The ‘wild’ of Park Orchards is beneficial for Owen, who totters in from the outdoors, tumbleweeded and sunburnt, to eat large portions of bread, dripping, apples from their own trees &c. And that is before lunch! I am not quite so blasé, however, as to forget ponds, dams, disused mineshafts … In fact, I cannot even read contentedly, for I must look up and spot Owen continually, and then put things down (pages flutter, place is lost) to run over and check he is indeed behind that tree and hasn’t crossed some boundary line, past which reside snakes, bunyips, men with shotguns …

It is living in Fitzroy that has made me alert to every sound and possibility; before, they were mere stories from unimaginable places. Just last week, a little girl some houses down was attacked by her mother’s lodger, a tall thin apparently average man I had been in the habit of saying hello to!

The lease we will soon take on in Hawthorn is just across the Yarra River from Richmond, near the Skipping Girl lights you commented on when last here: a big old house split in two, of which we will take the front portion. There is a bay window and big shadowy trees in the garden. Paperbarks in the street. The tram runs nearby, straight into the city.

If you ask me how my ‘work’ proceeds in the midst of everything, I can only tell you: short, unsatisfactory stints mainly. There is so much to do around the house. And yet, when I find myself with an uninterrupted few hours, I’m panicked, can’t get a thing down. I open my notebook, and a great wave of exhaustion overcomes me. Is it that the thought of work tires me, or that my own work bores me so much it puts me to sleep? I suspect some subconscious avoidance is at work. When I have time, at a desk, in silence, the whole enterprise of Poetry (capital P) becomes preposterous. Like pretending to work at the Parishes’: a pose. And now I am writing in alliteration.

I only tell you this because I know you will encourage me and pepper me in praise that, deserved or not, will spur me on to more scribbling!

Meanwhile, on the home front: I went out and bought two slabs of steak yesterday, and came home and fried the whole thing up with potatoes and mushrooms. My husband was delighted to be served a meal he was not involved in the making of, and O choked on a piece larger than it should’ve been—Jo leaned across the table in a flash, had O by the chops and his hand down his throat and up came the offending article, hardly chewed as that boy does not chew but inhales food. God help me, what a palpitation of the heart: I felt weak eating the rest of dinner.