In 1972, after a long absence, I returned to Australia with my newish Belgian husband. It was to be a brief visit and, of the invitations we received from old friends, my husband—I will call him Herman, for this was his name—decided that he would live, in a World War Two parachute erected as a tent, on the property of the historian Manning Clark, in the beautiful New South Wales coastal region of Wallaga Lake. He painted there for several months. I stayed in Victoria with my two older children, whose father had died a decade before, and my two…