ONE THE DAY of my birth, Boxing Day, 1921, something seemed wrong in the small rented brick house in the lower-middle-class Sydney suburb of Kogarah. In the real-life nativity scene in the main bedroom, the doctor, the midwife, my grandmother and my mother were witnessing a “complication” while my father, in the kitchen, decently out of sight of his wife’s vulva, dabbed his tears with a tea towel at the threatened still birth of his first child. Instead, with the cry of life, I became the sixth person in the brick cottage.

I “remember” this medical event clearly because the story was told so often as part of the family saga and because later I was to see so many similar scenes in movies … the water boiling on the stove … the baby giving its first cry … the grandmother coming out and announcing, “It’s a boy!”