“How would you like a trip to Sydney?” James McAuley asked me. We were sitting one morning in 1962 in his study as Head of Department at the University of Tasmania, located in one of those temporary, prefabricated huts on the new Sandy Bay Campus in Hobart before permanent buildings were completed. I had been appointed lecturer in English in 1960 following postgraduate studies at the University of London. In the January of next year the professor who had appointed me, Murray Todd, died suddenly of leukaemia. Jim arrived in Hobart shortly after in 1961 to take up a new…