Sandi: Mummy, do I have a dad? I was five when I asked the question my mother had probably been dreading. But she handled it very well. “Your dad’s name is Harry Wolf,” she said, “He lives with another lady. They got married after you were born. We don’t see him, and he doesn’t see us.” I was five, I accepted that, and went off to play. A little later she ruffled through her drawers, and she came out with a photo of a blonde man wearing racing silks and she said, “This is a photo of your dad. You keep it safe.”

A few months after that, Mum came to me again and she said, “Do you remember I told you about your dad?” I hadn’t forgotten, I had the photo. Your dad and his new wife had another little baby girl. So, you have a sister. But remember, we don’t get to see them, and they don’t get to see us.” I was living in a house full of adults, my mother, my auntie, my grandparents. A sibling was the one thing I wanted more than anything else in the world. And now I had one. It was like having an imaginary friend. A secret sister. But the catch was: she was real, and one day I would get to meet her and maybe we could be best friends. As I started to grow up, I gleaned more information about Harry, mostly from my auntie and my gran.

They were insistent that I knew he was short, something that didn’t really compute because, weren’t all jockeys short?  And they also told me that he had false teeth. So, I would sit there sometimes, and I would tap my teeth, just checking they were strong enough because I didn’t want this to be a genetic flaw that came down to me. At 16, my auntie told me she had found another birth announcement. In the paper, Harry and his new wife had welcomed another child. A boy. The notice read: “The stable is now full.”

So, Harry had his perfect family. Where did that leave me? Harry was an abstract concept, not a dad. He had given up that right. He had abandoned me when I was little. I thought of him more as a sperm donor than a parental figure. But siblings, there were three of them. And it was an itch that one day I knew I would have to scratch. The price would be meeting up with Harry, the sperm donor, the absent father.

Could I do that? At 18, I decided to scratch. I rang every “Wolf” in the book. No Harry. Now, Perth is a little place, so I put out the word that I was looking for my dad and I found out he had moved to Port Hedland. That was a bit of a problem. So, I told everyone I knew that who might possibly know someone who was in Port Hedland that I was looking for Harry and gave them my phone number.

Eventually, the message got to Harry. So, one night, after 10pm, because in the early 90s phone calls weren’t cheap back then, we had a two-minute conversation. It was enough to exchange our addresses and say hello. The letter-writing would begin. Now, I didn’t want to write these letters, which were a conundrum to me. “Love, Sandi.” There was no love. This man was a stranger. I did not want to write “From, Sandi,” because, well, as much as I felt formal and distant to this man, I didn’t really think I should let him know that this early in the game. So, I went with “Wazzles, Sandi.” Six months of signing letters: “Wazzles, Sandi.”

And then we decided it was time to meet. I booked my holidays, Harry booked me a ticket, and I went on a very tiny plane to go to Port Hedland. And as the turbulence bounced the aircraft up and down, I wondered if I was doing the right thing. Would I like this man? Would he like me? Would he recognise me? Would I recognise him? I got off the plane at midnight, and a very short, little man strutted towards me. He was shorter than I was, and it made me smile because everything my Gran and Aunt had been saying suddenly made sense.

Harry took my smile as a welcome and embraced me. I backed right off. “Uh-uh-uh. I’m not calling you ‘Dad,’ you have to earn that right. Angry, teenage bluntness. We drove back to Harry’s house. Because it was midnight, everyone else was asleep. I sat with my back in the kitchen chair, very firmly resisting the urge to cross my arms and glare across the table, while Harry chain smoked. “I came to see you several times when you were a baby,” he said. I hadn’t known that. This was new information. But I kept my face blank. He said, “And then, my mates started talking. My career was taking off. I was earning a lot of money. They said, “If you claim this child, you’ll have to pay child support.”” So, I took a week to think about that. And the week turned into a month. And the month turned into a year. You could say, the horse had bolted.”

He lit another cigarette, his hand shaking. He said, “You were three. It was at the racetrack. You were sitting there throwing stones, talking to yourself, telling stories. And my dad was down from Kalgoorlie to watch me race, and I nudged him, and I said, ‘Good little filly that one, she’d make a good granddaughter for you, wouldn’t she?'” Harry’s hands shook. He lit another cigarette. “My dad knew who you were. Everybody knew who you were. It wasn’t a secret. Just after that, I found out that your mother got married again. I looked the chap up, he seemed okay, but there was one thing for certain: I couldn’t walk back into your life now. I had to wait for you to find me.”

“And here I am,” I said as I sat back and folded my arms. Yeah, sure, I was 19 and I knew the stupidity of 19-year-old boys. So, I completely got where Harry was coming from. The 19-year-olds I knew, they’d probably make that mistake too. But knowledge and acceptance – two different journeys, and I was only partway there.  For the next few years, on and off, our contact was sporadic. I could blame the fact that I was a city girl, that he was a country boy. But the truth is, I kept him at arm’s distance. An endless punishment for the sin of abandonment.

When my son was born, and the Wolf family moved down to Goomalling from Port Hedland, things changed. There were visits to Scitech, visits to the zoo, family catchups. Life was good. But Harry was always Harry. Never Dad. He never tried to make up for the lost years and he never tried to parent me, because he knew that time had gone. Just after my 33^rd birthday, Harry rang me, his voice trembling. “This,” he said, “is the hardest phone call I’ve ever had to make. I’ve got lung cancer. I tried the chemo,” he said. “It didn’t work for me. I guess I don’t get to retire out at a pasture after all.

So, my son and I made the trip to Goomalling to say goodbye, because all too soon Harry had found himself in palliative care. It was a day where there was lots of love and laughter, and I was sitting there watching, as I always did, and what I saw was not the 19-year-old who hadn’t been ready to be a father, but a loving dad, husband and a doting grandfather. As my brothers debated the latest footy match, Harry and my son were talking. Jarryn said, “So the Squirtle evolves to a level 16, and then he turns into Wartortle!” And Harry said, “Ah, let me guess, after that he evolves again?” Jarryn was nodding frantically, and then Harry interrupted him. “When does the squirter become a wuzzle?”Harry winked at me.

My sister laughed; my son spluttered. For the first time, I was looking at my family with my blinkers off. This man, who had been an absent father for me, had learnt how to be a dad. Parenting was the wild beast that Harry had finally tamed, and as a granddad, he was a thoroughbred. Harry had hit his stride. When we returned him to the palliative care unit that afternoon, I bent down, I kissed him. I said, “I’ll see you soon, Dad.” It was a lie, but it was a lie that didn’t matter. We both knew that Harry was on the homestretch. But with one little word, I had let my dad know that I had finally forgiven him.