As we get to know Cecily, however, it quickly becomes apparent how angry and hurt she is. While she was abroad, her mother was in the last stages of breast cancer and she died. Why did Christina Ambruss not tell her daughter what was happening? A telephone embargo meant that they could not even stay in touch during the year. In addition, Cecily’s mother, who had met and approved of Wil, left a bequest to her daughter that was conditional on Cecily’s getting married. To Cecily this understandably imposes an unreasonable burden and when she turns to her mother’s family for support, though they are solicitous and caring, she feels that essentially she receives only evasion and deceit.

The special bond that had held Cecily and the others together during their trip also seems to have dissolved, leaving loss and disillusion:

We had a kind of harmony that was able to absorb the sticks and stones, and it wasn't until we got home, and I was still getting over hearing about Mum, that it dawned on me that maybe harmony like that happens only once in your life.

Kate, one of the members of the group, did not return to Australia with the rest of them, rarely bothers to write, and Cecily abandons her ‘stupid expectations’ of someone she reveals has been her oldest and closest friend.

Cecily inhabits the territory of Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, that of the adolescent going damaged and perhaps cynical into adulthood, though the literary model to which One of the Wattle Birds specifically refers us is a good deal older. This is Malory’s Marte D’Arthur which Cecily is preparing for her exams. It is not surprising that she would be interested in Malory's elegiac celebration of loyalty and betrayal, aspiration and failure, harmony and disintegration, though her feelings towards this old favourite of hers have recently changed. Where she previously immersed herself in ‘whirls of romantic fantasy’ she now has more prosaic concerns. In order to show how ‘modern’ King Arthur is, she wants to show that, after the first section, Arthur is the ‘only central figure whose fate is not changed by the intervention of magic’ and that he becomes Emperor by ‘dignity of his own hands’.

This detail poignantly reflects Cecily’s own state of mind. It says a good deal about the way she wants to be able to control her life and it is significant that, as she discovers, even Arthur needs the magic care of the Lady of the Lake to survive.

At the heart of Cecily’s problems is the fact that she was raised by a single parent and, although she receives support from her mother's family, she also discovers a need to make contact with her absent father, David Huth. She does this during the novel’s third day. David Huth has been a shadowy and rather incongruous figure to her: a photograph on the cover of a book her mother has shown her, a source of arguments between them, a public advocate of population control who has had no less than ten children. By tracking him down and learning how her parent’s relationship ended, Cecily is able to get a better understanding of her mother. Christina Ambruss in a sense treated Cecily and Cecily’s father ‘high-handedly’ but, as David suggests, another way to see this is to recognise that, like everyone else, Christina was fallible and at certain times in her life ‘her need overcame her scruples’. She wanted to face death by herself and she chose to have a child even at the cost of the relationship she had with its father. Christina wanted freedom for herself but she wanted to steer her daughter in the direction of the security she sacrificed to obtain it.

One of the Wattle Birds is an unusual blend of traditional, almost old­fashioned elements, with the textures and images of student life in a contemporary and markedly multicultural Sydney. Henry James’s The Bostonians, Thoreau’s Walden, and the Malory scholar Eugene Vinaver rub shoulders with grommet types who talk Surfspeak of ‘wild chops, tight arcs and tucking into barrels’. There is a continual narrative movement between memory and experience, though the tone is never sentimental. Moments of sharp feeling and illumination are all the more dramatic because of Anderson’s understated presentation.

Above all I enjoyed getting to know Cecily and following her movement towards an understanding of herself, those round her, and the force of love that unites them. ‘Love one another. Those words can still stun my perplexity’, as she says in the opening pages.

Though her parents are a few years older than the classic baby­boomer generation, Christina Ambruss and David Huth both emerge as proto­boomers and this fact gives One of the Wattle Birds a special emphasis. Through their daughter Cecily we can understand something of the burden of having to live with the unreasonable weight imposed by the ideals and aspirations of an older generation.