The Memory Box

It was baking hot outside, just like those other sticky summer days gone by that I remember from my childhood. My memories of school, of holidays, of riding around the house on my pink Malvern Star with the spokey-dokes, were all blooming with the smell of cut grass, dusty heat, then the sharp sting of rain on concrete from the summer storms.

Inside the house it was cool and quiet. My parents would be back in just over a week, returning from their three-month overseas jaunt where they saw their first grandchild grow up just a little. It must be exciting to see someone grow so quickly. In the time since they've been gone, I doubt I've grown as a person very much at all.

There used to be cardboard boxes filled with photograph albums on the top shelf in my parents' walk-in wardrobe. Now they're kept in a trundle box on the floor behind my mother's collection of designer handbags. Much manoeuvring and the box trundles free, out into the open where I can examine it more closely. It's a sizeable box, but it contains the entire collection of my family's life in pictures. Considering that, it seems diminutive.

The top layer depresses me. They are all small albums, one photo to a sleeve, from pre-digital Malaysian photo shops filled with photo after photo of people in black at various funerals I never attended. My grandfather, my aunt, my uncle, my cousin... I'm not sufficiently intrigued to follow that morbid path, so I put those books aside.

The next layer looks newer and yields albums with flip up sleeves that lie like fallen dominoes on each other. I rush through time, trying to guess my age. I'm always eight, until I find a picture of myself on my seventh birthday. But seven is too odd a number to guess.

There are half-recalled aunties and uncles - friends of my parents - at backyard parties, day trips to anonymous towns and all our birthdays, bad fashion, teased hair and big earrings.

The books get older as the box goes deeper. Some creak open, having not seen light for over a decade. These albums are inevitably brown and dusty-looking. The pictures are sepia-toned and the pages of the album fold out like shutters to reveal others behind them. These are the really early years. There's my mother in her training nurse outfit with some girls I don't recognise. There she is again with Nanny, her house mother in Australia, a lady who has always been ancient in my time. In this one she's wearing a crocheted dress and looks groovy. And there she is at the seaside with a younger version of my brother, posing in a purple bikini.

I jump back a bit in time for the next album. My brother, over six years my senior, being cradled, newly born. And suddenly he's a toddler playing in English snow with my dad. I put the collection down in favour of another, which I know contains traces of me. In a series of photos I am grumpy and serious while my mother, her mother, and my brother wear the grins for me. Then suddenly there's a break in the cloudy photos, a gurgle escapes my lips when I am nine weeks. Maybe I'm cute after all?

Then there's the hi-fi baby pose, losing myself in the sound. What am I listening to? Maybe it's The Muppet Show on record. Or maybe it's a lullaby, a ploy to get me to sleep.

Two and a half years later my sister comes along with her doll face and deep eyes. We're photographically inseparable as I lead her unsteady feet across the vinyl floor in our old kitchen, make her laugh uproariously by blowing a party horn, perch beside her in front of the camel enclosure at Taronga Zoo. We'd already seen the giant pandas that day, just she, my dad and me.

So there it is, a memory box full of images from my family life that are as clear in my mind as the translucent plastic of the trundle box. I don't know what I thought I would find when I opened this box - myself? I borrow some photos, pulling them free of their crusty plastic sleeves, just to try and remember what it was like when I was eight. Seven.