…the primary national interest is physical occupation, and science is the loophole through which the necessary infrastructure can emerge.

If there was no war then thousands of Aborigines were murdered in a centurylong, continent-wide crime wave tolerated by government. There seems to be no other option. It must be one or the other.

This is the double burden that those who are traumatised must carry. First the trauma, and then the inability of language to describe it.

Her ghost is in my body.

Ronan already knew he was a weapon; but he was trying to make up for it.

A fresh new irony in my life is that I have become fascinated with Aboriginal rock engravings, 20 years after leaving Sydney where they are present in magnificent abundance, 25 years after graduating from the Department of Archaeology where John Clegg taught and a year after John Clegg’s death. I never could see the precious things that were right in front of my face.

This one’s a little hard to make out, but it’s a whale shark, its nose pointing to the left, two eyes on the white patch of rock, and a fish inside it, its nose pointing down. It’s on the cliffs above Tamarama, on the spectacular walking path from Bondi to Coogee. We walked up there one late afternoon as the sun set behind the city and set the sky on fire.

The next two turned out beautifully – we found them at blazing high noon – but the shaming part is, they are part of an incredibly rich field that is walking distance from my childhood home, on a track I regularly wandered down, but I didn’t even notice that they were there until shortly before I left the country for good. They weren’t signposted as they are now, but also, I just wasn’t paying attention.

I remember a visitor from England saying very snottily that he couldn’t live in Australia because there wasn’t enough history here, compared with where he grew up. I wish I’d known enough to drag him to this place and point out that the people who made this art lived peacefully on this land for 40,000 years before there even was an England.

Murri stockman Herb Wharton wrote:

The old tribal elder who had spoken before said that he did not trust people who could leave the place where they had been born, to go to another country. For him, for all of them, their land was their mother, a sacred place. No matter what injustices they had suffered, nothing could ever break that tie with their own land and with the Dreamtime. Yet every one of this boat mob had left his own land.

I am boat mob twice over – my English mother, my exile self.

This site was the hardest to find and the most beautiful. Again, it was a few metres off a bush track I knew well, where I used to let my Arab horse Alfie stretch out and gallop; almost exactly halfway between my godmother’s house and that of Jeremy’s Aunty Jan. The kids were incredibly patient as I searched and searched for the obscured beginning of the footpath, and uncomplaining about the spiky grass and prickles they endured along its length. When we finally found the site it was as obviously holy a place as any church.

It’s believed to celebrate a successful hunt; that’s a spear between the kangaroo’s shoulder blades. I think your family of choice includes ancestors of choice as well. You choose which writers and painters and musicians and activists you want to emulate, and which you don’t. I recognize the people who made these images and the people who work to protect them. I acknowledge them as parts of myself, debts to ancestors I never knew, a motherland that will not leave me no matter how often I leave it.

We’ve been talking a lot about presence and absence this week, hardly surprising with Mum and Dad’s ashes in boxes under the TV. Last year when I was tying myself in knots trying to figure out how to organize this trip, I ended up sending mail to my brothers and sister saying look, all I really want is a beach holiday somewhere so that we can drink Bailey’s and play mah jongg and scatter Mum at sea like she wanted. My brother suggested this place and so here we are.

The pictures do not do it justice. On the land side the garden is thoroughly overexcited with hibiscus flowers and rainbow lorikeets and needs to take a calming breath. Climb over the dunes and Diamond Beach is a long wild golden crescent of sand with perfect emerald rollers. The sea is indigo near the horizon and the palest, clearest green where it covers the sand like mercury across glass to make a mirror for the sky. At night the Milky Way is a river of light.

It doesn’t matter that we never came here with our parents. It is every beach holiday we ever had with them and each other. We are all trying to show up and be in the moment for one another and although I was joking when I tweeted a shadow-selfie with the caption “the artist is present,” I am noticing for the first time Abramovic’s double meaning: being present is the art. Don’t just do something, stand there.

Our parents were flawed humans but they left us in no doubt that we were loved. They dragged us to kite festivals and hot air ballooning weekends and zoos and observatories and science museums and Indian and Thai restaurants (pretty exotic in the 1980s). Even though we’re atheists, even though the ashes are not even really the last of them, just more of what they left behind like clothes, even though there isn’t really any such thing as closure, it feels okay to be together here in this beautiful place. At sunset we’ll let them go into the sea, and we’ll build a big fire on the sand, and we’ll sit around it and laugh a bit and cry a bit while the Southern stars come out.