When Julia and Dad arrived, the breakfast dishes were all washed, incense was burning in the lounge room and everything else smelt of muffins. She insisted on taking Julia right through the house, showing her the renovations we had done. Julia admired the paint work and the old dresser the Counse...
Fortunately Mum rang me first thing to remind me to wear lots of blue (why couldn’t they come up with better house names – Dragon House, for example, Tiger House, House of Happiness – but no, we get boring old colours). Then Polly rang while Dad was trying to plait my hair into lots of little pla...
Mum and Sheri were sitting around in the kitchen, our sitting-around room. The lounge room was the TV zone. Only Mitchell’s dad sat in there—to discuss parenting issues with Sheri while Mum and I went for a long walk with Pavlov so we weren’t in the way or, worse still, influencing the decision m...
Once upon a time, Mum had made clop-clopping noises, sounding just like a real horse, or she’d held her hands in front of her as though she was holding reins, and bounced up and down in her seat at the breakfast table, making us laugh. But that didn’t happen anymore. Mum was hardly ever at the br...
I knew that leprosy often begins as a small dot in the palm of one’s hand. You shouldn’t call it leprosy, Mr Chapman said, it was really Hansen’s Disease and the fact that it was still called leprosy in our textbooks went to show you how behind Queensland was in the education system. I had a smal...