A scream pierced the mallee night, rivalling the noise of the thunderstorm in full rage outside the hessian-walled shack. The cry of pain brought no movement from the surrounding shanties, although here and there the dim glow of a lantern showed. No one ventured into the gut of the storm to investigate. In the miners’ shacks of the eastern goldfields, it paid to mind your own business.

Joseph Cochrane stared wide-eyed at his wife as she lay on the iron bed. He couldn’t believe the amount of blood that stained the linen. Her knees were drawn up, legs apart, and she panted heavily as another contraction built within her.

“I should go for the doctor, Jenny. Something’s wrong.”

Jenny reached out and gripped his wrist with a strength that shocked him. “Don’t leave me, Joe! It’s too late for doctors. The baby is coming now.”

“There’s too much blood.”

He looked longingly at the door, wanting to be anywhere but in the hut. With a great effort of will, he pushed down the urge to flee and placed his hand over Jenny’s, trying to help her through the next contraction. He had no experience with child-birthing, and hoped with all his heart that nature would take its course.

Jenny groaned and raised her knees higher as the contraction gripped her. Her night-dress had ridden up, and Joe watched with a mixture of awe and horror as the baby’s head emerged from between her thighs.

“Help it, Joe. Help get it out.” Her voice came as a whisper, hardly audible over the rain drumming on the roof.

Joe looked at his child, barely halfway out of the birth canal, and wondered where he should grab. The baby’s skin was slick with blood and other bodily fluids, and his hands slipped off each time he tried for a hold. In the end, he hooked both index fingers into its tiny armpits and pulled. The baby came out in a squelching slide and lay unmoving between his wife’s feet.

“She’s dead,” he said, for now he could see it was a girl.

As he spoke, the baby’s eyes fluttered open. She gave a gurgling cough, filled her lungs, and let out a piercing wail.

“Tie the cord,” Jenny whispered. “Two places, then cut in the middle.”

She had placed a spool of cotton on the side table for this purpose, and Joe used it to tie off the umbilical cord, then slipped his knife from the sheath on his belt and cut the cord.

With that done, he spared a moment to examine the child, their first. “She’s got a little blemish on her ankle, Jenny. A birthmark.” Joe traced his finger around the shape. “It looks like an eagle.”

Two weeks earlier, he had retrieved a wooden box from behind a hotel and used it to fashion a crib. Now he wrapped his daughter in a woollen blanket and placed her in the old brandy crate. Jenny had spent the last few weeks of her pregnancy fashioning two dolls out of rags, carefully stitching the pieces together. What resulted looked like two scarecrows, one male and the other female, complete with yellow hair and red checkered shirts. In a fatherly gesture, Joe placed the dolls into the crib. The baby wailed like a banshee the whole time.

“She’s a healthy one, Jenny,” Joe said proudly. “Got a good set of lungs in her.”

Turning back to the bed, he saw that Jenny’s eyes were closed. The red flush of her skin had been replaced by a pale, waxy sheen. His spirits slumped as he realised that more blood had soaked the bed, a lot more blood.

“Jenny? Jenny?”

He lifted her hand from the bed sheet, and it felt cold and limp.

Joe held his dead wife’s hand for a long time and listened to his daughter screaming. Finally he got to his feet and walked across the hut. Without so much as a glance at the baby, he retrieved a bottle of whisky and a tumbler from the sideboard. Sitting at the little table, he poured himself a glass. While he drank, the baby settled into a fitful quiet, and Joe used the relative peace to think.

“What am I going to do with a baby and no woman to care for it?” he asked the night. “I have to work my claim. I can’t look after no kid.”

He turned to the bed where Jenny still lay uncovered, in the same position she had been in when she died. “You were my heart, my soul, Jenny. Why did you leave me?” Tears ran down his cheeks as he poured another glass, raising it in a toast to his wife. “You were the best thing that ever happened to me. What am I going to do without you?”

The baby whimpered and began to cry. Joe looked at the makeshift crib and felt his anger surge, fuelled by the whisky burning in his stomach. “It’s all your fault, you little bitch!” He tossed more whisky into his mouth and refilled the glass.

