This was in the nineties, though you wouldn’t have known it. The eighties died hard in that corner of the world. The schoolyard was riven by class. Everybody knew who would be going away to high school and who would attend the local comprehensive down the road. This was the divide that ran through everything; it was the source of more cruelty than our teachers suspected. Animosity ran deep because jobs were under threat. The logging of old-growth forests was out of favour in the cities and there had been calls to put a stop to the convoys of lorries that growled up the winding roads bearing enormous logs. Between the town and the coast, at a point equidistant from Sydney and Melbourne and last in the pincer movement of felling and settlement, stood one of the last great old-growth forests of the eastern seaboard.

Meanwhile, my parents barbecued and dined with other schoolteachers, all of whom seemed to be building mudbrick or straw-bale houses. They were not on the dinner circuit of Bea’s parents and their friends. Living at the edge of town, we were neither one thing nor the other, neither landed farmers nor working-class. When I voiced my dislike of Adam McDonagh to my mother, she told me, ‘Rowan, you’re a snob.’ She threw out this accusation in an impulsive way. I was taken aback, and thought the reproach unjust.

I didn’t know it at the time but my father’s father, Snow, had been a shearer elsewhere. I knew he’d died racing a train, an event I envisioned like a sequence in a Charlie Chaplin film, complete with giddy piano music. In the shot, the light-haired Snow gripped the wheel of a black car. He tore along the tracks, while from behind (also in frame) a huffing engine bore down on him. Years later I had to revise this version when I saw a news bulletin about a motorist’s death at a rail crossing. Hearing it said that the crossing had no boom gate, bell or light, I realised that ‘racing the train’ did not mean what I thought it meant.

In class we were schooled to fear what could do us harm, other Chaplinesque dangers that were standard issue in country towns. These were strange men, dams and silos, roughly in that order. We were told about children who fell into silos, how they flailed about and drowned, their mouths filling with grain. The dangers were real enough but they didn’t apply to us: there were no crops in the area, so no one had a silo. As for dams, we had better options – a river that ran with melted snow each spring, and the municipal swimming pool with its lycra and flesh parade. That left only strange men, but there were no strangers in the town, and if any were to come they would be easy to spot.