Appo: Recollections of a Member of the Sydney Push, by Richard Appleton; Darlington Press/Sydney University Press, 2009, 300 pages, $35.

You always remember your first love. For years I had been searching for my golden girl from the Sydney University Quadrangle. In London a friend gave me her phone number. “Valerie!” I shouted happily. “It’s me—Bill!”

A quavering voice replied, “Bill, I’m not too well. I don’t get out much these days. Do you mind if I don’t see you?”

The launch of Appo in the Fisher Library at Sydney University was packed. Ponytails do not sit well on the shoulders of eighty-year-olds. Walking sticks were many. A few in the audience may have been under seventy. Age had wearied them.

This was the hardcore Push, unlike the majority who had passed through and on to the professions, married and today bore their teenage grandchildren with anecdotes. Sydney University is now a business enterprise.

The lunchtime Freethought Society meeting in the Philosophy Room at […]