LIKE MANY PROFESSIONAL drifters of my generation, I had moved house often and quickly until my thirties, and home had become quite a melancholy idea. The pandemic placed me on the floor of a valley a few hours from the city. I had always been trying to move, someplace, anyplace, outside of this country’s borders, and COVID-19 put a final end to my youth and all my futile efforts to leave forever. As the general lockdown stretched on, I accepted that I now lived with my partner in the spider-webbed farmhouse of his childhood. It was not the big change I had expected, but I hurtled my way further and further into my new country life, and we fell pregnant the following year.

‘Many cultures assign women to the interior,’ wrote Michelle Perrot in The Bedroom: An Intimate History. I thought I knew this. And yet as soon as my pregnancy formally commenced with an anxious pee on a plastic stick – those two watery red lines hovering, unbelievably, into view, the soles of my feet sweating a little on the cool bathroom tiles – these illusions began to fall away. With my body in full biological motion, I began to see the home as a site of heart-turning drama. Not hospital hallways, not Mafia headquarters. Not overtaken warehouses in political thrillers, not Parliament House, for God’s sake. Not newsrooms. Bathrooms and bedrooms and living rooms and dining areas. Verandahs. Corridors. Door frames. Windows. They are, for me, the loaded places of terrible, awesome, life-changing moments of emergency and tenderness and epiphany.