Liz accepts the Yewarra position and moves there

Liz accepts the Yewarra position and moves there in a decisive change of work, home, and social environment. The action is more than a promotion: it removes her from a precarious arrangement that requires weekend work, places her professional abilities in a setting where they can be recognized, and brings her and Scout into closer proximity to Cameron Hillier and his family circle. What first feels like an intrusion into Cam’s controlled world becomes the physical and emotional setting in which Liz builds a more secure life.

The Decision and Its Pressures

Liz’s acceptance follows Cam’s direct request for a decision. When he asks whether she has decided, she initially explains that she has discussed the matter with her mother, then corrects herself and says that she wants the position, provided he has not changed his mind. Her correction matters: she wants the choice to be understood as her own rather than as a decision made for her by Mary Montrose. Cam’s brief reference to her earlier “gone fishing” remark exposes the tension between them, but he confirms that the offer remains open.

Her reasons are both material and personal. The position would place her financially in a much better situation, eliminate the need for part-time weekend work, and strengthen her résumé. Because the work can be done largely from home, it would also give her more time with Scout. Liz connects that practical improvement to her fear that Scout’s father might challenge her suitability as a mother: greater financial stability and more time with her daughter would help her offer Scout more and appear better able to care for her. The decision therefore emerges from the pressure of single motherhood and custody anxiety, not from romance alone.

At the same time, the position is offered because Cam has recognized capacities that her current job conceals. He tells her that she has impressed him and is as good as Roger Woodward, if not better in some areas. In his view, she possesses both organizational and people skills and is wasted as a diary secretary. The move consequently marks a conversion of competence into status: Liz is not merely being rescued from financial strain but being invited to exercise abilities that her former employment leaves unused.

Arrival at Yewarra

Before accepting, Liz experiences Yewarra as a threatening extension of Cam’s authority. As she approaches the estate in his car, she briefly feels like escaping from the car, the property, and Cam himself. She feels overburdened and as though she is entering a zone over which she has no control. The gates make that loss of control concrete, while the estate’s scale reinforces the difference between her existing life and Cam’s wealth.

The first impression changes as Cam drives slowly up the gravel driveway. Beneath majestic trees, white and blue agapanthus fill the beds; jasmine and honeysuckle climb through jacarandas in pale violet bloom, while gardenias and roses add to the abundance of colour and perfume. Yewarra is therefore introduced through a reversal: the enclosed estate that initially suggests possession and surveillance becomes enchanting as a lived landscape. Its beauty does not erase the class and power difference between Liz and Cam, but it makes the new environment inhabitable.

The contrast with Cam’s city house is also significant. His residence, overlooking Sydney Harbour, is stylish, very expensive, and furnished with objects of apparent cultural and financial value, including a jade bonsai tree and a suspected Heidelberg School painting. Yewarra offers another form of privilege: not urban display, but acreage, gardens, stables, animals, and the possibility of daily participation. Liz’s relocation moves her from the polished social interior of Cam’s world into the operational and natural spaces through which his estate functions.

The New Home and Family Arrangement

Cam’s offer includes a comfortable staff cottage large enough for Liz, Scout, and Mary Montrose. He also points to Archie as a ready-made friend for Scout. The arrangement is practical, but it simultaneously constructs a provisional household around Liz’s existing family. She does not have to separate from her daughter or mother in order to advance professionally; the new employment accommodates all three of them.

A month after she begins at Yewarra, Liz has settled into the cottage. It is small but comfortable, with its own fenced garden, creepers covering the white walls, and a canopied double swing seat. The space gives Scout a garden after having lived in an apartment, and it gives Liz a workable domestic base rather than merely a place to sleep. When Liz works from the cottage, an inglenook has been converted into a small office, allowing her to keep an eye on Scout through the window.

The cottage also preserves Liz’s independence within Cam’s estate. She sometimes accepts Mrs Preston’s invitation to eat at the main house, but more often cooks for herself and Scout. When Cam is staying at Yewarra and entertaining, the cottage provides a retreat. The move thus does not simply absorb Liz into Cam’s household. It creates a negotiated boundary between employer and employee, intimacy and autonomy, while still bringing her family into Yewarra’s wider circle.

Work, Competence, and Belonging

Liz’s arrival quickly proves valuable to Yewarra. After a month, she concedes that Cam has kept his promise: the work is demanding but satisfying. She surveys the big house and identifies repairs, replacements, and upgrades, then sets the necessary work in motion. She arranges for part of the stable driveway to be repaved and personally checks all the fence lines across Yewarra.

Her return to practical estate life also restores a part of herself. Bob Collins allows her to ride a quiet mare whenever she wants, and she takes pleasure in being back in the saddle, in the country air, and in the scenery. The position therefore combines administrative responsibility with physical access to the land. Liz is not confined to paperwork; she becomes visibly involved in maintaining the estate and understanding how its spaces operate.

She also establishes a computer program for the stables, an undertaking that comes easily to her and gives her considerable pleasure. The system reflects the particular combination of technical and interpersonal ability Cam saw in her: Liz can organize information while remaining engaged with the people and animals affected by that organization. She often takes Scout and Archie with her to inspect the foals born at Yewarra, and the children invent names for them as they watch them develop from stiff-legged newborns into frisky, confident animals. Through these routines, work becomes a channel for family interaction and the estate becomes a shared environment rather than Cam’s private domain.

Boundaries, Choice, and Later Significance

Liz’s route to Yewarra is framed by earlier movements through spaces controlled by other people. At Narelle Hastings’s mansion, overwhelmed after speaking too openly to Cam, she tries to leave discreetly but finds herself in the kitchen and then in a service courtyard. When the back door is locked, she pushes a bin against the wall, throws her shoes over it, climbs in her dress, and drops to the other side, tearing her tights and grazing her knee. That frantic escape contrasts sharply with her later arrival at Yewarra: first she crosses a wall to regain control of her body and movement; later she passes through estate gates into a new life whose conditions she has chosen.

The contrast is not entirely simple. Yewarra initially threatens to become another enclosure, and Liz’s first response is still the impulse to flee. Her eventual settlement depends on retaining a measure of control: she chooses the position after speaking with Mary, keeps the cottage as a separate domestic space, manages her own household, and demonstrates that she is competent enough to justify the offer on professional grounds. The move consequently represents neither pure escape nor passive incorporation. It is a negotiated transition from vulnerability toward agency.

Its emotional importance grows as Liz’s relationship with Cam changes. Her acceptance is initially explained through finances, résumé-building, time with Scout, and the protection of her maternal position. Yet Yewarra places her in repeated contact with Cam while also giving her a life that is not wholly dependent on him. Later, when Cam presses her about marriage, she must distinguish gratitude from desire; he insists that they want each other and that gratitude is irrelevant. Liz ultimately acknowledges that he is right. Her later confession that she would never have slept with him without loving him, and that her feelings had been for him from much earlier, shows how the practical relocation has become entangled with a deeper attachment.

The movement reaches its fullest consequence when Liz and Cam marry several weeks later on Whitehaven Beach, arriving by helicopter with Scout and Archie while guests travel from Hamilton Island on Leilani and another boat. The wedding does not cancel the earlier significance of Yewarra; it confirms the path that began there. The estate first offers Liz employment and a home compatible with motherhood, then becomes the setting in which her competence, family ties, and love can coexist. Through the move, a space associated with Cam’s wealth is reworked into a shared domestic and relational world.