BARELY HOLDING ON

Chapter 1 – Reaching Out

I wake to a room that feels smaller than its five walls should allow. The house on Mt Buffalo sits in the South West Slopes of New South Wales, a place where the land seems to cradle rather than conquer, and yet tonight the walls close in with a careful, almost audible gravity. The night light glows a pale orange over the carpet, and the glow casts a slow, patient circle around a bed that belongs to more than one dreamer. This room is not ours alone, though it is where I learn to hold my breath and pretend it’s not there when the night arrives with its own weather.

My mother’s presence sits in the corner of the room like a soft shadow that never quite grows bright enough to warm the air. Depression, if you listen for it, you can hear its quiet gravity in the tilt of her voice, in the pause between words, in the way her hands rest on her lap as if keeping a harbour for her own breath. She is not absent; she’s elsewhere in the room, somewhere near the door, somewhere in the space between the stove’s heat and the lamp’s glow, an ache that travels through the space she occupies, leaving a ferry port of loneliness behind for us to cross if we choose.

The loneliness does not arrive with a shout. It arrives as a steady, patient tide that rises with the day’s small tasks and falls back with the night’s quiet. The room’s four walls become a map of my mother’s weather, the way a single word can lift her shoulders for a moment or let them sink as if she’s listening to a different wind inside her. The night light, that stubborn little sun in the corner, returns to its pale orange glow each time she moves across the room, each time she sets down a mug or picks up a thread of conversation she doesn’t quite finish.

She does not sit inert in this loneliness; she works it, almost as if the loneliness were a thread that could be pulled and re-woven into something habitable. The day’s chores are her scaffolding. She rises with the dawn, not for a show of strength but to give the day a shape: milking the churn, washing the floors, mending the wool in the basket, sweeping the dust that drifts in from the hill’s dry grasses. She moves with a careful economy, a ritual precision that seems to insist there is still a map of care somewhere in this house, even if the map’s author cannot live inside its lines at all times.

And she writes. Oh, does she write. Letters to her mother and to her sisters, those who sit in the far towns and keep the family’s old warmth alive in another room of the world. The letters are not mere words on paper; they are a lifeline. The handwriting is a steady, patient line, the ink smelling faintly of the days when the mail came by the neighbour’s cart and the world was not so large that a person could vanish in it. The pen scratches across blue-lined paper with a rhythm I come to recognise as a heartbeat she can control. When the day’s chores draw toward their close and the lamp glows warmer, she sits at the table, the kettle hissing in the background, a cup of tea cooling beside a stack of letters that look back at her with the audience of kin.

For us children, the letters are a doorway we are not allowed to walk through. The sister, bright, loud, almost a neighbour to the room itself, sometimes linger near the doorway, listening to the sound of the nib hitting the page, to the soft whisper of a line she cannot quite hear. The brother arrives later, bringing with him the different noise of another voice in the house, another door to be shut against the night. The house is not ours; it bears the weight of a family history older than any of us and older than the idea of a home as a place where you belong to yourself. Yet within that shared, rented space, the mother’s acts carve out a private country where warmth can survive.

The first instance of reaching out is not a loud act but a careful one. I am two, maybe three, and the house feels like a ship’s corridor: doors on either side, a floor that creaks with the memory of every step that has ever tried to be brave. The sister comes after me, a bright, stubborn flame of a child with a loud appetite for attention, and then the brother joins the chorus. The rooms begin to feel less like safe havens and more like stages where affection is performed, earned, weighed against distance, and sometimes withheld. It is a comfortable but painful arithmetic: the more warmth I seek, the more I learn to shrink into corner shadows, behind a door’s jamb, into the careful hedges of silence that the house itself grows so well.

I grasp for a presence that should be easy to find but is rarely there in the way a child wants. I reach toward my mother’s sleeve in a moment when a fear arrives, night, darkness, the long stretch of hours when nothing moves except the ceiling’s occasional tremor. The night light becomes a small sun, and the room becomes a map with only the tiniest redirections for where warmth might be found. But the warmth is not always there; the warmth is a practice, a patient delaying of needs until sleep might pretend to arrive, a way to hold the breath in a chest that is too small to carry the room’s heavy air.