He drank on into the night, listening to his daughter’s cries. It wasn’t until the bottle sat empty that he realised the storm had passed. Only a light rain pattered against the canvas roof, and the thunder had moved off into the south.

Joe went to the crib and looked down at the screaming baby. “Don’t you ever shut up, you bitch, you killer?” He staggered a little at the force of his anger and drunkenness, and had to place a hand on the wall to steady himself. “Well, I don’t want you. You’ve taken everything from me. You’ve only been in this world a couple of hours, and you’ve taken it all.”

Joe picked up the crib and walked to the door. Rain soaked his jacket as he staggered into the darkness and along the muddy street. At this late hour, no lights showed in the other shanties. He made his way to the end of the street, where it became a track winding out into the scrubland. For five minutes or more he walked into open country, until he came upon a stunted saltbush. Without a word, he placed the brandy box beside the bush.

Joe stared down at his daughter for a moment or two. As an afterthought, he reached down and picked up one of the rag dolls. Then he turned his back and walked into the night.

“Looks like the storm has let up, old girl,” John McComb told his horse. He went to the edge of the rock overhang they were using for shelter and peered into the night. No stars showed in the velvet black sky. To the south, lightning still flashed, illuminating a mass of cloud moving towards Norseman and possibly Esperance, almost three hundred miles to the south.

“I reckon it’s safe to get moving again.” He flicked his cigarette butt into a puddle, cinched the girth strap tight, and led the animal for a few paces before swinging onto its back.

The saltbush dripped as he rode, and he wondered what the wildflowers would be like now that the countryside had seen rain. The red plains would blaze with colour, until the ground dried out and the desert reclaimed what was hers.

A few lights showed in Kalgoorlie, mostly in buildings on the main street where the structures were more substantial. A flash of lightning silhouetted two poppet heads and allowed him to get his bearings. This area of the plains was dotted with mullock heaps and mineshafts, some abandoned and some being worked by hopeful claimholders. To leave the track could mean a fatal fall down a deep hole.

“Best we stick to this track until we reach the Coolgardie Road,” he told the horse. In daylight, when he had ridden out, he had taken a more direct line across the flats.

As he rode, John thought about the business meeting he had attended earlier that night. A syndicate of two brothers had started a mine to the north of town, and John had successfully negotiated terms for providing water to the workers. Riches were being dug out of the ground, but nothing survived without water, and John provided this precious resource at five shillings a gallon.

“I tell you, old girl, there’s more money to be made on the goldfields than what can be dug out of the dirt. You won’t find this boy working his guts out in a bloody hole in the ground. No siree.”

To his left, about a mile away through the trees, he could just make out a cluster of buildings against the night sky. “That’ll be the shanties. Nearly home, girl.”

The horse plodded along, and John let the mare set her own pace. Every now and then something crashed away though the scrub as they disturbed a kangaroo—the only sounds apart from his horse’s hooves splashing in puddles.

Ahead, in the darkness, he heard a bird call and frowned in puzzlement. He had lived all his life in the mallee and on the edge of the great deserts, and all the bird species and their calls were as familiar to him as his own voice. But John was hard put to place this noise, which sounded like the screech of a cockatoo. The noise died away, and he forgot about it until he reached the turn-off towards the shanties. Then the sound came again, and he reined the horse in, listening carefully. After a moment he realised it was a baby crying.

“Must be an Aboriginal camp,” he muttered, and made to spur the horse forward.

The cry picked up in volume, then descended into a series of tight little coughs that plucked at John’s heart.

“Doesn’t sound like the little nipper is doing well, old girl.” He looked down the track to where he had built his shack and camel yards, by the road that led to Coolgardie. In twenty minutes, he could be home and curled up in his bed. But the baby wailed on, forcing him to a decision.

Turning the horse to the left, he started towards the noise. “I didn’t see an Aboriginal camp on the ride out.” He imagined one of the native women in trouble; she might have fallen down a mineshaft, leaving her baby on the surface, or it might be trapped with her. Whatever had happened, he felt he should investigate.

The crying died away as he rode, and he reined the horse in, unsure of which direction to take. He sat patiently, listening, until a weak cough sounded from somewhere on his left. He dismounted and followed the noise, treading through saltbush and low spinifex that soaked the legs of his trousers. Near a large saltbush he stumbled over a box, unseen in the darkness. The baby coughed again, and John realised the infant was in the box.

