like a joey, and I fed her with a dropper. She grew well, and she grew up, and she stayed with me.

It was nice to have some company. I’d never planned to live alone, but there are reasons people do the things they do. There are scars on people’s hearts. There are words in people’s heads, and pictures in the pink light of closed eyes. Things happen and secrets are kept.

There is a reason I came from a small, wet, green town in New Zealand to live quietly in a place few people knew enough about to try to find. Although Winifred was pretty, and although I helped in the library on Thursdays, and bought tinned food and milk from Woolworths on Flinders, it was not where I chose to live.

Magpie Beach was barely fifteen minutes south of town. There were few magpies and there was no beach. There were no barbecues or picnic tables. There were pitted rocks, silver crusted with oysters and powdery once-were-worms. There were tiered saltwater pools, thick-waisted trees, sandflies and mosquitoes. There had been a battered sign up on the highway, but it leaned and then it fell and then it disappeared and never was replaced.

I was twenty-three when I arrived, and I was not alone. Two ran away and, road-weary and dog-tired of dust and gum trees, two took the road to Magpie Beach. We thought we’d find a quiet place to camp for a few nights, away from Who are you? and Where’ve you come from? We stayed those few nights and then we stayed a few more and then we cleared a proper spot and began to think about staying a while. There was no power, no electricity, no sewerage, but we’d found our plan and purpose.

Sonny was a fitter-turner and the factory snapped him up. We put in a septic tank and laid a slab, rigged gutters around the caravan and filled rainwater tanks. There was the odd How long are you staying? but no one really cared. We were outsiders, so we stayed outside.

I kept the house and dug around it, planting vegetables and fruit trees. I raised chickens. Sonny fished from the rocks when the sun was still an hour off rising. I’d slip eggs onto his toast as he lay whatever he’d caught in the sink. He’d take his spear when the moon was full and plough through the swell, diving to places I’d not have dared to. He’d climb back up the rocks with a fish still twitching on the end of his spear, his mask pushed up into his hair and shoulders warm to touch no matter how cool the early morning. If there were fishery patrols or licences, they didn’t bother us. It was a different world. It was our world. We smoked the fish. We sucked crab legs. We lay on dappled grass and made shapes of the clouds dotted above us. Beneath the chirp and hum of native bees and dragonflies and floury bakers, ‘Read to me,’ he’d say, because he knew I loved to; and I would turn summer-soft pages until the afternoon drew heavy, and wake at twilight with one hand in the soft fold of his arm, book marked and closed on the blanket between us. Little wings beat the air around my heart, and I thought we’d live like that forever.

But seasons passed. Rain fell, storms came and, too soon after, he was gone.