That first year away from home I had teething troubles adapting to life in Perth and the pressures of law school. I couldn’t focus on textbooks or assignments or anything much at all. Dialogue warbled through to me in a distorted chamber as if I was underwater.

During the summer break, I returned to the wheatbelt town of Narrogin in Western Australia (population 4607; settled 1897). The two-hour drive to Narrogin unfolds like a film. The buildings, palm trees, traffic lights and shops of Perth disappear, the ocean evaporates, the land becomes flat and scraggly with sheoaks, fusing into fields with milling sheep and wheat and wild grass. Barbed-wire fences and paddock stumps resemble Cy Twombly strokes.

Some historians claim the town’s name originated from the Nyoongar description for “place of water”, gnargagin. It is a hub for agricultural services in the wheatbelt, and during the harvest giant mounds of wheat line the horizon in Monet-like pyramids.

My childhood home abuts a forest reserve called Foxes Lair and I trawled its depths with Seva, my 11-year-old brother, spotting echidnas, blue-tongue lizards and galahs. Our Nyoongar neighbours hunted kangaroo and yoked the carcass home on barbecue days. Kangaroo tail was a delicacy, they said – the tender meat falling from the bone. The emptiness of the bush felt like a relief and a release.

Lily Chan with her brother Seva when they were younger.

My brother favoured long, meandering ambulations. Our favourite landmark was the Narrogin water reservoir. To get to it, we followed a........

© The Sydney Morning Herald