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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The earliest clear memory I retain is of lying in my pram and pulling down and chewing the poisonous foliage of a macrocarpa tree under which the pram was parked. Hardly less vivid are other early memories of lying looking up at the sky and watching the minute, moving ripples which occur in the liquid […]

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It is barely nine o’clock and already the Solomon Islands’ sun beats down on our backs as we climb the gentle hill to Atoifi Adventist Hospital. The wharf-side dawn market has wound to a close and locals sprawl under the trees nearby, hoping to find buyers for the bananas, raw peanuts and inkori that did […]

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7/5/77 Stamboul Prelude Our Belgrade train left the cavernous Sarajevo station at midnight. In the shove and bustle of the ensuing hours, K and I shared a compartment variously with a conscript, a student, a man with a bandaged foot, another with the fierce eyebrows and defiant cap of someone from an Eisenstein film, a […]

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My mother and father spoke Serbian. We whispered it at home like it was a secret language devised for our house and family alone. We spoke it and yelled in it. We ate our meals with it. The television talked in a different language, but we used Serbian in the commercials. My mother tore strips […]

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We married in Sydney in October 1958 and left for Saigon the following month. On contract to the then Department of External Affairs under the Technical Assistance Scheme—often referred to as the Colombo Plan—I was to assist the South Vietnamese Ministry of Education in the training of teachers of English at Saigon University. A month […]

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