The farmer is searching for a lost calf. It will not be easy to find. This is limestone country backing onto scrub-covered dunes, the ocean beyond, a salty lake in the near distance. Here winter rains leak beneath the surface into underground rivers and caves, seeping out to feed lagoons and bottomless soaks that disappear and reappear and disappear again. Here too, despite annual clearing, the scourge of Paterson’s curse returns to smother the paddocks in purple. The calf could be anywhere.

In the side mirror, the farmer can see the calf’s mother trundling behind the ute, udder swollen with milk. The calf is three days old. It was an easy birth and the calf was a good feeder. There’s no reason to think it might be dead. Sometimes the young are bitten by snakes, but if this one had the misfortune to meet up with a red-bellied black, its mother would be standing guard over it, not bellowing out her distress behind the ute.