AustLit

'I write on a laptop, at the kitchen table, even though there’s a perfectly functional study at the front of the house. Looking up from the screen, I’m facing north, gazing through the glass doors to the small courtyard, to the fig tree. The fig tree is netted in the late summer as part of our ongoing battle with the local birds and rats over the sweet juicy fruit that I have been addicted to since childhood. In autumn it begins to discard its leaves until it is a bare, grey-brown skeleton and then it grows them again in spring. By December, its thick shadowy canopy is an oasis under which I can sit with a book and a gin and tonic. This fig tree was grown from a cutting that came from my father-in-law’s tree. That tree was grown from a cutting that made the twenty-nine days trip from Calabria on the ship Australia in 1959. Like the bean seeds sewn into my husband’s toy bear, like the passengers on that ship, that fig tree cutting spawned offspring that are now scattered across the city.' (Introduction)