Forged with Flames by Ann Fogarty, Anne Crawford

month at the Berry Street Babies Home in Richmond, after which I applied for a couple of jobs as a kindergarten assistant, but without success. Jobs were easy to come by but not necessarily what I was qualified for. Whilst I was waiting for something suitable, I found a job not far away at the Heinz factory in Dandenong, filling cans with tomatoes. It was mind-numbing stuff and I got into trouble from my fellow-workers for filling the cans too quickly—I’m sure the boss didn’t mind! After working there for only a month,I was lucky to land a job at a newly-opened kindergarten close to home at Beaconsfield.
    During those early months and years, England would sometimes seem to be a world away. Although I wrote to my parents regularly, we didn’t have a phone at the cottage and even if we had done, international phone calls, which had to be booked via an operator, were very expensive. Phone conversations with my family were therefore limited to Christmas and birthdays, when we’d use Flo and John’s phone. I always felt a sharp pang of homesickness right after those calls, missing my family and the familiarity of England; I realised, too, what a steep learning curve I was on and how much I was making it up as I went along, every day. On the other hand, my eagerness to explore and discover more of Australia, the countryside and the people, remained undiminished.
    Our favourite activity on the weekends was to pack our gear and go camping in an idiosyncratic little car that Terry had brought back from the UK. It could only have been designed by an eccentric Englishman! The fetchingly-titled Dormobile, made in the south of England, was barely the size of a small sedan yet had lots of added extras not found in a normal car. The roof—which looked like a small, upturned boat when down—lifted up, enabling an adult to stand quite easily in the back. The rear seat folded down and the back of the car folded out, creating a bed wide enough to sleep two people. It had a stove, two small fold-out tables, a tiny sink, and various cupboards. It was really like a miniature caravan.
    Terry had found it terrific for touring England, Scotland and Wales in the two years he spent in the United Kingdom. And of course, it was in the Dormobile that he proposed. So weboth had reasons to be attached to it and didn’t think anything of shipping it back to Australia when we were due to leave England. Until the girls came along, we would head off for a low-cost holiday whenever the whim took us.
    It was on one of these trips that I had my first encounter with kookaburras. Early one morning in the summer of 1971, I was woken from a deep sleep when a group of them began to laugh uproariously. I shot bolt upright in an instant and made sure Terry woke up too, being convinced there was a gang of thugs outside the car. What else could it be? When Terry, laughingly, told me it was only birds, I didn’t believe him. The only birds I’d known—water hens, willow warblers, kingfishers, herons, woodpeckers, ducks, and the like—didn’t make noises remotely like this human-sounding cackle. It wasn’t until I’d looked outside and reassured myself of the source that I could settle back down to sleep, wondering at the strangeness of a country that had birds whose natural calls were indistinguishable from a bunch of people having a good belly laugh.
    We lived in our rented cottage in Berwick for two years before deciding to buy. It didn’t take long to find a property we both liked: a small, redbrick house on three-quarters of an acre in Upper Beaconsfield. I loved it the minute I saw it; the way it sat so neatly under its pale sloping roof, the white-trimmed windows contrasted against the red bricks, its location among the tall and majestic gum trees that I’d come to love by this stage. We marvelled that so much land could be ours with bush right outside our back window. There was something wild