The Seed-planter’s headlights shine astral between the scattered trunks. Blaze the eyes of a Spotted Nightjar, flushed from its ground roost by the vehicle. The girl is there too, among the wind harps and the River Red-gums, though she cannot see who is behind the beams. Friend or foe.

Around her the desert exhales. No longer stunned by the heat of the day or distracted by the wind, it is the time when the desert settles into itself, sighs, as a human does in sleep. So often it has been disturbed at night, a witness to cyclical death. Bat crunching moth. A Fat-tailed Dunnart disembowelled by a Southern Boobook. The shrill mammalian cries unleashing nightmares heightened by the absence of light.

There was once a man who would wake terrified when the stars were at their brightest point. Drenched in sweat, he would remember the white flash of a woman’s eye and of gunpowder, the crack of firing pin against primer, the thud of a body against the earth, and the child who uttered the cry of the Bush Stone-curlew. These echoed through his dreamscape, till one winter dawn he devised a plan. The woman lay in unconsecrated ground and from there she would continue her haunting, he believed, unless the land was given over to his god. He wrote to a preacher who was in search of a site for a new church, and he made his offering in the hope that the night would relinquish its power and the land would fall silent again, the worms resume their work and the bones lose their tormenting flesh. For a while his sleep was sound and he would wake to praise. His own in gratitude. From others for his act of charity. A street was even named after him. A stone monument raised. But he was careful not to travel at night and always slept with a tapered candle burning by his side, his window shut against the sounds that travelled across country, shaped by spindly branches and animals’ throats, with with, weer-loo weer-loo. And those bones, they waited, never to be disinterred, unlike others that were placed on mantles in fine houses and on museum shelves near and far: curio, trophy, phrenological proof.

Around her the desert remembers and exhales. No longer stunned by heat or distracted by wind, it is the time when the desert gives up its secrets.

But she maintains her silence.

Not ready yet.