For years Yvonne has wanted an ordinary house in the suburbs, and a proper garden, just like her younger siblings. She wants a life that matches theirs. Not a maze of old rooms behind a shop but a normal-looking house – brick, easy to clean – with roses and daisies and some herbs out the back. Nothing ostentatious, she hates that. Just the reassurance of streets that echo nothing back at you, not the past or your own ties to it. Ordinariness is what she craves. This is what she tells Arne when he decides to sell his business and they are released, at last, from its demands.

The house in Annerley, on the south side of the river, isn’t exactly what she wants – the kitchen gets the late western sun and is stifling in summer, the bathroom is poky and she’s tired of old tongue-and-groove boards that trap the dust. But there is something venerable in its lines, its lovely bay window, the crepe myrtle that splays against the white-painted walls in summer. There are roses in the front garden and a small lawn at the back, and it’s close to schools and to Stone’s Corner, where Ronnie’s grandparents had been the first white settlers.

She is quietly proud of this family history, commemorated now in the name of a hotel and a suburb. James Stone had made roads and ginger beer for a living while he waited for a licence to run a hotel. In the meantime his wife, Mary Ann, produced eleven children in pioneer conditions; Old Gran, Eliza, was the ninth. Yvonne liked to remember that, though Stone’s Corner was now an inner-city suburb, it was just 140 years since Mary Ann put her children to bed amid the utter blackness of thick bushland, and to the frequent near sounds of corroboree.

The Stones’ place in history was important to Ronnie’s wider family too. They clung to it, perhaps, as evidence of pioneer blood, of ambitious beginnings, a counterweight to the reduced straights in which some of them found themselves. As children, Yvonne and her siblings heard the stories of the slab hut, the ginger beer made in lieu of liquor, but they especially loved the story of James Stone’s funeral. They all recounted it over the years; they seemed to imagine they had been there, that these were their own memories: the eerie silence as the horse-drawn funeral carriage led a procession past the Corner and the hotel their great-grandfather never got to brew in, past the Moreton Bay fig he planted outside. The procession’s solemn pause outside the hotel entrance, beneath the now tall tree, and then the splintering sound – portentous, sudden – as a branch crashed to earth in front of the hearse. An unearthly sign, they all understood, that his life and his passing had been noted by some greater power.

My mother loved this story; she told it often when we were young. Even then, bent to my homework in the kitchen as she sewed, I could hear she was reaching for something beyond narrative: not just the undeniable ties to family and place, but, I see now, her own connection to courage and dignity and respectability. The evidence was before her, if not in Ronnie then in Eliza, the warm and gentle grandmother she adored. To my mother, Old Gran was everything her own mother wasn’t. She was civilised, measured, soft. As my mother’s fingers guided fabric through the Singer, her voice another thread in the tack-tack of the needle, she was reassured by James Stone’s and Eliza’s lives: dignity and respectability might yet be innate, might be inherited, might be – despite mistakes and mischance – retrievable.

A new house, imperfect but in sight of this history, would do. She takes a job in the sewing room of the local hospital, a fifteen-minute walk away. Arne reminds her she doesn’t need to work, but it’s an old habit now: she vowed so long ago never to rely on a man for money again. Andrew is enrolled at a nearby primary school; she’s there to collect him every afternoon at three o’clock, and together they walk home.