However, she had never come back to prove it, and no one cared about asking her alleged husband any unpleasant questions.
So much for the history of its owners; now to describe the homestead itself.

It had originally consisted of the two-roomed slab hut, which had been added to from time to time.

Kitchen, outhouses, bachelors' quarters, saddle-rooms, and store-rooms had been built on in a kind of straggling quadrangle, with many corners and unexpected doorways and passages; and it is reported that a swagman once got his dole of rations at the kitchen, went away, and after turning two or three corners, got so tangled up that when Fate led him back to the kitchen he didn't recognise it, and asked for rations over again, in the firm belief that he was at a different part of the house.
The original building was still the principal living-room, but the house had grown till it contained about twenty rooms.

The slab walls had been plastered and whitewashed, and a wide verandah ran all along the front.
Round the house were acres of garden, with great clumps of willows and acacias, where the magpies sat in the heat of the day and sang to one another in their sweet, low warble.
The house stood on a spur running from the hills.

Looking down the river from it, one saw level flats waving with long grasses, in which the solemn cattle waded knee-deep.