Julia is a feminist but her feminism rarely turns on me. Generally speaking, I have gone through life outside of the circle of blame. Perhaps if we’d had children, it would be different. Children seem to polarise the sexes, or at least fix in stone roles that were previously less regimented. But in the absence of children, Julia and I have been free to make what we want of our relationship. We each have faults. We each have habits the other can’t bear. I won’t give up smoking. Julia will not give up meat. We have a balcony. We have many frying pans. Accommodation of each other is not difficult. Sometimes I am in need of support and sometimes Julia is. ‘But times have changed,’ Julia says. ‘It was not always so. Forty years ago, we would have been considered a very specious, very dubious little unit, you and I!’

The years have rolled away in a gentle manner, very few ripples.

Do you need ripples to have a satisfying life?

Money insulates you; it smooths the sharp edges so you don’t get caught on them.

I watch Julia talking to a group of interested young women, all clutching their Veda Grays.

‘Veda was years before her time,’ Julia is saying. She has been saying this for three decades. ‘Years.’

The young women are nodding. Veda Gray now has a dramatic biopic glamour. The photo on the flyleaf is one of Mother well before she even embarked on this book: she is flighty, blonde, winsome. She never finished her own university degree. I don’t even know what she was studying. But the press that is putting out this thirtieth edition is a university press. There are academics here at the launch and many talented well-dressed female PhD candidates, writing on Luce Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference and Maurice Blanchot’s orphic philosophy of literature. Someone has already written a PhD on Mother: there will be more. The new edition is nicely packaged—not in brown and tan, but in sea-blue and green, rather in keeping with Julia’s dress colour-wise—with quotes on the back from distinguished scholars. I can’t help wondering whether Mother’s precocious adoption of the word FUCK is finally paying dividends.

Julia drinks too much champagne so it is lucky she doesn’t have to officiate. Local poet Lin Yiu, much lauded and this year’s winner of the Gwen Harwood Prize, is making the speech and cutting the figurative ribbon.

Yiu’s speech is full of high praise and elevated, if abstract, analysis. It’s difficult to say things publicly about poetry, I’ve noticed, and remain comprehensible to a general audience. Sometimes, there’s a retreat into further obscurity, because where else to go? Academia sometimes seems to require impenetrability. Mother would have made short shrift of that.