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desperate to find a place in the world I had once renounced to enter the seminary and was now anxious to re-find.
    I got the name of a publisher’s office in London from the copyright page of a book, bundled up the manuscript as typed for me by a young woman who lived on the corner of our block in Loftus Crescent, Homebush, and posted it off. Ten weeks later I was called out of teaching a class to take a message from my mother. A telegram had arrived in Homebush from London with the startling news that the publisher wanted to publish me. He (in those days publishers were always
he
), Sir Cedric Flower of Cassell’s, was willing to give me £150 sterling.
    In my post-colonial naivety, this was like the finger of the deity emerging from clouds and yelling, “You!” My more urbane British contemporaries would not have seen their own experience of getting published by a trade publisher quite in the same terms—they came from cultivated backgrounds where people did them the favor of telling them that it was impossible to make a living as a writer. But beneath the great dome of the Commonwealth of Australia’s then apathy toward writing, I had no one to save me from myself, and I clung to the idea that I would write and survive. This novel was to be my deck chair from the
Titanic
, and I never doubted that, clinging to it, I would be washed to unimaginable places.
    So the “profession” of the novel (£150 and all) was my deliverance from a clumsy start in life. That first contract would give me the confidence to reenter the normal, squalling, striving, aspiring world. Among other manifestations of liberation, I would take out and ultimately propose marriage to a splendid and exceptionally beautiful nurse from the Sydney suburb of Leichhardt, who generously considered that my intention to become a full-time novelist made perfect sense. Her name was Judith Martin, and I met her when she was nursing my mother in Lewisham Hospital after surgery. It astonished me that she harbored a preference for me over the doctors and bookmakers who generally took her out. She later said my patter was superior.
    We were married in 1965, and in our small house in West Ryde, between Sydney and Parramatta, I began to keep writer’s hours, eight to one, two to five, and struggled with the reality that in a suburban house at eight on a weekday morning, writing could seem stupendously difficult, like making a model of Buckingham Palace out of playing cards. I was fortunate that, because of my parents’ influence, I was—in the term smart people would ultimately adopt—“task-driven.” Now that I was a novelist, I could not face the ignominy of failing to produce novels.
    There were a number of factors which enforced discipline on me. One was that the Australian federal government gave me four thousand dollars, then a living wage, as a literary grant for 1966. Coming from a background where men and women viewed industriousness as a prime marker of their existence, I saw that money as coming from taxpayers in hard-pressed homes, and believed a sacred trust had been imposed upon me. It demanded that I consider my new experiment in life as a profession, a daily commitment from me. I must confess I have always tended to have an industrial approach to writing. I knew that if I was to survive I would need to be published as widely as I could manage—a pittance from England, a pittance from America, a pittance from Australia, all adding up to a living.
    By 1980, when I met Poldek, I was in mid-career. Some of the early bloom had gone off my repute, at least in the eyes of Australian commentators. By the time I went into Poldek’s store, I had two adolescent daughters, Margaret and Jane, and I lived with them and my wife in a house above a beach north of Sydney. I had had the ill grace to forget I had still been fortunate beyond belief—fortunate in the early generosity and openness of readers and, as any writer will tell you, fortunate in