Voices From The Corner

In honour of my fiftieth birthday, Gilbert Curtis, editor of Empyrean which had for more than twenty-five years published my work, invited me to write an autobiographical piece.

Reluctant at first, I let myself fall to Gilbert's honey-tongued persuasion, and, to do the assignment justice, thought it best to retrace the landmarks of my life, beginning with a visit to those homes of my childhood that had been the earliest mainsprings in my evolution as a writer: the welfare boarding-house in Carlton's Pitt Street; our first home in Coburg; the milk-bar in St Kilda's High Street; and, later, our flat in Barkly Street nearby.

Where, however, the Pitt Street boarding-house had stood, there was now a playground; the Coburg house had become a nursing-home; and the milk-bar had long before been levelled to allow for widening of the road. Only the Barkly Street block still remained, a dismal, grey and grubby-faced affair, an irremediable eyesore short of total demolition in its torpid small-windowed ponderousness - a far cry from the bright and spacious home I had come, long after, to acquire before a cascade of domestic upheavals compelled me to return full circle to a flat.

I had lived in......