I am visiting my mother in Brisbane. Years have passed since our reunion. There is nothing in my life and relationships to convince my mother that I can be left in charge of my own affairs and she has therefore decided to give me some advice. I know the advice is coming and I am trying to stall it, maybe postpone it forever. I bounce up from the sofa and fetch an ornament from one of the surfaces in the living room laden with such things and return with it to ask questions. Look at this, extraordinary, where did it come from? Or I comment on the strange drama my mother has created with her interior decoration, the dominance of red and black, the placement on ledges and tables of dragon figurines, dozens of them, some pottery, some iron.

But my temporising can’t prevail over my mother’s determination to save my life. She succeeds in engineering one of those pauses that people of powerful conviction manage so masterfully. A lifting of the chin, a slight pursing of the lips, a hand raised just a little to signal that the bullshit is over.

‘You are … restless,’ she says.

‘Mm.’

‘You have a restlessness deep inside you, my little love, deep, deep inside you.’

‘Possibly,’ I offer, intensely embarrassed and fearing that a Tarot deck might be produced.

‘It will not make you happy.’

‘No. No, I suppose not.’

‘There is a … a hunger in you. A hunger for love.’

‘Well. Maybe.’

‘I am telling you things that are difficult for you to accept. But you must.’

With anyone else, someone whose feelings I did not have to be quite so careful with, I would have said, ‘For God’s sake!’

‘I have received a letter from—(and here my mother names the mother of my third son). She is very unhappy.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘She loves you.’

‘I know.’

‘Then … why? Why, my love?’

‘Restless?’ I offer, meekly. ‘Like you said?’

‘Yes, restless. Now listen to me.’

And my mother goes on to warn me, in terms consistent with the drama of her living room, of all that will befall me if I do not open my arms to love. At times, she comes on like the head of a stern boarding school for boys. At other times, she sounds like a marriage celebrant tendering passages of Kahil Gibram and the Desiderata. And every now and again, she draws her purple and gold shawl close around her shoulders and becomes Madame Sosostra.

Love, she tells me, is not just sex. Do I understand that?

Yep, I reply.

Not too obviously, I hope, I fix my gaze on the framed photographs a little beyond my mother’s shoulder. One of the pictures shows her at a square dance with the man who, decades past, succeeded my father in her affections.

‘Be very careful,’ my mother says, ‘with the people who love you. More careful than you’ve been, so far. That’s all.’

After the lecture, I slouch out into the garden to smoke the first of ten cigarettes. I feel exhausted. I stare at the impeccable garden my mother has planted; at the smart, modern house she lives in. For relief, I think of my father, who never owned a house; who worked as hard as any person in the town, for the barest possible reward. I think of the restlessness that directs his attention away from building, from making. He sees himself as a Gypsy, a free spirit, or sometimes as a man born out of his time. He reads novels set in distant ages of manly trial and ordeal; tales of the Crusades, of Agincourt, of the Teutonic Knights. The women he most desires are of a type that may have flourished for a time in the age of the troubadors: women who minister to him tenderly after battles, bind his wounds, sing him songs, disrobe at a word of suggestion and croon at his touch. The women of the green island are essentially dusky versions of this accomplished, uncomplaining, eternally tender strain.

He likes to hunt with a bow and arrow. The bow he uses is unfancy: a lemonwood arc, modelled on the English longbow. He is a good shot. He also fishes, and as an angler he has no peer in my home town. While other fishermen struggle and curse, my father, a few metres downstream from his frustrated comrades, serenely floats a fly over a tiny rippled patch of water he likes the look of and pulls in a rainbow trout. He is also a fine shot with a .22.

The time comes when his restlessness—a great sustaining force in men and women alike—is no longer there. Broken in spirit by the ugly failure of his marriages, he becomes content to sit and drink shandies under an apple tree in the backyard. The doctor has warned him off full-strength beer. Sighing, bitter, he declines into old age, no longer able to long, to yearn. He sells his bow and arrows, his rifle, and barely bothers with fishing.

I drive up to Eildon to visit my father one Saturday towards the end of his life. He’s under the apple tree, stretched out on a banana lounge he’d rescued from the dump. Pale, broken, his chin and cheeks stubbled silver, he has roused himself so far as he can to ask questions about my life, my wellbeing.

‘Are you happy?’ he asks, turning his grey eyes to me. He seems puzzled by his own question.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I’m happy.’

He studies my face for a time, perhaps half a minute.

‘Well, good,’ he says. ‘Want you to have better luck than me. But you are happy, aren’t you? You’re getting along?’

‘Yes, I say, I’m happy.’

‘Good,’ he says. ‘I want you to be happy.’

I see that he is crying. The pallor has left his face and it has become charged with a rush of crimson. His lips tremble. I have never before put my arms around my father at such a moment, and I can’t do it now. I avert my eyes. ‘I’m okay,’ he says. ‘I’m okay. Bloody sook, I am.’

He picks a cigarette from a packet—not an unfiltered Temple Bar but a timid Wills Super Mild. He has trouble lighting it. His hands are unsteady. Finally he gives up and lets his hand, holding the cigarette, drop to his side. He closes his eyes, breaths in rapidly two or three times, small hiccuping gulps. He opens his eyes again only when he has his tears under control.

‘Be happy if you can,’ he says, mastering his emotion with an attempt at gruffness. ‘Okay? Will yuh?’