My earliest reading memory
Reading with my female cousins on a veranda above the Macleay River, cicadas burring, the river dark and robust far below, and the distant blue aspect of the Kookaburra Ranges. We read Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did series and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. I noticed my mother, a girl from the bush, loved me to read, and kept priming me with books when we moved to Sydney. She did not let us complain of boredom in our house by the Western railway. Her war cry was, “A child with a book is never bored!”
My favourite book growing up
The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper. It had everything a postcolonial child needed: the valour of British women, the serpentine malice of those French fellows, the noble savage and just about every other prejudice we delighted in in the late 1940s.
