Visit with Hanson family, tour area with Aboriginal guide.

What do 1,000 cockatoos sound like in the morning right outside your window? Answer: You don’t know because you can’t think. The sound is so loud that it numbs your senses. David gets up for a run, walks out the door, and sees the sunrise cresting distant hills and about 100 kangaroos grazing in the field in front of the cabin. Half of them turn and give him that “roo stare:” a mix of curiosity, self-preservation and photo-op self-awareness.

A couple emus stalk by, their foghorn calls drifting away in a gentle breeze.

We dash down the road to the Brambuk Cultural Center for our “Six Seasons” tour and get blank stares when we arrive (less interested, even, than the roos’ reactions). “How did you book?” We’re asked. A somewhat silent woman takes us from one building to another and turns us over to an elderly gent who says, “Ah. Uhm. Have a look at some of the exhibits over there and I’ll just make a call.” Variations of this play out for about 45 minutes and finally a guy named Geoff Clark shows up. He is an aborigine and was the originator of the cultural center, the first president of the Australian Aborigine Council (not sure that’s the accurate title and name), a drafter of the Declaration of Indigenous People’s Rights (again, not 100% on the accuracy, but the “positioning” is spot on), and one of the principal negotiators who produced the Native Title Act in 1993, following the Mabo decision by the High Court (remember the painting in the Melbourne Museum).

He loads us into his SUV and takes us to a “scar tree” at the edge of a field in the middle of nowhere. The tree is long dead, a silver stump about five feet around and 12 feet tall. It has two scars where bark has been removed, leaving a slightly gnarled indentation in the side of the tree. One scar is a little bigger than Cynthia’s palm. “It is a boundary marker,” Geoff tells us. “It marks the line between two clans. You may have been able to pass across one of these, but if you passed more, you’d be speared. Only a clan’s official ambassador could cross these boundaries with impunity.”

The other scar is much larger: about four feet long and maybe two feet wide. The aborigine who made it cut the bark with a stone in the Spring, when the wood was moist, and pounded the center of the oval cut to make the wood under the bark soften up enough so he could insert a stick under the bark and pry it from the tree in a single piece to make a canoe.

Geoff continues to drive us around the Grampians area, telling us stories from the local clan’s shared Dreamtime: How a spirit named Bunjil was chased by a Bunyip — think a giant seal-shaped spirit … bulbous body with a small head — that caught him and tore off his arms but Bunjil was found by his two brothers, who sewed his arms back, and Bunjil eventually tuned into stars in the sky. Sort of simultaneously, a giant emu rampaged around the countryside, stepping on various mountains so the valleys between them are in the shape of a giant emu’s three-pronged claws but Bunjil’s brothers eventually speared the giant emu.

In Dreamtime some heroes, some with superpowers and others with animal characteristics, embarked on epic journeys across a land originally barren and featureless. Their dreaming tracks sculpted the mountains and rivers. They made all the plants and animals. Each ancestor brought forth a different aboriginal people and for each clan, what their ancestor dreamed on its journey was passed on orally as a map both of the surrounding terrain and a way of life with laws and knowledge and customs. These ancestral tracks are recounted as stories, paintings, songs and dances.

We rejoin Wayne and Myra and, after cocktails and a short walk, we trundle into their car and go to the local pub to meet their son, Ian, his new wife, Sarah, and Sarah’s entertaining parents, Derek and Ann. We have a lively dinner with a Best Vineyard’s Great Western Bin #1 2016 Shiraz — totally quaffable — and a Grampian Estate 2016 Mafeking Gold Chardonnay hand-picked on the eastern slopes of the Grampians by the Moyston-Willania Football Netball Club from a single vineyard and aged in French oak (that’s the description on the bottle … how could I beat that?).

We drive back to the cottage, avoiding several kangaroo that scud across the road or decide to pace us along the scrubby shoulder, and arrive back at the cabin in one piece.

Another day of dreaming in Oz.