On Mt Buffalo, there is a memory I keep near me: a small carved wooden sheep, smooth and pale, found on a hillside that blooms with heather and the scent of dry grass after a rain. It is tucked away in a dented tin box on a shelf that the five-bedroom world does not quite manage to hide. The sheep has become my touchstone, the object I can reach for when the night’s fear becomes too loud in the walls. If I press the sheep into my palm, the grain of the wood rough against my skin, I can pretend I am touching something anchored to the world beyond this room, something that understands the land’s weather and does not demand a voice in return. It becomes a ritual: I hold the sheep and I pretend I am reaching for warmth from a mother who cannot always give it, for a father who cannot always hear the music of a child’s breath, for a neighbour who might hear the small sound of a whispered question and answer with a patient hello.

The memory of my father’s sister who visits infrequently, her presence in this house is like a candle whose flame flickers at the edge of the doorway. She becomes a ghost in a sense, not in a theatrical way but in the way a familiar room holds a familiar voice long after it has spoken. Her eventual untimely death in childbirth shifts the room’s weight in a way that feels both necessary and cruel. After she dies, her room is given to my sister, and my brother and I share the space we had once claimed as our own. The house’s geography changes with the memory of loss, and we adjust by shrinking a bit more, by listening more carefully to the land’s weather and to the engine of the tractor somewhere beyond the yard. The rooms no longer feel like private kingdoms; they become shared maps drawn with careful hands and quiet voices.

I begin to learn that reaching out does not mean shouting into the dark. It means a hand extended toward warmth, a whispered line in a voice that barely travels beyond the doorway, a hinge that creaks in a way that invites a listening ear. It means naming the fear of the night, even if the name itself trembles. It means noticing the hills’ slow breathing, the sheep’s steady rhythm, the wind’s unhurried insistence that life continues. The room, the four walls and the window, holds me as a place where a child can learn to wait for a form of care that may arrive from a mother’s breath, a father’s nod, a grandmother’s memory carried in a distant voice, or a grandmother’s old object on a shelf in the hall, but never seems to.

I am the first child, and I learn to listen with more than ears. I learn that loneliness does not always demand loud confession. Sometimes it asks for a quiet, daily rebellion: to stay present when you could run, to ask for a touch when words fail, to watch the way the lamp’s glow spills on the kitchen bench and pretend that light can be a bridge. The mother’s letters are a bridge in their own right. They connect us to a grandmother’s voice somewhere beyond the day’s noise, to a sister’s memory that might not be spoken aloud but is carried in the spaces between sentences. The act of writing becomes a way to reach out that does not require a shout, a way to pull a thread across the room that is otherwise heavy with fear.

The room’s night light remains a stubborn sun, a small, safe orbit around which I orbit too. In the early hours, I hear the wind in the eaves and the distant, irregular hum of the tractor engine that belongs to the land’s long memory. The scent of wool, the damp woollen smell of the jumper I wear to bed, the faint taste of heat on the lips after a long day’s work, all these textures fuse with the letters’ scent: ink, glue, envelope paste. The mother’s hands on her lap, the way she clasps them sometimes as if she’s holding a bowl for someone else’s need, the slow breath she draws before she writes a line that will travel far away, these details become the room’s quiet grammar for how to endure loneliness.

So the memory widens, not with a dramatic reveal but with a set of small, sustaining acts. The mother’s chores insist on a rhythm that keeps fear from flowering into despair; the letters insist on a geography larger than the house, a voice that travels beyond the hill and into the town’s post office and beyond; the boy’s breath finds its own rhythm within the room’s slow gravity, practicing how to hold still when the night’s fear climbs the walls. The five-bedroom house on Mt Buffalo is not a palace; it is a listening post, a place where the land’s weather is mirrored in a solitary mother’s mood, where affection is repeatedly offered in measured doses, the targeted warmth of a cup, the careful word that arrives on the page, the quiet insistence on routine even when the heart wants to crumble.

I return to the night light brightening the darkness of the night in my room, as a tiny sun held in the corner, not simply to comfort but to manage the room’s weather when the world outside grows loud and uncertain. The glow casts a pale orange halo around the carpet, the quilt’s edge, and the small table where the ink-stained letters wait like patient witnesses. It is not a luxury but a necessity: a steady, predictable warmth that keeps the night from becoming a landscape of sharp angles and sudden shadows.

