I scrutinise the news clipping titled Belle of the Ball; my mother in a chantilly lace gown, standing formally for the newpaper photographer, dirt scrubbed from her nails and country smells washed from her body, the animals safely drenched, dagged, docked, and crops sewn, harvested and stored, a shy farmer’s daughter who later sailed across the equator on board a ship named after an ancient river, to the home country, like so many other Australian girls and who travelled the length and breadth of that small seat of colonial savage history moving lightly through towns and cities ravaged by a world war, driving a food van with free samples of sweetened hot milk for holiday makers in green, rain drenched chocolate box towns and cold, shingled, Chesil Beach resorts, making life-long friends, breaking hearts, warding off amorous fellows with no long term plans except to make up for lost time, winning admirers for her work ethic and plucky can-do, the evidence of which is one tiny square print, the smallest photograph I have ever seen, a chocolate block sized image
and then years later unwittingly carrying a single bad seed that has hooked and attached itself, a seed of friendship with a family damaged by blackened bloodlines, mustard breathed, aftershocks of anger unrequited, back to her home country, the country of grey trees, blindingly bright plains and blue distant unreachable mountains.