Would a pig to rush out when I opened he door? I saw it as a real possibility. Braced myself with a smile, was primed to step aside to let the beast burst out.

The absurdity that a dream that led me here to what must surely futile embarrassment – clay dust, boxes full of knick-knacks were scattered round inside as I walked through, treasures, books waiting for a home, the detritus of our recent relocation.

My torch shone along the gloom onto the concrete posts supporting the joists.

At eye height on a nail hammered into a beam I saw it.

It was the pig.

My father had had a troubled childhood abandoned by both parents. But staunch mining and farming stock among his cousins aunts and uncles, produced family networks that protected and galvanised him through early life. Then as he listened to dinner table stories, he found pride in the family’s connection to proud moments in history such as the workers uprising against injustice at Eureka. One day he produced to me an heraldic family crest made of pressed copper and wood.

On it was the image of a wild boar or pig as mother used to say contentiously with her thin rouged smile.

There was a motto underneath the plaque I held. In Latin.

Dum Spero Spiro. While I breathe I hope.

Here was wisdom beyond any ability of myself. It was the result of a quantum arrangement of events, first of the neural influences of my dream, second of someone’s arm that moved to absently attach that sole particular item to the basement roof.

I remember the transcendent message today while I still continue to breathe while running along Plenty Gorge, and I keep the unbroken commitment to my loved family member. I trust in its meaning, cling to my steady hope and follow despite waves of despair, those simple words.

Three fifty beers then champagne breakfast before the Melbourne Cup. What a day in prospect glad I will be sleeping.

Unfortunately others not so lucky. Two policemen were murdered; the family member of the suspect says, is your mother mental give him up, he is already in the nick what more do they want.

Australia Hotel rendezvous with my cab in the lane, cars of the crooks land to meet us, have been watching every move from the silos.

Poor mum in tears on Chestnut Street child in arms held aside weeping who has seen the police dismantle her cottage brick by beam.

Triptych – would never forget the collisions in those times.

House lit up like an aquarium. Gantrified industrial area, can’t you shut the blinds, sit back listen to his poor engorged hubris, watch his engorged gut.

Any healing will be slow, his monumental chiseled features, look out for the catalepsy – I bail just before he fails to sign the cheque, he demanded I do not speak just listen as he touches up the rock art myths of youthful heroics, saves the suicidal woman at the cliff top yet again, romances her on the spot, wins the race across the heads to clamors of admiration. But now the lingering paeans of last hangers on begin to fade. They do not appreciate his victimhood. So much harm he unwillingly does to others but is so charismatically naive and impossible to dislike. Of his good time mates now only I remain.

Fingers dripping, urgent flurry of guidance. Water slips through and falls to ground then finds its own way.

Wandering off and cannot be recaptured. In that moment the trickle slipped beside a little watershed where ground fell away to one side.

Flows over a sand ridge then past fractured gibbers where a deeper line flicks it abruptly sideways.

What was anticipated in that first moment sometimes happened sometimes did not, the surge of intellectual strength at its limits of power against the void could never win but might just do enough.

That was the time that could and did limit the error, even though the future events were far out of sight and it was unable to focus working blind at the dark edge of ability and knowledge.

In anticipation 100 million years hence would come one of those sculpted moments that could not afford to fail. All its attention was on what would happen when the first coalesced galaxies caused stars to adhere.

No carbon in the universe yet, but there was a thin line of genius intent amongst chaos that itself was exquisitely concentrated, because just at that moment events of increasingly exponential possibility began to be caused, such as the triple alpha process in the helium furnace inside a newborn star, combined with an impossible but required resonance of the carbon-12 atom, which produced suddenly carbon in massive quantity from helium where it had never existed.

So what the superintellect had been able to see in that first moment, in its trembling minds eye lens, was that even if it would not survive, it could dream of Niles and Amazons and, if it worked out, one more close run thing on the horizon from that moment of creation, where the sharp rock became dislodged one hazy afternoon only because events had been prepared and smoothed along the way.

Had it done enough that the tiny heartbeat fire would start deep within the dislodged rock? Which proceeded to sit up crookedly flip its lid and begin to talk, try to figure then look around for something to pick up.

Time to leave was forced on us. We had been living among the industrial side working class, among neighbours staunch and supportive to our young family. At night we heard the ticking of the Westgate road deck that towered above, and in the morning scraped soot from our window sills.

Who would have thought that within a few days I would be regaling in a new home town far distant, hearing a joyous song that had come from nowhere but seemed to encapsulate the most promising of futures there?

Moving day was poised exquisitely. There was Steve’s breakdown and our long anxious wait for his arrival. He turned out to be a warm mountain of a man who as I remember grimaced broadly as he first perched each club chair on his shoulders, which then disappeared with only legs underneath toward the new home lower down the hillside.

We shared a beer. The neighbouring house lights came on at different times and levels along the gully walls, and when we looked out the back window, we saw a cathedral arched over with dark eucalypts.

Our two young girls would settle intuitively, they were blond nomads well used to the wandering life under tall timber on our river camps under canvas every holiday or long weekend. The birds came to them as the days passed. They were all sorts and colours and seemed to sociably come and go by way of introduction; they were prolific along the creek corridor we now shared with them.

The time I heard the song.

I arrived home at dawn after working all night. Aware or people sleeping close by on all sides, I stepped carefully toward the gate, not wanting to be the one to break the fragile attenuated silence.

But when my tread snapped a dry stick, immediately a single shrill call rose from somewhere in the canopy right overhead.Then another joined in and it had soon spread into a rhythmic pulse that birds in their hundreds took up among the unflinching treetops that had not moved, even when the entire gully was ablaze with the magnificent repetitive dawn chorus.

It was the song that celebrated the good fortune of the noisy mynas that lived there but had preceded us, and also our own since we had now joined them. Those fiercely industrious honeyeaters by day, braced for their working day ahead by perching meditatively and pouring out their impetuous harmonies.

They rode the trilling rhythmic boat that dawn, to welcome our little family it seemed, at the beginning of our lives that still continue in this delightful place.