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By the time I was ten, when I began seriously to read – so that silent words, not utterance, would be my form of expression – half the front room was crowded by books. My narrow canvas stretcher was in the same room, against the side wall. I would fall asleep watching my parents read at the kitchen table, and if I woke in the night I found myself in this peculiar, librarian city, the massive architectonics of other people's words. Terraces, ziggurats, prominences and voids. In the darkness the pillars of books seemed to tilt and arch over me, yet I fancied not collapse, but a kind of shelter, the roof-shaped protection of open volumes.

After my father died, my mother became gradually more boldly explorative; she opened books that she had been forbidden to touch, sought out those marked specifically as his own. Because we were stranded together, and because I stuttered, we read. There is no refuge so private, no asylum more sane. There is no facility of voices captured elsewhere so entire and so marvellous. My tongue was lumpish and fixed, but in reading, silent reading, there was a release, a flight, a wheeling off into the blue spaces of exclamatory experience, diffuse and improbable, gloriously homeless. All that was solid melted into air, all that was air reshaped, and gained plausibility.

My early childhood was watched over by Sal and Daff, and by Billy Trevor. They called me Deeta. Sal and Daff continued, for several years, to work at the Trevors' house – a big station homestead, just a quarter of a mile up the track – but then Sal, and one month later Daff, disappeared with no warning. I was six, perhaps, when they abandoned me. I cried for days and days, as did Billy beside me, holding one of my hands while he flapped the other, like a broken bird-wing, like a trapped cockatoo, in a gesture of private and glum desolation.

By then they had taught me fragments of their language, Yawan, as well as a few basic words of my wet nurse's tongue. Before my stutter, I was a flexible and canny speaker, and I loved the full-mouthed sounds of indigenous nouns, the clever and precise onomatopoeia of the bird names, the cyclical songs, full of sonorous droning. And although I was a whitefella, a
kartiya
, Sal or Daff would carry me angled on their bony hips, and take me down to the creek-bed, to sit with their people.

I would be passed, like other small children, from body to body, nestling there, cradled in capacious laps, and I would feel the long fingers sift through my hair for lice, and the stroking of my arms, and the tickle of a tease. I was nourished and cared for in ways my parents were incapable of understanding. Sometimes Mrs Trevor came striding down through the scrub
to drag Billy and me away – mongrel no-hopers, she called them, layabout blacks – but often we were simply forgotten and stayed where we were left.

From Sal and Daff I learned that my totem was a green tree frog: many had appeared in the wet season, at the time of my birth, and that this frog-fella, this one, this one was special to me. ‘Im special-fella.' Sal's totem was
puturu
, a grass seed that her mother was gathering to grind for flour when she discovered she was pregnant. We didn't know what Daff's totem was; she could not remember her mother. But there were spirits everywhere that might enter a woman, and Mandjabari, the old woman, said Daff one day might know.

‘Spirits ebrywheres,' she said. ‘Ebrywheres, all roun.'

Billy, Billy was different; but the small group in the creek-bed fed him and played with him and taught him skills with his hands. The spirit within him was particular and probably unknowable.

Only when I was older did I realise how much I loved Billy, how faithful and consistent a companion he had been. He was an odd-looking boy – pigeon-chested, with crooked teeth and dappled skin. He had bottle-grey eyes, which he forgot to blink, so that they often appeared watery, as if he was on the verge of tears. These features made him look both stupid and wise, and old-man Dauwarrngu said that Billy knew things, secret things, like blackfellas, this one Billy-fella. Billy used to like to plait my hair. The feel of his hands there, at my neck, was like adoration. I have come to believe that we have lovers all our lives, but only know them to be so if we remember the specificities of touch.

In the smaller community of three, taut with conjugal unhappiness and the burden of an unacceptable child, Perdita witnessed other, more strained, human relations. In the scattered light of
afternoon she saw her parents argue – the smallest thing would make them ferocious with each other – and discovered that the ruins of a marriage are not necessarily quiet, but include yells, imprecations, megaphoned insults. The first time she saw Nicholas swing at Stella, striking her with an audible whack to the cheek, she ran outside, alarmed, to consider what had occurred. She fled into the bush and simply waited there until her own heart settled, crouching until there was such a quietness, an absorbing distinction and clarity to the look and feel of things, that she grew almost afraid. She was stirred by a rustle in the dry grass behind her and when she turned she saw three rust-coloured kangaroos, lazily grazing in the falling dusk. They were usually a glimpse, bounding away from the car, flinging themselves on their huge feet into bumpy flight, but now they were close, closer than ever before. Perdita liked the way their neat ears pivoted and twitched, catching her presence, and their upright arch, so casually alert. The large one scratched itself on the chest. Cocked its head. Eyed her sideways. And though she was sure it had seen her, it took its time leading the other two away, and then not in bounding, but in slow heavy hops, seesaw, rocking, raising small puffs of red dust from its padded heels.

Later Perdita felt ashamed that she had not rushed to her mother's side, and found that Stella was a stranger when she re-entered the house. Perdita heard her cursing in old-fashioned language; only afterwards would she know these were also the words of William Shakespeare, wrenched out of theatrical decorum to service a personal fury.

Nicholas sat at the table against the wall, smoking and reading and pretending his wife wasn't there. In the light of the kerosene lamp he looked weathered, tense. His profile had a sharp,
Sicilian
quality.
Leontes.
And the light glinting off his eyeglasses, Perdita thought, made him look sightless, brutal.

In bed that night, shadowed by the already growing city of
books, Perdita calmed herself by remembering the eyes of the large kangaroo: they were so lustrous and calm, so intrinsically lovely. Visitants, they were. Intercepting guests that might have had this message: the world is
also
still and calm and without collisions; the world is
also
these fond, benevolent presences, fur-warm and comforting, wanting nothing, silent.

