This is a work of fiction. I want that said before the dust settles.

The central figure is inspired by my maternal grandfather, Frank Dvoretsky Cohen, born in Ballarat, Victoria, in 1894. Family oral history, and genealogical research that has only recently become available, give me the broad outline of his early life: the loss of his parents, his years as a child laborer, and the long silence that followed. Beyond those limited facts, almost everything in these pages is invented. I have changed names, altered dates and places, and made scenes that never occurred. What became of his parents is a story I am telling because he never learned their fate, and neither have I. The novel is one imaginative response to that absence. It is not a claim about what happened.

The working title is *Stay Outside! An Edwardian Australian Story of an Abandoned Child*. It is my third novel, and it is still in draft.

I did not choose the title for atmosphere. In the book, the sentence is spoken as a verdict. It is what a community says when someone marries outside it, carries a child outside it, fails to look sufficiently English, or simply has nowhere left to stand. A synagogue can say it. A schoolyard can say it. A small town on the way to a selection can say it. The landscapes change. The expulsion does not.

The novel opens years after that sentence, in Broken Hill, in the middle of a red duster. Midday has turned to an unnatural midnight. Wet cloths. A rattling window. A wall of stripped topsoil — drought, overstocking, rabbits — swallowing the town. I began there because I did not want the reader to meet only the boy with the papers and the shoe-shine kit. I wanted the man that boy becomes: a motor dealer in a good suit, a husband, a father, a man who can hire a crew to scrub the house and still cannot keep the grit out of the seams of his shirts. The dust is not backdrop. It is the same country that once had no place for him, now covering everything he has built.

From that storm the book turns, and drops back. Zhetl to Birmingham. Birmingham to Ballarat, into the depression of the 1890s. Carlton, and the smell of yeast and rye. Brunswick, and the streets. Then the ranges south of Yarram, where a winter road is not a road: ruts, then logs slick with moss, then a track marked only by an axe-chip in the bark. Twenty-five miles on a map is not twenty-five miles in the gullies.

The childhood chapters sit in the Edwardian years, but I am not writing costume. I am writing the machinery. A compulsory-schooling law that poverty routinely beat. A few shillings a week to board a child out, with no promise the child would be placed with the adult who wanted them. A land act that lowered the price of bad country and still required a selector to clear it, fence it, and reside on it. Later, the break of gauge, the overnight train, a dealership that can be sealed against a dust storm and still not answer the question of whether this place can be called home.

Readers who know my family will recognize the skeleton: Ballarat, Carlton, a Jewish baker, a large South Australian family, a child who went on to the motor trade. They should not recognize the rooms. The conversations are made. The explanations are made. Frank himself lived with the not-knowing. The novel refuses to solve that for him, even when it imagines a solution.

Six chapters in, the boy is still on the road into the ranges, in a coat bought large enough to grow into. He has already decided he will be rich, and that he will treat his family right. The novel knows more than he does about how those promises will be kept.

The draft continues. The dust, for the moment, does not.