Boys creep through the long grass. Seedheads plant themselves in their socks and needle at their skin, so they move at strange angles, unwilling to acknowledge that the prick of the small spikes in their flesh makes them feel exposed. The moon presses their shadows uneven on the uneven ground, and the wind navigates the Slender Cypress-pine until it reaches their ears as a sluiced sound. A little eerie, but only air. The sons of local farmers, they drove on a dirt road, not one of them old enough, but it does not count if it is not sealed, or so they say as they feel the eyes of the moon on the back of their heads. Once a bushranger hid in a cave in Dyurrite, a mountain not far from here, and he buried purloined gold in a billy where no one would find it, not generations of boys or their fathers or their own father selves, and it would remain there, cold as an unshared rumour, beneath the packed earth. The Mallee Wattle is a bloom of gold and as heady as honey but this is not what they seek tonight, not why they have ventured out into the Wallaby Grass and the moth-threaded air. They could have continued in the truck all the way to the front gate, but what would be the quest in that? What they do not know is that they are crossing the ancient plains. Not the way they once were, but closer, many of the grasses and herbs returned, each with three human names: Wergaia, Latin, common.

Murmbal.

Dianella revoluta.

Black-anther Flax-lily.

The house they steal towards belongs to a Seed-planter. The grasslands will become a rest-of-life’s work, but she does not know this yet. When they arrive they drop to their knees, not in supplication but to gather, stone upon stone, to fill their pockets, goldless but thieves all the same. They nudge ribs, elbows – one feels a sudden need to shit – but it is the smallest who goes first for he has the most to prove. The stone flies, a small planet or a meteor or a bat petrified by its communion with the stars, and the boy crouches again and waits for contact. And, as in all things, one follows the other, a battle on a cold tin roof that sounds like hail the size of Malleefowl eggs, and draws from and returns to myth.

But it is the Seed-planter who comes running out of the house, not the girl of rumour who has, some say, the agility of a possum, some say, the cunning of a dingo. And she is shouting into the dark, the boys hidden in the field. They clap their hands over their mouths so as not to be revealed, the words she is saying the kind you get your tongue soaped for. As they lie there amid the waving stalks, waiting for her to go so they can begin again and maybe this time draw out the girl, they hear another voice, avian, this one like the curdled scream of a mother with a knife to her throat. And the night that was their accomplice turns on them and they wish for light. Not the kind the moon is offering, anaemic as old bones, but what emanates from houses where warm meals are being spooned onto clean white plates.

So they empty their pockets, free themselves of ballast, make their way back through the grass seas, their wake already subsumed so that they must guess where they left their vehicle, its glass reflecting back the sky. Their movement through the long stalks releasing a message, swish swish: listen, listen deeply now, if you remember how and why.