Remarkably for her time and background—both her parents had left school at fourteen—Mum had scrambled into an education. She’d trained as a pharmacist and married our father, then a young solicitor with political leanings.

Now we lived in a big old house with a glimpse of Sydney Harbour. The roof leaked, the bathroom was a lean-to out the back, and the house was earmarked for demolition by the Department of Main Roads, but it was built on a generous scale. Mum had a dressmaker who made her copies of stylish— even outlandish—clothes from pictures in French magazines (the green brocade evening-coat made in panels so it hung like a piece of sculpture, the organza cocktail dress with the oversized collar that stood up around the back of her head). But her thrifty country childhood was never far away. She kept every piece of string and rag, she darned the elbows of her jumpers and she scraped the last speck off the butter-paper, using it later to line the cake-tin. She was a vigorous, intelligent, original, plain-speaking woman with a clear sense of what mattered and what didn’t.

One of the things that mattered was keeping those family stories alive.

Solomon Wiseman had worked on the Thames, but ran foul of the law in some way and was transported to Australia. Once in Sydney, he quickly won his freedom and, the story went, took up land on the Hawkesbury River. He’d done well for himself and died a rich man.

The best bit of the story, as far as I was concerned, was the part about his wife Jane. Wiseman was supposed to have killed her by throwing her down the stairs of the house he’d built on the Hawkesbury. Her ghost was rumoured to haunt it.

So, when Mum suggested a day at Wiseman’s Ferry to see the land Solomon had settled on and the house he’d built, I was keen. I pictured something Gothic and spooky. Creaking doors. Faded bloodstains. Maybe even the ghost herself.

I was short-sighted, but nobody knew. I was a teenager before anyone—myself included—realised that I badly needed glasses. Anything further away than a metre was a blur. As a result, my memory of the day at Wiseman’s Ferry is a series of close-ups and details. Nothing hangs together.

I remember a long dull drive through fuzzy bush, Mum exclaiming at a view that I couldn’t see (I thought that being able to appreciate views was something that happened when you got old, like enjoying oysters and olives). An alarming series of hairpin bends zigzagged down the side of a valley, the river swimming greasily at the bottom. The little township—a dozen houses, a shop or two, and the pub—was terribly quiet, steaming under a sultry sun, and with that humming silence you get in the country.

The house that Wiseman had built was now the pub, a sprawling two-storey stone place, with verandahs all around, top and bottom. From the bar I could hear a murmur of male voices and the races on the radio. Being so young, I wasn’t supposed to be in a pub, so it felt as if we were breaking the rules when Mum took me by the hand and led me inside.