Of course I'm a little young to be writing my memoirs, but this all began as a response to people wanting to see the stories of my childhood on paper. It really was a barefoot childhood, and very different from the lives of my school mates in the boom times of the 1970s.

The story also had to include the lives of my parents, two extraordinary people who came here, separately, as young people from the Calabrian countryside in the 1950s, married, and established a farm in Bindoon.

It was my working childhood on that farm that lead me into the corporate world and ultimately into community based work. Clearly that was not the only possible response to such a childhood - my seven brothers and sisters all followed different paths. But the connections between my path and my parents' drive and ethics seemed important enough to try to describe for the benefit of a possible reader who might be asking whether anything is worth making a commitment for.

I think the answer is yes. Same dance, your tune.

Trish Rechichi