Picking it up, he looked at the little bundle it contained. The baby had been wrapped in a woollen blanket, now soaked by the rain. Even in the darkness he could make out the little pale face. “Bloody hell! It’s a white child. How the hell did you get here, little fella?”

John reached in to touch the baby’s cheek and was alarmed to feel it as cold as hoar frost. “You’ve been out in the storm. You’re freezing cold, little man.”

He placed the box on the ground and shrugged his jacket off, then carefully lifted the baby and unwrapped it from the sodden blanket. “I do beg your pardon—you’re a little lady, not a fella.” He pulled off his shirt and used it to towel the baby dry, then wrapped her up in his jacket. “Let’s get you in out of the cold, sweetheart.”

After putting his damp shirt back on, John returned the baby to her makeshift crib and carried her to his horse. It took him several attempts to mount while holding the box, but he made it at last, settled the box in front of him, and turned the horse towards the south.

Twenty minutes later, he reached his camp. Leaving the horse untethered by the door, he went inside and placed the box by the cast-iron stove.

He lit a lantern, pulled the door to the firebox open, and was relieved to see a few glowing coals among the ashes. Quickly he added kindling and blew into the opening until the flames took hold, adding more wood as he went. Then he retrieved a soft woollen blanket from his bed and unwrapped the baby girl once more.

By the light of the lantern he saw the worm-like umbilical cord, four inches long and tied with black cotton. Her eyes were open, and she seemed to be at peace until a series of coughs wracked the tiny body.

John wrapped her snugly in his blanket and rummaged through the cupboard until he found an opened tin of condensed milk. He dipped his little finger into the tin and slipped it into the baby’s mouth. The infant sucked greedily until the milk was gone. When John removed his finger to recoat it, she let out an indignant wail. “All right, sweetheart. It’s coming.” He recoated his finger, and the greedy, slurping noises resumed.

John kept this up until the tin was empty. Then he picked up the infant, laid her over one shoulder, and patted her back until she burped. “I can remember doing this with my little Judith, God rest her soul.” The baby burped again, and followed it up with vomit that ran down John’s back. “The condensed milk is too rich, isn’t it, little one? We shall have to do something about that.”

He found another tin of condensed milk and poured half of it into an enamel mug, then topped off the mug with water from a jug and gave it a stir. Positioning a chair by the stove, he took up the baby and repeated the process, using his little finger like a teat. The baby drank thirstily until the mug was empty. John burped her again, then placed her back in the box, where she fell asleep.

He stood for a while, watching the rise and fall of the blanket as she breathed. The condensed milk could offer only temporary relief. The baby had been born recently, possibly even that night, since the umbilical cord was still moist. She needed proper milk from a nursing mother if she was to survive.

John tucked the blanket firmly around the sleeping girl, then went to the door. Dawn flushed the eastern sky with light. His horse still stood where he had dismounted. He swung onto the animal’s back and spurred it into motion.

He found the Coolgardie track and turned south, towards a stand of mallee trees where primitive gunyahs had been built around a communal campfire. Aboriginal men sat by the fire, and, despite the early hour, children were playing in the open space with sticks and stones. They yelled and laughed at each other as they ran about, but they stopped and stood motionless, staring up with curious eyes, when the white man rode into camp.

As John reined in, an old man stepped forward on legs hardly thick enough to support his weight. His beard carried the frost of age, and his once dark skin was as dry as the desert itself. The old man’s broad nose seemed to fill half his face.

John swung off the horse and bowed his head. “Greetings, respected elder.”

The assembled men let out a collective gasp, for John had spoken the language of the Desert People.

The old man smiled, his white teeth splitting his dark face. “Greetings, Kapi.”

John felt a twinge of nostalgia at the use of his desert name—the word for water, a name he had been given as a boy by this very man. “You’re looking well, Albert,” he said.

The elder dismissed the words with a wave of his leathery hand. “Not so well as when I rode with you and your grandfather, Kapi. By the stars, we ate up some miles. Now my old legs can barely take me out of sight for a piss on a dark night.”

