‘It sounds glamorous,’ I said.

‘It was,’ Ruby agreed, ‘but there was obviously a downside for Mum: nobody would go home! They couldn’t drive for three or four hours at night when there were no lights on the roads, she told me, and also there were kangaroos everywhere. So there would be extra beds to make and extra breakfasts to prepare. And she’s really funny about having had to do all that when she was a girl. I remember Steven and I were complaining to Mum once about all the other kids having home-made cookies and why didn’t she ever make home-made cookies? And Mum put her hands on her hips and said, “Oh, Rubes, please believe me, I’ve done my time with the flour and the apron and the rolling pin. I’ve done it over and over again.”’

The Hadenfeld property – the formal name was Normanswood – was a sheep farm, and shearers would arrive in big numbers at the start of every shearing season.

‘Mum was told to look down at her shoes while she was doling out their breakfast,’ Ruby said. ‘But the shearers were big men, and the domestics loved them and Mum was really pretty. Apparently Mrs Hadenfeld used to say to her, “Those looks of yours will get you in trouble.”’

Most families have got a bit of a story about how the parents met and, according to Ruby, it was love at first sight for her mum and dad.

‘Dad was the ringer, leader of the shearing pack,’ she said proudly.

‘Mum says she’d been eyeing him off over the porridge pot for a few weeks, building up all these fantasies of where he came from. He looked like the Australians: tanned, with what Mum called a big Ned Kelly beard. She didn’t know he was British until he opened his mouth and the accent came out.’

John Moore wasn’t just British, he was what the British call ‘posh’. He went up to Oxford – that’s how they say it, he ‘went up’ to Oxford – at the age of twenty in 1930 and, like pretty much half the athletics team, he was picked for the Olympics in Melbourne in 1956.

‘He ran as the third man in the relay race,’ Ruby said, but unfortunately the team didn’t place, and he didn’t get a medal.

‘Dad was due to fly home after the Games but wrote to his folks, saying he wanted to stay longer. They were all for him having an adventure.’

John Moore went by rail from Melbourne across the desert to Coober Pedy to look for opals, went from there up to Lightning Ridge to pan for gold and, when he heard that jobs were going for shearers on a large property called Normanswood in Western Australia, he headed straight there.

‘As far as I’ve been able to work out, he must have arrived at the Hadenfelds in around October 1957,’ Ruby told me, ‘because Mum says she was seventeen when they met.’