The Only Thing That I Was Equipped

It's Disturbing At My Age To Look At A Young Woman's Destructive Behaviour And Hear The Echoes Of It, Of One's Own Destructiveness In Youth.

Writers Seem To Me To Be People Who Need To Retire From Social Life And Do A Lot Of Thinking About What's Happened - Almost To Calm Themselves.

On Melbourne Summer Mornings The Green Trams Go Rolling In Stately Progress Down Tunnels Thick With Leaves: The Bright Air Carries Along The Avenue Their Patient Chime, The Chattering Of Their Wheels.

And Always Melbourne, Melbourne, Melbourne, Over And Over The Same Photo In Glaring Greens And Reds, Of A Tram, Huffy, Blunderous, Manoeuvring Itself With Pole Akimbo Round The Tight Corner Where Bourke Street Enters Spring.

But I Can't Bear It When Somebody Who Some Man Made A Pass At - To Call That Violence Seems To Me Absurd And Insulting To Women Who've Really Met Violence, Who've Been Raped Or Bashed.