Otherwise, though, there seemed on the surface not to be too much fear of what was catching. I saw my first ever Australian edition of Pravda for sale on the streets of Brisbane. I saw two on-duty policemen browsing through the modern fiction section of a pavement bookstore, and after serious deliberation make a purchase of a volume of Frank Moorhouse stories and a new novel by David Malouf. And although I’d heard that some shops in Queensland wouldn’t stock my books because of the illustrations on their covers (as some feminist bookshops, mistaking depiction for incitement, even in non-censorious London won’t), I saw them shown prominently, one might almost say flagrantly and abundantly, all over Brisbane. As indeed I saw at last, in a section devoted entirely to the Australian contribution to the genre, the collected poems of Orianna Ooi.

There is always hope for a city prepared to make accommodations such as these to the life of the intellect in action.

We didn’t spend long in Brisbane for all that. I made the mistake of dragging us off to see Hannah and her Sisters on our first night in town, as a way of getting Green Island out of the system, and it worked so well for me that it tolled the death knell over my interest in anywhere that wasn’t New York. I came out of the cinema in a fury with where I happened at that moment to be. Queensland! Brisbane! What was I, as a Jew, as a European, as a depressive, as a gourmandizer of the quasi-kosher, as a connoisseur of social experimentation and disappointment – what was I, as a seeker after urban exhilaration, doing in Brisbane? New York was where I should have been. Not the real New York; I wasn’t dealing in real anywheres. But New York as portrayed in Woody Allen movies – full of allure and illusory amenities, all Gershwin street-throb and dangerous conviviality, beguiling, trashy, tumultuously lyrical. So badly did I want to be Woody Allen (who was always wanting to be someone else himself), pushing my barrow-load of confused and disbelieving hopefulness up that hill, that I didn’t just turn on Brisbane, I turned on Australia altogether and couldn’t understand what had brought me back here so many times when it had so little that I wanted.