At nineteen I left my family, my home, my city and my state and travelled to Hobart to learn to play the violin from the only teacher I thought could help me. I put aside seven years of inconsistent learning and faulty technique to start building my playing again from the absolute beginning with Jan Sedivka—‘The Boss’, as his students called him—the charismatic and controversial director of the Tasmanian Conservatorium of Music.

In 1976, Sedivka’s small school, really only a house in a street in Hobart, was the only place I knew of where my discomfort on the instrument—my technical defects, my area of I Cannot—would be noted without moral overtones. So I packed my suitcase for Hobart amid raging arguments at home, and when the screaming and yelling was at its worst, I threw myself like a petrol bomb into a love affair with a violinist I admired. (Not, I’m sorry to say, the violinist I eventually married.) This other young man was a hard-drinking wild-haired hippy Heathcliff and I chased him south despite knowing that Hobart and Melbourne were stuffed full of Isabellas ill-used by him already. It was a time of self-immolation when I could feel the concrete of my personality, my circumstances, my culture, my new adult body, all setting hard and fast around me, and I burned every boat that had carried me across my nineteen years.