A plane blinked past.

‘Sometimes I see teenagers with their mothers,’ Astra said, ‘and I just think, you’ve got no idea how much that poor woman loves you.’

Astra stood up then and raised her hands to the sky. And just like that it occurred to me that this — this private valley — was the place she came to make contact with the UFOs. I imagined the discs swooping down, hovering in the gulf of air above us, humming and giving off their warm glow. I imagined Astra communicating in psychic waves. I must have laughed out loud.

‘What?’ Astra said.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I was just thinking about Dad.’

‘He had a sense of humour.’

‘Did he? I can’t really remember.’

‘No,’ she said after a while. ‘Neither can I, to be honest.’

12.

12.

A few weeks later, I took the day off work and went to watch Mike Tadic’s three surviving films, in a little booth at the Screen and Television Archive at Federation Square, in Melbourne. They were funny, awkward, luminous, boring films of odd lengths: thirty-seven minutes, forty-two minutes, one hundred and fifty-seven minutes. Too long, or not quite long enough, as if they were designed not to be watched at all, to fall instead through the gaps of our attention span. They were all shot in 1970 or 1971, over a period of weeks with not much money, which is to say, with every last cent of Mike’s money and a small contribution from the Experimental Film and Television Fund. I’d done some research. Later, they were converted from 16mm onto VHS. These precious, faulty, amateur videos — this is our heritage. You can go see them anytime you want, although I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it.

The first film jammed in the video player, and I think I might have destroyed it when I tried to pry it out. An assistant managed to find a second copy somewhere, but the sound on that one came and went, and for agonising periods I was forced to lip-read through a roar of static. Then the sound would suddenly clear, and those uncanny Australian accents from the seventies would return, so ordinary and lonely and naive. The voices of people who had no idea what was coming. Then just some very long, psychedelic dream sequences. Too long for most people’s taste, I would say.

That first film was called Ghosts. It was the most experimental, the most interesting, and the longest. It opened with a group of hippies stumbling around for ages through a smouldering wasteland: grey sky, flute solo, sleepy guitar, and mounds of rubbish burning under an enormous half-built bridge. The soundtrack was composed by a band called Leprous Porpoise. ‘Love should be put into action,’ the singer moans, ‘but man, I can’t move, I’m just relaxin’.’