Memory is a strange thing. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, it will pop up an image of you standing in a doorway, aged seven, and then a minute later refuse to tell you your PIN. Memory is a shape-shifter, interpreting and re-interpreting, sometimes explaining you to yourself, sometimes excusing, sometimes deceiving. We all have shared […]

Read More

Over more than 100 years, the Commonwealth Public Service has probably employed a million men and women. A.N. Wootton was just one of them, outwardly a likeable and overloaded Commercial Secretary and Assistant Trade Commissioner, but also an incidental spy. Declassified departmental files tell his story, reflecting both the very best and the very worst […]

Read More

We sat at the crossroads; it was early in the rainy season and we all sweated gently in the humidity. I say crossroads, but really they were just dirt tracks. The one from the east led in from the coast and went on to the big lake, to the village where we lived and from which we had motored early in the morning in the Land Rover. The southern track wasn’t up to much but the north-going one went on to the diamond mines.

Read More

Behind Iceland Spar, John Greening’s eleventh collection of poems, lies one wartime narrative and one remarkable mineral. In addition, I must own to a particular, almost jealous interest in the parallel between Greening’s relationship with Iceland and my own, such that, in what follows I will both review his book and write myself into the […]

Read More

The number of immigrants arriving in Australia from Europe increased rapidly just before and after the Second World War. As a postwar immigrant myself I would like to comment on how my experiences differ from the main characters in three Australian books. Moniek Prochownik, the unfulfilled artist in Alex Miller’s novel Prochownik’s Dream (2005), migrated […]

Read More

When I was a child, I often used to wish I came from some other family. This is not an uncommon feeling in kids, who can easily become convinced that other people’s families are better and more interesting than the one they’ve been born into. In my case, though, I used to wish mine was […]

Read More

Chancellor, Provost, Fellows of the Senate, ladies and gentlemen: This occasion is for me a great honour and a great pleasure. The University has played a large role in my life. I cannot, to this day, drive past it and glimpse its towers, without recalling that summer morning sixty-two years ago when I first came […]

Read More

FIRST OF JUNE, 1993, 11.30 p.m., platform number 5, the main railway station of Budapest. There is a bit of frisson to the location: the last time I left Budapest by train was in June 1944 and I, with 1680 others, was leaving for destinations unknown, seventy to a cattle truck. We finished up in Belsen. Now […]

Read More

“TEACHER-IN-CHARGE—Maria River via Kempsey. Second Class Rail Warrant Attached.” Yes, this was all the information thought necessary for me to begin my teaching career in some far-flung corner of the Department of Education empire. Well, I knew roughly where Kempsey was, and having been a member of Section 7, the small school section at Newcastle […]

Read More

ALEXANDER WAS HIS SURNAME and I don’t remember his given name. He was a handsome boy with dark curly hair. His father was a professor at the Lwow University, his parents knew mine and I was encouraged to play with him. Baches, again a surname, was a somewhat overweight boy and wore glasses. Again, his […]

Read More