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'Simone de Beauvoir noted that you don’t often make new friends after age 60. But Jill and I enjoyed what you could call a late friendship. Jill came to the ANU as a visitor after she retired in 2003 and we immediately fell into an easy friendship. We were born just a year apart – Jill in 1940 and me a year later. We were both country girls, Jill a farm girl from Eyre Peninsula and me a small-town girl from southern Queensland. We had both fled rural life in the late 1950s and been the first in our families to go to university in the early 1960s. When Jill was writing her final book, Our Fathers Cleared the Bush – her memoir of her childhood in that remote corner of South Australia – we found that we shared many experiences, despite the distance between South Australia and Queensland and their different histories.1 ' (Introduction)
