At first, you served as my means for telling this story. My entry point, a conduit for the unravelling of flesh and blood. You were my beloved; but you were a daughter who had missed out on the succour that family is capable of.Your family was impossible, a minefield of abuse and promises never kept. Fascinating only for its kinship complications, a template you could explain to people once they started to be friends. I could make my family picture from Australia for you who comes from somewhere else. I thought I could make it with a variation on the tools of your trade: archaeology. I could dig down and look for traces of lives, learn about how these people lived together. Use a little spade and dig through the dirt. Investigate imaginary middens for signs of life, of deception, of success, of pain. Who ran with whom. Why this shame had reared its ugly head and shut everybody up.   You could be my way in. An ideal, even idealised you, sitting on the side of it all, connected only to me, at once my own, newly-made family. The juncture between the past and my here-and-now.   In Canberra, living with you, I began to write my stories about Perth and Fremantle, about my family and their arrival in Australia. I was living in an inner suburb of a cold-hearted city, a transient place that empties out at Christmas and all of the other holidays. People return to where they belong, or once belonged, or still wish they belong. This was an ersatz residence. I was only there for love, in the pursuit of the sanctity of a life lived with you, who I could cherish and spend a whole life with. But from the start my exile from home was tenuous and taut; at its best it was an immediate comfort.   I couldn't write as I had been yearning to of my intriguing coincidences and rambling family saga-stories: they seemed to require a bodily attachment, or maybe this new place was to blame. The writing seemed to be asserting and aligning itself to geography, to physical traces and known land-markings. I was collecting little details in the National Library, making links and realising my deep roots with this place, with my own community. Working out why I couldn't leave on what became the flimsy basis of love and a life with you. It was too soon to be doing this, there was too much untested business. I am glad now that I resisted.   When you left me and all of my structures went to water, washed away, I realised the archaeology would not assist me in my work. Through the pain that found its physical manifestation in my body, made me feel the intensity of a heart attack, I also found another metaphor to write by, that of therapy. I needed it for my pain, and then it helped me in my quest.   My field of writing contains suffering, but it is only the ordinary, daily sort; a recognisable and domestic, familial, suffering. No examples of the monumental variety: this is a contained field: made up of loss and physical pain, denial, repression, and lost opportunities. Psychic pain and the screaming in the chest that never gets released, never finds its voice, transmutates into inheritances and bitterness. No plane crashes, environmental disasters, Holocausts. Just death, daily losses, and repressions.   Not all doom and gloom, of course; we learn from our sorrows, and one of the things we can keep learning about is pleasure. To live in a small place, even a small city like this one, when it is a matter of adult choice, is to entine yourself completely with the past, to admit that there is enough pleasure lodged in the familiar, the expected. It isn't always like this, but it can be. You are best prepared if you realise that everything is not as it seems, that secrets and silences will eventually be opened up along the way whether or not you choose to know. The funny thing is that once you uncover the first detail of a secret, the other messy stuff inevitably comes dumping in on you. It has been sitting there, so close to hand, for years. At your fingertips. This is the way coincidence operates: the clustering of sources and influences and the chance remark at a party.Suddenly, everyone is your cousin or wants to be or has met one a long time ago. Or knows something.