Mireille Day

No, completely the opposite, actually.

The message that I got from a very early age was that the world was a dangerous place.

Don't go outside the fence.

Don't play on the road.

And above all, do not get into cars with strange men.

So what do I do as soon as I had a bit of a freedom?

I got into not a car with a strange man, but a boat with a strange man.

They were very disapproving of it.

We were living in sin.

That was the way my mother described it.

She wanted us to get married and do all of that kind of thing.

But, you know, it was the 70s.

We were rewriting the rules.

Marriage was a bourgeois institution.

It turned a man into a husband and a woman into a wife.

So that was fairly traumatic as well, but I'd had Tony by my side to cope with that.

He also came from a family that disowned him because of being a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, et cetera, and his father had been, like mine, a World War II veteran, and that was completely rebellious on his behalf to have done something, you know, against the family tradition.

Well, if anybody from the Australia Council is listening, I did do the work.

But part of it was spent on buying an old Mercedes-Benz 220S, a second-hand car that I bought from a friend and it was a bit of an old rattle trap and it was very large and I was quite small, probably bit off a bit more than I could chew with that car.

A bit was spent on champagne as well, I think, Mireille.