A few years ago I decided (the sort of decision you make when blind ignorance and extreme optimism collide) that when my third and youngest child started school it might be fun to do a PhD. I was interested in Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War and the differences between that experience and popular culture representations of the war – which are mostly driven by the US experience. So, I signed up and started researching. I was working and raising a family, and such is the nature of the horse industry that I would usually get an hour or so to research before picking the kids up from school and starting afternoon lessons. The early months of my research became, for me, a series of moments of extreme cognitive dissonance – standing in the playground watching children play and thinking about Post Traumatic Stress, Ho Chi Minh and land mines...
 
During that time we went on our first family holiday to Exmouth. After about seven hours of driving I knew the Wiggles entire discography by heart and the children were starting to disappear beneath a drift of muesli bar wrappers and empty juice boxes. We stopped at the Overlander Roadhouse and as I was walking the kids to the toilets I noticed a man sitting, eating a hamburger in a white Subaru and on the window of his car a small sticker that read AATTV (Australian Army Training Team Vietnam). On the way back to the car I tapped on his window and introduced myself.
 
He was happy to talk about his experiences in Vietnam and we stood in the car park and the kids played on this scratchy little patch of grass while road trains tore down the highway. He'd done two tours of duty, the second had been worse because he'd been married by then and leaving had been harder. He told me about his experiences with Post Traumatic Stress. About ten years after his last tour things had got pretty bad and he'd decided he was going to blow up his boss. He'd worked out a way to disable the locking mechanism in his boss's car and was just working out how much chlorine he was going to need for the bomb when his wife discovered what he'd been doing and he was committed. He coughed and said that there were years when things had been hard, really hard.

My brother has always been a special person. I might be biased, but I think there are lots of people in the world who would agree. For me, he has always been more than brother. He’s been a mentor, friend, coach, confidante, partner in crime, fellow experimenter and always a loving big brother.
 
We went to Rottnest recently for a day trip and it reminded me of countless hours spent on the island in my childhood. It was the place where I learnt to ride a bike, make phone calls to the mainland on pay-phones, buy the paper for Dad in the morning, purchase clothes at the surf shop, make lunch, dinners and breakfast, swim, surf, snorkel, be resilient, experiment, try (and fail), be scared and survive, get cold get hot, get tired and push on. I learnt to dig deep, have very sore quads after long bike rides around the island and to conquer fears. In many ways, it set me up very well for life as an adult.
 
I think these hours spent experiencing things with my brother built the foundations for the courage I now have in life, and the beginning of the ‘can-do’ attitude.
 
Talking to Roland recently he said that courage is the product of having a few key aspects in life under control. It’s sort of the pinnacle. He spent some time teaching children who were struggling in traditional schools because of dysfunctional family situations and they developed some interesting strategies. The formula for building resilience in these children began with finding which area they were strongest in and building from there.

​My grandmother could not remember her mother-in-law's name. Sixty years since she last saw her and the pages of the past had faded. "She was very kind to me," she said, but she could not remember her name. Her husband, Herman, had been an only child and he had been gone for ten years so there was no-one left to remember the names of the dead.  My grandmother could remember the really important things though, the milky smell of a baby's skin, the song of birds at dawn, a friend's good bye – and her mother-in-law's kindness.
 
She showed me a photo of my grandfather in Sumatra as a child, his parents on either side. Dressed in white, a tropical plant in an ornate silver box and a wooden shuttered house behind. My great-grandmother, as though she is somehow already taking leave from the family history, looks without expression at the camera. She wears a thick, dark necklace and holds a paper fan. My grandmother pointed to the necklace in the photo, "I have that necklace somewhere," she said. "Maybe one day it will be yours."
 
In the photo my great-grandmother wears a white, drapey dress of lace, a wide black sash around the breadth of her rib cage. My grandfather looks about five years old, dressed in a sailor suit with woollen socks pulled up. My great-grandfather wears a white suit, his face is calm, his chest broad and a watch chain disappears into his pocket.