I have a childhood memoir being published next year: This Place You Know, by Christina Marigold Houen, Ginninderra Press. It weaves my mother’s story and mine around the theme of place… a loved place which is lost. The loss is caused by an original loss, the loss of the husband and father. He leaves the farm when Anna is seven and her mother is 52. Her mother, who has never worked outside the house and garden, takes over running the farm with Anna’s help, and help from the boys when they are home on holidays. Six years later, Martha sends Anna away to boarding school, and the second year she is there, her father returns and turns her mother off the farm. She arrives at Anna’s school carrying a suitcase, to tell her that they can’t go back.
The loss of the place is more devastating than the loss of the father, whom Anna has killed off in her heart. The loss continues to reverberate in Anna’s life and in her mother’s.
Here is the epilogue:
THE LAST SONG
Your mind is an outback landscape, washed almost white in the glaring summer sun, with bare, flat plains and a faint line separating the land from the sky. The only vertical marks on this horizontal world are a line of fence posts, trailing off into the distance, a lone tree etched against the bleak sky, and, if you look behind, the straggly trees, dark grey-green-black, curling along the line of the life-giving river, mysterious in its depths and shallows, a presence you cannot see unless you approach it, but you can smell it, and when you are lying still at night, or resting in the afternoon, you can hear it, whispering its ancient song as it wanders through the land, knowing its way, carved out over thousands of years. This is not your country, but you dwell in it, and it is in your blood, your bones, your nerves, and it will never leave you, wherever you live, whatever you do, and when you die, it will always be this place, this place you know.
Below is the image that will be on the cover. It is my pastel painting of Patterson’s Curse on the Hay plains, from a photograph taken about four years ago by Rob Olver.
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