Having signed a contract to buy a farm on our return to Australia, after four years with our Vanuatu venture, we filled our time until completion with a trip to the UK and soaking up the galleries and museums in Australia. One of these was the Turner exhibition in Canberra. My husband, our best man, Gray, and I went and on our return journey we visited Hatton’s Corner at Yass in search of Trogladytes. Okay, we weren’t really looking for prehistoric cave dwellers but rather trilobites and other fossils from the Silurian period. These we didn’t find but instead a small kitten adopted Rod, my husband, who had returned to the car early as he felt unwell . There were another six kittens which we could not get near. The mother cat we found, shot dead, nearby. The kitten was insistent that we rescue her. Knowing we would soon have a farm we did not hesitate to take her with us, stopping in Yass at the vets to ask them to do something for the other kittens.

We took the kitten, now called Trog – we had been looking for Troglodytes after all – back to my Mother’s unit. She was in a sorry state. She looked a sight with her eyes gummed up with a conjunctival infection, a flea infestation and horrible scabs over her body. Although my mother fell in love with the scrap of cat we were not allowed to keep her in the apartment due to a no animal policy, so after a wash in the laundry tub and one night Trog went to stay at Gray’s house.  The first three weeks he looked after her and then he returned to his job in China. We took her to the vet and came away with eye ointment, antibiotics for gut and skin problems. The vet told us that she would have been no more than three weeks old and we were lucky that she was able to lap. She was a survivor.  It was a lonely early life for her as she was living in the house of Timmins, by herself, with no human company apart from our visits to her. After a week of this a friend who lived in the same suburb, took pity on her and moved Trog into her home until we moved to our farm at Bucca Wauka.