John chuckled, and Albert placed a hand on his shoulder. “Come, Kapi. Share my fire and tell me what brings you to my camp. You must tell me about my grandson. Is he behaving himself?”

“I’ll share your fire another time, Albert. Right now I’m in a desperate hurry. I need a mother still feeding from her breast, a woman who has milk to spare for another child.”

The elder gave a slow nod. “There is one who may be able to help. Her child was taken by the ancestors not too long ago.”

“Can I speak with her? I need to hurry. The child is very hungry.”

Albert turned to a group of women who were sitting by a second fire and raised his voice. “Nellie?”

From among the group came a reluctant form. Nellie shuffled forward slowly, her head held low. She wore a threadbare, stained cotton dress. There were no shoes on her feet, and her hair hung in knots that partly obscured her face. She stopped a few paces behind Albert and studied John with a look of fear. He guessed she was no older than eighteen.

“Your child is dead?” John asked.

Nellie gave a little nod.

“You still have milk?”

Nellie nodded again, and John caught a flash of grief in her dark eyes.

“I have a child who’s hungry and has no mother to feed her. Will you help me?”

Nellie looked to Albert, and he explained to John, “She is from my cousin’s family She and her infant daughter came to me from their camp many days east of here, when her husband died.”

John nodded, then spoke directly to Nellie. “I will not harm you.”

She looked to Albert again, and the elder pointed at John. “It’s your choice, girl. I know this man. I knew his father and his grandfather. They were both good men. Kapi saved my life once, when we ventured out into the Burning Blue as younger men.”

“A long time ago,” John admitted. “Now I’m the one in need of help.”

“This baby very sick?” Nellie asked in a weak, nasally voice.

“No, just very hungry. She has no mother to feed her.”

The woman pondered John’s words for a moment and then stepped towards him. “You’d better take me to her, plenty quick.”

John heard the baby crying as he neared the shack. In the yard beyond, several of his camels were crowded at the rail waiting to be fed, a task he and Jimmy normally performed at sunrise. “Won’t be long!” he called to the watching animals. “Sounds like there’s one inside who’s even hungrier than you lot.”

Nellie had refused to sit on the horse behind John; instead she had trotted along behind him on her skinny legs. “That the baby?” she asked now, pointing at the hut, only a little out of breath.

“That’s the one,” John said. He swung down from his horse and looped the reins over the branch of a tree. “C’mon. She’s hungry again.”

He opened the door and ushered Nellie inside. Light flooded in through the small four-paned window on the eastern side of the hut, illuminating the brandy box by the stove. John went to it and picked up the baby, cradling her in his arms and making shushing noises. “There, there, little one.”

He rocked the infant gently as he carried her to where Nellie stood by the door. “This is Nellie, and she’s gonna fix you up.”

He passed the baby to the Aboriginal woman, who gazed down on the little face, red with rage and indignation. “She’s loud, this one.” Without the least show of modesty, Nellie fished a breast out of her dress and guided the nipple to the baby’s mouth. The lamenting wail was instantly replaced by sucking noises.

“That seems to have done the trick,” John said, smiling at the feeding girl. He pointed at two wooden chairs beside a small deal table. “You can sit if you want. The chairs or the bed. Make yourself comfortable. I’ll leave you to feed her and put her to sleep. I need to feed my camels.”

“What’s her name?” Nellie asked, without lifting her gaze from the suckling infant.

John paused, his hand on the doorlatch and a look of puzzlement on his face. “I don’t know that she has one.” Judith sprang to mind, but he immediately dismissed it; there was still too much pain and grief associated with that name. His gaze settled on the wooden box in which he had found the baby. Once it had contained a dozen bottles of brandy, and the word was stencilled on the side in blue paint. “Why don’t we call her Brandy?” he said.

“Brandy?” Nellie repeated.

“Yes, Brandy.”

John opened the door and went out into the yard. Beside the camel yard stood a lean-to hut made of rough boards, with a flap of rawhide covering the opening. John crossed to it and kicked the wall with the toe of his boot. “Hey, Jimmy! The bloody sun’s been up for an hour, you lazy bugger. These camels aren’t going to feed themselves.”

