BY THE 1970s we were well settled in Canberra. The children were at school and enjoying multifarious activities, including sport and music. The schools they went to were within walking distance of where we lived. I often cycled to the university, using a recently constructed network of cycle paths, many of which went through bushland. Occasionally, I would walk to work across the native bushland of the shoulder of Black Mountain. It took me about an hour, and I would encounter kangaroos, wallabies and the occasional echidna – a kind of inflated hedgehog.

Since our family was growing up, we needed more space, and decided that we should build an extra room at the back. Like most Canberra homes, ours was single storey, but we had enough land to extend horizontally. Audrey, with my encouragement, proposed to direct the project herself. Kate can describe what happened next much better than I can, so I will reproduce her account:

I can add the following to Kate's account. The building official who interviewed her was a Mr Huckstep. Audrey believed that what clinched the agreement was her answer to Mr Huckstep's question, ‘What can you tell me about soffitting?’

Between July 1973 and June 1974 I was granted a year's sabbatical from the ANU. We spent the first half at the University of Oxford and the second half attached once again to Shaken, the Institute of Social Science at Tokyo University.