At her pre-kinder orientation session Jasmine drifts around each of the activity areas: a kitchen table with wooden fruit, a bench with bowls of play dough, a colourful array of outside play equipment, and a table with a red-and-white-check tablecloth for snack time. Across the room I perch on one of the tiny kinder chairs to breast feed Evie. Jasmine is on her own nibbling her fruit and crackers and gliding her blue eyes around the room without focusing on anything or anyone. I can’t pinpoint why she looks so vulnerable. By the time I resettle Evie into her pram, Jasmine is outside painting with water on the wooden cubby’s walls. For the rest of the session she dashes the wet brush repeatedly across the surfaces, casting undiscernible images that rapidly dry and vanish in the hot February air.

A fortnight later Evie and I arrive at the kinder just as all the other parents are leaving with their tired charges. I pluck Evie from her car capsule and hurry inside. Jasmine is standing in front of her teacher, a relentlessly chipper blonde in her mid twenties. ‘Has she had her three-year-old maternal health nurse check yet?’ the teacher asks, pointing downwards at Jasmine’s auburn head. ‘Uh, no’, I reply, ‘she’s not three yet. She turns three next month.’