Ross had been teaching at Drummoyne Primary School for two years when the inevitable, though unspoken, announcement finally arrived: Ms Crisp was retiring. The news itself caused only the slightest ripple among the staff. After all, Ms Crisp had been at the helm long enough for everyone to anticipate her departure. What did raise a collective eyebrow, though, was the subsequent declaration from the Department: her replacement, the new headmaster, was to be Mr Ross Cooper.

Ross had taken to teaching like a duck to a country dam, full of noise, splash, and a sense of destiny disguised as play. The classroom, to him, wasn’t a box for rote and regulation. It was a living, breathing organism, part chalk dust, part imagination, part controlled rebellion. He refused to let it sit still.

Of all places in the wide, bustling world of classrooms and chalk dust, Ross was to commence his “in-school practical training” at none other than Drummoyne Primary School. The irony was not lost on him. Drummoyne, where the streets smelled faintly of laundry and the river whispered of lazy afternoons. His days at Drummoyne though were locked behind the steel gates of the orphanage. And here he was, about to navigate the labyrinthine politics of pencils, playgrounds, and primary-level pandemonium just a few hundred metres from the very place.

All to the tune of ‘Click go the shears’ 1966 was the year Australia woke up and found its pockets lighter and its world tilting slightly off-centre. Decimal currency arrived with a bureaucrat’s grin and a popular Australian shearing song to promote it, but in the shearing sheds and public bars, it was still pounds, shillings and pints that measured a man’s worth. The old hands refused to speak in dollars. “Bloody decimation,” they’d growl, rolling the new coins across their palms as if they were counterfeit tokens in someone else’s country. “Shoulda left the decimal coins until all the old people died” some wise old punter had said. “Alright for the young fella’s”

Finally, Monday morning. The town yawned itself awake, and Ross was already standing at the brass-handled doors of Goldsborough Mort & Co., looking as if he’d been waiting there since Federation. The clock struck nine with a sense of ceremony that the rest of Echuca didn’t share. He stepped inside to find that the world of commerce smelled faintly of tobacco, ink, and smugness.

Indeed, it was a vision, scary and surreal, as Ross slowly opened his eyes. The room swam into focus, whitewashed walls glaring, faint scent of antiseptic pricking at his senses, and the persistent beeping of something that probably wasn’t a church bell.

“Good afternoon…hellooo…”

The first man Ross met who knew sheep the way a gambler knows odds was named Arthur “Blue” McInnes, though his hair hadn’t been blue for thirty years. It was the washed-out silver of an old coin and framed a face that looked like it had been carved out of leather, then left on a fence post for a few seasons.

Ross found him at the Echuca stockyards late on a Wednesday afternoon, sitting astride a gate, smoking a cigarette that had gone out halfway and never been relit. He wasn’t watching the sheep so much as judging them, the way a priest sizes up a congregation and knows who’s sinned before the first hymn.

We don’t know where he are

Unlike Clancy, who had apparently “gone to Queensland droving” and vanished into the dust and legend, Ross Cooper was charting his own curious version of a bush ballad. The difference was that Ross had never so much as held a stockwhip or sat a horse that wasn’t bolted to a carousel. But he did have a restless itch and a tendency to act on whims disguised as divine revelation.