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about those days when he and the others first met. Such a contrast with the bullish ordinariness of tonight.
    Whenever Jack looked back to his university experience and compared it with today’s student life, so much seemed to have changed – even friendship itself. Without computers and mobile phones, face-to-face communication ruled the day. He, Ava and Helen had started talking before their first classes, they talked between classes, they talked over lunch in the cafeteria. They talked at the pub in the evening, they talked as they ate supper, they talked long into the night. They trawled through hundreds of ideas across a multitude of subjects. He learned very quickly he would need to get over his shyness if he was to belong to this group; and similarly, a scientist like Helen had to read energetically outside her discipline to be a fully-fledged member.
    And there was so much to read. Books were constantly passing between them: Sartre, de Beauvoir, Adorno and Barthes, Ginsberg, Rilke, Rimbaud, Plath, Orwell, Woolf. Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet assumed iconic status, as did Canetti’s Auto da Fé . In the early hours of the morning alone in his room, Jack would find himself reading not only for his classes and assignments but for conversations in the days ahead.
    To attend university in the late 1970s was to enter a promised land where anything seemed possible. There was a church-going, private-school girl in his philosophy class who metamorphosed into a radical lesbian separatist before the end of the first semester; and a classical pianist and first-class dork from his high school discovered basement jazz clubs and reconfigured himself as an avant-garde musician. As for his own guitar-playing, a fewweeks after the start of the university year he was regularly performing at an inner-city folk club. Such things just happened: someone suggested it, someone else made the introductions, and suddenly he had a regular paying gig.
    Fortified by free education and feminism, mature-age students flocked to the university. Together with Ava and Helen, he met nuns in civilian clothes and housewives fairly bursting out of their narrow lives. They mixed with Greeks, Italians, Indians, Chinese and Vietnamese, throngs of people from Melbourne’s multicultural heart. Ava from the white and uniform outer suburbs and Helen from provincial Geelong met people the likes of whom had never before crossed their paths. Even with his own left-wing, Jewish background, Jack’s circle of friends was soon more colourful than that of his parents.
    For students fresh out of school, university supplied a brilliant sojourn between the restrictions of childhood and the responsibilities of maturity. And it was surprisingly easy. With free education and living allowances, no one needed to work more than a few hours a week, and although money was always in short supply, particularly for Helen, he and Ava were happy to cover for her. Ava, with no family to call on, never seemed to run short. She said she had savings; once she mentioned a bequest from an aunt. Neither he nor Helen pursued it. The personal was far less intrusive back then and a great deal more private.
    Theirs was the post-Vietnam generation, wise to authority but not stymied by cynicism. Pre-Thatcher and pre-Reagan the world was more than a collection of GNPs. The iron curtain was still in place although the cries from behind had become disturbingly shrill. No one was denying the repressive culture of Soviet politics any more, but the loss of ideals was palpablein many quarters, and his own parents, who had quit the Party in 1959, were not alone in their political griefs. The Cold War was arctic, and with nuclear stockpiles increasing at a terrifying rate the world was sandwiched between two righteous Goliaths, neither of which was about to fall. In the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate there was a pervasive anti-Americanism among their generation, but also a