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they were shone by hand. On the Friday of my first steps, this task was being done by Jimmie Walker, a cheerful and willing Irish lad in his late teens. Jimmie had been sent out by an emigrants’ welfare organization to find his fortune in Australia. He was desperately homesick when he came to Coorain, and loved to play with us children because we reminded him of his brothers and sisters at home. We were entranced with a new playmate and were always by his side as he worked. His metabolism was attuned to gentler climates and we children were astonished and fascinated by the extent of his perspiration compared with that of the hard-bitten Australians we knew. On this Friday I was assisting the floor polishing by crawling backwards in front of him ever alert to the point when a river of perspiration would drop from his forehead and nose and smear the beauty of the floor he was polishing. While we were thus engaged, he on hands and knees, and I crawling backwards intently observing his forehead, I suddenly stood erect and went to fetch a fresh towel for dealing with the flood. I don’t recall the steps, but I have a clear picture of the excited faces of my mother and brothers summoned by Jimmie’s shout.
    Another of my earliest memories is of my mother singing me to sleep seated on a cane chair on the front veranda of the house. She and I, and the governess instructing my brothers in a nearby room, were a tiny island of women in a world that revolved around male activities. Her voice was cheerful, positive, and relaxed as she hugged me warmly. I recall the comfort and security of being sung to sleep and also some tentative efforts to struggle out of the warm embrace. I was born with a different type of skin and hair from the rest of the family. Their hair grewluxuriantly and curled. Mine was fine and limply straight. They tanned in the sun. I freckled and grew scarlet. The tweed coat my mother was wearing as she cradled me scratched and prickled so that mixed in with the security was a sense of being ill at ease. The memory is symbolic of the way our relationship was to unfold.
    We did not see my father until he came home from the run in the late afternoon or early evening. As we saw the car on the horizon or his figure on horseback silhouetted on the skyline, we would rush to finish whatever task or game was under way to be ready to greet him by the gate to the stableyard. He would stable the horse, or put the car away, and then make his way to the house carrying me on his shoulders, with the two boys circling around, our questions about his day tumbling out helter-skelter. Had he seen any snakes? Were there any lambs yet? Was there much water in the dam at Brooklins (one of the largest and most distant paddocks), part of the recent addition to the property, a second grant, which brought its acreage to thirty-two thousand acres. Occasionally we would have news of our own to offer. We had found an emu’s egg on a walk. Jimmie had shot a hawk with a wingspan of four feet. Bob had reached the top of one of the climbable trees nearby. Our world revolved around the land and its creatures, the weather, and our parents. After my father had bathed and changed he and my mother would sit in the shade, on the edge of the front veranda, drinking a glass of ice-cold beer before dinner. We were instructed to keep our distance and to remain quiet during their one moment of relaxation in the day. We would watch from a distance as they sat, close together, enjoying a stirring evening breeze. Their feet rested on the large nardoo stone which formed the front step, and as they talked they would gaze out over their land, discussing this project, or that pipedream. My mother’s conversation would be intense and serious, but before long my father’s way with words, puns, and storytelling would have her laughing. They would look out on their world with high good humor. They seemed content.

3.

CHILDHOOD
    B ECAUSE OF MY parents’ thrift, hard