Saturday Morning With Jack Tame

Last year, in those fleeting months before Delta was discovered in the community and the Trans-Tasman bubble was closed, I flew to Australia and spent a few days with my grandma. It was just the two of us for four or five days. A grandma and her eldest grandchild, sixty years between us. By that stage, Granny was too frail to drive. I hired a car and we went on a few day trips together. She took me up to Kapunda, where the first of her ancestors to arrive in Australia settled almost 190 years ago. We went to a museum that celebrated the life of her best-known relative, Sir Sidney Kidman, a cattle barron who once had landholdings greater than the size of Australia. We lunched at our family’s favourite cheap Italian cafe, the first place I ever tasted gelato.  In the evenings, Granny told me about her childhood. She was born in the 1930s on a remote station, 500km north of Adelaide. The closest property with other children was more than fifty miles away.  As a girl, once a week there was a radio show that helpe