‘Okay. Firstly, JavaScript and SQL are languages, Blockchain is a technology that creates an incorruptible ledger of digital transactions, financial or otherwise – a kind of cryptography – actually a “public-key” cryptography –’

‘Okay, now I know why I haven’t listened properly to you before.’

‘Look, I suppose it is just possible I’ve never really sat down and talked properly to you about it. But all that stuff that I go on about is just the nuts and bolts and cogs and gears that make the thing go.’

‘Cogs and what?’

‘Oh shut up.’ Mum laughed.

I laughed too and then Mum sighed theatrically and described the function of her business. She told me that there were so many people in communities in need of home care and lots of other people in those same communities looking to give back somehow and make connections. She designed an IT platform where those people could find each other and have all the proper checks and processes handled for them, and built a company around it, and offered advertising and sponsorship deals with private health funds to get it profitable – ‘Lucrative, actually,’ she said.

‘Really?’ I said. ‘That’s what your business does? Matches people up for free. That sounds like, really good. Even kind of community-minded.’ Mum rolled her eyes at my better-late-than-never enthusiasm. ‘But wait, like health insurers . . . aren’t you just exploiting the vulnerable for advertising fodder?’

‘You could look at it that way, or you could see it as the small price for offering people a free service that helps them. And private health funds are looking for ways to speak to their target markets, just like any other advertiser. It doesn’t automatically make them malicious. It’s a win-gain situation. That’s how I think of it, anyway.’

I nodded and looked back out the passenger-side window. ‘It sounds pretty clever, Mum. No wonder it’s won all those awards.’

The landscape rolled past and then suddenly Mum pulled the car into the side road at the Gundagai truck stop.

‘Let’s eat with the dog on the tuckerbox.’

We got chips and gravy and sat on the block at the bottom of the statue as the sun began to lean towards the horizon.

‘I stopped here,’ Mum said as we took turns dipping chips into the shared pot. ‘That first trip. I stopped here – it was mid-morning and I had next to no money but I decided to get myself an egg and bacon roll and I sat right here. That roll was the best thing I have ever eaten. It tasted like freedom and escape and new responsibility for myself. Looking back, I was probably just in a great deal of pain and denial. But I was seventeen. You can get a lot of things wrong when you’re seventeen.’

‘Tell me about it,’ I said.

And she looked at me and shook her head slightly. ‘You haven’t done anything wrong.’ And then she frowned. ‘Maybe I didn’t either. I actually didn’t have many choices.’