Yadaka’s escape and wanted status

Yadaka’s escape and wanted status expose the collision between colonial policing and Indigenous belonging: repeatedly confined and pursued, he travels north toward his people, finds welcome at a gathering of nations, and becomes a keeper of a story entrusted to him by Ginny May. Later, wanted for killings he says were committed in self-defence after an unjust arrest, he takes refuge with Molly Johnson. His presence puts her household at risk, yet their meeting also gives Molly knowledge of her origins and makes his flight part of the family’s struggle against colonial authority.

Confinement and Escape

After being taken from Pentridge Prison by Father Matthews, Yadaka had been given a place in the Matthews household and taught to read and write. He was grateful for their help, but continued to yearn for his land and his mother’s country in Far North Queensland. He wanted to return to his clan and repeatedly tried to escape; each attempt before the last ended in his capture and return.

At twenty-five, Yadaka escaped successfully and made his way north through the mountain ranges. He encountered other clans travelling in the same direction, but kept his distance because approaching people beyond one’s own tribe could be dangerous, especially for someone who did not belong to that country. He eventually reached a large gathering of nations, tribes, and clans. His journey is therefore both a flight from confinement and a search for a community to which he can safely introduce himself.

Welcome and Responsibility

The gathering was associated with ceremony and the celebration of the bogong moth, whose seasonal abundance provided food before winter. Yadaka stayed at its perimeter until he had worked out which nation was hosting, then explained his plight to its elders. A woman in her early sixties took an interest in him; after the elders considered his request, she adopted him, and he called her Njadjan, meaning mother. Yadaka had not seen his own mother since he was twelve and did not know whether she was still alive, so the welcome offered a form of kinship without erasing his longing to return home.

The woman was Ginny May, and her adoption of Yadaka also entrusted him with a story she had been forbidden to share within her clan. It concerned treachery, broken law, and forbidden love, and was treated as a story that brought bad luck. By choosing Yadaka as her son, Ginny May could pass it on: he became responsible for keeping it alive. His movement from fugitive to storykeeper gives the journey a cultural consequence beyond his own survival.

Wanted Status and the Pursuit

Yadaka’s later flight is tied to a pattern of racialized policing. When Molly Johnson worries that helping him could bring troopers to her home, he explains that his supposed crime is simply being Black. The narrative places his vulnerability within a broader climate in which Aboriginal people are blamed, arrested, imprisoned, driven from their homelands, or exposed to unofficial permission for settlers to shoot them on sight. His fugitive status is not presented as a private matter detached from that system.

A telegram reports that a trooper and a Native Police officer were found dead north of the Victorian border after escorting a prisoner. The prisoner had killed them and was wounded in the lower back. Sergeant Nate Clintoff connects this report to the wanted man and wonders why he has returned to the mountains. The search is organized around a wanted-poster portrait, a reported wound, and the routes through which Aboriginal people travel; Spencer Leslie proposes bringing troopers and trackers from Jarren’s Outpost. Nate notes that their route could pass through the Johnson property, while Spencer says Molly will be checked on only after a delay of two days, if the party leaves at once. The possibility of official scrutiny thus reaches Molly’s isolated home before the pursuing party does.

Recognition and Arrest

When Spencer visits Molly’s home, Yadaka is initially able to remain in the background. The full moon reveals his face, and Spencer recognizes him as the man wanted for the deaths of the Edwards family, their Chinese house-hands, a trooper, and a Native Police officer. Spencer orders him not to move, seeing an opportunity to establish his own credibility by capturing the wanted man.

Spencer later arrests Yadaka in the Queen’s name for the murders of Missus Edwards and her three children, Trooper Phillips, and Native Police officer Dempsey Buckskin. Molly is startled because Yadaka had not told her about the deaths of the men. The brief exchange of looks between them registers both her new uncertainty and his wish to explain his side before the trooper interrupts. The arrest makes the cost of sheltering him immediate: Spencer also orders Molly to accompany him to the lock-up for questioning.

The narrative gives Yadaka’s account of the two officers’ deaths: he killed them because he was being arrested for something he had not done and believed there would be no trial. Faced with what he understood as a choice between living and dying, he chose to live. He also recognizes that Spencer is uncomfortable in a confrontation and that a panicked response could endanger both him and Molly. Rather than reduce his actions to the authorities’ description of a wanted murderer, the account connects them to his fear of an unjust process and to the imminent danger surrounding the arrest.

Consequences for Molly and Her Children

Before the arrest, Yadaka has told Molly about her origins. He understands this knowledge as a gift and recognizes that meeting her has mattered even as his own future grows grim. That disclosure becomes significant when the threat of child removal surfaces: Miss Shirley labels Molly’s children octaroons and asks Judge Eisenmangher to authorize their removal; the judge signs the order. When Danny returns to Molly and tells her what happened, she recognizes the term from an earlier episode in her own childhood and understands that her children are in danger because of racial classification and the story Yadaka has shared.

Molly later binds Miss Shirley and Father McGuinness, takes the removal order, and burns it before leaving with her children. The paper’s language authorizes separation in the name of the children’s safety; Molly’s destruction of it rejects that authority and its claim to define her family. Yadaka’s presence has helped expose the history behind the threat, even though his arrest has also left Molly to face its consequences without him.

The novel’s account of Yadaka’s fugitive life therefore holds two forms of pursuit together: the state’s search for a wanted man and his own movement toward land, kin, and cultural responsibility. His escape leads not to a simple return home but to temporary belonging, a story entrusted for preservation, and a meeting that changes what Molly understands about herself. The police can identify and arrest him, but their classification does not contain the relationships or knowledge his journey has carried.