My Aunt Mimi sits next to my grandmother, Lilian Alice Slape, in the Botanical Gardens around 1930. I imagine they sat here on a Sunday afternoon after taking the ferry to Circular Quay from Rose Bay in the Eastern Suburbs. It was the depression so maybe they couldn’t afford to put petrol in the car to go on their usual Sunday drive. An afternoon ferry trip on Sydney Harbour would have been a wonderful and affordable family excursion instead. Did they buy ice cream cones at Circular Quay and walk through the gardens? Were they happy, or was this one of the dark days?

I’m sure that my grandfather took the picture. It is beautifully composed with Lilian, whose nickname was Ducky, and Joan Yvonne, who rejected that name and called herself Mimi, sitting next to each other. Mimi’s posture is almost like her mother’s, but still part gangly child. What was each of them thinking on this Sunday in 1930? Even if they were still here for me to ask them, it is unlikely they would be able to tell me. Can I remember what I was thinking at three o’clock last Sunday, let alone when I was ten years old?

I am writing a historical novel based on the life of that girl whose pose is graceful but full of the promise of movement, poised for flight. For years I talked to Mimi about her life, her adventures, her struggles, her losses, taking down notes, recording her voice, considering whether I might tell her story as a biography. But then, how do I account for a Sunday at the Botanical Gardens? How can I free myself to write authentically if I can’t know with any certainty what was in Mimi’s head or the details of her life on a given day?

She died in 2018 at the age of 96, but I had spoken with her about this many times, and although she had not always agreed that her life was worth capturing, she came to see, as she neared its end, that hers had been extraordinary, and that her experiences coming of age just as Australia entered the War, and the ways in which its reverberations changed the trajectory of her life, were worthy of telling. We agreed that the only way for me to capture the truth of her life, the essence of its joy, tragedy, and complexity, was to free myself from trying to imagine the specifics of the real and invent the specifics that would create the real. 

So, all these things are true.