When Sneaky Snook in his mail truck happened upon the wreckage near the boundary of Meredith Downs, sheep were scattered along the roadside and the fence, bleating, dazed. Anyone approaching the scene could be forgiven for thinking they’d stumbled on a grisly barbecue. The bars of the truck had caged in a dozen wethers as their wool was singed away and they gradually burned to death: distressed, sacrificial, but smelling just as delicious as a grilled lamb chop ever had. So the barking of the mailman’s dog, Lightning, could have been consternation, or merely appetite.
Fortunately, this was a relatively busy road for the area—usually at least one vehicle came along it each day. In fact, it was not even an hour before Sneaky found them, alerted by the smoke. Warren was bleeding but conscious, propped on an elbow, ordering Sneaky to get the sheep back, swearing when the man tried to move him. Matt, as still as a rock on the gravel—like his father not far away—was dead, Sneaky assumed: his leg was gashed, and blood crusted his ears. So the mailman concentrated on the one still talking. Save the life he could save, and so forth . . . Turned out later Warren’s liver had been leaking blood, letting him swear and curse all the way to oblivion. The three men were just far enough from the truck to avoid being incinerated—
“At least we’ll have the bodies,” Lorna would say later. “At least we can bury them.”
Wheezing with the heat, the mailman hauled Warren into his truck cab, then dragged Phil’s body over, letting out a grunt as he hoisted it into the back. Lightning, nobly forgoing the chance of a mutton lunch, was standing over Matt’s chest, growling, when Sneaky returned.
“Get out of it!”
The dog ignored him, and licked the boy’s face. An eyelid twitched. “Crikey, Lightning!” Sneaky bent down to reassess the corpse. Detecting a faint pulse, he turned to the dog. “Clever boy!” To Matt, he said, “Hang on there, son. Don’t you go anywhere, now.” He shoved aside parcels and mail sacks and crates of groceries to make room for him beside his father. “Right. Keep an eye on him, fella,” he said, waggling his dog’s snout, “and yell out if he gets worse.” With that, he squeezed himself back behind the steering wheel and drove hell for leather to the nearest roadhouse, twenty miles away, where they had a pedal radio and bandages and an airstrip for the Flying Doctor.
*
When he landed his plane, Dr. Finbar Rafferty, the normally unflappable Irishman who’d known the MacBrides for years, flinched at the sight that greeted him. “Mother of God!”
Then he rubbed a hand across his face to collect himself, and began assessing the figures as patients rather than old friends; followed the clinical steps that led his thoughts onto safer ground.
*
On the morning that the lives of her menfolk were being haggled over by Life and Death, Lorna MacBride was in her kitchen, moving with her usual brisk efficiency as she made the fruitcake for her youngest son’s approaching birthday.
The sprawling kitchen was the heart of the old stone homestead, which in turn was the heart of Meredith Downs. Its immaculately neat pantry, which Lorna provisioned on an industrial scale, held enough supplies to get them through months of being cut off by fires or cyclones. In addition to her own preserves and Vacola’d produce, shelves were stacked with cans of fruit and packets of dry biscuits, great hessian sacks of rice and flour, and jumbo tins of powdered milk.
The kitchen had fueled generations of MacBrides when they set off before dawn for a muster or came home thick with dust and grime after putting up a fence or repairing a bore. Its long jarrah table was the construction site for hearty lunches for neighbors who came to help erect a mill or for a cricket match, and for visitors calling in on their way to or from Perth. Sporting victories were celebrated here, floods and droughts lamented.
This morning the room was filled with the wafting aroma of the bread Lorna had put in to bake in the enormous wood-fired Metters: the only electricity in the homestead came from the thirty-two-volt generator, which provided a few hours of electric light in the evenings. Though the system managed only a dim glow, Lorna was still grateful for the flick of a switch rather than the toil of refilling oil lamps and trimming candles.
Like many stations out this way, there was no telephone either. Instead, beside the cooling rack that stood ready to receive the scorching-hot loaf tins, sat the ped set, the pedal-operated transceiver that was the MacBrides’ lifeline to the outside world.
