A camp blanket is a record kept in wool. You sew on what you were given and where you went, and it ends up the only document of a life in the movement, because nobody else is keeping one.

This one runs twenty-four years. The earliest things on it are from 1957: a Baden-Powell centenary ribbon, and a badge from the centenary corroboree at St Ives in New South Wales, which was an Australian Girl Guides national camp. Then a pennant from the Australia International Camp of 1959, with a kangaroo on it. Then almost nothing for fifteen years. Then, from 1975, it fills: Expo 75 in Auckland, camps at Otimai and Arahina, Auckland Province 1979, Waitemata 1980, the ninth New Zealand jamboree at Hawke's Bay in 1981.

The gap is the question. Badges from a girlhood, a long silence, and then a dense run of province, district and camp badges. Whether she came back to it as a leader, or simply stayed in and kept turning up, the blanket does not say. There is no warrant badge anywhere on it, and that is the thing that would settle it.

Auckland is where she was, and the blanket says so five times over: a Kohimarama and Mission Bay company tape, a Roskill District triangle cut from leather, a Sea Ranger ship tape for R.S. Tamaki, Hui Omana, Otimai. Around those sit the tapes other people handed her at gatherings, which is how you know she kept going to them. Second Winnipeg in blackletter. Huntingdonshire. First Enfield. First and second Wangaratta. First Box Hill.

Then there is the thing that is not a badge at all. Across the middle somebody has stitched a kangaroo by hand, nearly a metre of it, laid in yellow wool and couched down stitch by stitch, with a boomerang below it in orange. The printed Guide Law sewn beside it is the Australian one, with a kangaroo on it too. She was an Australian who spent her Guiding life in New Zealand, and she said so in wool, at the scale of the whole blanket, once.

Nobody wrote her name on it. Camp blankets did not carry names. Uniforms did.