My memories of the time when they drowned veer up in summer, especially on certain hot days ending with thunderstorms. Anyone who's spent a summer in Victoria knows the kind of day that marks the end of a heatwave.
A day like that can still rattle me, yet it also thrills me. My father loved thunderstorms. Back then we were inland people, and in 1993, two of us drowned in the muddy brown water of an irrigation channel.
When I was growing up, my family lived in a small town in northern Victoria where summers were brutally hot and rain was a special event.
The sky must still have been blue when they went into the water. By the time the news of their deaths reached me, the sky was morphing to a shade of violet tinged with black.
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