At Castlemaine it was very warm. Even the night was milder than I’d expected. Discouraging memories presented themselves as I roved about the slopes picking up firewood. What does this almost-finished book say about men and women? There doesn’t seem to be a way of planning this. My attitude emerges as the story tells itself. I couldn’t help agonising over it, thinking of the smallness of my scope, the ordinariness of it, its bourgeois nature. What critics will say. What my friends will think and not say. How I will appear before the world. Oh shut up.

We stood on a slope and watched the moon rise: up it came, round as a drawing. We saw how the stars became brighter, sat deeper in space. M and her friend struggled to philosophise. They laughed, and were excited. ‘I can’t sort of grasp,’ said M, ‘what there is beyond the universe.’ We all played the ukulele when we felt like it. She made up a song called ‘In the Paradise Cafe’. The boy read Tom Sawyer aloud: he couldn’t restrain his laughter. I woke at two in the morning, lay there filled with a kind of shame. Looking out at the moonlit bush, silver by night, grey by day. Don’t be so proud. Accept criticism, accept editing and guidance. No one will think less of you. I got up at dawn. There were tasks and I did them: finding wood, making a fire, boiling water. The sky became more orange and the wind began to stir. The coming light. It creeps across the dull grass and pinkens it, between the thin trunks. My panic left me. The problem becomes merely the work I still have to do, rather than an indictment of my whole personality and talent and social position.