My mother and father were always great storytellers. Country people, exiled to the city by history and circumstance, they bequeathed to their children, through the tales they told, a sense of pride and place. A cup of tea, a yarn, and a political debate around our dining room table could, and did, last for hours. Against the backdrop of Basin Mountain, Forbes Lagoon and The Bonewood Scrub, a bizarre cast of characters, with names like 'Wormy Wright','The Carbine Heifer',and 'Old Tarnation'; creatures far too fantastic for mere invention; lived out lives of hardship and high adventure. They were, to my brothers and I, stories of a foreign world; a place inhabited by aunts and uncles we had never met, and by dangerous creatures and fabulous sights that we had never seen. But they were also, for city kids, a tenuous link to 'The Bush'; that fantastic place of myth and legend; of snakes, crocodiles, horsemen, shearers and beer; which existed somewhere west of Strathfield, in the uncharted lands of a suburban childs' imagination.