AustLit

'A few years ago, I wrote a letter to Greg Dening. I was staying at my childhood home in Brisbane, where my parents still live. It was the school vacation, and my daughters were being minded upstairs by their grandparents. I sat in the office under the house, a 1950s-style elevated Queensland house, not the romantic now sought-after variety with deep wooden verandahs, but one with a concrete patio and swirly wrought iron railing up a tiled staircase. Under the house was not a place for us children, at least on weekdays. This was the office and base of the family plumbing business—one side housed a row of plumbing vans which seeped black liquid onto the concrete ground, while above hung the ingeniously arranged, ever changing complex of copper and plastic pipes. Like branches of a familiar canopy, these softly gleaming creatures went unnoticed by me, though it was hard to ignore the racket of their clanging early-morning departures from beneath my bedroom floorboards. Under the house, the brick wall on the far side was lined with cardboard box after box of plumbing taps, washers, sockets, tools, hot-water systems, drain-digging devices, and the ‘Insinkerator’ cutting tool Dad had invented himself: anonymous brown boxes, except for the scrawled, indecipherable abbreviations and bad spelling. The place I wrote that letter was in the office, with its sour, peppery smells of metals, burning solder, grease, raw bricks and mortar, and its distracting poster of ‘unionist’ monkeys dressed as plumbers. This narrow, cave-like room was now devoted to charity work, especially speeches for the Lions Club.' (Introduction)