There were no real uncles in my childhood, to ask me what I was going to be when I grew up, and give me threepences. But there was Uncle Laszlo from the flat downstairs, who was not a real uncle but who did these things, and there were his many sisters, who spent long hours with my mother in the kitchen producing slippery food in crockery pots. Uncle Laszlo was fond of asking me what I was going to be, never tiring of my answer and never failing in his response. I will make history, I told Uncle Laszlo each time, and each time he and Father would laugh and slap their thighs, and exclaim Good luck on you, then, Joan, trying to sound like the men they heard on the streets. Then the many sisters of Laszlo would come from the kitchen to find out what so much mirth and thigh-slapping was all about, and the whole thing would be translated for them so they could all laugh too, and exclaim in foreign syllables, and remind themselves they had come to a country nude of any history to speak of, so little Joan had the right idea, planning to make some.

No history is to be made in the dull wastes of childhood. I spent mine set apart from all the others in the playground, being ashamed of the thick dark bread made by my mother, of which my sandwiches were constructed, and the olives in my lunch-box, and the reek of garlic from our kitchen. I was embarrassed too, by the way my skin was always brown, even in winter: all the other girls were pale puddings of people who made sure sunlight never darkened their skins, and they would not have wanted to be me.

Even more than all this, I was shamed by my foreign gold-toothed mother, with her smiling helpless inability to make herself understood, so that I had to stand twisting one foot behind the other, mulishly translating for her at the butcher’s and the greengrocer’s, and having those large red-fisted men shouting at me as if I, too, was stupid and foreign.

My poor bemused mother was baffled by most things in this country, where the birds frightened her with their mirth, and the sun threatened to fry her where she stood. The shapeless folk of this land did not bother to conceal that they thought she must be an imbecile not to be able to say Fine weather for ducks when they said Wet enough for you? as they wrapped a parcel of best neck on the marble counter, while the savage antipodean rain poured down outside the shop. She was baffled, and did not ask her stranger daughter much, because her daughter was impatient at her own clumsiness with the language they shared. She had not grown into a slant-eyed, catlike smooth young girl, such as the mother had been back in the suave old country, but was becoming a tall, loud, bold-eyed girl who laughed too loudly and too knowingly.

Even my father, although able at least to exchange an approximation of those phrases with the other fathers, held his cigarette in a way none of them did, and could not be relied on to react in the proper way to small remarks on the weather or the price of wool (being likely, to my humiliation, to embark on a long guttural speech about the climates of nations and the price of freedom): even he could not make me feel anything but an alien. How lucky they were, Phyllis and Gladys and all the rest, whose fathers knew how to get the fire going at a picnic, and could deal with a puncture on their bikes without, as my father did, becoming flushed and manic, turning the nuts the wrong way!

Those lucky girls went home to solid houses with front lawns, not muddled buildings cut up into many small flats. There they did their homework at one end of the worn table in the kitchen, licking the tips of their pencils until their tongues were purple, labouring over arithmetic and parsing. At the other end of the table their mother peeled potatoes comfortably, and out on the verandah their father sat in his singlet with a long glass of beer perspiring in his hand. Those fathers were made uneasy by all the foreign philosophising of my father, and despised such incompetence with fires and nuts, and were wary of so much accent, that meant you could never be a hundred per cent sure the bloke was not having a bit of a go at you, with his long words. So they mocked me, all those classmates, taunting me in the playground for the way my father was bald as well as foreign, and the way my mother looked funny with a scarf on her head. Was she bald as well, they wanted to know?

When we arrived at a certain age, all those tidy girls with their neat sultana sandwiches put out large matronly busts under their tunics. I, still as flat of chest as a wall, watched and hankered after them with hankies down my own front. I loved their melting flesh when I saw them changing after rounders: I could barely resist running a palm over those rolls of biscuit-coloured flesh above their petticoat elastic, and I longed to touch the gleaming shoulders under the straps that cut into them.

They were shy, though, these flawless women, and their mouths became prim as they dressed in the chilly change room. They turned away from me and put their elbows up like bats to do up their blouses at the back, or writhed under their robes, becoming red in the face, and did not emerge from underneath until they were fully dressed, so I missed the moistness of thighs where suspenders snapped against soft hairless flesh, and the shadows between breast and underarm.

I joked and cavorted, clowning at my own expense, because to make them laugh would have been a kind of acceptance, but their faces never showed much besides distaste. I even learned rounders to win their approval, and enjoyed the galloping, and the yelling, and although I found the game absurd, ridiculous, there was a pleasure in belting away at the ball, and in seeing those smug faces distort and go crooked when, by accident of course, I struck their smooth shins with my bat. In my desire to please, and in a sort of rage of contempt, I even ran fiercely around the oval, pretending I cared enough about their absurd game to want to train for it, like some silly seal.

