Tony Birch

And many, many years later, I think I was in my 40s, I was out that way.

I called in to see a friend and then gone to a nursery actually to buy some plants and

And I was near the river and I realised I knew this part of the river.

And then I remember, well, this is Heidelberg, this is Rosanna.

I looked up in the old street directory, the Melway, and the street was very close.

So I drove the five minutes to the street, I drove into the street, parked outside the house, immediately recognised the house.

The odd thing was that the day that I'd arrived at that house when I was five, I remember the garden being incredibly bright and these flowers, and I don't know the proper name, but people call red-hot poker, these incredibly bright flowers and this really almost luridly bright garden.

And then when I went back there, these decades later, it was in real sort of neglect and disrepair.

There was some old rose thorns, but it looked like a garden that hadn't been tended for a long, long time.

I got out of the car and knocked on the door with little understanding or notion of what I was doing.

And then the door answered.

An old woman opened the door.

She didn't seem too alert or well.

I'm sure she had a wig on.

And the other thing that was sort of quite eerie is that I looked and the wallpaper that I'd known as a kid was still there, but it was all sort of scrubby and... Yeah, so the place looked run down, basically.

And then I asked her if she was the woman who lived in the house and I said... Because I stayed in his house when I was a boy...

and i gave the family surname and she sort of clutched at her she had a dressing gown on she sort of clutched at it and in a way quite defensively yeah she's looking at a strange man she wouldn't know who i was and so maybe there was good reason to do that and she said i don't know what you're talking about and and closed the door really abruptly and i left

Certainly I don't know if it was the woman who was the mum who picked me up and I left thinking, well, I don't know and I should leave because, you know, I could have disturbed someone.

So I just left and left it at that.

It's a really interesting point you make because the way that I grew up was...