As a celebrated visual artist, Judy Cotton has lived in the USA for decades. Born in Broken Hill in 1941, she finds that no matter how many times she leaves home, this country won’t let her go.

Her memoir, Swimming Home, may seem haphazard, as it skips around the timeline of her life, and that of her parents and grandparents, but Cotton is as skilled a writer, as she is an artist. For many years she contributed to Vogue Australia, and her memoir is like a person telling a family story, with one thing reminding them of another.

She hardly mentions her own career, maybe that is for another memoir, but she details the lives of her late parents, who eventually became Sir Robert and Lady Cotton. Her father was a senior Australian politician and then a much-respected Australian Ambassador to the US, and her mother, trained to be a concert pianist, eventually made her mark as a top breeder of sheep in the Oberon district.

It is Eve Cotton, the author’s mother, who makes a huge impression in this book.

When she died in 2000 the writer Shirley Hazzard described her as ‘a beloved and delightful woman’, but Cotton presents Eve as she best knew her, the most particular person she had ever met, setting impossible standards in her life.

The young Judy Cotton and her mother clashed on almost every topic and the defiant daughter could not wait to leave her family and Australia, living in South Korea, then Japan, and finally the US where she had a long and happy second marriage.

Cotton’s deep love for Australia and its natural world is told in lyrical paragraphs, enough to make even the sternest expatriate admit that this country will always hold them in its thrall.

Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville