I said, ‘Here in Australia?’

Ruby laughed. ‘I know, I know, meeting the Queen in Australia! You’d think she’d remember seeing sheep or kangaroos or spiders or snakes, but Mum remembers seeing the Queen and Philip on their trip to Perth, two years after Elizabeth took the throne. There was supposed to be a church service but there was a polio outbreak, so the Queen didn’t get off her yacht, and the Fairbridge kids were left to wave at her from the wharf. And Mum swears that Prince Philip picked her out, pointed at her, and gave her a little wink. She tells the story all the time: “He looked right at me and winked at me!”’

‘She sounds like a card,’ I said.

Ruby nodded. ‘She is. She’s the joker.’

I said, ‘How long did your mum stay at Fairbridge, Ruby?’

‘Until she was sixteen,’ Ruby replied. ‘She was sent into domestic service at that age. I’m not entirely sure where, only that it was a large property that Mum calls “the Hadenfelds”.’

From my own research, I’m pretty sure that ‘the Hadenfelds’ must be Mr and Mrs Winston Hadenfeld, who in the 1950s had a massive property near where the Lyons meets the Gascoyne River, a five-day mail run from Perth. It’s not there any more – the land was purchased by the industrial giant, Monsanto, some time in the early 1980s – but when the Hadenfelds owned it, the land size was 46,000 square kilometres, so it was bigger than the village of Bucklebury, where Ruby’s from.

‘The way I understand it, Mum had to travel there by bus and it took days to reach the place,’ Ruby told me. ‘She said, “I’d get off the bus and get put on another coach and we’d travel for a day, and then I’d be checked into a women’s motel with a chaperone, and it went on like that for almost a week.”’

Finally Agnes was dropped at what looked like the intersection of four dirt roads, all leading to the horizon, and she was standing there in the heat in her hat and gloves when a horse and carriage appeared for what was the final leg.

‘Mum was covered in dust and the first thing she wanted when she finally arrived was to have a bath, but she was sent straight out to work,’ Ruby said. Domestics at the Hadenfelds in those days dusted and did laundry; made damper and billy tea for the shearers; cooked eggs in skillets on open fires; scrubbed the floorboards in the main house and swept the veranda, which was four metres wide and seventy metres around; sewed patches into torn clothes; and picked fruit, bottled and preserved it.

‘It was obviously hard work, but I do remember Mum telling me that there were parties every month and they were wonderful,’ Ruby said. ‘People would come by horse and cart, or by tractor or bus, some of them from homesteads hundreds of miles away. Food would have to be flown in, including fruit and vegetables that Mum had never seen before. Melons, for example.’