His ambivalence about danger confused me while I was growing up. He never discouraged me from taking up risky activities; instead he filled me with fear about the possible consequences, with the result that I was never any good at them. When he taught me to drive, he made sure to emphasise the fallibility of the machine, something he would have learned during the war at flying school, where mistakes could be fatal. He liked to open the bonnet of the car before we set off, and run through a sort of flight check with me to make sure everything was hooked up to everything else. These were good lessons and they’ve served me well, but I wonder if a certain enthusiasm for risk drained out of me as a result of his teaching methods, and whether that wasn’t his intent. It strikes me that I might have turned out differently if he’d taken me for a spin one day in one of the Tiger Moths he loved so much, shown me what had turned him on to flying in the first place, emphasised the mad joy rather than the danger.
The irony is that, despite my never having tempted death the way daredevils do, I’m dying anyway. Perhaps it is a mistake to be so cautious. I sometimes think this is the true reason for my reluctance to take my own life. It is because suicide is so dangerous.
I shall miss you so much when I’m dead: Harold Pinter, dying of cancer, speaking of his wife. I know exactly what he means.
The short answer to the question of what I’ll miss the most is Shin, my husband of thirty-one years, and the faces of my children.
The long answer is the world and everything in it: wind, sun, rain, snow and all the rest.
And I will miss being around to see what happens next, how things turn out, whether my children’s lives will prove as lucky as my own.
But I will not miss dying. It is by far the hardest thing I have ever done, and I will be glad when it’s over.
I’d like to be remembered by what I’ve written. As somebody once warned, if you don’t tell your own story, someone else will.
But I know I have no real say in how I will be remembered. It is in the nature of memory that different people will remember different things, and that none of what they remember will be verifiable or true. This is the case even in my own recollections about my life, which are porous and mutable and open to contradictory interpretations. If I use them in my work, which I often do, it is to fit them into a particular narrative, to shape them to a purpose, because that is how fiction is made. In the process, I become convinced that the fictional version of my memory is the real version, or at least preferable to it. It is a thoroughly self-serving exercise, I know, but that is part of its attraction.
In the end it is a blessing to be remembered at all, and we should not worry too much about how or why. My grandmother on my mother’s side died before I got to know her. But I remember her as a talented woman with literary aspirations, who died too young to fulfil her potential—because that’s what I heard so often from my mother. The point of the story was not lost on me. It was a cautionary tale, and it haunted me, as it haunted Mum. But to my mind it was also a romantic story, especially in the detail. My grandmother was a country girl from Longreach, in outback Queensland. When she was scarcely out of school, she married a grazier twelve years her senior. She wrote bush poetry that was published in the Bulletin, but her real wish was to escape to the city, to meet with other writers and be part of a literary scene. Her chance didn’t come until she was sixty. Newly widowed, she bought herself an apartment at the Macleay Regis in Kings Cross, in the heart of bohemian Sydney. A week or so after moving in she died in her sleep. A sad end, of course, but what impressed me was the strength of her ambition—she had nursed it for so long and against such odds. And I admired the fact that she took writing seriously, which gave me permission to do the same, to protect my own little flame of ambition as soon as it flared up in high school.
Without my grandmother’s example, who knows what might have become of me? I might have dismissed poetry as a waste of time and concentrated on my science classes. As it was, a part of me always believed that I was honouring my grandmother’s memory by choosing writing as a profession, that I was finishing something she had started, or at least taking up the baton. I know she is not aware of it, but I’m still persuaded she would be pleased to think that this is how she is remembered. In that way, too, she is a pioneer, gone ahead of me into the great bohemia in the ether.
II
Dust and Ashes
I am the youngest of three children. My sister Sarah is six years older than I am, and my brother Eliot four years older. I have the impression that I was a surprise, if not a mistake. According to my mother, when she announced that she was pregnant for the third time, my grandmother shook her head in disbelief. ‘You stupid girl,’ she said, rightly worried about the state of my parents’ marriage. For some reason, this story always made my mother laugh. I couldn’t see the joke; maybe you had to have been there.
From time to time as we were growing up my mother would take Sarah and Eliot and me out to the place where she was born. We went in the winter school holidays, from Sydney, and later from Canberra. It was two or three days by car, up through New South Wales, and across the border into Queensland, the towns growing sparser and dustier the further we drove, the horizon flattening, the sky overhead broadening until there was so much of it your eyes ached from staring.
The pattern of our visits was always the same. We stayed with my mother’s youngest sister Jenny and her husband Ranald. They lived on North Delta, a sheep and cattle property near Barcaldine that had belonged to my grandfather Norman Murray. The country there was ochre, scrubby, and we approached it along a rutted road that my mother navigated gingerly because of the bull dust. I could tell she was scared as soon as she turned off the bitumen. She gripped the wheel and narrowed her gaze to a few feet ahead, expecting us to strike disaster at any moment. The bush wasn’t her natural element. She might have been born there, but after years of exile she had become suburban and cautious.
At the end of such a long journey the homestead was always a joyous sight, set in a clearing surrounded by rough-hewn fences. We drove in from the back, passing the machinery shed and the chicken coops and the pigsty and the tethered dogs along the way. The verandahs were pitched wide and low, so from a distance the house appeared to be all red roof. Once you had come in through the kitchen door, you immediately saw the point of this arrangement. It meant the sun was barred entry, and inside was kept dark and shadowy as a cave.
There was no real logic to the design of Delta. Beyond the kitchen was a breakfast room, really just a screened section of the verandah, and beyond that a warren of rooms that had been added or partitioned over time to accommodate Jenny and Ranald and their four sons. Jenny would lead us through the rooms, allocating beds as she went, then serve us tea at the front of the house, where the verandah was at its widest and overlooked a lawn and a swimming pool.
It was here that the talk took place and all the stories were told. It was here that I learned where my mother had come from and why she carried such a burden of sadness. Not that this was much in evidence, for generally she was a person who liked to laugh and enjoy life, but underneath her vibrancy there was another strain, a sort of indelible grief that no amount of good cheer could dislodge. And this grief, it soon became clear, had originated in her Queensland childhood, to which she felt compelled to return periodically, with us in tow as her excuse.