Free Our Sunshine: Popular Penguins by Robert Drewe

into new assertive points.
    ‘Daddy, she might’ve got better!’ Aaron says.
    ‘We’ll never fucking know,’ says Old Man Sherritt, reaching for another shank.
    They decline the Sherritts’ offer of overnight shelter and at dark they rouse themselves from the floor and ride across the flooded Oxley Plains with four new horses Aaron has picked up from the Mob, their other four as spares and two pack animals. Riding beyond their exhaustion, they move through Everton and Wangaratta after midnight and head up into the thickly forested hills and crevices of the Warby Ranges. The land is drier here, and safely rugged, safe enough for them to keep riding into the crisp morning.
    In the thermals whistling kites soar in pairs, buoyant and easy, then drop, shrieking, after rabbits. Sun glances off the granite shelves where black snakes and copperheads have come out to bask in new skins. Dizzy in its glare, they climb higher into the hills, gritty eyes drawn every so often to those tall and isolated ghost gums topped by wedge-tailed eagles’ nests, boldly conspicuous platforms seven, eight feet across, with clear views of the surrounding territory. Rounding a bluff, they come upon one wedge-tail tearing at a dingo pup. Everyone stops, hands drop automatically to guns but, strangely, no one shoots. Then the day extends into a frozen moment of fierce defiance, a frowning standoff, before the eagle grips its meal and the party shakes off its self-consciousness – its leaden, human foreignness – and watches it start arrogantly into the sky. It trails long streamers of fur and entrails. Its claws grip without mercy but how admirable the languorous way its wing tips caress the air.
    It’s now November, the favourite pale-yellow time of early summer, and they’re back in a place they know well and which is well aware of them.

FLAME
     
    F or six weeks after Stringybark all this summery country becomes a black and white Inferno, and he the Devil.
    From city desks and drawing boards come dramatic representations, in words and pictures, of the sombre ravines and precipices, the jagged crags and scars of the monster’s territory. This is Hell’s gaseous fire lifted holus-bolus from the depths and thrust into the tender and defenceless features of Victoria. And there in the centre of the holocaust stands Satan with his eyebrows meeting in the middle, eyeteeth glistening and shotgun smoking.
    That is the view from Melbourne. Meanwhile Satan is drinking ale in a hammock in the hills with his shirt off and his eyes and ears open. He’s reading the papers and listening to cicadas.
    He takes in all the rumours and ballyhoo. They’ve escaped to New South Wales, South Australia, America – no, the Cape of Good Hope. A Sydney shipmaster swears he sold them tickets to Cape Town. They plan to storm Pentridge prison and rescue his mother. He’s gathering an army of angry rural selectors and city workers to overthrow the government and found the Republic of Northern Victoria.
Is he, indeed?
    And while he takes the dry and drowsy air, the press is lecturing the government and Chief Police Commissioner Standish on sparing no expense to run the murderers to earth, blah blah. In other words, Standish should pull his finger out and it wouldn’t hurt his men to do the same.
    The papers abuse the police for creeping in tentative circles around the places they’d been spotted. First, Superintendent Nicolson had set out to catch them on the Murray riverbank, sending a party of troopers on ahead, then dispatching himself to the border by first-class train. (When he arrived, his cheerful blacktrackers reckoned they had only missed the gang by a fortnight.) Then, after two days’ cautious ruminating, Inspector Brooke Smith had led twenty-two troopers out from Wangaratta into the foothills of the ranges. But coming across a lame packhorse the gang had left behind (Brooke Smith saw its police brand – it was Lonigan’s horse, taken at Stringybark