The light’s need grows from the fear of the night and the sense that darkness can rearrange a room’s memory. When the wind changes at the eaves or a distant engine coughs into wakefulness, the four walls feel closer, the window sharper, as if the hill itself could press through the glass. The night light steadies the air, holds back what the dark might rewrite in the mind, and gently pushes the fear toward a clock’s quiet, predictable rhythm. I watch the glow travel along the quilt seam, tracing a line between safety and exposure, a path my small hands can follow as I inhale and hold, then release.

Its warmth is not loud, but it is insistently present. It touches the skin, the back of my hands, the knuckles where a child’s fear nests, and sends a thread of heat into the chest, a reminder that I am still here, still breathing, still listening. The lamp’s shade softly ripples with the room’s slight movement, someone shifting in their sleep, the kettle’s soft hiss from the kitchen, the distant creak of the house adjusting to the night’s weight. The light becomes a companion to the room’s textures: wool on the jumper, the rough grain of the wooden dresser, the faint scent of ink and glue from the letters waiting to travel beyond the hill.

This night light is also a boundary and a bridge. It marks the limit of the fear I can bear without folding inward, and it offers a way to reach outward, toward my mother’s faint, steady presence as she writes, toward the idea that warmth can be earned by small, repeated acts rather than dramatic passages. It anchors the room in a time that feels small and sacred: the ritual of waiting for sleep, the deliberate pace of the day’s closing, the patience of a child who has learned that comfort can come in a quiet, persistent glow.

You might read this and think a night light is nothing. To me, it is a quiet oath: a promise that tonight, and many nights after, I will keep watch with a careful breath, a careful touch, a careful question I raise to the wall or to the page. The five-bedroom house on Mt Buffalo is not a palace; it is a listening post. The land’s weather mirrors the mother’s mood, and the light offers a single, stubborn answer to the fear: you are not alone.

And so, in the quiet of night, with a carved sheep tucked into the pocket of a drawer or the dented tin box where its memory rests, I learn that reaching out, at tleast for my mother, can be as simple as a whispered question to the room, a note in a letter to kin, a plan to write again tomorrow, a vow to hold onto one line of warmth as long as a single breath remains possible. You are not alone. The road may be long, the night may be heavy, but there is a way to keep listening, and in listening, a way to begin again.

Outside is a 2-metre chicken wire fence, built to keep us in as much as anything out. Even its construction created anger and tension, before during and after its construction, a low, continuous hum that settled inside the walls like a stubborn draft. I learned to measure the fence with my small hands before I learned to name the fear that lived behind it. The mesh rasped under the nails as the posts went in, a dry, metallic sigh that sounded like the house speaking in a language the five beds could not translate. The day the line of wire rose from the ground, the air between the kitchen and the wind insisted on a new kind of weather, the weather of containment, the weather of caution, the weather of a silence that follows a shout even when no one shouted aloud.

The fence’s shadow falls across the yard as the sun climbs, stitching a pattern of diamond shapes into the dust. In those diamonds I sometimes saw the world beyond: the hills that held the sheep like a flock of small doubts; the road that bent and disappeared behind the far line of gum trees; the distant smoke from a neighbour’s stove that told me someone else’s life was still happening outside our walls. The outside world is a promise and a threat, a lullaby and a warning, all at once. It is where the land’s breath meets the air of the house, where the engine’s heartbeat, far away and then nearer, sings a cautionary tune that makes the air feel thinner when you stand at the gate.

Anger rose with the fence as easily as the dust rose from the yard. I remember the day the wire went up: the long stretch of posts set in the dry earth, the coil of metal hauled by rough hands, the sound of a hammer biting into timber. My father stood at the corner of the yard, his voice a weather system that spoke first of safety and then, almost as an afterthought, of punishment if the lines were crossed. He spoke of boundaries like they were prayers whispered across a table of tools: you stay where you’re meant to be, you move when you’re told, you do not invite trouble by stepping across that line. The words were practical and sharp, and in their practicality lay a form of love that felt almost foreign to a child’s ear, tight, necessary, a shield that could become a weapon if misused.

The fence also meant a different kind of work, the work of keeping the world out when the world’s noise found its way through the walls anyway. Inside, the room held a night light, a soft orange glow that kept the shadows at bay and made the edges of the bed look like a small coastline. The wall, the floor, the ceiling, all became a map of a day’s small rituals designed to ward off fear. My mother’s presence sits in the corner of the room like a soft shadow that never quite grows bright enough to warm the air. Depression, if you listen for it, you can hear its quiet gravity in the tilt of her voice, in the pause between words, in the way her hands rest on her lap as if keeping a harbour for her own breath. She is not absent; she’s elsewhere in the room, somewhere near the door, somewhere in the space between the stove’s heat and the lamp’s glow, an ache that travels through the space she occupies, leaving a ferry port of loneliness behind for us to cross if we choose.

