In asking where Jocelyn Wogan-Browne's interest in the interrelation of differing languages began, we might start with a small Australian girl on roller skates gliding (because how can we imagine Jocelyn otherwise?) along the pavement in a Melbourne suburb, singing out ‘Buongiorno!’ to an Italian neighbour and then being mortified when he replied because – already voluble, no doubt – she had reached the limits of her vocabulary. Or with the child who longed to go to high school and learn French, wondering if the French alphabet also began with ABC – or was it perhaps DEF? – and who, when she finally found out, was pelted with pebbles by the other children for of course getting 100% in the French exam. Or later winning a scholarship to a private school where she could learn Latin and German in addition to French. Or, when she got to the Melbourne University English department, encountering Old Norse, taught by Ian Maxwell, who was as charismatic a lecturer as she herself would become in her turn. Or, after graduating in English as the top student of her year, using her spare time to learn Greek while teaching in order to pay off her student loans (Italian had to wait another twenty years or so). No doubt her Greek accent is as impeccable as all the rest. Jocelyn's fascination with other languages must have been underpinned by what was, in the 1950s and beyond, a peculiarly antipodean nostalgia for Europe, for poems about May reverdies that you had never seen and birdsong that you had never heard. Ignoring the place-names of the Melbourne area – Moorabbin, Ivanhoe, Heidelberg West – she remembers poring over maps of England as a child and asking herself how a place like Ashby de la Zouch could ever have got its peculiarly hybrid name: a uniquely Wogan-Browne variant of what Australians used to call the ‘colonial cringe’.

Jocelyn's origins are not simply English, though, but European: her mother’s family had come to Australia from Germany (her scientist grandfather was a native German speaker) and her father's from Ireland. Donald Wogan-Browne was a commander in the Royal Australian Navy and was often away; when he left the service, around the time Jocelyn started at Melbourne University, he and Jocelyn's mother, Geraldine, took up dairy farming.