After all, boys being boys they would have shot the bloody things! The only chance you had of escape from a wild emu as you trudged barefoot and dressed in flour-bag clothing was to hide behind a cactus bush. Great-Aunt Emma, my authority on this matter, informed me that wild emus find it difficult to see around corners and, having only very little brain, tend to just give up and go away. They also dislike cactus bushes because they catch their feathers on the prickles. A hard life indeed. A strange climate, too.

I must tie up a few ends in the story. Great-grandmother never went home to England, and I bet Lady Collins had a bit of fast talking to do when she got home.

‘What have you done with our girl, Lady William?’ Mum and Dad would have asked.

‘Oh, goodness. I knew I’d left something behind. How silly of me,’ Lady C.

‘Silly, be damned,’ the furious father. ‘It was downright careless! Australia! A fate worse than death!’

However, Great-grandmama was in no way deserted by her family. She became a remittance woman. Year in and year out for the rest of her life money from the Old Country was deposited in an account in her name at a Sydney bank. She touched not a penny of it. I like to think that she and Francis were happily married. The four boys took off over the Queensland border and, God help us, helped run the Queensland police force for a generation. Of the four girls, Emma, the eldest, became a nurse and fought in the Boer War. Fought? Yes, I use the word advisedly. Great-Aunt Emma was a tough lady! Annie, my grandmother, trained as a Salvation Army officer and was a missionary in other emu-infested bits of Australia and then in New Zealand. Mrs Hamilton Reeves lived to a ripe old age. I have one photo of her taken in her mid-eighties; slightly stooped, gaunt of face, hair pulled back and with a very prominent nose. (I feel a peculiar affinity to this woman!) In the fullness of time the fortune that had piled up in the Sydney bank got shared among her daughters…I think I know where most of our share went. Ah, yes, those Salvationists have much to answer for.

Family histories, stories, recounted orally, word-of-mouth, one generation to the next, are very edgy things. Fragile. There is metamorphosis as they get handed down, embroidered, told against present background where the social mores of the day may require a certain tempering or change of emphasis. The lecture I offered on this occasion was actually on the power of story and how it is a dominant factor in my life and work. The tale of Mrs Hamilton-Reeves is certainly a powerful story.

‘You mustn’t believe everything that Auntie tells you,’ my grandmother, Annie Georgina Taylor, would say to me gently, after yet another visit from her sister, my Great-Aunt Emma. An admonition I was none-too-keen to heed! Aunty Emma’s stories were so good they just had to be true.

When I was eleven I lived for about a year in Petone with my grandparents, Annie and Alex Taylor. It was a good time. Things had been a bit difficult at home. My battles with my sister, Margaret, were none too easy for both our parents to manage. The two of us were close in most ways, and I probably depended on her more than she ever did on me.