They taught us about the two world wars in school, but what I knew about them came mostly from the screen. Men were drafted, food was rationed, bombs fell from the sky. I’d known who Hitler was, of course, but Schindler’s List had come as a shock.

Lily was the first person I knew who’d really been or come from anywhere else, and was prepared to share it.

The odd times I saw Mum, she wouldn’t tell me anything I didn’t know already about Melbourne: it rained a lot, and the wind blew icy cold straight up from the Antarctic; sometimes you might recognise a face you knew from television. I wanted to know more. I wanted to know what it was like to live there. Did people travel everywhere by tram and bring their groceries home on their knees? Did people chat or pass each other by? Were the gardens at the front or tucked behind the houses?

I’d been to a few markets with Eddie, but they were all in the same small towns: a flat patch rented out in squares; a pub with the same counter specials and beers; and black-and-white photographs of men with long saws clearing the bush to plant the place, in the beginning.

I went to Yeppoon for year six camp, but that hadn’t given me much more to draw on. No one wanted to sit next to me on the bus or take the bunk below. We made damper in a campfire and learned how to snorkel, but the seals on all the masks were leaky.

I wished Fran back from London for a day. The questions I had for her. Was it as busy as it looked in movies? What was it like riding her bike between fat black cabs and double-decker buses? What did people do on Sundays? What did she miss, if she missed anything at all?

Even Liz, who was the oldest and the sister I’d known the least growing up: I would have had some questions for her about Sydney.

I wished Eddie’s brother would visit from wherever it was he’d settled in the end. Belgium, I think. I didn’t know anything at all about Belgium. I thought it was quite rainy, but it’s not all about the weather.

Meg spoke sometimes, but not often, and she never gave us much. It snowed where she grew up, and she told us once about its cold and quiet. I’d imagined the patter of rain and the wind that pushes ahead of a cyclone, but it didn’t make a sound, Meg said. ‘It’s quieter than silent.’ Lily snorted at that, but I suppose what Meg meant was that it muffled everything else like a pillow. It fell in the night when everyone was asleep, she said, and when you opened the curtains in the morning there it was, like a surprise, all over everything—bikes and buckets and washing lines—and it sparkled. I’d never have imagined that either.

To know properly about something is second best to knowing it properly yourself.

My real father wasn’t Australian. What I mean is that if he was Australian, he wasn’t the type who lived in Carney County. Mum used to tell people I looked like her side of the family, where there was a swarthy Uncle Joe. Both her parents were dead, so no one could add to that (or take from it). A handful of photographs curled in an old brown case under her bed, along with our birth certificates and other papers. They were baby pictures, mostly, and strangers grouped around tables. No one looked like me. They gave nothing away. I don’t know whether she took them with her to Melbourne or threw them out, but when I packed to move in with Michele, all that was left in the case was a drawing she’d had done at a fair that stopped in Winifred when my sisters were little. They remembered camel rides and toffee apples. I’m sure Mum only kept the picture because it made her look prettier than she’d ever actually been. In real life she had a pointy chin. I had Joe’s chin. I don’t think there even was an Uncle Joe, but it made me think that might have been His name. It was my first clue.

I asked her about him twice. The first time I was seven or eight, and Dad had been shouting in the night. He’d called her names and threatened to kick us both out on our own. I’d told her in the morning we should go and find my other dad. I reckoned he couldn’t be much worse, and of course expected him to actually be much nicer and sorry that he’d left us. I thought we could pack our cases in a hurry and be on the train before King got home from work, but Mum slapped me hard across the face and growled ugly, ‘Don’t you ever suggest anything like that again.’

My cheek stung, and my ear rang, and tears rolled down my face. I was embarrassed and ashamed and I was angry, but she was angrier.

The only other time I mentioned him was not long after King died. I worked myself up to simmering-excited, expecting her to put the kettle on and tell me everything she remembered, and that in no time, we’d be off like the Goonies on the trail of One-Eyed Willy.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said then, and when I tried to reason that it didn’t matter now, and anyway I wouldn’t tell anyone else, she just shook her head. ‘You are Roy Cole’s daughter,’ she told me.

‘But I don’t want to be!’ (I might have wailed.)

‘Well, you are. And whether you like it or not, that counts for a lot in this town.’

I didn’t like it. I’d never liked it, and I was never going to like it, but ‘The subject is closed,’ Mum said, and it never opened up again.

I could have asked other people, when I was older and had free access to them, without my mother by my side and in the way. I could have asked Leonie, who might have remembered something. Eddie always insisted she and Mum had been best friends, but I have no memories of them ever standing close enough to share a secret, or even a bottle of wine—and anyway, if Leonie had known anything, she would have told Eddie, and Eddie would have told me.

If the town had heard a whisper, they would not have kept it secret. I would have heard it. In among the names called and the notes passed and the compass scratches on the toilet doors, I would have heard it. I would have picked it out.

I used to fantasise that my real father would come back for me, cast somewhere between Daddy Warbucks and the King of Siam, stinking rich, hands up and hopeful. Sorry he’d lost me, and desperate to make up for the time we’d spent apart.

As I got older, the fantasy shifted and it wasn’t a father I imagined coming for me, but a soulmate. A handsome stranger who arrived as unexpectedly as one of Meg’s snowfalls and whisked me off into a better life.

In that quiet half-hour before sleep, I’d pull my pillow close and lose myself in wide-awake dreams rich with detail. Even more so after a night at work, when I had the whole day to lose if I chose, and the bed all to myself.

Sometimes he wore sneakers with a suit and a smile, and he bought the factory and worked late and ordered takeaway and we laughed and shared sesame chicken and eventually moved together to Hong Kong, where I wore heels and took his notes at long-tabled, high-rise meetings.

