My four sisters and I gathered in 2023 to mark the centenary of the birth of our father. We read his favourite poems aloud and we walked across the farm (now owned by our cousin) where we had grown up. As we walked we talked, remembering childhood incidents and retelling old stories. We visited the site of the house we’d lived in until 1967, before we ‘moved across the paddock’. The old house is long gone, but a one-roomed hut that sat adjacent to the house still remains. As we approached, we noticed a rotting pile of old clothing. Upon closer inspection we recognised the clothing; our childhood clothes, our mother’s dresses, patched trousers belonging to our father. What were they doing here?

Our cousin supplied the missing piece to the puzzle. A couple of months earlier she’d discovered rats living in the hut and had dragged boxes of old clothes out into the paddock with the intention of burning them. She’d been too busy to finish the job. She told us there were boxes of old schoolbooks in the hut too that had been abandoned when we’d moved. The clothing and the books had lain there forgotten for nearly sixty years.

That evening we’d scheduled a slide show of our father’s photographs. We appeared, projected on the living-room wall, clad in those very same garments that now lay cold and wet in the long grass across the paddock. It was a powerful encounter with the past and the beginning of my current body of work.