I said, ‘How are you going to be able to cope?’

He said, ‘I fended for myself for years. You’ll notice I didn’t starve to death.’

I said, ‘But you’re eighty now, Dad.’

He said, ‘No, no, I want to stay in my own house,’ which was a bit frustrating, because if he’d moved out I would have been able to sell that house and, sure, it might not have been worth much, maybe only $300,000 or $400,000, but it would have at least meant that I wouldn’t have had to find another job because I could have managed that money for him. But as it was, with Mark’s gambling, I did have to find another job and that was how I ended up at Emu Cottage.

Snow

Chapter Twelve

The locals wouldn’t want to admit it but there are quite a few similarities between Bondi, where Snow lived before she went to prison, and Manly, where she was working at Emu Cottage.

They’re both by the beach, and they both have at least nine gelato bars, three of which are going broke.

It isn’t easy to move between the two places, however: to get from Bondi to Manly, you’ve got to get a bus up Bondi Road to Bondi Junction, then a train to Circular Quay, and then a JetCat across to Manly, and then it’s a fair walk up a steep hill to Emu Cottage, on Emu Lane.

I know how far it is because I made the trip out there pretty much as soon as I found out that Snow used to work there. Emu Cottage wasn’t a geriatric home like the one she worked in before her mum died. It was a day-care facility for disabled children. It’s closed now but it wasn’t too difficult to find. It’s on Ocean Road and it’s a timber cottage like the other ones on the street, but if you look through the windows you can see that the old pictures are still on the walls: there’s a big giraffe painted in one room, and a whale in the other.

There’s a ramp out the front with bright yellow aluminium handrails, like you see at childcare centres, but it’s not for prams, it’s for wheelchairs.

As far as I understand the chronology of events, Snow started working there early in 2002 as a senior nurse. That might sound good, but the money wasn’t great – Snow and all the others were taking home around $540 a week – and Mark was by this time in the grip of a serious gambling addiction. The Star City Casino had opened in Sydney, and he was without doubt one of their best clients, eligible for all kinds of free drinks, provided he kept turning up.

The money Snow was making obviously wasn’t sufficient to feed his habit because he was also taking stuff out of the old house – and off the street – and selling it on eBay.

It seems that Snow was at Emu House for about a year, and by most accounts enjoying it, when a minister in the State government announced the funding had been cut.