Even at three-hundred yards Dad can see the flies buzz above the carcass. We lie in twin tunnels carved in the long grass, Dad with his rifle and me with the binoculars. Dad aligns with the bolt-action Lee-Enfield, his cheek folded over the butt and finger curled around the trigger. He stares down the barrel with the focus of a man reading an epitaph on the ironsight at the far end.

for several years we, your father and i, brushed off your infatuation. a phase, we told one another. a passion. just a creative preoccupation. at times you endeavoured to hide your desire, tried to act as if nothing was going on. but there was no point, you were transparent. you wanted to be normal.

He placed the rusty knife by the cutting board and slipped on a pair of rubber gloves. A brown body with two yellow hands. He picked up the knife again and with a sharp thrust pushed the blade into the gut of the fish. She looked away, expecting blood to gush like water, but the board was clean, the white belly of the fish hanging open like a toothless smile.

We’d been coming to Wallaby Point for nearly twenty years, from the time our kids were babies, our daughter crawling bare-bottomed into the water like a little turtle. But this year something changed. Or maybe it has always been changing and we only just noticed.

Several years back I visited the former premises of Overland, a ramshackle house posing as an office on a residential street in Footscray (or so I remember). Within, ducking from room to room, was ‘Team Overland’, including former editor Jeff Sparrow and current editor Jacinda Woodhead. That quiet afternoon, in which I was interviewed for an intern position, changed my life.