The doctor looked up from the report and asked, "Do you prefer a female doctor?"

"Umm, no — not necessarily," I stammered. "I don't mind either way."

A specialist! I thought. Well, that's unexpected. Surely a bit of an over-reaction. I was uncomfortable with the direction this consultation had turned.

Turning back to her computer, the doctor brought up a list of breast specialists in the Gold Coast area. She nominated one, then printed out and handed me the referral.

Although surprised by the test results, I was confident it would prove to be a hullaballoo over something trivial and was taken aback by all the fuss. I was more irked at the intrusive timing than concerned. But the situation felt odd — almost surreal. It was July, Friday the 13th. Not a good date to receive test results.

The previous unbelievably exciting eighteen months had seen me record, and then at the age of sixty-nine, release my debut country music CD, Never too Late. Not an album destined for great acclaim, but it was my first and I took immense pride in knowing it was all mine. I'd realised part of a long-secreted childhood dream and was about to take the next step.

But now this — the timing was woeful.

Whilst I wasn't born into musically-involved family, to the resigned bewilderment of my parents, I displayed a childhood love for country music. But a lack of opportunity and encouragement left that youthful leaning secreted away behind the more pressing busyness of life. Although cast aside, my love simmered over the years until finally, at the age of sixty-six, with time running out to fulfil life-long aspirations, I bought a guitar determined to learn to play. However, when lessons began, to my dismay I found my guitar teacher enforced a strict policy that his pupils must sing in accompaniment to their playing. His impatient response to any embarrassed avoidance was, "Everyone can sing. You sing."

So, the album was the product of a series of events, not the result of any calculated intent.

Taking the specialist's referral, I thanked the doctor. Picking up the pack of x-rays, I hoisted my bag onto my shoulder and returned to reception.

I was born during World War Two. A time of worry, uncertainty, and strict food-rationing — but I was too young to understand. Welcomed into a close, loving family, my childhood memories are scattered with roasting chestnuts over the kitchen fire, picking wild blackberries for my mother to make jam, helping my father make us home-made sweets, and walking to school on frosty cold mornings with fingers warmed by an oven-heated stone clutched between my gloves. I felt safe and unquestioningly accepted that my world would always remain the same.

Although seeming incongruous and distant now, I remember a simpler, and in many aspects, happier way of life when compared to today's more cosmopolitan, over-commercialised, technology-dominated existence. But archives of memory can be biased, and it could be debatable as to whether life was in fact less complicated, or whether it appeared so because I was experiencing it from the secure perspective of a child.

Certainly, prior to the introduction of safe, reliable birth-control, for a mother relegated the responsibility of rearing a large family on a limited income, her burden must have often felt intolerably heavy. With none of the appliances we now consider basic necessities, none of the health benefits that massive advances in medical technology has gifted us, nor access to the surfeit of medicines, medical sundries, and commercially marketed foodstuffs that overflow the shelves of today's pharmacies and grocery stores, life would have been infinitely more challenging.

My maternal grandparents lived just a few doors up the street from us and before retiring and moving to Auckland, my gentle, poetry-loving grandfather held the eminent position of mayor of our country town.

It was an era when one could buy tiny, half-sized, penny ice-creams. Bread, unsliced, was bought for seven pence a full loaf, or four and a half pence a half, and a 'take-away' meal meant fish and chips wrapped in newspaper. Three dozen fabric nappies, despite the relentless barrage of repeated washing and disinfecting, survived to serve two or three babies — and even then, fought on to the death as household cleaning cloths.

I was about eight years old when my father got his first car — a 1936 Ford V8, and around the same time, my mother got her first electric washing machine — a Hoover. Prior to that, household washing was done in a large copper-vat set in concrete block housing, with water heated by a fire lit in a purpose-built fire-cavity underneath. After boiling, items were lifted separately from the vat, dropped into the first of the concrete twin-tubs, fed through a hand-operated mangle into the second tub of rinsing water, squeezed back through the mangle, then carried outside to a wire clothes-line stretched across the back yard.

What happened to the old copper? My father used that to brew beer.

With Victa yet to come up with their much-acclaimed motorised brainchild, lawns were hand-mown with a push-along rotary-blade mower. Telephone calls were connected manually 24/7 by female switchboard operators. "Number, please?" "May I have 357, please," — my childhood home phone number. These same operators also provided the correct time if requested.

Coal to fuel our coal-range stove was delivered by the sackful slung across the back of the local coal-man. The noise, as it was unexpectedly dumped into the wooden coal-bin outside the kitchen window, startled everyone inside the house. I tried eating it once as all kids must — until I was caught. I remember it was crunchy, but otherwise disappointingly tasteless.

Many bitterly cold winter mornings, often with the household water frozen solid in the pipes, would find my mother outside at the woodpile next to our out-house toilet. Dressed in my father's brown-checked woollen dressing-gown, her nightie peeping out from below the hemline danced around her ankles, while she split logs into kindling to light the range to cook the porridge and heat the household water. When we children reached what was hoped to be a 'sensible' age, using the smaller axe, chopping kindling became our weekend job.

While the breakfast porridge cooked, the billy-can of milk was collected from inside the front gate where it was placed the night before. As a child, snuggled down in my warm bed, on occasion I was awoken in the small hours of the morning by the oddly-comforting sound of the milkman's truck getting closer and closer, stopping at each house as it edged up the street. Eventually I'd hear it pull up at our gate. Soon would follow the rattle of coins, as the money and the milk-order note were removed from the billy, then the dull clunk of the metal milk scoop as it knocked against the side of the milk can, while the ordered measure of milk was ladled into the billy.

Those were years well before the inventions of pasteurisation or homogenisation, and an increasing number of cases of bovine-transmitted tuberculosis being diagnosed around that time, encouraged most families to follow newly-issued government health recommendations to boil all milk before use.

I recall the great excitement when we got out first fridge — a Leonard. It meant our mother could now make home-made ice-cream. I was seven. Prior to that, sitting on the floor...