VALLEYS AND GHOSTS 1. Our potato farm stretched across the hill above Lake Connewarre. Sixty-four kilometres due north, the You Yangs rose like tors from the flatlands beyond Corio Bay. It was said, that when they appeared close and clear, it would rain within a day and, in those times, rain it did, from early autumn, through winter and until mid-spring. Days and weeks and months of deep, soaking rain, so that the paddocks sloping to my friend's house were thick and wet with tussocks of green

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... ass. The paddocks turned yellow with cape weed daisies in the spring and the cream, produced by the cattle that grazed there, carried the sour taste of it. The Barwon River flowed from the west, swelled over the marshlands of the valley to form the lake and narrowed again as it made its way south to the Heads and Bass Straight. From our verandah, it looked like a python, full from a big lunch, lying fat and snoozing in the sun. Its belly would shrink in the summer months, exposing reeds between the cracks in the lake bed, while the surrounding paddocks baked hard and brown. My friend once said to me, 'We have all we will ever need right here.' Staring westward under a bright moon, I believed him. A sea mist crept across the lake and somewhere in the deep silence, came a sound like a cry underwater. Ours was a rambling home of slamming doors, songs sung around the piano and arguments pounded out on the kitchen table. It was strange to live teetering on the edge of worlds as we did. Not one of us had a mild view of things. We were too brave to have been worn down by the ordinary and the small, and too young to believe life could be any other way.