THE MYTHOLOGY OF PLACE:

JAMES K. BAXTER'S OTAGO WORLDS

Lawrence Jones
II
The Brighton World
Page 14 
In a gloss on the poem he revealed that 'the Scroggs Hill farm is the place where my own father was born, in a sod house'.
If the garden is primarily his father's (although his mother has her corner of it), the house is primarily his mother's and is an Eden only in an ironic sense: 
Respect an Eden so designed
      To occupy the hands and mind,
      Whose serpent always lived elsewhere
          In other people's tough, disordered lives. 
His mother the poet associates with the kitchen, like the other mothers and female relatives.  As the children climbed the macrocarpas out on Bedford Parade, and 'pelted each other with resinous cones',
        The boring jailors, far below, indoors

         In steaming kitchens floured a batch of scones
         Hot-tempered as their ovens, squat and humming
         In a closed universe of mutton bones. 

 
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