Likewise, when I was forced to line up with the unemployed at Bungaree at spud-digging time, in Mildura when the grapes were on, at Kaniva and Shepparton for the soft-fruit season, I held myself aloof from my fellows. I, having shone my boots and ironed my shirt, was not one of them. When some stirrers up at Bungaree tried to organize a strike against the spud farmers who were paying only sixpence a bag, I was called a scab. There were plenty of us, don't worry, and it was us scabs who brought in the spuds for those celebrated spud cockies at Bungaree.

"What sort of mining?" my guest inquired politely, while my son, unseen by anyone, jiggled a little piece of wire inside the lock of her battered brown suitcase. (If you look at him now, pressing his body against the dancer while he undertakes his inquiry, you will be certain he will grow up to be a thief. He has all the qualities, the most important of which is sheer persistence.)

"Gold-mining," I said.

The dancer snorted. An extraordinary sound. The shape of her body, the elegance of her legs, the broomstick spine, the tidy contours of her flinty face, gave no indication that such an untidy explosion could emerge from her. Sonia was entranced. She liked odd things and I could see the noise attracted her. She came and sat beside me and squeezed my hand secretly. A joy to Sonia was nothing if it could not be communicated.

"It is gold", the dancer said sternly, reaching for a fourth Bungaree trout, frowning, and then deciding against it, "that is the curse of this country." She wiped her mouth with a little square of torn newspaper, a gesture that smacked of both fastidiousness and complacency. "It is what is wrong with it, has always been wrong with it, and once you look at what gold has done, you can go back and look at the attitude towards land ownership and find it is exactly the same."

I had no idea what she was talking about, but I was offended just the same. I took the last slice of trout, broke it in half and gave it to my children.

"It is gold", Leah said, "that has led ordinary working men and women into terrible delusion; it has made them think that they can be the exception to ordinary working men and women all through history; it has made them think that all they need is luck. They have been blinded by gold. They have imagined that all they need to do is drive their pick into the right spot in the ground and they will be another Hannan – they'll be bosses themselves. It has corrupted them. It has been the same with land. Men who spent their lives suffering from the ruling classes went out and stole land from its real owners. Hey, presto, I'm a boss. There has been no history here," she said. "The country has woken like a baby and had to discover everything for itself and only now are people learning what the ruling class has done to us, that we have been lied to and deceived about some Working Man's Paradise and we need more than luck to have freedom. So if you are still, in 1931, looking for gold to solve your problems, I must say you are barking up the wrong tree."

"I did not ask you to share my tucker," I said, "to hear you insult me in front of my children."

"It's not personal," she said. It may have been a trick of the light but I imagined I saw her eyes flood with tears. "Why do people always take it personally? I try to have an intelligent conversation, but there is no tradition of intellectual discussion here. When a subject is discussed the women simper and say they have no ideas and the men want to settle it with a fight. I am not attacking you personally, Mr Badgery." Her voice was half strangled. "I am attempting to analyse the history of this country and point out why the working classes have always acted as if they're going to be bosses tomorrow. I'm trying to point out why we're in this mess. But if you want to take it personally, that's your right. You can give me my marching orders now, and I'll go."

She took another square of newspaper from her pocket and blew her nose. It would have taken a hard heart to evict her. She rubbed the corner of her eye with the sleeve of her coat and stared into the fire.

"You must understand", she said after I had begged her to stay, "the difference between a criticism and an insult. Do you do well from your alluvial mining?"

Honesty, like temper, has a habit of coming on me without fair warning. Before I knew what I was doing I'd tossed her my specimen bottle and she'd caught it with a snap. A few gold specks glinted in the firelight.

She threw back her head and laughed and her laugh was as remarkable as her snort: a tangle like blackberries, sweet, prickly, untidy, uncivilized, and it is an indication of the difficulty I have with her, for her character will never stay still and be one thing, refuses to be held down on my dissecting board, pulls out a pinned-down leg and shakes it in the air.

Sonia loved the laugh. She nudged me conspiratorially, silently asking me to appreciate this marvel, this genie released from an austere and flint-grey vessel.

While the laugh raged around him, Charles's persistent wire at last hit the secret of his mother's lock and, from the battered three-strap suitcase, came the unfiltered odour of his flesh and blood.

The blue-bellied black snake that came first to his hand was only an average specimen, no more than three foot long and sleepy and stiff with the cold. Yet this is not to take credit away from my son who handled this, his first snake, with an instinctive sympathy.

Sonia gurgled, but whether from amazement or fear I could not tell.

"Shiva," the dancer said softly. "Don't let the others out."

"I shut it," Charles said, stroking a finger along the snake's spine.

"I had it locked."

Charles bestowed a magnificent smile upon his new friend and I cannot remember him smiling at all until that night. Perhaps it was the first time in his difficult life that he dared expect happiness, and when I recall him by the fire it is not, any longer, as a child, but as the big-jawed, heavy-necked, sloping-shouldered, wide-hipped, fifteen-stone business man whose rare smile could so charm those who saw it. It was a smile to treasure, a smile people would try to induce, the more wonderful for being so rare. I have felt a similar emotion when splitting open a dull piece of rock to discover a fist of opal hiding inside: that such splendour could exist captive in such ugly clay.

"There is a rule of the road," Leah told my son gently, "that you do not go messing with another fellow's swag."

"It's a suitcase," Sonia contradicted, leaping to her habitual defence of her brother.

The snake moved through my son's hand, ran along Leah's arm, and stopped. They both stroked it. The creature did not seem inclined to move any more.

"It is an unusual person," Leah said to me, "who will be at home with a venomous snake."

Let me tell you, I was no longer one of them. You can mistreat a horse and be forgiven it. You can kick a dog and it will come back and lick your hand. But a snake is another matter, and once you have wronged it, it will carry the memory of you with it, like a bolted convict with lash marks on its back, criss-crossed, burned in like a loaf of fancy bread. And there is no doubt that the greatest mistake I ever made in my life was to keep that Geelong snake a prisoner in a hessian bag, to starve it, to use it for tricks. Had I not been so foolish my whole life would have taken a different course: Jack would not have died, I would not have been permitted to marry Phoebe, and I would not have been troubled by the sight of my son besotted with a snake-dancer.

I was forty-five years old when I met Leah and a man, at forty-five, is meant to be mature. Certainly he should not be dependent on the good opinion and respect of total strangers who blunder into his camp.

"Most men", Leah said to me, "will run a mile from a snake," and I felt myself compared to my son and found lacking and I was led by my emotions rather than my common sense which told me to let my son have his moment of glory and not to worry that this blue-coated lecturer thought me a coward. My emotions, however, ruled. I could not stand it, this invasion of the one place on earth – my camp – where I might be confident of some respect.