Something Old Something New

Sleek and striking, Axon’s vertically grooved cladding panels breathe fresh new life into any home.

- Alex Miller

ON HOME

The distant memories of home and loved ones can tantalise and haunt you for a lifetime, as this award-winning novelist discovered.

 More than 50 years after I left England to go alone to Australia, my younger brother Ross came out to visit me for the first time. On the last evening, he and I were sitting in my back garden under the apple tree, enjoying the last of a very large bottle of duty-free Glenfiddich he’d brought with him. Ross is nine years younger than I am and was not yet eight years of age when I left home as a boy of 16.

Since my departure from England, I had retained an image of my family standing there on the platform at London’s Liverpool Street station. In the steam and smoke of that dark November day in 1953, it was a tight little group watching my train pull out for the port of Tilbury and the other side of the world. In this last remembered image, Ross is standing between my father and mother, holding my father’s hand. My older sister Kathy and my younger sister Ruth are holding each other’s hands, standing close up against the skirt of my mother’s coat.