Chapter Two

His father was a big man who had been made small by weather.

Neville McIntyre came into the place at twenty-six, when his own father dropped dead in the crush yard with a bull's head in his hands, and he spent the thirty years afterwards doing exactly what his father had done, in exactly the same order, and being punished for it with exactly the same regularity.

He was not stupid.

Jamie would eventually tell four hundred people in the Melbourne Convention Centre that his father was "a beautiful, decent, uneducated bloke who never had one original idea in his life," and it would get the laugh he wanted and the sympathy he wanted, and it was a lie in every respect that mattered — and it was, of all the lies in this book, the only one that took nothing and was never forgiven.

Neville McIntyre had ideas. He had a folder of them in the kitchen dresser. A clipping about lucerne. A brochure about a co-op abattoir at Guyra. A letter from a stud at Armidale about Angus semen. A page of his own handwriting, in pencil, costing out a bore.

The ideas were in the folder.

The folder never left the dresser.

That was the whole of it, and that was the whole of what Jamie learned — not that ideas were worthless, but that an idea in a drawer is worth nothing and an idea said out loud in a room full of people is worth whatever you can get for it.

The distinction would eventually cost something in the order of eighty million dollars and ruin the retirements of several hundred people across two continents.