In 1964, he signed up as a ranch hand, known as a jackeroo, after embellishing his abilities on horseback, and was sent to the Kimberley, a vast region in northwestern Australia.

The trek doesn’t go quite as planned, and Lola takes a job as a jackeroo — the term is explained — at the winery’s nearby sheep farm.

And how many Americans of any century would say “jackeroo?”

My boyfriend and I have set up a meeting with Father David Barry, a soft-spoken scholar who worked as a bricklayer and as a jackeroo — a cattle station worker — before joining the monastery in 1955.

Happy Valley resembles the country that White rode across as a handsome young jackeroo, an unsalaried apprenticed drover.