And there I am, the first child, a small figure against the glow and the wire and the weight of the day’s tasks. The fence teaches a rhythm different from the room’s own: a cadence of looking out and staying in that never quite aligns. I watch the sheep shift along the fence line, the wool catching the sun and turning it into a pale gold. I listen for the sound of the hills moving under the weight of the land, the wind in the gums, the distant rumble of the tractor, the soft, hollow call of a bird that seems to know the world beyond the gate but cannot tell me how to cross it. The outside world feels like a map with routes drawn in faint ink, routes that vanish if you blink, routes that require permission to trace.

The fence also holds a private memory of the family’s history on this land, the incursion of settlers into a wild landscape, the way water and soil and timber were wrested into a plan that would become a way of life for generations. It is this history that makes the fence heavy rather than merely protective. It is a line drawn in the dirt to keep in what the house needs to breathe and who the house needs to shelter, but it also marks the boundaries of a child’s imagination, a place where a small hand reaches toward a larger love and finds the wire’s rough texture instead of the skin of a mother’s warmth.

Lying awake at night, in my mind,I press the oil lamp closer, as if to remind the room that light can travel through a boundary and still return with a story. The lamp sits atop the old wooden wardrobe, its flame a small, stubborn orange that I am not allowed to touch; my father lights it each night and extinguishes it again before sleep, a nightly ritual that keeps the room in line with his clock. The lamp’s glow lengthens the shadows across the walls and floor, the quilt’s seam turning into a coastline where fear and light meet. The fence’s shadow lengthens and shortens with the moon, and I imagine it as a listening strand, the world’s breath threaded through the wire, listening for a small voice that would venture beyond the gate. I want to believe, even in the most restrained way, that a hand can extend through the gaps of metal and warmth can cross the line from outside to inside without becoming danger. It is this stubborn wish that keeps me reaching, inch by inch, toward a mother’s quiet warmth, toward the grandmother’s remembered voice carried along a neighbour’s fence, toward a distant town where letters travel like small boats across a dark lake. You are not alone.

You are not alone, I tell you in the way a child learns to tell a friend to listen. The fence is not merely a barrier; it is a nurse, a jailer, a memory, a constant reminder that to reach out is to press against a boundary that is never just physical but always emotional. If the night light holds, if the letters reach, if the room’s breath stays even, perhaps tomorrow the gate will be softened, and the world beyond will feel a touch more open, not because the walls are torn down, but because a small hand learns to press, gently, against the wire and ask for a voice to answer in kind.

This is how the story starts, a child just asking, “is there more,” with the answer is “no, that’s all there is,” much like Oliver Twist’s disappointment while growing up learning to stay deep down in an environment of family as it was.

And yet, even in that early answer, the room holds a second chorus. The lamp on the wardrobe, the oil lamp that the father lights and dampens with a careful breath, casts a wandering circle of warmth across the quilt and the chair rail. It is not a flame meant to dazzle; it is a quiet hinge, a small weather system that keeps the fear manageable, that makes the night not a canyon but a corridor you can pass through with eyes half-closed and a hand resting on the bed’s edge. The lamp’s glow is a stubborn thing, a hand-me-down sun that refuses to surrender to the dark, and it anchors the room as the wind moves through the gaps in the window’s sash.

I learn to judge my breath by the lamp’s light. When the flame wavers, so does my heartbeat, a reminder that the world outside, the hills, the wire fence, the distant gate, has its own rhythm, its own weather. The night is not simply a black sheet; it’s a map of possible fears, a map I must learn to read without flinching. The lamp’s glow does not erase what I sense: the weight of a house that isn’t mine, the way the walls press in when the land’s old stories press up from the floorboards. The five bedrooms feel like a chorus line where no one quite belongs to the same part, where the door’s hinge creaks with the same old tune of authority and longing.

