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‘What do you mean?’
    â€˜Paddo is the top of the restaurant hierarchy, after New Farm which is for foodies, and my own West End, which is far less pretentious than here.’
    Xanthe was offended. ‘I’m not pretentious!’
    â€˜Of course you’re not, Xanthe – everyone drinks Pimms, daaaahling!’ Ellen said cheekily, waving her already half-drunk cocktail in the air.
    â€˜What I meant,’ Izzy glared at Ellen who was always trying to be funny and sometimes missed the mark, ‘is that Paddington is a great suburb for food. And in some places it is pretentious, but you shouldn’t be so surprised, or offended.’
    Veronica sat quietly listening, loving her own suburb of The Gap and not really interested in the conversation. She was preoccupied with her own home-life woes and didn’t feel like sharing them.
    Izzy took a sip of the mineral water she’d poured for herself and continued. ‘I’d live here but I love the river too much. Just own where you live, tidda, and be proud.’
    Xanthe hadn’t thought much about status before, and certainly not in recent times with her work and ongoing obsession with getting pregnant. But the truth was she had a mortgage worth more than many would see in a lifetime. She only bought organic produce, and she and Spencer ate regularly at the fancy restaurants along La Trobe Terrace. She wasn’t embarrassed about her lifestyle, but she didn’t like being labelled as ‘upper’. Just as she hadn’t liked being labelled ‘boong’ and ‘abo’ back in Mudgee as she walked to and from school and the kids from the rival public school hurled abuse at her from across the road. It was bad enough she was Koori, they’d say, but she was part-wog too. Xanthe sighed deeply, recalling the pain of a young child who did not understand the racism that was rife in the late 1970s, or thesenseless labels that came with it. Labels she now worked hard to explain to her clients were archaic and socially unhelpful. Labels of any kind rarely served a purpose, and she rejected them all.
    The little-town-girl-done-good was proud of what she had achieved as an adult in the big smoke – Brisbane being big smoke compared to country New South Wales, even if still ‘little smoke’ compared to London, as Spencer had pointed out. And they’d agreed that Brisbane was warmer than both their hometowns, and aside from each other, that’s what kept them there. They’d worked hard to buy their house and had done most of the interior renovations themselves to make it their home. Xanthe had studied diligently at uni, and worked even harder now that she was running her own business. She did own her lot in life and wasn’t apologising to anyone. It was a mantra that she often repeated to herself, especially when working with people who brought their stereotypes into the room and suggested she had to be poor, welfare dependent and uneducated to be Aboriginal. She was never going to fulfil someone else’s stereotype of being Black in Australia in the twenty-first century. It was why she was so good at what she did as a career: she walked the talk.
    â€˜Actually, we’re saving for a Queenslander,’ Xanthe said proudly. ‘Spencer is already looking around here for one.’
    â€˜That’d be right, the coloniser wants the manager’s quarters; the worker’s cottage isn’t good enough, is it?’ Ellen was only half-joking. She couldn’t imagine ever hooking up with an Englishman, let alone having the means to fund a Queenslander in Paddington.
    â€˜Don’t be so ridiculous. Or mean!’ Xanthe said seriously, pulling Ellen back into line. ‘The Queenslanders are on top of the hill, they get all the breeze!’
    Xanthe shook her head; she knew that Ellen didn’t approve of Spencer with his posh, plummy English voice, but she didn’t imagine her