“Boo, hoo! Ow, ow! Me’ll die. Boo, hoo. The pain, the pain. Boo, hoo!”

The opening lines reflect Sybylla’s earliest memory: getting bitten by a snake. At this young age, Sybylla is still pre-verbal. Anticipating by 20 years James Joyce’s opening in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Franklin captures how future writer Sybylla struggles for words to convey experience.

“He was my hero, confidant, encyclopedia, mate, and even my religion till I was ten.”

Crucial to Sybylla’s development is her relationship with her father. His downfall into debt and alcoholism is her earliest experience with disappointment. Unfortunately, it will not be the first.

“He was crippled with too many Utopian ideas of honesty, and he was too soft to come off as anything but second-best in a deal.”

Sybylla struggles to understand what appears to be illogical. Everything that makes her father admirable leads to his financial ruin. At this point, she cannot grasp how a good man could lose so much, so quickly. Yet writing from the vantage point of maturity, Sybylla acknowledges that his demeanor was simply incompatible with the harsh landscape of rural New South Wales.