Outside, the fence continues to hold its ground, but inside the room the lamp holds ground too. It stays. It glows. It does not demand a voice in return. And with it comes the memory of the children who have lived here before me and the ones who will come after: the sister who visits rarely and the brother who drifts in with the day’s noise and exit with the night’s ache. The lamp becomes a witness to their absence and presence in equal measure, a small, steady witness that warmth can exist where it is not demanded or seized.

The mother’s loneliness threads through the room like a running seam in wool. Her absence is not a gulf but a hush between words, a space that the lamp’s glow cannot quite fill, a gravity that tilts the night toward memory rather than oblivion. The night light, the lamp, the wall, these are not borders so much as a way to tell time in a place where time is felt more than counted. The day’s chores, the careful washing of clothes and floors, the rhythm of mending wool, the quiet arithmetic of drying and folding, keep the home’s breath steady, but they cannot reach the breath of a mother who carries loneliness in her chest the way she carries the wool in the basket. The letters she writes, the faint scent of ink and glue on the page, travel outward as if the room itself could release a thread that would pull a familiar voice back toward us.

The memory widens not with a thunderclap but with the slow, patient accumulation of acts. The father’s voice, sharp with instruction, even when the subject is the weather or a fence, taught me how to measure risk and to weigh the distance between fear and curiosity. The land’s history, incursion, settlement, a map drawn with the blunt edge of necessity, becomes the family’s own weather system. And in that weather, I learned to listen, not just with ears but with skin, to feel the room’s temperature shift when a door opens or a chair creaks, to sense the moment when warmth may arrive in the form of a cup of tea or in the careful handwriting on a letter that travels far beyond the hill.

The sister’s laughter arrived later, bright and loud, a shape that cut through the room’s quiet like a bird breaking through a pane of frost. The brother came with his own noise, a different current that pushed against mine. And then the house’s geography changed again, the sister’s room, the brother’s corner, the shared space we claimed only in memory and practice. The five bedrooms, once a sign of a small kingdom, became a map of strangers inside a larger lineage: the land’s history pushing us to fit into roles we did not choose and could not fully inhabit. In that fit, I learned to hold myself tighter, to listen for warmth not as a shout but as a phrase whispered in the space between sentences or in the soft twist of a letter’s crease.

The oil lamp’s flame teaches a patient discipline, the way its glow travels across the room’s grain and settles in the line where night meets morning. It is a light that asks for nothing but presence, a light that returns warmth if you meet the gaze of a mother’s memory or a grandmother’s remembered voice that travels along a neighbour’s fence, or the slow ink moving across blue-lined paper. The room remains a map of small acts: the lift of a mug, the tap of a page, the brush of a woollen sleeve, the kettle’s whistle in the kitchen, the door’s soft sigh as it closes on another day. It is in these acts that the child finds the possibility of reaching out, not in a dramatic rescue but in a daily practice of showing up.

You, reader, are invited to walk this space with me not as a spectator but as a fellow traveller across a country of rooms and memories. You are not alone in the quiet fear that sometimes rises in the night, the fear that the room might shrink again, that warmth could be a thing you chase and never quite grasp. The lamp’s steady breath, on, off, on again, tells you that light can be a hinge, a way to cross from inside to outside and return with a story that can be carried back to the bed, to the corner where the day’s last tasks are done, to the page where a letter waits to travel beyond the hill and into a town’s post office, beyond the yard’s gate and the night’s edge.

This is the chapter’s hinge: the night’s small light, the room’s patient weather, the family’s old wounds and old rituals, and the child’s stubborn, careful effort to reach toward warmth. The memory’s core remains simple and stubborn: we reach out not with grand gestures but with measured, practical steps, the lift of a hand toward a mother’s still-handled warmth, a whispered question offered into the room’s soft air, a plan to press the letter’s corner flat, a decision to wait for the next day’s weather and the next day’s chance to be heard. The five-bedroom house on Mt Buffalo is not a palace; it is a listening post. It teaches that the world beyond the gate can be seen, can be tended, can be crossed, not in one leap but in a sequence of careful breaths and patient choices.

And so I want to tell you, as I tell myself, you are not alone. The road has its own current, the engine its slow throb, the dust its quiet memory. The room’s light is a map you can follow, the land outside a steady breath you can learn to imitate. Stay with me in this memory; let us practice the small reach: a hand toward warmth, a page toward kin, a question asked in a voice you barely recognise as brave. Tomorrow’s road will come with its own weight, but we are here, we are listening, and we are not alone.