Mind, body and age

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  • Published 20040601
  • ISBN: 9780733314339
  • Extent: 268 pp
  • Paperback (234 x 153mm)

ON THE DAY of my birth, Boxing Day, 1921, something seemed wrong in the small rented brick house in the lower-middle-class Sydney suburb of Kogarah. In the real-life nativity scene in the main bedroom, the doctor, the midwife, my grandmother and my mother were witnessing a “complication” while my father, in the kitchen, decently out of sight of his wife’s vulva, dabbed his tears with a tea towel at the threatened still birth of his first child. Instead, with the cry of life, I became the sixth person in the brick cottage.

I “remember” this medical event clearly because the story was told so often as part of the family saga and because later I was to see so many similar scenes in movies … the water boiling on the stove … the baby giving its first cry … the grandmother coming out and announcing, “It’s a boy!”

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About the author

Donald Horne (dec.)

Professor Donald Horne was one of Australia's foremost academics, historians and philosophers and was named as one of Australia's living national treasures.He wrote 28...

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