It was late one night in the early nineties. I was 19 and hanging out with an artist friend in Melbourne’s bayside suburb of St Kilda. It was still a rock’n’roll part of town then: Joey’s for the speed heads, the Prince and Greyhound for gigs and drag queens, and the Espy front bar for anyone who wandered in off the street. We were at Monroe’s, a local institution, kicking on alongside a bunch of reprobates too hungry for action to sleep. Afterwards, we stumbled up the road to a friend’s flat on The Esplanade. I was on the cusp of independence, one foot still in my parents’ place and the other wherever I could rent a room for a few weeks. I wanted to move on, I just didn’t have the executive function to make it happen.

The artist and I climbed the stairs to the flat and bunkered down in its cushion-filled bay window, rustling palm trees and Port Phillip Bay stretching out below. My friends christened this cosy den ‘The Womb’. Enveloped in her soft folds, it was there that I became pregnant for the first time.