AS A HISTORIAN I’m not used to this sort of archive.

It’s a freezing spring morning in Clifton Springs, near Geelong, and I’m elbow deep in shellfish in a suburban backyard. We’re measuring mussels: sixty-five millimetres long, twenty-nine millimetres wide, fifteen millimetres deep; fifty-six millimetres long, twenty millimetres wide, nine millimetres deep. On and on it goes, hundreds of times. Then we move to oysters: fifteen millimetres; fourteen millimetres, three millimetres…