Being Determined

Dad? Dad! Smiling among my son's books, Moustached, short-back-and-sides, barrel-chested, Bald as me...the same age, just the same looks... A photo I'd forgotten. Good on yer, grinning there!

My sons are off to university, not the Royal Welch Like you, then me. You won your stripes in bloody mud; I returned salutes with a swagger cane and Your last words to me? "You don't know what's good."

Mugabe's win the morning that I left - five months later you were dead. No grasping determinations so deft which sent my brothers, then you, to Transvaal, me to Australia's authentic life.

- from Being Determined (1990)