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It is now a corporate business, this inheritance business, the ancestor game. I am getting better at it, digging up the dead, especially the victims. When I look for photographs of my ancestors I find that almost all the images are those of men killed in action and donated to libraries by their families. Through luck and persistence I have tracked down the odd military portrait of my great-grandfather–a vague, blurry shot of Light Horse cavalrymen parading in front of the pyramids. Although both my grandfather and great grandfather survived their wars, almost nothing was written by them or about them, and their letters home have not, alas, come into my possession. If their letters had been saved, they are lost to my father and me. Those kinds of documents do not now belong to us, or to be more correct, the full archive is never going to come down to us.

The last bit of family memorabilia my father ever owned was a digger’s hat he took to Asia. It was possibly his grandfather’s. A sister-in-law I have never met probably owns it now. She is, unfortunately, someone my father did not impress, when at his brother’s funeral in Melbourne my father charged him–her ex-husband–with being a racist. All this in front of her relatives.‘I had a bit too much to drink, you see,’said my father, when we recalled the event.‘A racist who married a Sri Lankan?’I queried, but felt I didn’t want to push it too far. No wonder she hates my father. I want to make light of it so in a last gasp of paternalistic chauvinism I affirm that we are the legitimate heirs and last of the Aitken-Strong line, not her!(Well, not quite; there is another relative in Western Australia who will survive us, of whom little is …