PROLOGUE
The temperature in the living room of the little cottage in Yindi Creek out in the western plains of Queensland was threatening to plummet close to zero, so Ethel had laid in some of the wood from the woodpile that had been home to many a brown snake over the years. Dot never said she was feeling the cold, of course, but Ethel knew. Ever since the shingles that had taken a year or more to come good—and had taken some of Dot’s eyesight and a lot more of her pep with them—the little sister Ethel had lived with for seventy-seven-and-a-bit years needed a little extra cosseting.
Ethel didn’t mind, even though she grumbled a bit just to keep Dot on her toes. Cosseting was one thing; encouraging Dot to turn into an old lady was another thing entirely.
‘What do you fancy watching?’ she asked, bending over as far as her seventy-nine-year-old spine would allow her to toss a few lit matches into the newspaper under the logs. ‘A cooking program?Landline?One of those reality shows with a whole lot of idiots running naked through the jungle, wondering why the mozzies are biting them so bad?’
‘I was thinking we might get out the scrapbook, pet,’ said Dot.
‘That old thing? I don’t even know where it is.’
‘It’s in my room,’ said Dot. ‘Next to my bed. For some silly reason that I can’t explain, it’s been on my mind lately. Let’s put the good lamp on and go through it, Ethel. It’ll be like old times.’
Hmm. Ethel knew for a fact old times and sentimentality were on Dot’s mind. Having a health scare did that for you when your eightieth birthday was two shakes of a lamb’s tail away. Made you think about all the people you knew who’d not made it that far before getting their funeral notice printed in theWestern Echo. Made you think about all the things they’d never got to do or say. All the things you’d left undone and unsaid.
She found the scrapbook as promised, next to Dot’s bed, under a little yellow vase that held a few sprigs of dried rosemary.Dirt Girls’ Diarywas written on the cover, not very decoratively, in a fat red marker pen, like the ones they’d used to mark up the weight of fleece back in the day when they were still on Corley Station and the shearers would visit every April or May.
Dot’s blister pack of pills sat next to it on a floral saucer that was part of a tea set their mother had been given when she married. That tea set was as pristine now as it had been on the day their mother had unwrapped it—life on the sheep station out past Yindi Creek in the 1940s and fifties (and sixties and seventies and eighties and nineties; right up until when she and Dot gave the life away, come to think of it) hadn’t provided a lot of opportunity for the women of the station to fuss about with pretty tea sets. Dot must have been rifling around in the glass-fronted cabinet in the living room. Maybe that was where she’d found the old scrapbook.
‘Here we are,’ Ethel said when she took the collection of old papers and photographs back to the living room.
But Dot had fallen asleep on the couch, her cup of tea and saucer (not from the fancy set) still loosely clasped in one hand. Asleep … or dead. Ethel nudged her sister’s ancient paisley slipper with her own matching one, putting some heft into it, until Dot shifted a little.
Not dead then, which meant there was no earthly reason why a hot cup of tea and a chocolate biscuit should go to waste.
Ethel rescued the cup before it could fall and sat down beside her sister, the dirt diary on her lap. She opened it and began rifling through the pages of bleached Polaroids (how proud they’d been of that camera!), clippings from journals, and notes written in her own spidery cursive about the plants and insects of Australia’s prehistoric past.
A thin scatter of crushed rock flicked over her trousers from the inner margin of the pages. Ethel pressed her finger to the reddish grit and snorted. Look at her, getting all sentimental and silly, treating some decades’ old dirt like it was precious as cake crumbs. She was getting as bad as Dot.
Her sister had been the one who’d loved searching for fossils on their sheep station. A beetle was the first—carapace, wings and hair-thin legs perfectly preserved in a slice of rock they’d found while they were out on the quad bikes, looking for a recalcitrant ram. Dot had become an enthusiast. Just for plants and insects at first, because who would have thought there’d be anything else buried up here in the dirt? Not anything as exciting as adinosaur.
Of course, then the fella from Elderslie Station down by Winton found himself a titanosaur—a four-legged brute just a tad larger than the beetle fossil currently sitting in the cabinet with the tea set. Ethel took a bite of Dot’s biscuit and tried to remember when that had been, exactly. In the seventies, maybe? The decades were all starting to run together these days.
Whenever it had been, that had been that: Dot had decided Corley Station must have something equally exciting just waiting for her to discover, if only she kept searching.
And there had been more sauropod dinosaur finds over the years since, Elliot and then Matilda, preserved now in the fancy museum down by Winton. Footprints baked into rock that spoke of herds of the darn things pounding about the place ninety-five million years ago … just none on Corley.
At least, noneconfirmedon Corley.
That’d be the unfinished business Dot was fretting over, she supposed; the bone they’d found. The hopes they’d cherished. The dream that the rest of a giant, regal dinosaur might be lurking there, intheirsoil, just waiting to be dug up.
Ethel had been disappointed, too, when all the initial excitement and palaver dwindled into nothing, but she hadn’t been crushed the way Dot had been. Ethel’s enthusiasm had been for being outdoors and planning weekend digs. Keeping up a correspondence with the academics they’d come in contact with over the years: the palaeontologists from the university; the curators from the Natural History Museum in Brisbane; that silver fox photographer with the gleam in his eye who she’d fancied back in the day. Before her romantic inclinations (amongst other things) dried up.
Being one of the Dirt Girls (Dot’s nickname for them, not Ethel’s, but it had stuck the way dags stick to a sheep’s bum) had brought a little bit of notoriety their way. The local paper had written up the bits and pieces they’d found. Academics visited them to admire their collection and fossick out in the paddocks and university students would rock up in beat-up old cars to ask if they could bunk down in the old shearers’ quarters and do the same, and Corley Station would come alive for a few brief weeks after each little discovery.
Ethel had liked the attention.
But that’s not what drove Dot. Her sister had been impervious to all that stuff. For Dot, the rush of being an amateur fossil hunter had been the dirt. The dig. The rich natural past she was convinced lay beneath the sheep dung littering Corley Station.
A card slipped loose as Ethel turned a page.
It was still white and new-looking, despite the fact it must have been stuck in the scrapbook for years now.Dr Jedda Irwin, read the name across the front.Palaeontologist.
Hmm. There was a phone number embossed on the card in black type big enough for Ethel to see without fetching her glasses from wherever she’d put them, and an email address. Should she do it?
Should she ring?
Or did the old adage to let sleeping dogs lie apply equally to a sleeping prehistoric fossilised femur that may or may not have once belonged to a two-legged, plant-eating ornithopod that would—if found—be a spectacular addition to Queensland’s dinosaur story?
