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That’s right.’
    He rubbed his face. ‘What are you going to do? What can you do?’
    I wanted to get off the subject as quickly as possible and get him home to bed. He still hadn’t told me why he was here, so I just said, ‘Sleep on it. I’m too tired to make any decisions tonight. I need to think this through.’
    â€˜You’re not going to give up on this.’ He glared at me. ‘Are you? They can’t …’
    I cut in. He was going into full strategy mode, which would probably involve me threatening legal action and God knows what else. ‘Des, I will deal with it. Just not now, not tonight. I need to think this out.’
    He read the finality in my face with narrowed eyes. Then, instead of continuing with his rant, he leant back in his chair, sighed, and said, ‘You know, Kannon, I remember when you first became interested in archaeology.’
    I sighed as well. I knew this tactic. It was softer, but it took longer.
    Des was like a terrier: when he wanted something he just kept at it until he got it.
    â€˜Yeah, me too,’ I said, hoping if I went along with it, he’d be irritated and give up. ‘That first summer I spent at Rollie’s place was special.’
    Which was true. I’d never forgotten that time. Rollie was Des’s younger brother. He ran Nunga, the Carmichael family homestead in Western Australia.
    â€˜Yes. Yuki’d asked me to find a place she could take you for the school holidays. A quiet place in the country,’ he said, with a suitable hint of nostalgia.
    I eyed him in disbelief. That wasn’t the rosy way I remembered it.
    What Des hadn’t mentioned was that Yuki’d wanted me as far from the big city as possible, because I’d spent my fourteenth birthday living on the streets in Kings Cross. They’d just brought me back home again, and she didn’t know what to do with me.
    So I said, with heavy sarcasm, ‘Well, Des, you don’t get much more country than Nunga.’ It was north of Geraldton and about eighty miles from the coast. The nearest neighbour was half a day away by four-wheel drive. ‘Not a big city in sight.’
    Des ignored the jab. ‘Yep, that’s right. Nature. In all its glory,’ he said, with a hint of longing, ‘Rollie took you both around the old place, didn’t he? You camped out under the stars, saw the rock paintings, met the local tribal elders.’
    That was a bit too much.
    â€˜Cut it out, Des. You hate the place. Haven’t been back to Nunga since you were my age.’
    He gave me a deeply offended face. ‘Well, Kannon, that trip got you thinking about the big picture, didn’t it? Nothing like thinking in terms of millennia to stop you focusing on yourself, and your own problems.’
    â€˜Yes,’ I said, reluctantly. ‘It did change things for me. Make things look different.’
    He was right, however manipulative he was being. The incident in the park with Ledbetter had shown me what I didn’t want. But that summer had got me thinking about what I did want. What the future could be.
    Des said idly, ‘It was when he took you out to the Abrolhos Islands that did it, wasn’t it? That was when he taught you to snorkel.’
    The Abrolhos Islands were a string of 120 islands, sixty miles off the coast of Geraldton. The reef there teemed with sea life of every description, and had a haunted history, which had both chilled my bones and focused my teenage ambitions.
    â€˜It was the story of the Batavia that got you in. The story of the shipwreck on that reef in 1629 …’
    â€˜You can stop there, Des,’ I said. It was getting late and he had to go to bed and recover. ‘I know very well why I became interested in archaeology. You don’t have to give me a pep talk.’
    â€˜Kannon.’ He became more serious. ‘Rollie got you interested in someone else’s life story. And