It was 1951. I was in Grade Seven; I was twelve years old. I was sitting for my Progress Certificate, and posed for the photograph with all the others in the boys’ playground under the varnished leaves of the Moreton Bay figs. The smallest girls sat in front on a rug: Janice Rugey, next to Catherine Oates, who held her handkerchief like a water-lily; Chérie Russell, who boasted of her name that was French; Yvonne Turley, who was white-haired and eye-lashed like an albino; the Twinnies; Beverley King, the dentist’s daughter, who wore a Scottie-dog pinned to her cardigan.

And behind the smallest girls we ascended miraculously into the air. I stood second from the left, in the third row from the back. My eyes were narrowed against the sun (they have disappeared to black slits). I wore the orange corduroy jacket that was my mother’s over the red and blue jumper knitted in brick-pattern (but in the photograph I am dressed in black and white and grey).

And I look at the photograph twenty years later, and the black and white and grey takes on colour. I see the dark green leaves of the fig-trees, Shirley Miller’s pink jumper with the brown horses’ heads knitted into the front, Patty Briggs’ ginger hair above lace-collared velveteen. I see Irene Carapetis’ chestnut plaits and smell garlic and hear her boast of Prince Philip being Greek; I see Loris Jenning’s red flannel petticoat, and remember when Roberta Starr and I were cruel, and counted the days she wore it.

And I look harder, and in between our fresh pinkness I see the faces of the girls who are poor and cannot pay for their books. They are girls who know they are different, and have no hope; girls with perpetual colds and running noses, who wear sandshoes in all weathers; girls who bring their tomato sauce sandwiches wrapped in newspaper, whose clothes are worn by others before them, or bought too big to make them last. They come from the back streets of Thebarton that smell of gas; the narrow streets by the Wheatsheaf Pub, where I walked with my grandfather.

There is one of them who is beautiful and bold called Valda. She pushes her uncle along in a wheelchair; he has a disease, and is withered like a skeleton. She pushes him along, and she whispers of the things he does to her, and the things the boys do too. And even though she has her boldness and her beauty, and it is Australia and 1951, she doesn’t have a chance.