Chapter Six

The drought broke the farm in 1991.

Not dramatically. Nobody's house burned. There was no auction on the front lawn with the neighbours standing around in silence. It went the way most of them go, which is slowly and administratively, through a series of meetings with a man from the bank in Inverell who wore a short-sleeved business shirt and said things like we're just looking at the serviceability, Nev.

Jamie was seventeen. He had left school at the end of Year 10 and was working the place, and he sat in on one of those meetings because his father wanted him to understand what was happening.

What he understood was not what his father intended.

He watched the bank man open a folder. He watched him turn it around and slide it across the kitchen table. And he watched his father — who could castrate a calf blindfolded, who could read a sky, who had never once in his life failed to do a thing he said he would do — go completely helpless in front of a piece of paper.

Neville put on his reading glasses. His hands were shaking.

He said: "Right. Yep. And this figure here, that's the—"

"That's the interest component."

"Right. Yep."

He didn't know.

Jamie could see that he didn't know. His father did not understand the document that was taking his life away from him, and he was too proud and too frightened to say so, and so he sat at his own kitchen table and nodded at a man in a short-sleeved shirt.

Afterwards Jamie went out to the machinery shed and sat on a drum for a long time.

He did not feel pity.

That is the thing he would never admit to anybody — not to a wife, not to a court, not to a journalist, not at four in the morning in Canggu with his nose full and his hands going.

He felt contempt.

Contempt for the bank man, who was a clerk with a haircut and a company car.

And contempt — vast, suffocating, unbearable — for his father, for being on the wrong side of the table. For not knowing the words. For having spent thirty years growing the cattle instead of standing on the catwalk describing them.

That night he opened the dresser and took out the folder and read every page of it standing up in the dark. The lucerne. The abattoir at Guyra. The Angus semen. The bore.

Good ideas. Every one of them.

He put the folder back.

And he drew, from the single most formative hour of his life, precisely the wrong conclusion, and the wrong conclusion was this:

The people at the table holding the folder always win. It does not matter what is in the folder. It matters that you are the one holding it.