The following are childhood memories of some people who were “Münzenberg Leute”—as they were then called. On my monthly visits to my mother, Münzenberg was too busy and too remote to bother with me. Yet I too fell under his spell when I first met him. It was Easter 1929 and I was six. I […]

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Late October 1973 The Horse Camps of Central Asia The hilly street where my cousin dwells is recent and unpaved. She lives in Ankara with her husband Denis and her newborn son in order to foster a small Christian community in this part of West Asia not especially hospitable to her faith. Beyond the medium-rise […]

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I had my prison epiphany on January 5, 2009, when I realised what the name of my mother’s last cat meant. I asked her about it many times when she was alive, but she just laughed. Well, Mum, I know now. The cat had the strange name of Chapitucho, which belonged to no language I […]

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On a Friday lunch hour in 1964, hungry and thirsty barristers returning from court were a chattering scrum around the doors of the Owen Dixon Chambers lifts. The doors of a descending lift opened, its interior lights revealing two male occupants; dei ex machina, so to speak. One was tall, ducal looking and immaculate in […]

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About three weeks ago my passport was stolen. I would not have realised it had gone, except that the overseas development aid organisation that I’m registered with as a volunteer e-mailed to say an overseas client was interested in my working with their group. I looked for the passport. Hunted everywhere. It didn’t help that […]

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Can books have a moral influence on our lives? I have long thought so, though it’s an opinion that nowadays I tend to keep to myself. Confess it to any of the multitudinous practitioners of contemporary crit-theory-speak who have hijacked the humanities and you’ll be laughed to scorn. “Bravo! Matthew Arnold, I presume?”—“Oh, come on! […]

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As I sit down to write this, my family and I are exactly three weeks shy of the ceremony that will officially make us Australian citizens. That’s just time to get ourselves the obligatory criminal record, as the old joke goes, and we’ll have passed the final hurdle. I’m thinking maybe a bit of shoplifting […]

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Flowers Isn’t it remarkable how many things you can consider bourgeois if you really set your mind to it? The ideological brains behind the Cultural Revolution were very good at this. The hua wang (flower king), the much respected gardener, became the hua gong (flower worker), and all of China’s gardens fell into disrepair. Teams […]

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27/12/85 Gaze and Counter Gaze Some weeks ago gentlemanly Stewart asked permission to pass my telephone number to his friend who wanted “professional” advice on the MS of a novel he had written. At 25pp per hour, a 400pp MS asks for sixteen hours of my time, and I have been put in the way […]

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The Independent State of Papua New Guinea gained independence from Australia and United Nations trusteeship on September 16, 1975. For many in both Australia and Papua New Guinea, that was too early. In fact, it was more or less inevitable, with only the precise date a matter for dispute at the time. With the dismantling […]

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