Helen Trinca, editor of the Australian’s weekend magazine, made the most encouraging response to learning I was being treated for prostate cancer. “That can be your new persona!” she exclaimed. As a professional performer I knew exactly what she meant. From now on, whenever I wrote and published something it would have cachet as possibly my last words. Not that this would necessarily guarantee reverence. For example, when a journalist friend recently announced his retirement, our former prime minister Paul Keating asked him: “Why don’t you get that old fart Devine to retire too?” This implication that I still had…