We’re very proud of Sydney – look at him now with only one year of his PhD on manta rays to go! – but we dread what might come from his fixation on the environment. We’d hoped that he’d train as a doctor and we blame Ivy’s prejudices for turning him from that path. There were also the David Attenborough documentaries they watched together when Sydney was small. We raised no objection at first, believing them to be educational. Then Sydney began having bad dreams. Night after night he cried out under his Spider-Man doona because so many animals had disappeared or were doomed.

Another mistake we once made was to go away for our anniversary, leaving Ivy in charge of the children. We were gone three nights, and returned to find a ruro and his goat installed in our yard. The bearded man, the animal with jewel eyes, the old woman, the capering children – it was a scene from a fairytale, by which I mean menacing and strange. Seeing us, Alan started to bark and trampoline behind the patio doors. The man had lost his family in a bushfire and his business when his town ran out of water, Ivy explained over the racket. She was paying him to teach the children to milk the goat. He gave me a laminated leaflet, germy with fingerprints, which claimed that the experience ‘encouraged a child’s empathy with nature’. There was also propaganda about the benefits of goat dairy products. Sydney held up a Streets ice-cream container, so old that its red plastic showed blurry white stars. I’d last seen it full of dirty water from washing the windows – now it held an inch of unsanitary milk. The goat wore a ragged bandana. It had eaten our gazanias down to the soil. Pellets that looked like tiny footballs were scattered on the patio. Chanel said some words. She spoke softly, with a smile. The ruro left our property without a fuss, but led his goat around the neighbourhood for months. During all that time, I was forced to drive everywhere. I was afraid that the ruro would hail me if he came across me in the street. To this day, the long brown puddles that form after rain remind me of him – I have no idea why.

What with Sydney’s awful, pointless photographs, sleep deprivation and the thought of what lay ahead, it was a shocking time. It was almost a relief when I had to act. At two o’clock one afternoon, Russ stopped by my desk, keys in hand. He was wearing a lilac shirt and carrying a linen jacket over his arm. This is Melbourne. It was three degrees outside. Cleaning his ear with a key, he asked me to ‘run through the thing that came in from the feds at lunchtime and allocate the necessary tasks’. He no longer bothered with excuses for leaving work. Until I met Russ, I’d never seen a face like his on a grown man. Sunglasses mask its opinions. When the glasses are removed, the eyes meet yours frankly. Who, me? they ask. I haven’t done anything wrong, mate. That face confirms my belief that Australian lives have no previous acts.