I emulated my mother and gloated over the Social Pages of the Advertiser (page twenty-six is best). I conjured up a fabulous company of doctors’ wives in electric-blue Thai silk and lady-mayoresses swathed in Arctic fox (Beaumont/Toorak/Burnside/Tusmore). I read elevating accounts of elder sons (Alistair) that proceeded from the cloisters of St. Peter’s College via the Young Liberals (who are not liberal), and the English Speaking Union (E.S.U.), the golf-linked swards of Kooyonga and a junior-partnership in the firm of another (Old Blue), to the dizzy (Elysian) heights of the Adelaide Club. I saw pictures (admittedly a little out of focus) of younger daughters (Annabel) on their days of glory: in tulle with pretty rose-bud posies, making pretty curtsies from the ranks of those others from (Woodlands, Wilderness, all the rest) select (expensive) private schools; in magnolia silk at Marquee Receptions after Cathedral Weddings with other people’s elder sons (Alistair); in gardenia linen at Cathedral Christenings of dear little babies (Alistair, Annabel) in feather-stitch and tight French knots.

I was a stranger to this world. I could produce no requisite pedigree of ancient antipodean families seconded from more ancient Anglican shores; no mother who ministered at Red Cross Fêtes and hospital Spring Fairs; no old collegiate father; no money; no brown serge school-days — all the proofs of kinship to the world on page twenty-six. Therefore I was no one.

Yet still I was not free.

There were the classrooms, the after-school games, the chewing-gum and soap powder jingles, the radio announcers, the film star buccaneers, the sovereign and the flag, God and the sunburned land. Faces cajoled and winked from hoardings, newspapers announced thousands dead or maimed. Tragedies were wrapped about peas and beetroot; cast an awful blight on fish and chips.

And there were other grooves more sticky, more well-oiled that sought to bind: all those things that a little girl who knew her station ought to do. (And twenty years later a nice Adelaide lady will write that it is always the woman who comes off worst — she means me — that she has no rights by name or next-of-kinship — she means by not being married — and how can relationships survive without strong ties? — she means wedlock — and she says ladies — she means me — are denied fulfilment as women — strong word — by not having children — she means Alistair or Annabel — she says Believe me, time runs out in this respect — O lady, I believe you — and she talks of human nature being what it is, and types of situations, and free love syndromes — only she didn’t spell it right. After all, she’s only talking to her son.) Yet I was saved from my pliancy and submission — my ignorance, by something awkward and unyielding, prickly and resisting deep inside. I was saved by the crudity that made me pee into the bath, and revel in the tar-black shit that poured out of me and stank. Therefore I was different.