Since her distrust of outsiders was more powerful than her hesitation of mothering, Stella would not allow her daughter to be sent away to school. So from the age of five, Perdita was taught at home, inefficiently, erratically, in fits and starts. When she was nine war was declared and Stella, in strange response, became orderly and purposeful. Nicholas left early each morning – as though he were a worker in a city bank, with a train to catch and a satchel of urgent papers to attend to – and then Stella, equally in need of a sustaining and fictitious timetable, waited exactly until 9 a.m. before the first lesson commenced. They would continue for three hours, then halt, even in mid-topic, on the dot of twelve, so that in the afternoons Stella could sleep, sew or read. She had drawn up a list of subjects – history, geography, religion, arithmetic, English, biology, Shakespeare, of course – which she reordered or dispensed with according to her inclination and mood, sometimes adding whatever book she had taken at random from their collection. That these books were adult and difficult seemed not to have occurred to her: and Perdita was both oppressed and delighted by what she could not understand, finding in every case at least a scrap of the comprehensible world. She wrote long lists of words she did not know the meaning of and promised herself that one day, in the future, she would know them all.

From her mother Perdita inherited an addled vision of the world; so much was unremembered or misremembered, so that
the planet reshaped into new tectonic variations, changed the size and outline of countries on shaky hand-drawn maps, filled up with fabricated peoples and customs (many of them disquieting, weird, remote from understanding). History was English, and so was morality (‘no elbows on the table' was a moral precept; ‘don't complain'; ‘don't lie'; ‘never tell strangers your real feelings'); so too, now that they were at war and the Hun were enemies again, the world had a protestant purpose and a democratic mission. Communism was evil, Perdita learned, more evil even than the Nazis, and the Godless Russians ate their own children during long frozen winters in which the sun, too defeated, simply slid along the horizon for a few hours before it returned everything to an icy, deathly darkness. Stella had coded the world into her own fierce antinomies, super-populated with villains and evil-doers, fuelled by daft purpose and maniacal intention.

In the world of these lessons Stella and Perdita discovered, for the first time, an experience of intimacy. Perdita loved the imperative sound of her mother's voice, telling tales about everything under the sun. She loved her laugh, now and then, at her own descriptions, and the way she would embellish information with the slightest encouragement.

‘How?' Perdita asked. ‘Why? Why not?'

Perdita watched her mother's mouth move, and heard what a wonder the mighty world was. Mother and daughter were united in what might be told and in the elastic possibilities of any telling.

The Shakespearean lessons were those Perdita loved best because they were stories. When her mother recited she was at a loss, completely bamboozled by the half-English, half-ornament quality of the verse, the overwrought pomposity of it all, the lavish sentiments. But when Stella first read aloud from Charles Lamb's summaries, the plots became intelligible,
and Perdita was entranced by how terrible and how heroic people could be, by how many monarchs were mad, how many lovers disguised, how many women were faithless, or exceeding in beauty, how mistaken identity was everywhere and disastrously abroad, how easily stabbings or poisonings or suicides might occur, to shuffle off, Shakespeareanly, one's mortal coil. Stella had a particular affection for the tragedies, and a love of the soliloquies of Hamlet above all, so that by the time she was nine Perdita knew his most famous lamentations by heart:

Perdita was not entirely sure what this meant, but liked the animating grizzle, the bad-tempered tone. Stella declared that this speech, and others like it, were about ‘the big questions'. She told her daughter that everything one needed to know about life was contained in a volume of Shakespeare; that he was all-wise, incomparable, the encompasser of every human range.

Even as a child Perdita knew this to be false. She stepped out into the dazzling light of Australia; she saw their blue kelpie, Horatio, scratching his balls in the angled cool shadow of the water tank; she saw zebra finches flash past, their black-white racing; she saw the Trevors' windmill at a distance, creakily turn, time-worn, straining, holding its iron wings cruciform; she felt
hot wind brush her face and heard the hum of blowflies and the crackle of live things desiccating and the scamper of unseen lizards; all this life, all this huge unelaborated life, told her there was more on heaven and earth than was dreamt of by Mister Shakespeare.

There were dreaming spaces Mandjabari knew of, and old-man Dauwarrngu. There were even things her father knew of, with complicated names, and then there were all the unremarked, simple and non-noble feelings, the taste of warm water dribbling from a canvas bag, the silky air of early evening shining with nickel-glow, the floaty feeling induced by hearing Aboriginal songs by firelight, and the rhythm of the clap sticks, repeating, and the words, the Language, drifting and braiding, drifting and braiding and dissolving into the darkness, like wind, like forgetting.
Small
questions, Perdita thought. There were
small
questions here. Or perhaps – the idea subversively filled her head – there were
different
big questions.

When she tried to discuss this with her mother, she was met by staunch refutation. Stella looked up from her sewing, a seersucker blouse with a row of tight crimson smocking, and said that some things in life were implicitly understood: the immortality of the soul, the mortality of the body and the peerless, exceptional, genius of Shakespeare. Beyond dispute, it was, wholly beyond dispute. She flapped the blouse fabric before her and examined it on her lap. Her fingers fiddled with a dangling thread, distinct as an artery. Beside her lay her sewing box, of wicker, and a biscuit tin of old buttons. Shakespeare had identified, she asserted again,
all
the ‘big' questions. Stella directed her hazel stare at her daughter and dared her to contradict. Perdita sensibly withdrew. She had, after all, known for a long time of her mother's idiosyncratic fixation and its suite of tough declarations on the meaning of life.