The Returning Tree

The boy went with his parents to homestead in New South Wales. But he was a bookish type and didn't like the barren expanses of their homestead. When his father cut down the lone gum tree in their fields, the boy knew that hundreds of white cockatoos that came to roost every night, would never return. The next day, the boy left with his friend, the traveling librarian, and, like the cockatoos, never returned.