Tony Birch

It was a grey and pink colour.

The lounge room would have been bigger than our whole house.

The Christmas tree was... I mean, as a kid, I thought, I don't think Jack from the Bean Store could climb that Christmas tree.

It just seemed so huge.

And they had this amazing wallpaper in the hallway, which was a texture of a sort of a velvet pattern, a black velvet pattern on white.

And the first...

that I committed when I went to the house was when the woman opened the front door and we entered the hallway, I was so drawn to this wallpaper, I thought it was carpet on the wall.

I ran my hands across the black velvet texture and the woman just turned and she snapped, don't touch that.

So, yeah, everything was big, everything was bright, a huge big black and white television.

And then...

My clothes, which were, again, secondhand clothes from op shops, were taken from me.

I still remember they burnt all my clothes in the incinerator in the backyard and burnt the cardboard suitcase.

But they didn't say anything.

They hardly spoke to me.

They were looking at me like I was some exotic species.

I mean, I suppose it might have been just normal middle-class life because if you imagine, Richard, us sitting in our small kitchen in Fitzroy, there were seven of us around the kitchen table, everyone weighing in with their say, kids talking over the top of each other, everyone, you know, if you lost a potato off your plate, who could stick the fork in that potato quick as God?

LAUGHTER

Got the loose potato.

And so it was all about formality that didn't make any sense to me.

The fact that people didn't seem to speak, didn't seem to really interact.