Born on a farm in Broken Hill, squeezed milk from cows’ tits like my father but my hands weren’t big like his and even then I didn’t have his patience. On cold mornings when the milk wouldn’t flow my face burned and my eyes watered. With a hardness in my throat I’d pluck at the cow’s hairs whereas my father would smile, stroke the cow and wait.

My mother was a tedious woman. Often after working the field the sound of her crying could be heard as my father and I drew closer to home. Tripping over stalks of grass always so much taller than me, I’d often wait for mother’s sound to know how much further we had to walk. I remember the world looking so green and focusing on my father, a yellow figure of light guiding me through the thicket. I made a game of guessing what ridiculous detail had tripped my mother into hysterics this time. Some days she had run out of sugar, others the salami had gone off or ants were colonising the house. Only in her world could salami go off. Only her eyes ever witnessed ant invasions. While it was sugar, salami and ants that brought her to tears, it was the dust that made her crazy. If my mother didn’t have time to clean she screamed like the world was ending and, well, with a sound like that I grew up believing the world could end anytime like a scream without a reason for it.