The clipping was a half-page article honouring the work and recent death of a senior academic at an interstate university. In the accompanying photo the academic was pictured with his wife, who had died in 2007. His face struck no chord of recognition in me, but hers did. It was a strong and beautiful face. I realised for the first time, looking at her picture, that she must have had Spanish or South American blood.

Something opened inside me, filling me with heat and sadness. I had never shared it with anyone.

How to tell this story?

Let me backtrack and evoke other scenes that will put this one in context.

My mother is not well. I am eight. We have moved into a new, raw house in a new suburb. I have been enrolled in my sixth primary school. We have moved countries twice, and this is at least the eighth house I have lived in, so the move itself is nothing new. But in this house my mother is more of a presence in another room than an available person. She is in bed all the time and her bedroom is out of bounds, except when we are invited in to say goodnight.

The next scene takes place in the morning, on a clear day. My father takes me and my brother outside to sit on the front step. Perhaps there is still no lawn to look at – only the trees are clear to me. He says our mother is dead; that she died in the night and was taken away. I know I am being told something momentous. I know what dead means, or at least I think I do. I feel strangely numb. The bedroom that in my mind, until this moment, contained a presence known to me as Mummy is now sitting behind me in the house, empty. Our father is still talking. He is saying that our mother loved us, that she made him promise to take good care of us. He says this is a promise he will take seriously.

Here is another memory – a brief flash. It is weeks or even months later. I am standing in the front yard, thinking about my mother’s death. I feel strange – my lips have gone numb. I am aware that a normal girl would be weeping and shocked. I know that this means I am a hard and unnatural girl. There is no one I can share this with. The subject of our mother’s death is never discussed again, by anybody. There has been no goodbye. No funeral. Nothing.

This story took place in the sixties, in provincial Australia, and it happened to a rudderless, immigrant family with no community connections and no relatives anywhere in the country. Of course my father struggled. He would have been distraught. He couldn’t cook; he had no idea how a washing machine worked; he didn’t know how you clothed children; there was no such thing as childcare.

And then, out of the blue, it seemed to me, another family stepped in. I don’t know how long they helped out – it could have been weeks, it could have been months. They lived, when we first met them, in a flat. They moved soon after into a house very near ours. They were American – the husband worked with my father at the university. They had two children who were roughly our age.

What I remembered most about them was their warmth and permissiveness. Our home was rigid, hierarchical, fairly uncommunicative. In their home we were invited to call the adults by their first names. This was an exciting novelty to me. There was much frank discussion, generous expression of feelings, the inclusion of children. There were few rules and little bother about obsessive domestic tidiness.

It was even more moving to learn from the newspaper tribute that this family had only moved to Australia that very year. So this was a hospitality extended not by long-standing friends but by virtual strangers who were themselves forging a new life in a foreign landscape. We – my brother and I – were collected after school and taken to their home. We played, did our homework, and were fed before our father took us home.

Examining the eyes, the face, of the academic’s wife as she looked up at me from my kitchen bench, I was overtaken by something I could no longer avoid.

We’ve been at school all day, and here we are again, in this unfamiliar flat, with these kind but unfamiliar people. There seems nothing much in this world for me to hang on to. The woman asks me to do something – is it eat? Help with the washing up? Suddenly I want or need something so badly I am not myself. I say I won’t do whatever-it-is until I see her breasts. Is that what I call them? We are in the living area. She looks at me. There is a pause. I don’t know what I expect. A tongue-lashing? Horror? She takes me by the hand, quietly leads me to her bedroom, sits on the bed, unbuttons her blouse. I don’t think I’ve seen a grown woman’s breasts before. They are exotic. They are ordinary. They are brown. I’ve seen enough. She does up her blouse and we leave the room. I know I have done something shocking. And I know that she has taken this in her stride. It is never mentioned – or repeated.

Whenever I thought of this incident later, and I have generally been successful at not thinking of it, I burned with shame. What did it say about me, the perverted girl who couldn’t cry over the death of her mother? I put it away in a deep drawer, marked ‘unnatural’.

Until here it was, nearly five decades later, on my kitchen bench on an ordinary summer’s day. I examined myself minutely. The shame still flickered. I also knew I would have liked a chance, as a grown woman and mother, to have thanked her – although I could see, looking at that beautiful face, that she would have been the sort of woman who knew just what she was doing, and why.

Now there was enough distance, compassion for my little self could flood in. The meaning of those breasts, that kindness.