Well, it was the fourteenth of March, nineteen forty-seven, at the Gympie hospital. And the way Mum told it, Dad came straight in from the afternoon milking. Didn't even stop to wash. He put Mum up in the old Chevrolet truck and the empty cream cans were still on the tray, rattling the whole eight miles into town from Black Gully. Ha! I came into the world to the sound of cream cans. I was seven pounds even, and Mum always said I came out with the milk still warm.

Ha! Cream cans rattling all the way. Was that a story that got told every birthday?

Oh, every birthday, love. And Dad would sit there looking dry about it. He was a quiet man, my dad, Tom Hayes. He'd say, "Well, the cows wouldn't wait either." He was a dairy farmer like his father before him, and he never went to the war, you know, because dairy was what they called a reserved occupation. They needed the milk. So he stayed home milking while a lot of the other young blokes went off, and I think that sat with him, in a quiet sort of way.