For more than a week beforehand, I'd had a deep seated feeling that something was wrong, but tried to talk myself out of it. I felt no movement, althugh Gus had moved strongly at 14 weeks. One day, I put on a pair of shorts and realised that they were fractionally looser than they had been. I tried to ignore all this and promised my baby that when we had the "routine" mid pg scan, all would be well. It was an odd, disconnected kind of week - very hot and bone dry and I had the sense that time was pressing down on me and suffocating me.

I sat waiting in the changing rooms, talking to my baby and reassuring us. When my turn came, I knew almost immediately that something was very wrong, but the tech wouldn't tell me at first until I demanded to know, hysterically, if there was a h/b. There wasn't. Our baby had been dead for some time. I was screaming and crying - and thinking that surely, any moment, the tech would apologise and say that she'd failed to re-set the machine after doing a bone scan, or that the screen had just seized up.

Three weeks before, I had a gush of bright red blood and an emerency scan. The baby looked perfect - with her back turned and her arm waving. That image has haunted me ever since - it was as if she was already floating away, waving goodbye, but I didn't know.

It was New Year's Eve. My mother, desperate and clutching at straws, came quickly with her face contorted with grief. My best friend was there immediately. That evening, I felt almost certain the baby had moved - but I knew in my heart that she was gone. As I lay curled up on our bed, the boys brought me all their favourite animals and told me I could keep them as long as I needed them. Next morning Gus, who was only 3, found the big cookbook I'd gotten as a Christmas present and dragged it down to me.

I didn't want to go to the hospital. I wanted to carry my baby with me for those last few hours. I didn't want to stop being pregnant, even when my child was dead within me. At the hospital, we had another scan - the radiologist was in shorts and a t-shirt and he gently, carefully showed us all the signs of death - the thickened skin, the fused bones. He found no deformities and perfect size for the gestation. He also told us that from the pelvic bones, he believed the baby to be a girl. I had experienced a strong intuition that this would be the case, although nothing had suggested this to me before we learnt of her death.

Late that afternoon, I was induced. My dr warned me that because she had been dead for some time, the birth might not be complete and that if the induction did not work, he would need to do a D&C. He respected our intense desire to have our daughter's body and agreed that we would consult over what to do next if the situation arose. The induction produced unrelenting, hard pain. I walked and rocked and tried to sleep with Dave, curled up in the birthing suite's double bed. About 1.30am I felt a strong "pop" and intense pain. I agreed to some demerol and felt wafting relief. I was floating in a sea of mist and melancholy, engulfed in deep sadness. Dr Currie came and at about 2.30, my daughter Susannah's tiny body slipped out. DH was curled around me as the midwife held my hand and said "baby's here now, she's here for you to see". I saw Dr Currie turn away to wipe his own tears.

Her skin was still semi-transparent. She had a sharp, pointed chin and tiny, fused fingers and toes. I could see her brothers in her. She lay still, with an arm folded across her chest as though she were asleep. I'd had a moment of feeling horror at how she might look before she was born, but catapulted over that emotion into intense need to see and hold her gently. It was too late to do an autopsy or check the amniotic fluid - she had been dead for too long. We have never known why she died. Perhaps it was chromosonal, or perhaps her heart just stopped beating.

We sat with her for hours before the nurses took her away and prepared her for her journey home. We rang our priest and asked him to come out that evening. We planned to bury her on a gentle rise behind the house, where there is a century old grave. It belongs to a distant ancestor of Dave's and the inscription reads:
James Matheson Mackenzie
"Uncle Jim"
Manager of Wallendbeen Station for 45 years
Erected by those who loved him

We felt that Uncle Jim would look after our daughter. From here, the curves of the further hills are green in winter and gold in summer and the creek winds through the valley below, lined with willow trees. It is not within sight of the house, but just over the crest of the hill.

When we reached home, the boys came to meet us. Henry started to cry because we didn't have a present for him. I was shocked and angry until we realised that when Gus was born, he'd had gifts for his brothers and Henry thought this would be the same. I understood that they were shocked and hurt too.

An extraordinary instinct guided me that hot afternoon. I felt like every woman who has ever mourned on earth. I needed to tend to Susannah's body and honour her in death in an ancient, primeval way. I knew everything that was necessary and acted in a way that was almost not conscious but rather ritual and sacred. I felt like my Irish ancestors, keening and calling as I performed the rituals which prepare the dead. There were moments when I felt that the heat and dust outside had slipped away and I was in a cold stone village, veiled in black and feeling the wind whipping off a grey ocean.

Her body was wrapped in a soft wool shawl I had used with all thre other babies. I gave her the cross I'd been given for my 21st birthday by a friend and kept the chain. I wrote her name, birthdate and our names on a slip of paper with the words "of this world, but never in it". She was placed gently in a wooden box which Dave had made at school and always treasured. Dave had wanted to dig the grave himself but the soil was as hard as iron and he covered his hands with blisters. Our old fencing contractor, Pat, came out from town and made a space for her in the hard red earth. I was conscious of the hour for her burial approaching like a clock ticking in a silent room.

Together with the boys, Mum, MIL and our priest, we carried her through the rose garden and into the paddock. Her grave site and her body were blessed with swift, quiet prayers and Dave and I were left to bury her together. The sky had clouded over and there was a heavy heat in the evening air and then a brief flurry of rain and the wonderful smell of raindrops on bare, dusty earth. The clouds behind us parted and strong, low shafts of light poured out across the paddocks. And there, directly above us, was a perfect double rainbow, the first I had ever seen.

I knew with absolute clarity and certainty that we were being given a sign.

The weeks and months afterwards were desperately hard. Friends and neighbours and our families were supportive and caring and I was shocked by the number of women, many of whom I knew only a little, who came forward to tell me of the babies they had lost 20, 30 or 40 years before and whom they still quietly grieved. Babies whose names were never spoken. Babies who had been buried in hospital flower gardens or taken away by the staff. Babies whose mothers had almost died too. Babies who were carved into the hearts of women who "got over it" but never forgot and never stopped loving. I was being initiated into a secret network of women's stories, bound with threads of grief and longing.

There were untintentional hurts and a confrontation with my mother, who had buried her own grief for my father too deeply to deal with it and didn't understand why I wanted to talk and talk and talk. One of my closest friends told me six months later that I should have put "it" behind me by now. Sometimes I woke up in the middle of the night sobbing and aching. I had a laproscopy to find and clear away a tiny placental remnant and felt as if my womb had been scoured with a scrubbing brush.

On the date she was due, we planted 18 white ironbarks in a double walk leading to her grave. They are willowy, twisting trees with soft, chalk white bark, grey-green leaves and pink, spidery blossoms.

And then a few weeks later I was pregnant with Rosie and through all the fear and pain, found a new way to trust my body and to experience the miracle of her birth.

Charlie suggested that we should never visted Susannah's place without a flower. I pick only blooms that I have planted, or gum leaves from the paddocks. I wish, when I am with her, that she would visit me in my dreams. I hope that I will see a small girl running through long grass towards me. I feel that she is here, if I could just reach far enough. She is my will-of-the-wisp, phantom daughter. Susannah.