Mountain Books   Unwise in retrospect, our short cut from Moonan Flat was via Barrington Tops, its road with gearshift gradient and hovering views. Melvil Dewey would have been appalled at our car-boot’s disarrayed titles, but we were moving house by increment.   A dozen outdated encyclopaedias crowded the spare tyre, while Descartes and Hume endured under copies of Gardening Australia. (This was no time for metaphysics.)   Middlemarch came along— (we hardly had need of ballast). Steinbeck enjoyed the dispossession of it all, and Hemingway was there; Death in the Afternoon portentous where windscreen gnats yielded to sleet.  …