"The shearers is on strike," he spat.

"What's a strike, Mr O'Hara?"

"A strike is when the buggers won't work," he spat again. "So we got no wool to carry. The Fergusons got no wool. The Rosses got no wool. The McCorkells got no wool. It's all on the sheep, not in the bale, and there'll be bloody war before there is."

They sat on the back veranda. Jack McGrath stared at Dinny O'Hara. He had never heard of such a thing. "A war."

"A war, a bloody war, that's what they want", O'Hara said, "and that's what they'll get. Boozers and bushrangers", he said, "galloping around with their guns and their speeches. So I'm giving you the sack."

Jack didn't say anything. He remembered breaking a gum twig in half and then in half again. He threw the pieces of broken twig on the ground. He could not understand the justice of it. He was so used to being liked by men. His eyes were suddenly, surprisingly, wet with tears and he turned his head into the shade of the veranda on the pretext of finding something amiss with his kangaroo-hide belt.

"I hear tell," O'Hara said, "there's a fella in Point's Point with a team doing work with the timber. His driver got kilt, run over by his own wheel, the silly bugger."

They didn't shake hands. Young Jack McGrath rolled his swag and started walking the sixty miles to Point's Point. He walked through the bush all night and all the next day. He sang hymns as he walked, not because he was deeply religious, but because they were the only songs he knew. He walked for twenty-four hours and stopped, dead beat, three miles short of Point's Point. He unrolled his swag and slept beneath the bridge at Gaffney's Creek.

The next day he found there was no job and no one had been run over by a wheel. He walked up to the gold mine to try and get work but there wasn't any. The manager of the mine was an Englishman known locally as Twopence Thompson, a name that related to his cunning in money matters.

Twopence Thompson's problem was a thirty-six-ton steam boiler that a previous contractor had abandoned sixteen miles away on the mountain road to Point's Point. He offered Jack McGrath two hundred pounds to bring it into the mine and whether from desperation or a rare fit of generosity, advanced half of the money to enable Jack to buy a team.

The opinion of the town was that they were both fools, Jack for accepting the job and Twopence Thompson for parting with his cash.

Jack McGrath chose his team, paying forty pounds each for good polers and ten pounds each for the rest of the team. He made the yokes from Queensland brush box and spent two weeks rigging together a new harness. Then he walked sixteen miles to the abandoned boiler and studied it. Where the other contractor had tried to pull the thirty-six tons uphill, Jack worked out a series of pullies so his team could move downhill. He anchored the pullies to giant bluegums and began the job. It took him three months. Sometimes he was bogged for a week. At other times he moved it a hundred yards. But move it he did, and Twopence Thompson parted with his other hundred pounds.

His luck had started. He had a good team and he was well respected. He worked in the timber and had he wished he could have drunk himself to death on French champagne as plenty of bullockies had done before him.

He banked his money. There was nothing he wanted to spend it on.

When, in 1910, he bought the charabanc he was thought insane and then shrewd. In his opinion, he'd been neither. He'd been lucky. The gold mine was working hard by then and there was plenty of money in the little town. He took his share of it: running sober miners down to Warburton and bringing drunken ones back.

Ten years later, on the road to Colac, he could still smile about those days. By God it had been fun. He'd driven that Ford, the first of its kind in Victoria, around those winding mountain tracks, stopping every mile or so for men to empty their bladders or settle disputes which were often funnier than the arguments that had begun them. And coming back after a big storm! That was the go. The road blocked by fallen trees. How he had loved shifting them.

They called him "Jack the Gelly" in Point's Point.

He blasted those trees with gelignite and never, as long as he did it, did he ever learn to carry enough fuse so as they approached home the fuses would be shorter and shorter and once, just by the Sixteen Mile Creek, he had been blown nose first into the mud and had a dagger of splintered wood driven into his broad backside by the force of the blast. When the dust settled, his drunken passengers clapped and cheered.

He could still wax poetic about the smell of cordite which had become, in memory, the perfume of the eighteen-ounce gold nugget -shaped like a swallow – he had accidentally blasted from that roadway. He could still feel the soft clay mud as he rubbed the swallow in his hands. He could still smell the sweet sappy wounded wood of the great gums, see his breath suspended in the air above the road in 1910 while his passengers, suddenly sober, gathered in the headlights of the charabanc. They stood in the spluttering light of the acetylene arcs, as silent as men in church, and handed the nugget one to the other.

The Point's Point Historical Society has a cast that was taken of the nugget at the time. It is named, in that dusty little-visited room, "The Swallow". The real name for the nugget was not "The Swallow" at all. It was "Gelly's Luck".

It was also Gelly's luck that he had the honour to drive Molly Rourke from Warburton to Point's Point for the first time: a more proper barmaid than any he had ever seen, a more beautiful woman than he could have imagined.

There are people alive in Point's Point today who have never heard of Molly Rourke but they can tell you the story of how old Sam McCorkell spent a pound one night just on swearing, and how he paid up, meek as a lamb, before going home to strangle his wife and children. The swearing box in the story is Molly's. It changed the Grand Hotel and those who didn't like the restrictions would walk across to the Sandy River Hotel. More often the traffic was the other way and Dusty Miller, the publican of the Sandy River, became disheartened and sat in the parlour drinking Queensland rum. Molly sent men across to cheer him up. A small group, known collectively as Dusty's Bridesmaids, sat with him on his veranda above the river and drank tainted beer from unwashed pipes.

Molly Rourke hated the bush. As everyone said, she was a city girl (she came from Ballarat) and they liked her for it, even while they teased her because of it. She was a point of distinction about the town, like Bert McCulloch's German clock and Mrs Walter Abrahams's fine bone china set. She was something that set them apart from other dusty streets in the middle of the Australian bush.

Jack McGrath drank his lemon squash and fell in love with her, although it took him an awful long time to do anything about it.

On one Saturday afternoon in May he was observed to drink a total of sixteen lemon squashes. The Cavanagh brothers kept a book on it and Bert McCulloch won ten quid.

When, at last, he courted her, it was as delicately as he might (had he been permitted) have picked up Mrs Walter Abrahams's bone china between his big callused fingers. Dusty's Bridesmaids would smile to see them together, the big clumsy man bending over her so attentively, so delicately, as they took their Sunday stroll down the two miles of macadam to the Boggy Creek ford and back again.

He was told often enough how lucky he was to have found Molly. He never doubted it. He expected they would marry and have children and live out their lives in Point's Point and be buried on the hillside amongst the bracken above the river. It was the place where, the man in the Hispano Suiza at last admitted, he really belonged.