Sometimes he was a famous actor whose yacht ran aground at Maggie Beach, who didn’t want Hollywood rags to find the story, so stayed with us. I mediated boat repairs while we fell in love, and when he sailed away into the sunset, it was with me beside him at the helm.

He was a wealthy widower whose young twins took a shine to me while riding Eddie’s horses at a market, and could I come away with them and be their nanny in a rambling Queenslander on the banks of a river at the base of a mountain far away from Carney County? You bet.

If Eddie had a part in any fantasy, it was purely platonic. A strong supporting role, a caring older brother or best friend, not the lead, as I’d actually cast him in real life. Not the one I’d given all my promises.

I can’t tell you how many nights and afternoons I fell asleep dreaming of Richard Gere. He was your ideal whisker-awayer, back then.

Mary Mudd worked at the factory. The others didn’t like her because she didn’t make much of an effort to fit in, which only meant she didn’t laugh at every joke and didn’t pack sandwiches like the rest of us. They called her China, and pretended it was because she was small with creamy skin and a perfect little mouth painted on. ‘You just look like a little doll, don’t you!’ Shirley told her with a smile, but she didn’t really. She looked like me.

The first time we met, she spoke to me in a language I didn’t recognise, and she was embarrassed when I answered her in English. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said then. ‘I thought you were Filipina.’ She wouldn’t have been sure I wasn’t going to take that as an insult. (She knew why they called her China.)

‘That’s okay,’ I told her, and smiled wide as a tawny frogmouth so she’d know I wasn’t like the rest of them.

‘I was born in the Philippines,’ she explained, and we talked for a while about her family who were still there. Her parents and brothers, aunts, uncles and cousins, and the grave of a younger sister who died of pneumonia when she was only small.

I packed rice to take with me for dinner the next night. ‘Flied lice—that’s nice!’ Margy Clarke said, and she hummed ‘The Siamese Cat Song’ from Lady and the Tramp whenever she came across Mary and me sitting together after that. It was like being back at school, but I really didn’t care.

There were questions I wanted to ask Mary Mudd, that’s why I sat next to her in the crib room. (She didn’t need a reason to sit next to me; she was happy to have the company.) I wanted to ask her if she thought my father could have been a Filipino, but that would have left me wide open, so instead I said, ‘My father came from the Philippines,’ to see if she’d accept it.

She looked pleased. ‘Where’s he from?’

‘I don’t know. I never met him.’ I didn’t want to lie about it all. I wanted her to tell me things, but I didn’t want to ask too much.

She came from an island called Masbate, which was beautiful, she said.

‘Do you miss it?’ I asked her, and she shrugged.

‘I love it, of course,’ she said carefully. ‘I miss my family, but my husband and I visit. We’re going next year.’ She smiled at the thought of that. ‘He loves it, too. Maybe when we retire, we’ll move there.’

‘What does your husband do?’ I asked.

‘Well, actually, he’s retired,’ she said, and we both laughed.

Mary’s husband picked her up from work at the end of every shift. I’d only seen him from a distance. He met her at the gate on an orange moped, kissed her on the lips and buckled a helmet up under her chin. But one morning he wasn’t there. I waited with her for ten minutes, and then it started to rain, so I offered to take her home.

‘I should wait,’ she kept saying. ‘He will come.’ Like Shoeless Joe Jackson in Field of Dreams. But in the end, she let me take her. I told her if we passed her husband on the road, we’d honk and flash the lights, do a U-turn and catch him up, but we didn’t see him.

They lived on a sailboat. ‘We were living in Gladstone for a while,’ Mary explained, ‘but the marina was expensive.’ Muddy had been to Winifred before. ‘It’s nice,’ Mary said. ‘No one bothers us.’

Mary had been living her life on Masbate when her Prince Charming had sailed in, and when he left, she was on board. A real-life whisking-away. She told me all this as we drove through the rain and along a road I’d never taken that ran beside the Barra, where their boat was anchored. Muddy Duck was its name, but I wouldn’t have known it had one if Mary hadn’t told me. You couldn’t read it from the riverbank. It looked old and sinkable, with rusty brown streaks down its sides and green slime in a strip that touched the water. It was a far cry from the yacht that sailed in to rescue me in my dreams. Mary whistled and shouted for her husband, and eventually he appeared up on deck looking flustered (and nothing like Richard Gere).

‘Before I met Muddy, I’d been nowhere,’ she told me, as we waited for him to row over in a little wooden dinghy (Ugly Duck, that was called. You couldn’t have read that either from a distance, but up close it was clear enough), and now they’d travelled all over the place. ‘I am very grateful,’ she said.

He was older than I’d pictured him. He wore tight denim shorts and a yellow raincoat open wide with no shirt underneath. The skin on his chest was baggy and his grey hair was pulled back into a ponytail.

‘Oh God, I’m so sorry, Mary!’ was the first thing he said when he got to us. It had stopped raining, but the dinghy was half full of water. ‘Thanks for bringing her, love,’ he said to me. ‘Very good of you. She doesn’t like being left alone.’

It was a strange thing to say, I thought, but Mary only nodded.

Muddy reached up awkwardly to shake my hand. ‘Rosemary, isn’t it?’ So she’d mentioned me. I liked that. ‘You’ll have to come out for a sundowner some time—you and your husband—when it’s not, well …’ He indicated the weather and I nodded.

It was starting to rain again, and Mary clambered into the dinghy. ‘See you tomorrow, Roz!’ she called above the splash of paddles.

Roz. I liked that too.