Tell me a story --

Should it be real or not? What sort of story do you want? A fairy tale?

I'm teasing it out, bit by bit.

I met a man in Busselton in 1997 with a story about how his father was in Victoria, Australia, when Ned Kelly was hanged. He wasn't that old, the man in Busselton, in his early sixties, but his father had married late and had children even later. So suddenly, a century and more compacts into a manageable size and you can understand about lives in the ninteenth century when they had been previously about as 'real' as dinosaurs.

That moment for me was when I found letters handwritten by Brina Israel in the State Archives.These were letters that were well controlled and built an argument, but with a subtle tone. They were about care and social justice, about arguing for her place in the society that had kept her out. I read them in an entirely contemporary way; I identified with that voice, felt that they could have been written by me.

And speaking of shrinking time: my great aunt May who is still alive and living in the Howard Soloman Masonic Nursing Home in suburban Perth was born in the year that Brina died. She knew her father, who was Brina's youngest child, for twenty eight years, and I knew my great-grandmother Jessie, Brina's daughter-in-law, for my first eleven years.She died the year that we were listening to Australian cover versions of hit songs from elsewhere. We drove around Perth in that year in our brand new Falcon station wagon with her in the back, skinny and ancient, and us in our bikinis and beach towels with the radio as loud as it would go, singing along to In the Summertime , not the Mungo Jerry hit from England, but the Australian cover version by The Mixtures.

***

It is a Hebrew tradition that forefathers are named as we , that therefore there is no demarcation between us andthem.Time shrinks into a different form: I would like to consider this type of continuum. And am trying, against all hope, to make connections with a stream of individuals who seemed to work, sometimes actively so, against community. And the Hebrew myth is just that: my conceit.So many of us born into a mainstream, into a majority, long to be, unhealthily, the exotic other. (But usually without that obligatory apprenticeship of oppression that can last a lifetime.)

More interesting than Church of England.