"People felt the change long before they understood it. Fishermen stood on the jetty at
dawn, their boots white with salt, their nets limp in their hands, staring at
water the colour of weak tea. The estuary, once alive with splashes and
wingbeats and the clatter of crabs on pylons, lay still as a held breath. A
mullet flicked once, then drifted belly‑up. Farmers walked their paddocks in the earlyheat, their boots sinking into dust that used to be soil, the cracks wide
enough now to swallow a hand." This paragraph is in the prelude