Her father has a prospector’s map of Australia from 1914. He keeps it in his work room off the main bedroom that Molly’s never supposed to enter. The prospector’s map doesn’t even have Darwin marked on it. It doesn’t even show the whole of the Northern Territory. That map is pink and everywhere outside of what is mapped out as the states of Western Australia, South Australia, Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria is marked simply with the word ‘Aborigines’. Depending on the wilting spirit or rabid desperation of the goldminer, these areas marked ‘Aborigines’ were seen by Horace and Aubrey and their old goldminer friends as either dangerous no-man’s-lands or untouched gold-rich money fields ripe for a sharpened pickaxe. But this etched map in her hands is like no map Molly has seen. This is a map from a storybook. This is a map not of towns and cities, rivers and roads. This is a map of wonder and mystery, fortune and glory. And treasure. She remembers what her mother said: ‘We all have our own treasure to find.’
A treasure map, Molly tells herself, as her fingernail traces the single etched map line down to a second set of words.
West where the yellow fork man leads
East in the dark when the wood bleeds
She doesn’t repeat these words because she can see more words below them and she’s too desperate to follow the etched line that travels from north-west to south-east now down the back of the copper pan in a shaky course to another set of words, and a thousand blue butterflies are set free inside her stomach as she runs her short forefinger beneath them.
City of stone ’tween heaven and earth
The place beyond your place of birth
The map line runs on and there are more words to be read on the pan but they are covered in silt. She rushes into the creek water once more and uses her yard dress to wipe the back of the pan completely clean, and she must remember to breathe when she raises her grandfather’s sky-gifted treasure map to the blue sky and reads the last collection of words etched into the pan.
Own all you carry, carry all you own
Step inside your—
‘Moll-yyyyyy!’
Uncle Aubrey is shouting at her from beneath the milkwood tree.
‘Get outta that feckin’ creek, child!’
The gravedigger girl rushes and splashes out of the water and crawls up the creek edge, grasping at clumps of tall grass to haul herself up and onto the cemetery grounds. Molly can see her uncle standing over the grave he’s just dug, leaning on the long shovel he used to dig it. Her father stands next to him, his head down and his black hat in his hands.
‘Get over here, child,’ Aubrey commands. His long thin arms and his long thin finger bones are waving her towards him, but she doesn’t want to go there.
‘May I please stay here, Uncle Aubrey?’ Molly calls.
‘No,’ her uncle says. ‘Come here now.’
‘I don’t want to go over there,’ she says.
‘Get over here now, child,’ Aubrey Hook barks. He’s so tall and thin, and his wide-brimmed work hat is black like his eyes and his eyebrows and his gaze. And Molly wants to cry now to show her uncle that she’s frightened. Cry, she tells herself. Cry, Molly, cry. Cry and he will understand you. Cry and he will care for you. But she cannot cry in this moment, no matter how hard she forces herself to.
‘Dad,’ Molly calls.
But her father says nothing. And she knows her father is weaker than her uncle.
‘Dad!’ Molly calls again.
But her father has gone away in his mind. Gone away, she tells herself, gone away like Horace and Aubrey said her mum had gone away. They said she wandered off into the bush. They said she was lost in the wild and deep country and she couldn’t find her way back again. Back to Hollow Wood. Back to Molly.
Horace is frozen in this moment, head down, his hat in his hands.
‘You will come here now, child, and you will say goodbye to your mother,’ Aubrey demands from the edge of the grave.
Molly grips the sky gift copper pan and hugs it to her chest. I will never be afraid, she tells herself. I will feel no pain. Rock is hard. Can’t be broken. She shakes her head. No. ‘She’s not in there,’ Molly calls.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘She’s not in that hole,’ Molly says. She points to the sky. ‘She’s up there.’
Aubrey is momentarily stunned by his niece’s words. He looks at her closely to see where they might have come from, which part of the girl’s bent mind. He tilts his head and squints his eyes. Poor little gravedigger girl, he tells himself. Mad little gravedigger girl, he tells himself. Mad like her grandfather, mad like her mother.
‘What is that you’re holding?’ Aubrey barks.
Molly is silent. He takes a few steps closer.
‘What is that you’re holding, child?’
Three more steps closer and then he stops.
‘It’s a sky gift,’
