Read Reunion for Free Online

moratoriums and anti-apartheid demonstrations; he had accompanied them on each new campaign championed by the left. But he wasn’t of draft age and he wasn’t under threat; he was just a child, a child, moreover, who hated crowds. The crush of people so much bigger than he was, the shouting, the huge banners with their precarious lurchings, how he envied the babies and toddlers protected by prams and strollers. And he couldn’t rely on his parents to look after him as they were seasoned banner carriers and loudhailer users. He might well have attended some of the defining moments of the sixties and seventies but his childish fears and failings were inflamed to a far greater extent than any political passions. For all that Helen and Ava admired his background, all too often he had felt a fake.
    Family aside, in most other respects he, Helen and Ava inhabited the same made-to-order, one-size-fits-three utopia, and a queer business how oddballs and outsiders managed to find one another. Not that it was always a happy liaison. Leopold and Loeb, for example, gravitated together only to commit what turned out to be the not-so-perfect murder, andParker and Hulme, those two imaginative creatures from New Zealand, suffered a similar fate. And there were some outsiders like Orwell and Wittgenstein who abhorred other outsiders. But not so for the three of them. After years of finding sanctuary in the solitary protectorates of their own minds – the same solution for all three despite their different backgrounds and sensibilities – they arrived at university and found one another.
    Most conversations would find them in an impassioned state of wonder, most days an exhilaration which never ceased to amaze. Serenity was on the dark side, serenity looked across the river to death; together they experienced so much that was new, and change itself seemed to add to the intensity. They fell in love with ideas, they fell in love with books, they fell in love with films and songs, they fell in love with their tutors who fell in love with them, and they fell in love with each other – although only Jack would make it an enduring devotion. Restraint was practised very occasionally and only when issues of safety were involved. Like most students at the time, they believed all ages of consent should be lowered, marijuana should be decriminalised, judges and lawyers should stay out of the bedroom, that the law was an ass.
    They regarded their friendship as special, and wondered, or rather hoped, they were perpetuating the tradition of the Bloomsbury group or the Cambridge Apostles or the luminaries who gathered at Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Co in Paris. They assumed they would always be friends.
    â€˜Early friendships are cemented with the hardest glue,’ Ava had proclaimed one evening, about a month after they all met.
    As for the wider world of the 1970s, it came via films and music, books and periodicals, all reinforcing how very seriously Australians had missed out. Australia had neither Jimi nor Janis nor Woodstock nor Black Panthers. There were no Beats on oroff the road. Critics like Foucault and Barthes would starve in the wilderness that was Australian culture where intellectuals were regarded as less desirable than dole bludgers. There were no Australian Buñuels or Wertmüllers or Herzogs, and the only thriving political groups were feminism and the anti-nuclear movement and these were nourished by their overseas counterparts. The brain drain of the fifties and sixties that had eased during the Whitlam years was again a stream and they planned to add to it. They wanted to make a difference, they wanted to contribute to the future, and there was no point in staying where they were not appreciated. Indeed, the major reason for being at university in Melbourne was to acquire the credentials to be transported to a university elsewhere.
    And yet despite its apparent shortcomings, there was a sense in