MY MOTHER’S ASHES got scattered at the end of Australia’s Black Summer. She’d been dead for eighteen months. But her family – my five foster siblings and their twelve children – hadn’t been together since the funeral. Now we belatedly congregated under storm clouds south of Coffs Harbour. I was given the duty of unscrewing the lid like a petrol can and pouring her remnants towards the tank of the Pacific Ocean.

My brother John, a car salesman in Bundaberg, recited ‘Clancy of the Overflow’ – a paen to solitude my mother cooed to us before sleep back in Wondai. It imbued us with the residual delusion that we grew up on a sheep farm, not at a pub filled by graziers and tradies shearing their brain cells with beer.