Was thinking this morning about the four countries where I’ve lived. I’m not counting England/London because it was more like a long but intermittent stay of about a year.

It struck me that I have a series of images and sensations that come up for each country every time I think of anything to do with that place. And it’s like I must acknowledge those moments before any other thinking can get going.

Next I winnowed through each series to find the single most important moment to me. Came up with four moments that are seared in my memory.

I was born in North Holland, in the Netherlands. When I was about six years old, my father took me ice skating. A local farmer would’ve flooded a field for a hard winter freeze to turn into a skating rink.

The only thing I remember was how I fell over and between my hands on the ice saw a bright yellow dandelion flower set among a three of sap green dandelion leaves in the ice. Lifting my gaze a little, I understood there this ice skating rink was.

That little flower encased and covered by ice is my primary memory of my childhood. When I think of my early years up to age ten, that little flowers is always the first thing that comes to mind.

In Indonesia, where we lived next, for a ‘big’ year as my mother used to call it (about fourteen months) the moment that stands out for me was a moment of the half hour I spent utterly alone sitting on a large rock in a nearby creek (kali).

Rainforest lined both sides of the little river with no paths that I could see. And anyway, the way back was rock-hopping over the stones till I came to the place where the village (kampong) women washed their clothes.

The hot blue sky above pressed me down on the rock and I sat with my feet in the water. I don’t recall wearing shoes. A couple of rocks furter upstream, a log seemed to come alive. A large lizard, probably of the goanna tribe, dipped its fore half down into the water. To drink I thought.

But no, it slid all the way in and went I don’t know where. I’d risen as it slid down. I hovered waiting to see where it would come up.

All I recall next is the rock hopping way back, and that I was wearing a white drill cloth dress with embroidery round the hem. For heaven’s sake, I think now, why a white, embroidered dress to muck about in?

Fast forwarding now to Australia, where we arrived in late 1959. It’s difficult to extract just the one outstanding moment here. I grew up north of Sydney and then spent six years in New Zealand.

Since I returned until now I’ve lived a variety of different kinds of life. So I think I’ll honour them all, all those different lives in a separate post.

New Zealand is the first country where my soul felt at home. I haven’t worked out yet why that is. Many of my fictions are set in an amalgam of New Zealand/Aoteoroa that I called Leaf Island.

Which is a fictional island rising from the edge of the actual submerged continent Zealandia, about halfway between present day New Zealand and Australia.

My adventures in New Zealand in the early 1970s took me to a small dairying community at the base of the Urewera Range. The whole two years I lived there, I wanted to go up into the Ureweras and explore the wilderness. But I would need a guide. Someone who was native to the place.

Hard to meet for a shy new pakeha (White resident of NZ) woman when most of the Ureweras were owned by Maori.

I met a man who might’ve taken me on his last day in Murupara before he immigrated to Parramatta in Australia where he had a job. On my last day in the valley, I drove to the foot of the mountain.

The plain was flat. The Urewera Range rises steeply out of it without foothills. I parked my car in a newish gravelled carpark. Walked to the mountain. Afternoon light burnished the low heather/montane vegetation.

I put my hands on the earth and soil in front of me as if I would climb up. The slope was between 45 and 70 degrees from the horizontal I remember thinking.

I didn’t climb. Stood there with just my hands spread pressing into the thin soil backed with the stone of ages. A shield wall at the edge of the Mt Ruapehu volcano’s caldera. When I think mountain, that’s it, the Ureweras. An ongoing mystery.

When I woke I lifted my hands from the almost vertical ground taking care not to dislodge the little shrubs and miniature grasses. The sun was well down in the west, a glowing ball on the western horizon.

No other mountains have owned me the way the Ureweras own me. They are the most numinous landscape in my mind.