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in an even deeper way it was probably true.
    The authority of her childhood years remained with Edith, the lives of her grandfather, his friends and her parents and their friends binding her to a respect for their values which she could not easily desert in her own art. She was convinced she had been born into a worthy tradition. And like her family she believed, often against her youthful inclination to rebel, thatshe owed a debt to that inheritance and was honour bound to repay it. Society, Edith understood, would require from her something of worth in return for the advantages of her birth. Indeed, that something was owed she accepted as a founding principle of her caste.
    All that splendid illusion lying in the future for those two Manner girls when they were twelve and nine and Edith’s grandfather offered their father a place to camp while he got his finances together after their return from France. Hence the head and shoulders study, dutifully hung in the parlour of the Anderson family’s Melbourne home in Brighton, in case the great Mr Max Manner or his daughters ever returned for a visit. But they never did. ‘He obscured my eyes with that dark shadow of my hat brim,’ Edith’s grandfather complained. But Edith had always thought the picture the very likeness of him, imagining within the luminous shadow of his fedora’s brim the familiar light of innocent pleasure in his eyes. She had never known her grandfather sombre or preoccupied but on one occasion. She found him one summer evening in the garden at Brighton, sitting alone on the bench within the bower of the old apple tree. He was weeping. She did not ask him why he wept, but leaned her child’s weight against him and took his large hand in both her own, and waited there with him in the shared silence of his grief—which, she remembers with sudden acute clarity now, was chipped away at by an angry blackbird in the laurels. She never learned the cause of her grandfather’s grief that day.
    As a young man her grandfather had studied in London at the Slade school, learning the tedious perfection of anatomical drawing from Henry Tonks. Then later, in Paris, he won agreatly coveted place in the Atelier of Fernand Cormon, where he met the Australian artist John Peter Russell. The young Thomas Anderson and the young John Russell were both skilled boxers and soon became firm friends. Thomas had no enthusiasm, however, for the revolt against Fernand Cormon’s formal academism mounted by his fiery fellow students—among them the dangerously unstable Van Gogh, who liked to make threats of violence and to nervously finger a black revolver that he kept in his overcoat pocket. Crusaders for the revolution of modernism. Well, there did seem to be some kind of ultimate truth in it at the time that might even have been worth dying for (though none did) but was certainly worth living for.
    It was not modernism that excited Thomas’s imagination. John Russell’s stories of his home inspired in Thomas an enticing vision of an exotic Australia on the far side of the world. John was happy to give his friend Melbourne introductions. When Thomas arrived at Port Melbourne it was a blustery winter day of bright sunshine and harried clouds rushing across the bay from the Southern Ocean, as if something out there had panicked them into making a dash for the safety of land. Ten minutes after stepping out of the customs shed and nearly having his hat blown off the end of Station Pier, Thomas met the beautiful young Gwendoline Pocock. Miss Pocock was at the port with her mother and father seeing her eldest brother off to England, where he was to study something useful at Cambridge. Thomas gallantly held the train carriage door open for Gwendoline and her parents. Encouraged by the blush on her cheek and her murmured, ‘Thank you,’ he stepped into the carriage after them and sat himself down opposite her. And he smiled. And she smiled back. It was the old story. He alwayssaid it