The ironbark was the first thing Maya saw from the road, the way it had always been: a dark, rough-skinned column rising from the paddock behind the house, taller than the silo, older than anything else on the place. Her great-grandfather had built the house in its shade. Four generations had hung a swing from its lowest branch. Tomorrow it would belong to a company whose name was three initials and a logo.

She parked beside her father's ute and sat with the engine off. It was the particular silence of the farm in March, after harvest, when the stubble stood in rows like unfinished sentences and the sky was too big to look at for long.

Her father was in the shed, where he always was when something needed not to be said. He was sorting tools into boxes with the slow care of a man packing for a long trip. He looked up, nodded, went back to it.

'You didn't have to come,' he said.

'I know.'

'Your mother's done the kitchen. There's the box of photos she wants you to go through. Take what you want.'

Maya picked up a shifting spanner, turned it over, put it down. The handle was worn pale where his hand had held it for thirty years. 'Is the tree going?'

He didn't answer straight away. 'They've got plans for that paddock. Centre pivot irrigation. The tree's in the way.'

'It's a hundred and fifty years old.'

'It's in the way,' he said again, and there was nothing in his voice at all, which was how she knew.

She walked out to it in the late afternoon. Up close the bark was deeply furrowed, almost black, the fissures packed with the resin that gave the species its name and that had once, her father told her as a child, been used to seal the hulls of boats. She put her palm flat against it. It was warm from the day. Above her the leaves turned their narrow edges to the light the way eucalypts do, giving nothing away.

She had been nine when the long drought came, the one that was supposed to end every winter and never did. She remembered standing here with her father, both of them looking up, while he explained that the ironbark would be fine. It had seen worse. Its roots went down to water that the wheat would never reach. Other things on the farm might die that year, he said, and some did, but not this.

She had believed him then. She was not sure, now, whether he had believed himself, or whether it had simply been something to say to a frightened child at the end of a bad year.

The swing was still there. The rope had greyed and the seat was a plank she did not trust, but she sat on it anyway, carefully, and let her feet drag through the dust.

Her father appeared at the fence. He did not come over. He leaned on the top rail and looked at the tree, and she looked at it too, and for a while they did that together from their separate distances.

'I rang them,' he said eventually. 'The company. Asked if they'd leave it.'

'And?'

'They said they'd look into it.' He said it flatly. They both knew what it meant.

Maya pushed off and the swing moved, a small arc, the rope creaking in a voice she had known since before she could speak. She thought about the roots going down, and down, to water the wheat would never reach. She thought that there were things you could not keep and things you could not carry away, and that the ironbark was both.

'I'll take the photos,' she said. 'And the spanner. If that's all right.'

Her father was quiet for a long time. Then he said, 'It's all right,' and went back to the shed, and she stayed on the swing until the light went out of the paddock and the tree became what it always became at dusk: a shape darker than the dark, still standing, giving nothing away.