Southern stars glint above Mickey in his final minutes. He’s alone on the track that snakes down into a gully where steam escapes from pink and yellow earth. Sulphur owns the town of Rotorua, a perverse perfume from a geo thermal underworld. If you were born here, like Mickey, you only became aware of other air when you left town. Mickey has the thinning long hair, crappy beard and drawn face of an aging stoner. At 50, he still stuffs most things up. A self-loather, his arms and neck are inked with Maori motifs, skulls, stars, huia birds, and an owl with a tear slipping from one eye. They hide his seven-eighths European skin. The other eighth is Maori, on his father’s side, a descendant of the Arawa people who followed those same stars to the bird-only islands near the bottom of the world.

Mickey has come to a fenced lookout above a boiling, grey, mud-pool. He takes a plastic bottle and garden hose bong from his bag, lights up and draws a breath. A more-pork owl calls its name from the cover of tree ferns on the far slopes of the valley. Mickey returns the call brilliantly, through the bong bottle: ”More pork! More pork.” He’s only answered by the soft ‘b-loop’ of the mud.

Mikey’s climbing the fence. He’s leaning out over the mud, holding his nose with one hand, like a kid about to jump in a pool. His other hand grips the fence rail.

LAVENDER BAY, SYDNEY.

4.30 am and a magpie has begun its fluting early again. The bird positions itself in a flame tree in front of a high block of units – to get rebound and magnification eastward across the rooftops stepping down to Lavender Bay. To buy real estate here takes millions – but a magpie, up early, can own the entire bay with a melody and testosterone.

Mickey’s elder sister is asleep in a harbour-side unit. Lee is trapped in the usual nightmare which goes like this:

When it rains the bones get uncovered. And Lee hurries to rebury them.

The thick rain that makes fern trees explode out of black soil around the Rotorua lakes, wants justice. Lee and her brothers have killed someone – a person – another kid. The dream keeps the who and why from 55-year-old Lee. Less is more. But the proof is the leg bone she holds in her hand. It feels deeply wrong to be the secret keeper of human remains – interred with no ancient prayers, the site known only to the killers and the elements. To know that down a track is buried a corpse of a kid that disappeared tearing a hole in his mother that will burst open again every birthday, until the end. The not knowing can bring on madness. And the not telling.

As Lee’s subconscious releases her from its tale, she surfaces to the sound of the magpie’s chortle outside in the dark flame tree. Without lifting her head from the pillow, she reaches for her iphone to check the time. It’s too early.

“ Fucken magpie, shut up.”

Later that week, Lee leans back into the soft leather of a reclining chair. Tall and in good shape for a woman of 55, she’s retained the dark looks of her part-Maori heritage. Not that she’s kept any connection with the islands she fled 30 years before.

Erectly beside her sits therapist Barbara Lu. Barbara, an Asian descent Australian, has a spot of grit in her eye. As she talks she pulls out her eyelid.

“You seriously believe that’s possible Barb?”

“Indeed. I have no reservations saying it. Intergenerational trauma is real. I have at least two Jewish clients to prove it. It often manifests as guilt.”

“What, as in survivor guilt?”

“ That, or guilt from the deeds of the forefathers - to put it biblically.”

“ My dreams are inherited guilt? Really?”

“No, possibly.”

The therapist rips a tissue out of a box and applies it to her eye, still struggling with the grit irritating her eye. Lee sees none of this. And at $200 per session, this is all about her.

“ The worst thing my mother did was kick a rolled-up hedgehog back under the house”. Lee laughs recalling it. “And dad was a war hero.”

“Your father served?”

“RAF navigator”

Lee’s phone vibrates – she reaches to pick it up off the low glass table – the therapist, still pinching her eyelid, beats her to it. But glancing at the text message, she decides her patient should read it: