The ocean’s benevolence raised me; not fishes hauled and eaten in abundance, but its great iconoclast, the whale. This custody was devised by two parents finally decisive about their irrevocable differences, that the Southern Ocean and the Victorian plains do not cohabit. My mother would never declare ‘I am a whale’ as I declared ‘I am a seal’. Her name’s meaning, ‘dark stranger’, is an internalised marker. A name in vogue in the late 1950s, but maybe even at one day old, they perceived her as foreign. If we tend towards the souls of things, then the bookshelf of hardback children’s books, all solemnly illustrated, belies her name. Inevitably they spoke of songs from the great enigma and great comforter, a cappella from the depths of constant night. Before I could read these for myself, my mother thought she’d given birth to an angel. My wings had been misplaced, so on photos and a Chagall collage she drew them in pastel.

My father is from the Mallee, inland Victoria that knows its salts are exposed, embedded in the terrain. I appeared to follow the maternal line—sea-kinned, toes pressed to ground. Bound, boundary to boundary. This is Rudolf Steiner’s definition of the sense of touch. I developed an obsession with seals, buffering sleep around my head with one, two, seven, twelve, finally twenty-one plush embodiments christened with three-fold names. I was a selkie, a seal come ashore in human form, her ocean-skin shed. Its disappearance traps her on land, yearning for home and kin. Sea and land, maternal and paternal. A child’s mythology develops; the queer child grasps one origin, and in adulthood continues to trace her true genealogy, the geography of which surpasses diagram trees.