Cirrus@Austlit

Dedication: For Ben and Ant (for all the love and light)

Author's note: The region of Coolabarradin with its outlying farms, including Mamerbrook, is a fictional place, modelled on the southern Riverina in New South Wales, Australia. All of the characters in the book, with the exception of the Southern Bell Frog and the Plains Wanderer, are fictional and bear no relation to any person, living or dead.

Epigraph: 'Territory, you see, is not necessarily the place you feed in. It's the place in which you stay...where you know every nook and cranny...where you know by heart every refuge...where you are invincible to the pursuer. I've even measured it with sticklebacks.' Konrad Lorenz (comment made to Bruce Chatwin, published in The Songlines)

'Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.' Gertrude Stein.

' Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch, A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, A chorus-ending from Euripides, - And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears As old and new at once as nature's self, To rap and knock and enter in our soul... Robert Browning (from Bishop Blougram's Apology)