But where were the hills of the history book, stitched with the pathways of Burke and Sturt and Leichhardt? — the hills of the sun-burned earth and budgerigar grass, the azure skies and fiery mountains we sang about at school before the flag spangled with all the stars of the Southern Cross I was never sure of seeing? Where were the old dark people I did not link with the lost couples on suitcases at the railway station? Where were the crocodiles and brolgas, the billabongs and snakes? Where were the flowers that wilted in blistered clay, the rusty waves of spinifex that looped the cliff?

(The hills are gentle, their trees are pale: the scented paperbark with its peeling trunk, the snow-white ghost-gum — warm to the touch. And prickly box that grows by rivers, silky-oak with orange flowers; blue-gum and red-gum, cider-gum and dwarf-gum; bottlebrush with tooth-brush spikes.)

I looked about me for the sunburned land. In vain.

When we get back to Rose Street with our hens’ eggs and honey the trees are ugly — robbed of blossom and berries and leaves by the petulance of the season, the pruning of the Council. Sparrows sound mournfully from telegraph wires. Even the rose-buds cannot cheer me. I carry my wildflowers into the house, and already their fragrance seems fainter.

For a few days the house is full of flowers — until they wilt and shrink, drop their petals, and my grandmother complains.

(They did not look the same.)

They remind me of the shells I brought back from the beach — the shells that lost their colour once I plucked them from the sea.

FIFTEEN

I lived in Rose Street.

It was a long street, with a beginning and a middle and an end.

Its ending belonged to the trains and there was a Police Barracks and men in black boots and horses that did shit, and the middle had storks on one leg and lawns mowed every week, and the beginning was my street and you went past the stump tree on one side to Mrs. Dingle and the lantana hedge and the monkey-puzzle and at the end was the Italian shop and Reece got the ice-block and made me sick and round the corner the Oval and I ran across in my blue and gold stocking-cap (I had a rosette too) and got Charlie Pyatt and John Willis and John Mehaffey in biro in my book.

The part that I surveyed from afar was claimed by the trains that whistled in the night … the middle section led exactly nowhere … the other end was my street.

And I lived in a house like Anne Hathaway’s on the tin (not really). It was all creamy with zigzag round the door. Red. And two funny roofs like March Hare triangles or Tudor gables (that is more romantic). And the verandah and the pebble-dash — all those little tiny stones and all rough — and snaking rose that came out pink but not called Peace (not yellow) and geraniums, agapanthus, lily, primula, fuchsia bush down the back.