AustLit

'Early childhood memories are like pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle,' says Roberta Sykes (1997) in her autobiography, Snake Dreaming (1997, 4). She spends her life in assembling and organising these pieces in order to understand the complete picture. But, these pictures, accessed with difficulty, slip in and out of alignment quite often, thus distorting and complicating the already incomplete picture. These pieces consist of incidents that occur, people she met and people she did not meet, but whom she continues to speculate on as they were conspicuous by their absence; place that she was familiar with; and beyond that the secrets that she also had to hide securely. Like Old Nick who haunts her mother's dreams, her childhood haunts Roberta Sykes, not only dreams but through every waking moment of her life.' (Author's introduction p. 35)