Watercolours by Adrienne Ferreira

wiped them, remembering how embarrassed she used to be by this cracked seat, how she hated her friends to see it, even Diana. Being poor was almost as humiliating as being a wog with garlic breath. But Diana didn’t care, she did speech and drama eisteddfods, which came with their own set of humiliations: ‘At least you’re not posh,’ she used to point out.
    The ute rattled noisily, even on this newly razed surface. It was a bomb, but she’d never get rid of it, not now, even if they could afford a new one. Its seat of socks was far too precious.
    Sun struck the dusty windscreen and for a moment she was blinded. Slowing, she gripped the steering wheel and relied on her knowledge of the track until the car was engulfed in shade again. She drove through bush and dappled sunlight before shuddering around one final corrugated bend. Before her, hundreds of mulberry trees ran in wobbly rows like fat green beads draped over the slopes. It was such a familiar sight, as intimate as the contours of her own body. She felt the landscape filling her in, making her substantial again. This odd, ordered plantation hadbeen her home. It explained who she was and within it she made sense.
    Here, Umberto had raised her on stories of her grandfather and his mulberry tree experiments. It was her grandfather’s dream of becoming a silk farmer that had led him to plant the different varieties of mulberry, grafting hybrids, testing which were most suited to the climate and which were best for silkworm food. Because of Umberto, Mira knew that white-mulberry leaves produced the best silk, although the black variety proved the hardiest and most resistant to drought. And because of him she knew that dust could turn a silkworm — the fussiest of creatures — off its food; a number of early silk ventures had failed simply because mulberry groves were planted alongside dirt roads and the dust had rendered the leaves inedible. A silkworm’s delicate constitution used to spark one of Umberto’s favourite stories. He would always be bursting to tell it, but he managed to adopt a grave tone to begin with, to draw Mira in.
    My father’s neighbour, he tried and tried to raise silkworms, but he had no luck. Time after time the worms turned sick. They refused to eat. They refused to grow. And this neighbour would scratch his head in confusion and pull his beard in frustration. He tried everything but nothing seemed to help.
    At this point in the telling, unable to contain himself, Umberto’s long moustache would start twitching like a couple of silkworms itself. Do you know why the caterpillars wouldn’t grow? Why they felt so sick?
    Of course she knew. He’d been wheeling this one out ever since she was still small enough to curl up in his lap, but she obliged him anyway.
    Bad breath.
    That’s right! Bad breath! he’d crow, whacking his big hands together with glee. Despite his amusement, Mira always thought it a sad story. The poor neighbour was a friendly fellow but famous for his halitosis, made all the worse by a set of woefully unhealthy teeth. He and his teenage wife had come to Morus at the turn of the century as part of a small wave of silk pioneers and were meticulous farmers. They fussed over their caterpillars, diligently cleaned out their trays, were zealous in guarding them against ants and wasps, and handpicked the choicest mulberry leaves, drying them carefully to protect the stock from damp. Despite all this their silkworms languished. Hardly any reached maturity and those that did spun only weak silk.
    After a while they wondered if they’d been struck by the dreaded pébrine, a disease that had devastated the silk industry in Europe, gradually wiping out all of the native silkworms there. Australia was an isolated island at the edge of the world and this was one of the reasons a silk movement had begun; there was a voracious European demand for uncontaminated silk and