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land titles, which gave up generations of dust when opened or closed.
    The job attracted a variety of what were then called displaced persons. They included a gentle Hungarian intellectual called Tom Pick whose family had once had a sausage factory in Budapest. He was scholarly, owlishly bespectacled, and occasionally unintentionally patronising. ‘What? You have read Apollinaire?’ And Hans, who’d flown with the Luftwaffe and had seen ‘terrible things’. He had a high nervous colour and always seemed on the verge of eruption. One morning, when we were enjoying our extended tea break high up on the ­catwalks, we heard a commotion below. Hans was having a fit on the floor. Something had triggered a wartime memory, and staff had to pinion his arms and legs as he lay there, crucified and screaming.
    Work was undemanding at the Titles Office, and at the Melbourne Zoo almost non-existent. We were supposed to be painting the outdoor seats, but under the tolerant foremanship of an old ex-digger named Drummer, you could make yourself comfortable under one of them and doze off.
    A fellow-worker, a portly and expensively tailored Bachelor of Education from one of the Gulf states, found the work demeaning. He had no intention of wedging himself under a seat, and opted for the revolving wheel in the playground. He’d stretch out on it, have us push him, and fall asleep. One afternoon the Works Manager appeared not long after we’d got him circling. He leaned over the rotund form and told him he was fired. He took his dismissal in style, allowing himself a couple more leisurely turns before easing himself onto the ground and, looking as ever the real manager in his well-cut beige suit, striding off.
    More comedy followed the next day. ‘Don’t go near that chimp,’ Drummer warned, ‘he’s a grumpy bastard.’ As soon as Drummer disappeared for his morning smoko, we dared one another to go behind the safety fence and taunt Horrie. I did so, in front of a handful of visitors. I taunted it, glowering under its hessian sack. Then I threw gravel at it. Horrie hurled himself at me, shot an arm through the bars and grabbed at my jumper, while I performed an equally speedy move backward. I came out shamefaced, to laughter. ‘If he’d a’ got you,’ said Drummer later, ‘he’d a’ broken your arm like a fucking carrot.’

So this is Darwin
    The time I dreaded had now arrived—the post-graduate Diploma of Education year. To take our minds off it, Desmond O’Grady and I set out on a hitchhike to Darwin over the summer holidays. Every father needs something to hold up to his children about his youthful adventurousness. The now white-bearded and slippered patriarch, too young for World War II and too old for Korea or Vietnam, sometimes falls back on his second hitchhike: he too had once been at the hot gates.
    In 1953 Darwin was a remote outpost, and to try to hitch there was regarded by our mothers as foolhardy and ­possibly dangerous. But Desmond was a doer, not a dreamer or a drinker. He would sometimes come to our Campion Society meetings. During evenings of what we thought were merriment and ­ribaldry, Desmond would sit over his glass of milk, unsmiling and unmoved.
    If I was holding back in life because of shyness, Desmond was pushing forward, meeting editors, poets, professors and girls, getting stories published in Melbourne University Magazine . I was once in the study of Father Golden, the genial Newman Society chaplain, when he picked up a copy and said to Desmond: ‘Starting to make a name for yourself, I see.’ I felt wounded and out of it—literature as well as life.
    This was my chance to catch up. Newsweekly , a strident Santamaria tabloid, had agreed to run my despatches on the adventure, only fragments of which, mercifully, remain: We breathed deeply the cooler air. The morning was warm blue.
    We made good progress to