I grew up in a once-upon-a-time land when milk and loaves appeared at the door to the jingle of bells and the clopping of hooves, when housewives were Cinderellas in sacking aprons and hair permanently rollered for the ball, when men wore hats, and lifted them to the funerals of strangers passing in the street. That time – the forties, the early fifties – has been mythologised into a Camelot of Anglo-Celtic virtue, or a dark age of tribalism and British cooking. In my recollection, of course, it was neither, but simply the way things were. It is disconcerting to find one's private past, one's collection of ordinary memories, become a matter of ideological dispute, and to discover, after peaceful decades spent reading historical documents, that you have become a historical document yourself.

The elevation is the more disconcerting because I know almost nothing of the history of which I have now become an artefact, having abandoned Australian history in my heart (the formalities took a little longer) in the fifth grade of primary school. To that point ‘Australian History’ comprised a doleful catalogue of self-styled ‘explorers’ who wandered in what large Mrs O'Loughlin used to call ‘dretful desarts’ glumly littering names about – Mount Disappointment, Mount Despair, Mount Hopeless – until, thankfully, they ‘perished’. (Even in those benighted days I noticed that during their wanderings they would occasionally totter past little bands of people they called ‘Aborigines’, and I would think ‘at least somebody knows how to manage out there’.