A few grunts and groans issued from within. Moments later, the flap parted and a black face squinted out into the day. The skin of Jimmy’s face still held the shiny smoothness of youth. A few sparse whiskers, as long as fingers, sprouted from his chin. John had tried to get the young Aborigine to shave them off, but Jimmy stubbornly refused, claiming that his facial growth made him a man.

He came out of the hut and stood stark naked in the yard, a pair of trousers clutched in his hand.

“Better hurry up and pull your strides on, mate. We’ve got company. Female company.”

Jimmy glanced at John’s hut, then stepped quickly into the trousers. He secured them about his waist with a length of rope. “You got a woman now, boss?”

John was moving towards the shed where he kept the fodder for his camels and horses. He stopped and looked back. “Not in the way you’re thinking. I found a baby last night. The woman is feeding her.”

“A baby?”

“Yeah. Bloody hell, mate, didn’t you hear her crying in the night?”

Jimmy shook his head.

“She was in a box beside the track out to the Cullotty mine. Your grandfather found me a nursing mother so the little bugger won’t starve.”

Jimmy gave a nod of acceptance, as if finding abandoned babies out on the track was a common occurrence. He hurried across the yard as John swung the shed doors wide. “You gonna keep the baby, boss?”

John gathered up an armful of fodder and headed for the paddock. “Can’t, really,” he said as he reached the rails and dropped the fodder over.

The six camels on the other side jostled each other for position, grunting and spitting until a pecking order had been established.

John turned back to Jimmy. “I don’t have time to care for a baby.”

BEYOND THE BURNING BLUE is a historical novel that explores whether a father’s belated love for a long-lost child can redeem the evil act that destroyed his family. I wrote it after being inspired by an Australian legend of a lost gold reef in the desert.

In 1894, Joe Cochrane’s wife dies in childbirth. Drunk and grief-stricken, he abandons his baby daughter in a box in bushland. John McComb, an older man, discovers the baby and takes her in, raising her as his own. He names the girl Brandy, after the box in which she was found, and employs Nellie, an Aboriginal woman, as a nanny. Nellie raises Brandy on stories of Aboriginal myths and legends. The young girl fills a hollowness in John’s soul, but his joy is tainted by his guilt over the lies he tells her to satisfy her curiosity about her mother.

Years later, John takes a job guiding prospecting teams into the desert, colloquially known as The Burning Blue. One day, he and the group he is leading discover a rich gold reef. However, they lose their camels and are forced to walk back to civilisation. John alone makes it back alive, his mind and health ruined.

Meanwhile, during a botched robbery, Joe Cochrane is wounded and arrested. While being wheeled to surgery, he sees Brandy, now a young woman, sitting beside John’s hospital bed. She is the spitting image of Joe’s dead wife, and he vows to escape custody and find out the truth about his daughter, who he always suspected might still be alive.

John passes away and is buried with the woman Brandy believes to be her mother. However, the dates on the tombstone reveal that the woman died years before Brandy was born. Angry that John lied to her, she questions Nellie about her origins, but what her nanny tells her only deepens the mystery.

In John’s journal, Brandy learns of the gold reef, and she and her boyfriend, Peter Rafferty, put together an expedition to reclaim it. They head into the desert, unaware that Joe has escaped custody and is hiding in one of their trucks. At the same time, a brutish man named Cole Baker is following them with a group of henchmen, intent on claiming the reef for himself.

When Joe is discovered, he confronts Brandy and tells her that she is his daughter. Brandy doesn’t believe him, yet the information Joe offers fills the gaps in what she does know. She is tormented by the possibility that he might be speaking the truth, although her love for John is unwavering.

When she and Peter find the reef, they are horrified to discover that it is a place sacred to the Desert People of Nellie’s stories. If mining were to take place, the site would be destroyed. They decide to claim it for themselves and protect it in that way, but before they can go back, Cole Baker arrives. Determined to prevent Brandy from returning to Kalgoorlie and filing a claim, he kills some members of her expedition, burns her transport, and prepares to abandon her in the desert.

In a desperate bid to earn redemption, Joe confronts Baker in a deadly showdown, striving to save the daughter he abandoned long ago.