Yewarra

Yewarra is Cameron Hillier’s estate in the Blue Mountains and one of the novel’s most important spaces of transition. Liz Montrose first approaches it feeling that she is entering a zone beyond her control, but the estate gradually becomes the place where her organisational abilities are recognised, where Scout and Archie form a shared childhood world, and where Cameron’s private family history is made visible. By the time Liz and Cameron marry, Yewarra has become more than property: it is the domestic centre of the family they choose to build.

Setting and Physical Character

Yewarra lies beyond Sydney, reached by road through the Blue Mountains. As Cameron drives the Graphite-blue Aston Martin west, the landscape rises beyond Penrith into rugged plateau country scored by gullies and ravines and veiled in the blue haze produced by oils released from eucalyptus forests. The mountains are described as both awe-inspiring and secretive, a quality that prepares for Yewarra itself: secluded, impressive, and initially difficult for Liz to read.

The estate announces its boundaries through tall wrought-iron gates. Cameron opens them from the car, presses the dashboard buzzer, and formally welcomes Liz to Yewarra. Her first reaction is not simple pleasure. She briefly wants to escape the car, the estate, and Cameron himself, feeling overburdened and deprived of control. That anxiety changes as he drives slowly up the gravelled driveway. Beneath majestic trees, white and blue agapanthus grow among flowering jasmine, honeysuckle, jacarandas in pale violet bloom, gardenias, and roses. The grounds become a riot of colour and perfume, and Liz’s apprehension gives way to enchantment.

The house stands beyond a fountain as a two-storeyed building of warm, earthy stone with a shingle roof. Timber-framed windows carry wrought-iron security grids, while the carved double front door bears a dolphin motif with curved brass handles. The architecture combines beauty with protection, making the estate both a gracious retreat and a guarded domain. Its refinement is linked to Cameron’s mother, whose love of gardens and innate sense of elegant living survived the harsher life she shared with his father.

Estate as Workplace and Household

Cameron brings Liz to Yewarra under the stated pretext of engaging staff, then reveals that he wants to offer her the position of managing the estate. The role is explicitly logistical rather than domestic. Yewarra hosts frequent entertainments and house parties, and although Cameron already has capable household staff, he needs someone to coordinate arrangements in the house and stables. The position would also relieve the studmaster and the people working with the horses of paperwork and shield them from the stream of visitors passing through the estate.

The offer changes the meaning of Yewarra for Liz. She is not merely being invited into Cameron’s private world as an observer or employee performing secretarial tasks; she is being asked to organise the machinery that makes that world function. Cameron tells her that she is as good as Roger Woodward, and possibly better in some areas, and that she is wasted as a diary secretary. He identifies both organisational and people skills in her, presenting Yewarra as the place where abilities that have been underused can acquire an appropriate scale.

The position includes a comfortable staff cottage large enough for Liz, Scout, and Mary Montrose. It therefore offers a practical answer to the needs of a three-generation household rather than an individual career opportunity alone. Cameron also points to Archie as a ready-made friend for Scout. Employment, accommodation, childcare, and companionship are thus joined in the proposal, making Yewarra a structure capable of absorbing Liz’s existing family responsibilities.

Family Memory and Intergenerational Meaning

Yewarra carries Cameron’s memory of his parents. In his study, paintings of horses, trawlers, and Shakespeare recall the family’s work, interests, and inheritance. The trawler Miss Miranda is especially important because it was the first trawler Cameron’s parents bought; the newer Miss Miranda II is larger but has not yet been immortalised in paint. The estate’s cultivated beauty therefore exists alongside the history of boats, fishing, and labour that produced the family’s wealth.

Cameron remembers his parents as an unlikely couple: his mother came from an impoverished but blue-blooded background, while his father was a laconic bushman raised on a cattle station in Cooktown in Far North Queensland, with the sea in his veins and a dream of owning a prawning fleet. His mother’s relatives, the Hastings family, effectively cast her off except for Narelle Hastings, yet the marriage endured through breakdowns at sea, tropical heat, disappointing catches, and exhausting work. Her ability to make a home anywhere, even through a hibiscus bloom in a glass or a small arrangement of shells, becomes part of the emotional meaning of Yewarra.

The gardens are consequently not decorative excess alone. They are Cameron’s tribute to a mother whose longing for gracious houses and temperate gardens survived difficult circumstances. Yewarra gives permanent form to the domestic beauty she had once carried from place to place, while its connection to the trawlers preserves the history of the family’s struggle. The estate is a reconciliation of cultivated refinement and practical Australian enterprise.

Children, Care, and Everyday Life

Yewarra contains spaces designed for children as well as for adult entertaining. Liz is impressed by the nursery wing, particularly its playroom, whose walls display large cut-outs of characters from Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, and other stories. The wing includes a kitchenette and three bedrooms, making it a self-contained environment for children and their carers. Cameron’s decision to place Liz’s family within this setting allows the estate to function as a shared household rather than as an adult retreat to which children are merely accommodated.

Scout soon becomes close to Daisy Kerr, Archie’s nanny, a practical and responsible woman with a streak of romance and nonsense suited to children’s imaginative play. Liz and Daisy join forces to occupy Scout and Archie with games. One favourite is the baby elephant walk, inspired by the birth of a real baby elephant at Taronga Zoo and by Henry Mancini’s “Baby Elephant Walk” from Hatari. The adults imitate elephants through the playroom with one arm extended as a trunk and the other behind the back, until the children join in and everyone collapses in laughter. Cameron watches unseen from the doorway, and his laughter and approving glance mark his acceptance of this informal, playful version of life at Yewarra.

The estate also becomes a place where children’s disappointments are handled through care rather than command. When Archie worries that he cannot play the didgeridoo Cameron has brought him, because Cameron has said that girls are not allowed to play it, Liz kneels beside him and reframes the problem. She explains that the instrument requires special breathing and greater age, then proposes that they investigate how didgeridoos are made and where his might have come from. Yewarra thus holds both the privileges and the tensions of the world beyond it, while Liz’s care turns a troubling rule into an opportunity for curiosity and learning.

From Private Estate to Chosen Home

Yewarra’s decisive transformation occurs after separation and return. When Liz and Cameron fly back to the estate, Mrs Preston and Daisy greet them with tears, while Bob and his wife and Hamish, the head gardener, wait at the helipad. Archie’s reaction gives the estate’s emotional stakes their clearest expression: he fears that Liz will leave again and says that nothing feels the same when she is absent. Liz promises that she and Scout will not go away again, and the children race together toward the menagerie.

That reunion shows that Yewarra’s household has extended beyond employer, employee, and visitor. Its bonds include carers, staff, children, and the adults who have become responsible to one another. The estate’s helipad, gardens, house, nursery, stables, and menagerie form a network of shared spaces, but belonging is ultimately confirmed through the children’s fear of renewed absence and Liz’s promise of permanence.

Several weeks later, Liz and Cameron marry on Whitehaven Beach, with Archie and Scout present, and later remain together as they cruise the Whitsundays. Although the wedding is held away from Yewarra, the estate is the place to which the newly formed family returns and is welcomed. Its significance lies in this movement from guarded possession to relational home: Yewarra begins as Cameron’s controlled domain, becomes Liz’s workplace and residence, and ends as the setting whose household recognises her return as the restoration of its own wholeness.