I was born in Adelaide in September, with a birthmark on my neck and an excitement mark on my left cheek. The birthmark was arrested, and faded to a pale snarl. The excitement mark was more wily, escaped detection, and was left to flicker on and off — a perpetual warning of something yet to come.

I had a father, but he died. Three months after that I was in a hospital too. I tricked them — lived; came home to five.

Three of them were important — graved themselves for ever. Two became objects on a mantelpiece.

My great-grandfather left a bell that he rang in a last illness — a bell of brass rimmed with fruit like apples, and leaves the poet called acanthus. He left a purse that opened to reveal empty pockets and a silver clasp, a compass with a querulous face, a china inkwell painted with a China-rose, a penknife. And a photograph of himself sitting in the sun, and a name — I called him Little White Puppy, because of his hair — because I couldn’t say ‘Papa’.

My great-grandmother betrayed herself with less: a bleached cameo carved with someone who could have been her, a tray-cloth sprigged with iron-mould and satin-stitch poppies, a photograph of herself with spectacles, stockings in folds, slippers with pompons.

(How is it that the bell, the purse, the compass, the inkwell, the knife and cameo and tray-cloth should live on? Why is it that their owners should be preserved so perfect in their endings on the green album page — like odourless flowers from an ancient wedding, a dead favourite’s curl, butterflies behind glass, silver-paper pictures: he, in the sun; she, in blank spectacles before sweet peas? And how did a baker become just a bell? Why the spinster an iron-mould speck? Once he was twenty-seven and had a name — George Henry Nobes, and he married her, and she was Elizabeth Davis — his Stella, his Beatrice, his Lesbia. And she was twenty-one, and it was 1889.)

My great-grandfather was born in Cornwall — came to Australia as a boy in one of the last sailing-ships; as an old man signed his name in the register under the gumtree at Glenelg. My great-grandfather was a baker who was too generous: gave countless Depression loaves on credit, went into liquidation. Always helpful, he ushered in his end: held the gate for them when they came to put out the fire in the shed — the ladder hit him on the head, and he died at eighty-four.

My great-grandmother, that Stella of the speckled mould, was born at Houghton in the Adelaide Hills. Her father was an adventurer who died seeking El Dorado at Alice Springs. Her mother was Welsh. She had three sisters and a brother: Poll and Mill and Annie and Jack. Some of them were people I knew.

There was a sepia picture of Poll with an ostrich feather bonnet and a studio palm-tree. I remembered her in a simpler setting — visiting us from the hills, a shrunken lady, her sisters dead, bringing country eggs and honey with a comb. I walked down the path with her and she pulled up my sock by the agapanthus — and there was lovely warmth I didn’t know was sensual, and I felt dizzy.