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she walked past the window and waved at me to come along. I extracted myself and we took off.
    It was sad, really. She was something of an outcast after that and had to get the police to help her recover her belongings from her parents’ house. However, we would be together for another five years.
    Getting out of the wedding wasn’t the end of my ­medical problems. The doctor who’d put his finger on the cause of the headaches suggested that I have apsychiatric review;hypochondria must have crossed his mind. I did so, reporting that the headaches had gone. The next thing I knew I was in the psychiatric ward of the Royal Adelaide and they were telling me I could benefit from a period of voluntary residential care. Someone was sent to my flat and, in case I was a danger to others, confiscated theguns andknives I used for hunting. This scared the hell out of my flatmateTheo, who wondered what sort of a person he’d been living with.
    So there I was, stuck in hospital for two weeks and unable to get on with my floundering PhD work. I didn’t think their treatment was doing me any good, so to get myself out I carefully answered all the questions in the next assessment, not honestly, but in a way I felt would convince them of my sanity. It worked. The psychiatrists decided that I’d made a remarkable recovery and I was released. This left me with considerable scepticism about this field of medicine. One that remains with me.
    At Flinders I was active in the anti-Vietnam movement but also took an interest in other social issues. I took part in the protests about the Springboks playing in Adelaide, Aboriginal land rights, and was interested in emerging issues of ­feminism and the rights of gays and lesbians. These were all valid ­concerns when coming of age as a baby boomer in Adelaide. OneFlinders Postgraduate Students’ Association (FPSA) lunch remains particularly memorable. The FPSA would hold regular luncheons; the sherry would be ­flowing and there would always be a guest speaker but the events were generally pretty dull. When it was announced, however, that there would be a scheduled talk by controversial psychology lecturerDr John Court, who claimed his aversion therapy cured homosexuality, dull things were not.
    A small group of us from the physical sciences ­department walked across past the campus lake to the union building where the lunches were held; I had my prepared questions in hand. On this occasion I’d spent hours poring over the writings of philosopher and sociologistHerbert Marcuse to get precisely the right angle to make Court squirm. We were itching for a fight on this issue. My problem on the day was that by the time question time came around, I’d drunk way too much sherry. I got up to harangue Court and slurred my words, making something of a mockery of my carefully worded question. On seeing my condition, the marshals at the event quickly moved in, with a view to removing me forcibly. As they grabbed me, I reached out for anything at hand, which happened to be the tablecloth. This led to a dramatic overturning of the table, with its cutlery and my comrades’ food and drinks. Needless to say, John Court’s hour in the spotlight came to a rapid end.
    The lunch would later be written up in Nation Review . I can’t remember who the journalist was but the opening line of the article was as fine prose as you are likely to read. It started: ‘When she arrived with two “No More Duncan” badges impaling her nipples it was clear that this was not going to be your average postgraduate students association luncheon …’ The journalist was right.
    The Duncan badge referred to the 1972 death of academicDr George Duncan, a Cambridge graduate who had moved to Adelaide. He was an openly gay man and lectured in law part-time at the University of Adelaide. One night, he and another man were thrown into Adelaide’s Torrens River near the