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Santamaria manipulating Mannix, or was it the other way round? My father had his own theory about the Catholics and the Communists. ‘They’re all in it together.’

Green in the face
    After innumerable beery nights in smoke-filled rooms, eight of us decided on a hitchhike round Tasmania. My fellow Campions included Bill Hannan and Ron Fitzgerald, both to become leading educationalists, Kevin Keating, soon to join the Dominican order, Desmond O’Grady, later a writer and Rome correspondent for a number of newspapers, and the prickly Ron Conway.
    Conway, who became a prominent Melbourne psychologist, had an unnerving habit of applying his alleged analytic talent to the rest of us. I and one or two others in the group, he confided as we flew to Tasmania, were heading for a crisis. There was indeed a crisis—when we split into two quartets, how to avoid being in the same one as Ron?
    Tasmanians proved extraordinarily generous in those innocent times, and trucks and utilities stopped for us, despite our dishevelment and number. I had only two dramas. In the first, after we decided to pair off to get quicker lifts, my companion Bernie Barbour and I were dropped off at night beside a paddock. We got through the fence, dug our hip holes, laid our groundsheets and slipped into our sleeping bags.

    Not prisoners on day release—Catholic lads on a hitchhike around Tasmania.
    When I woke up, at dawn, a trio of bulls was giving us close and unwelcoming inspection. It took a lot of whispering to wake Bernie up, which he did to this: ‘Don’t move.’ We didn’t move. The bulls didn’t move. ‘Stay horizontal,’ Bernie offered. We stayed horizontal. The bulls continued to stare at us. They looked hard and mean. The farmer that now happened to drive past would have shared their puzzlement. He would have seen two green sleeping bags, caterpillaring like giant pupae towards the fence.
    The second trauma came at the end of the hitchhike, when we boarded the geriatric Taroona for the trip back to Melbourne. I’ve always been a poor sailor, dating back to the days when my father took me on fishing trips in Port Phillip Bay, and I’d spend the time seasick in the bottom of the boat, while he tossed empty beer bottles into the water and pulled flathead out of it.
    The Taroona bucked across Bass Strait all night, and after leaving my lavatory-sized cabin to throw up in the genuine one, I couldn’t find my way back, and opened a succession of identical doors onto a variety of snoring and suffering passengers, before finally finding my own. Much to my embarrassment (twenty-one, and still a mummy’s boy) my mother was at Port Melbourne to greet me, and looked shocked: ‘You’re green in the face.’

Ron, myself and the mystic marriage
    After this adventure, Ron Conway had taken a puzzling fancy to me. He would invite me to his Middle Park cottage where he lived with his mother, usher me into a room crammed with books and records—he was the Catholic Advocate ’s music critic at the time—put on a Mahler symphony, and we’d share its rhapsodic transcendencies in silence. Sometimes, in the middle of an epiphany, there’d be a timid knock on the door. Ron, not pleased, would open it a few inches only. A pallid hand would pass him a plate of biscuits, then the door would be smartly closed. I never saw more of his mother than her fingers.
    Ron belonged to a Catholic theatre group called the Cardijnian Players, where his fondness for dominance found an outlet in directing and writing. By 1951, when I thought there was modest evidence of literary ability, he was quick to put me straight. ‘Your talent, I have to say, is for the cameo. I prefer the broad canvas and epic sweep.’
    He soon got what he wanted. Ron was commissioned to write a play about the life of St Jean Baptiste de la Salle, founder of the order of Brothers at whose school he taught. The