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of the Light Horse who has been to Egypt, taken part in the cavalry charge on the Wells of Beersheba, has ridden into Jerusalem behind the victorious General Allenby and walked down the Street Called Straight in Damascus, arrogant in his slouch hat with its emu feathers. He is full of stories of adventure, untainted by the horror of the trenches, for he remained in Egypt when many were shipped off to France, leaving behind their whalers, their prized horses born and bred on the farms of New South Wales. His worst moment, he tells me, was when a camel stamped on his foot. He is his mother’s eldest son, her darling, and spends many an hour on her verandah. He is a tick dodger, a tick inspector, one of an army of returned soldiers, most of them from the Light Horse, employed to wipe out the cattle ticks that are infiltrating the district. This is done by a program of rounding up the herds and swimming them through arsenic dips. It’s easy and pleasant work and few believe the scurrilous rumour that the tickies carry matchboxes full of live ticks to re-infest any herd which seems about to be declared clean .
    This then is the House of Bliss. In this place a child wakes each morning with a glad heart. The magpies and butcher birds greet the day with their holy descants. The dew hangs on fences, garden flowers and weeds alike, and each spoke of the spider webs is hung with diamonds which reflect the light. A rickety spider clings in the centre of her web, bearing the cross of St Andrew effortlessly on her back. The child goes to the washstand on the back verandah and pours water from a china jug into a china dish; many decades later she sees the same thing done by a priest in the great cathedral of Santiago. Jug and dish are patterned with full-blown roses, and the soap is Cashmere Bouquet. To the child the perfume of this soap is as frankincense and myrrh. The water is icy-cold and full of wrigglers from the tank; someone has forgotten to pour kerosene on top of the water. She dips her hands gingerly in the water and carefully baptises her face, two eyes, nose and mouth only, and goes in to face the day. She sits on the kitchen stool leaning on her elbow, one hand languidly supporting her head and gazes adoringly at her Granny across the breakfast table, for she loves her more than anyone on earth. This is the old lady of the garden, the storyteller who carries down through time not only the blood-lines but the family stories, the folklore, the medicinal balm, the wisdom of garden and kitchen, the great burden of unreserved love that only a Granny can give. This is the Great Mother herself, never again to be seen so clearly.
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    At this point I must admit that my childhood was not simply a progression of flower shows, Sunday school picnics and coconut ice; indeed, in retrospect, I can see how shadowed it was. I am told that a chicken is genetically programmed to recognise the dark shadow which sweeps overhead as that of the hawk, without knowing that it is a hawk, or even what a hawk is. The child too, in a home such as ours, is programmed to be prescient, to wait for the shadow that dominates the house without, at this stage, understanding its nature.
    Perhaps anxiety is genetic, absorbed through the umbilical cord, a steady drip seeping into the bloodstream of the developing child. Consider the anxiety of a pregnant girl abandoned on the railway station and even perhaps shoved towards the steel wheels of the locomotive; could this not predispose the child to a similar state of anxiety? Perhaps even (here I become more fanciful) this is a generational thing, a matter of communication through what James Joyce called the daisy-chain of umbilical cords, the anxiety and obsessiveness of each female generation seeping through like a drip, permeating each developing embryo. A clover chain would be more appropriate in our part of the world, where a child could sit comfortably in the pasture and string together the musky cream