Joni Mitchell sang on, the pool grew, the night moved forward. Immersed in his work, he was removed from himself, from this world. Work silenced his demons. He knew he ought to protest against nuclear tests in the Pacific, he knew he should rally for a better deal for nurses, but his was not a loud-hailer personality, and never would it be.

It was late when he went to bed, tired yet relaxed, the trials of the day entirely subdued. With Goddy curled up next to him, he fell asleep. He slept through to the morning and woke refreshed, happy with the prospect of an uninterrupted day of work.

4 PROSPECTING FOR HOME

4

PROSPECTING FOR HOME

Not far from Andrew’s studio, on this warm November morning in 1987, Galina Kogan was marking her first anniversary in Australia. She didn’t feel it warranted a full-blown celebration, she was still too unsettled for that, but she did have steady work and sufficient money, and she was now living in her very own Australian home.

Perhaps it was this, she was thinking, that deserved a celebration: that after a mere four months, her odd, unconventional dwelling did feel like home — not home as in Leningrad, but a secure and welcome comfort after the extended bivouac of her first months in Australia.

Her home was a former saddlery shop, located in a lane opposite the Melbourne Cemetery. She was inclined to believe that the very unorthodoxy of the place had been its primary attraction: that in the same way she was an oddball among the Australian people, so too was this dwelling among Australian houses and flats. Decades earlier, the saddlery shop had been converted to a bedsitter, with a shower and toilet closeted off in a back corner. She had placed her bed down one end of the rectangular space. A kitchen was pressed into one of the side walls, and she had put a small table and two chairs nearby; a glass sliding door along the other side led to a courtyard garden, described as tiny by her visitors, though many times larger than the balcony of the Leningrad flat. The northern end of the room doubled as a work and living area. With a mere half-dozen steps from bed to desk, the saddlery, Galina decided, must have specialised in gear for miniature horses. She bought a two-seater couch upholstered in a splashy green-and-fawn floral; it was not a pattern she would have chosen — hard to imagine what sort of person would choose such a pattern — but the couch was in good condition, it was cheap, and it was comfortable. She added a side-table and a well-worn leather pouffe from the same second-hand goods shop.