Astra had met my father back in 1972, she told me, when they were both working as volunteers for a community organisation called ‘The Workshop’, a kind of anarchist collective that operated out of a little house in Prahran. I’d heard stories about it from my father, though I’d never bothered to connect them together into something that seemed like real life. Weeks later, at the State Library in Melbourne, I found copies of the little magazine they’d put out — The Worker — a name that was somewhat ironic, Astra pointed out, since everyone involved with it was on the dole. But they did work, it seemed to me, in their own way. They had a helpline and an information referral service where they dispensed advice about abortions and tenancy disputes and bad trips. They organised crash pads for people who found themselves with nowhere to sleep and offered a free legal service. At some point, they started a food co-op and began helping draft dodgers. Once, Astra said, they even managed to break someone out of the Royal Park Psychiatric Hospital, though she’d had nothing to do with that personally.

‘Was Dad involved?’ I asked.

She didn’t know.

Astra and my father had worked the telephones together every Tuesday night, comforting the lonely and trying to talk people out of killing themselves, even though, as Astra admitted, ‘We were just kids. We had no proper training, and really, what did we know about anything.’ While the phones were silent, it was just the two of them. They had hours to themselves. Astra moved into Dad’s place in Byron Street sometime in 1973.

‘Vince and I had a scene together for a while,’ she said, opening the fridge door and squinting into the light.

We were drinking mid-strength Asahi, but we’d already had quite a few. She placed two fresh bottles on the table between us, and then sat down again and began flicking back and forth through her diary, which she’d gone to the trouble of digging out for the occasion. She was trying to jog her memory. Her diary from those years had dates, names, events, but not much more than that.

‘May 19, 1974,’ she said. ‘Labor re-elected.’

‘August 1974: party for Peter Moksin,’ she said. ‘But I don’t remember who Peter Moksin was.’

‘April 14, 1974. Party for Mike’s film at Byron Street.’

‘Who was Mike?’ I asked.

‘He was a filmmaker, who hung around with Vince for a while,’ she said. ‘He was quite attractive. I had a fling with him, actually. Which caused all sorts of trouble.’

‘While you were with Dad?’

She shrugged.

The pages kept turning.