Then, one night, he met an American embassy officer at an agricultural trade conference dinner. It was one of those nights when the diplomatic bureaucracy felt, to Asquith, like a mock feudal world in which nothing important could ever be accomplished. Hierarchies could be preserved. The world could not be saved. Their conversation turned to their social life during the war, and Asquith said he’d once had the honour of meeting Benny Goodman at the Collins Club as part of a USO tour.

He couldn’t have met him, the American said. Benny Goodman had never visited Australia.

‘But he performed as Benny Goodman,’ Asquith insisted.

‘Then he must have been a fake.’

‘You sure?’

‘Sure as shit I am.’

A sudden flash of mortification in Asquith, before he realised the imposter could be useful. The fake ‘Goodman’ showed him what was possible: he demonstrated the lengths to which you might go. His fraud suggested Asquith should go further with the Bion project rather than, as he’d been thinking lately, destroying the notebook and manuscript and trying to fare better at his consulate job.

Soon Asquith was reading from the play at his classical-themed book club in Elizabeth Bay. He announced to the book club members that Ziegler—who preferred Theokritos among bucolics and thought Bion was trivial—had probably failed to see merit in The Twins and thus, while he took notes of the Greek text in 1863, he had never adequately translated it and had failed to alert the scholarly community. An excerpt from The Twins was published in a new literary journal, the Meanjin Papers. Next, the Weekly Times wanted to run an extract. The journalistic angle was Amateur Scholar Finds Treasure of Antiquity Ignored by Dead German Expert. Also, the Southern Review published six pages of Greek trimeter verse by ‘Bion’ alongside Asquith’s translation, flanked by a background article on the right-page strip, which gave an account of how Asquith had found the notebook. He published under the name I.W. Asquith. He was becoming a new person in his new country. He wanted to be loved and admired for an ability that no one had acknowledged or even suspected.

3.