In all the photographs I’ve ever seen of my Grandmother Collie, she looks worried, her eyes the strange paleish blue, the same blind milky colour as me and dad’s. (Pommie blue, Nana Ralph called them.) But in real life Gran Collie didn’t worry much at all. Never minded at all what other people might have said about her or the colour of her eyes. Never minded what other people said about Grandad Mike’s new and unendured farming ideas.

Not because she cared. Because she didn’t.

My Gran Collie’s hair was so long and thick it rugged over her whole back, even when she was old. It was dirt thick and the colour of molasses and draped down past the top of her legs the way tree roots stretch downwards for water.

When she was eight years old Colleen O’Brien and all her brothers and sisters caught the head lice and had to have every last drop of their molasses coloured hair cropped to the skull. It happened on the same morning their mother died of syphilis. The last thing my great grandmother did as a living woman was to tell her three children to get the hell out of her house because the pox had spread to her brain by then and she didn’t recognise them with their hair eaten up by the shears.

I was almost as young as Gran Collie had been then when I got told the story and I heard it all wrong and thought that what my Gran and the rest of them had suffered from was head lights. Head LIGHTS. And the idea of it made me laugh so hard I wet my pants so bad the piss stung the insides of both thighs and dad gave me a clip on the ear to teach me not to be such a stinking pig of a girl.

But at the time, my baldy eight-year-old grandmother didn’t laugh. She cried for three days non-stop. And after that she didn’t let a soul anywhere near her head and she never cried again. Her hair grew longer and longer and thicker and closer to the ground until by the time she went grey the oldest ends dragged along behind her in the dust.

Every so often, when the tips began to fray, she threw her head forwards over the back verandah and cut them herself with pointy sewing scissors and I’d watch blunt bits and pieces of my grandmother’s hair flying around in the wind like windscreen shards.