It was not from the wireless, however, but from a knock on the front door, that Lorna learned of the crash. She had just put Matt’s cake in to bake when two policemen from Wanderrie Creek, sixty miles away, hats in hand, guided her back through the house to sit at her own table before breaking the news.
Like rain running off a greasy fleece, their words barely touched her with meaning. Then, as they sank in, Lorna was aware of a strange, sick sensation: her family, the world—reality itself—had been destroyed, but every cup on every shelf, instead of falling to the floor to smash into a shattered mess as it surely should, sat, unmoved: unimpressed to be handled, at last, by Sergeant Wisheart, who made tea and put three sugars in it for her and for her daughter Rose. The girl, full of excitement just moments before as she recounted her ride to the old mine on their property with Miles that morning, now stood speechless and deathly white with shock.
All their men gone. The phrase echoed in Lorna’s mind as she put her floury fingers to the cup handle, but couldn’t remember how to lift it.
*
The crash that claimed those MacBride lives was not an extraordinary event. A light coating of death dusts any scene you care to observe in the bush: the desiccated tree weathered into twisted stone, the rams’ horns flaking in the dirt, the insects banked up against the flywire of a homestead window in a snowdrift of wings and legs. Death twinkles in this landscape like mineral sand.
In any given year, you’ll know someone fatally thrown from a horse, or killed when their car ran off the road, or bitten by a snake, too far from help. Mine shafts are a popular haunt for death too. As well as the miners who get lashed by a snapped steel cable, or whose heads are crushed when the operator absentmindedly hoists them up instead of down, there are plenty of people desperate for somewhere to jump from, in a largely flat landscape with no tall buildings. The mine shafts oblige them generously, particularly after a bender or a jilting. And an abandoned shaft can keep this a secret for months or years.
So you can’t survive out here without the invisible network that spreads across stations and towns, like veins in a body, sending vital support to victims of calamity and carnage. After the radio call to the Flying Doctor, word flowed like water over the Sched, the nickname for “the Schedule” on which the various stations were allotted time to use the shortwave radio frequency run by the Flying Doctor.
Everyone knew where Meredith Downs was on its yearly schedule of lambing and mustering and shearing. And everyone knew that if they were in the same godforsaken straits, they’d want their neighbors to appear on their doorstep to help. At least it was January, the quietest month of the year, when you mostly just kept your head down and waited for the sapping heat to lose interest and move on.
Rose had insisted on following Matt straight to the hospital, many hundreds of miles away in Perth. “Someone should be there when he wakes up. Or if he—” The two women had looked at each other across the table in silence. Though Lorna couldn’t bear to part with her last healthy child, she yielded. She herself would get there as soon as things were under control at the station.
Maudie Knapp from Deep Springs Station, fifty miles to the north, was the first to turn up after hearing about it on the Sched. She bustled in with a hastily packed suitcase, a big tin of her famous shortbread, and the pot of stew that she’d had on the stove when the news came through.
“Oh, Lorna!” The sight of her dear friend, gray eyes gazing blankly, barely able to stand, robbed her of words for a moment, and she took a deep breath. “Right. I’m here now, love. And Charlie’s on his way. Bob Sowerby and some of his boys’ll be coming from next door at Maundy Creek. Just tell us which paddocks the stock are in and what the hands are due to be doing.” She opened and closed cupboards until she found what she was looking for. “Here. Drink some brandy.”
*
If you’d asked Lorna MacBride exactly how the time passed after that terrible event, she couldn’t have told you. That first day, it was a matter of getting through a breath at a time, as though she might actually forget to take in air if she didn’t make the effort.
She found herself obsessing about funerals. The undertakers could wait a few days, but she knew they didn’t have a cool room, and the Wanderrie Creek hospital morgue would accommodate “guests” for only so long. But it might be bad luck to plan funerals before she knew whether there would be two or three?
Her thoughts were interrupted by Maudie, who was saying gently, “I know you’ll want to get to Perth to see Matt . . .”
“Mattie . . . Yes, of course.” But just in that moment, Lorna couldn’t for the life of her remember whether that particular child was dead or alive. She knew—yes, she knew her Rosie had survived. Which of the boys, though?
__________________________________
From A Far-flung Life by M.L. Stedman. Copyright © 2026 by M.L. Stedman. Reprinted with permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster.