When that failed too, I tried to make a good story out of it all. My grandmother was a vampire, I told them. She was from Transylvania, where all the vampires come from. This was the truth, for my long-dead grandmother really had lived in Transylvania, although on the tinted picture we had of the place, it seemed to be grass and sky like anywhere else. Because it was the truth, I had to try to make it more interesting, so I looked shifty, askance, as if I was inventing this tale which was in fact the truth. The girls became confused then, and fell to thinking with satisfaction about their own grandmothers from Dural or Woy Woy, who knitted matinee jackets and bootees, and had nothing foreign or peculiar about them.

As my youth progressed, Uncle Laszlo and Father spent longer and longer talking gravely in the old language, and there seemed more and more for them to be grave about. Out on the streets, Mother began to be the victim of scowls and things muttered behind hands. In the playground the girls explained with satisfaction that they could not speak to me any more because I was a filthy Hun, and Australians were at war with filthy Huns. The more I tried to explain, with my feeble grasp of geography, that being from Transylvania was not the same as being a filthy Hun, the more their faces closed against me.

Mother wept one night: Father had come home pale, his baldness leaving his face exposed under the blast of emotion, and spread out a piece of paper on the table where the light rained down on it. With a finger under the words, he read, so loudly it made my ears hurt: To Whom All Persons Shall Come. I could see Mother was already lost, but Father’s moving finger moved on: Am desirous of abandoning and renouncing the use of the name Victor Radulescu. His finger shook, as his voice did, as he caressed the sounds of his own name: I hereby absolutely renounce and abandon the said name of Victor Radulescu.

Then, paler than ever, with the points of his cheekbones making the skin of his face tight, he used his thick-nibbed fountain pen to cross out Joan Radulescu in all my books and replace it with Joan Redman. Finally he brought out the Atlas of Australia over which he pored from time to time, memorising Australian towns and rivers. Here, Joan, he said. We are loyal Australians, and must put the map right. From his briefcase he took out a newspaper and peered at it, then at the map of South Australia, scratching out and rewriting: Hahndorf into Ambleside, Blumberg into Birdwood, Rosenthal into Rosedale. When he had finished, the colour had returned to his face. There, Joan. No one can accuse us now.

Those Abercrombies and Smiths were not fooled, though, by Miss Gibbs crossing out Joan Radulescu in the roll book and inking in Joan Redman. It is not your real name, they pointed out at wearisome length in the playground. It can never really be your real name.

As we all grew older, and the others grew more and more womanly of form, they gathered in clusters and whispered about their boys and their prospects and their possessions. They all wanted the same kinds of prospects and possessions, and even wanted the same boy, the son of a doctor, who was a particularly good prospect. I had seen this boy, who seemed to me no kind of prospect at all, but a lad overextended and puny of limb like a potato sprouting in the dark.

They clustered and giggled, those silly girls, and pretended to each other that their stockings and frocks mattered to them for their own sakes, and that the hours they spent with mirrors, trying their hair parting on the other side, or a pair of combs or a daring red ribbon, were for themselves alone. They could not admit that they were biding their time and preparing themselves for their dream. But what a secondhand dream theirs was! It was to marry a prospect, to be the colourless wife of an ambition, to wash the socks and underpants of a destiny.

None of them would ever burst into any flame more dramatic than their one day in white. Even then, their faces would be cross with anxiety until afterwards, when the confetti would catch in their eyelashes and they would kindle for a few moments, so the photographs would catch them laughing into the teeth of their grooms. But they would not blaze later that night in the honeymoon suite at the Royal with their large knuckled boy: he might have had prospects, but he would have no more idea of a good time in passion than would a silly dog humping on your leg.

Such were my uncharitable scathing thoughts on the subject of these women I could never resemble, and whom I envied while I despised. I knew things would always be very different for me: I knew I wished not to marry history, but to make it.

I took consolation in planning many histories for myself, each one larger than the last. I will be a great writer, I told myself, staring at a cloud in a soulful sort of way. Or I will be Prime Minister, and I thought with pleasure of how the girls would not sniff in that dismissive way then, but admire me at last. Unlike these feeble creatures I was forced to spend my days with, I was not blind to the beckoning finger of history, or deaf to the clarion calls of destiny. I wished to make the earth shiver on its axis with some large action or other, whose precise shape would be revealed to me in due course.