The first 15 years of my life were spent on the family farm at "Toothdale", between Candelo and Wolumla, in the Bega Valley of New South Wales. My grandfather, Mr Arthur Thomas Cochrane (A.T. for short) bought the property in 1934 from the Porter Estate, whose family had lived there since the 1870s.

John Porter built the lovely old house overlooking the property "Oakvale", in which my Uncle Trevor Cochrane and family lived until his death in 2005. My father Horace, Trevor’s older brother, was married later than Trevor, so my family lived in the farmhouse down by the dairy. Horace and Trevor worked together every day, before and after the Second World War, with never a sharp word between them.

As the first born of Horace and Joan’s family, I had a year of undivided attention until my sister Diana was born, then two other sisters arrived by the time I was five years old. As a result I became very good at entertaining myself around the dairy farm and assorted sheds, talking to the poddy calves, chatting to the chooks, climbing the lovely willow trees, and generally getting in the way in the dairy at milking time. I would walk with my father across the paddocks to collect the cows for milking and enjoyed his stories about the wildlife we saw, the snakes, hares and quail that would frighten us by jumping out of a tussock as our feet were about to tread on them.

As I got older I was allowed to walk the cows to and from the dairy by myself, very proudly feeling the responsibility of the job – little knowing that Dad was standing in the hay shed watching my every move. "Flossie" the blue cattle dog was my mentor and guide as she knew everything about the movements of the farm, and many was the time she would attack a snake that came too close. She would always get bitten during conflict, and would disappear under the house to nurse herself back to health, appearing several days later as bright as ever.

School days involved a car trip across the valley to South Wolumla School with the teacher, who lived in the old Schoolhouse at Toothdale, after the Toothdale School had been closed and moved away in 1946. My sisters and cousins had to walk up the road in all weathers, jumping on frozen puddles to break the ice, imagining ghosts in the thick fogs and marveling at the spring flowers that had popped out overnight. We would all pile into "Sir’s" little Vanguard or Prefect car and rattle along the corrugated dusty road to South Wolumla where my cousins lived. The population of the school at times was a majority of Cochranes, although the school population in my six years there never went above twelve students.

I have lived all over the world since these special days and coming back to the Bega Valley after forty years has reinforced the emotion of "my place."