but finding it difficult to cope with over-populated classes, in what are often antiquated
schools.. And when I say "librarians", I don't mean those in a great institution like this -
where you don't have the same opportunities for contact with the ordinary or shy reader. I
mean those of you in charge of suburban and country libraries. You hold the balance between
hope and despair for starving intellectuals and embryo artists. You can feed the hungry and
perhaps fire imaginations by gently suggesting.

And don't be too strait-laced. The puritan strain is one of the great flaws in the
Australian character. Some of us are unable to distinguish between porn and bawdy - the
sludge of today and the lusty tradition of world literature, as found in Chaucer, Shakespeare,
Rabelais, to name a few exponents. I like to remind myself of the Dorset proverb, "God gave
us meat, we have to go the Devil for sauce." Good God, yes: A spoonful of gamey sauce never
harmed anybody. And how fashions change. It's incredible to think that Flaubert's great
masterpiece Madame Bovary should have caused such a panic and a court case when it appeared
last century, or that Lolita should have banned only recently. I remember hearing Sydney ladies
who had gone to ingenious trouble and considerable expense to smuggle Nabokov's classic
satire into Australia - to enjoy a perv - afterwards protesting with disgust, 'It's so boring
you can't read it!' So, let the bourgeoisie, the Festival of Light, or whomsoever, take
heart. What they want to root out is in the Bible and the dictionary, anyway. The dictionary
was one of my great reads as a child. Spending much of my time in the country, I might not
have understood what country people were exploding about if I hadn't consulted the diction-
ary. My own explosive vocabulary was born in my early childhood - by life out of the diction-
ary.

Those early days when it is always morning! Time was endless. Even as a young man who
had written a couple of insignificant novels, I felt I had endless time before me in which to
write masterpieces. Now, perhaps because I am an old man, I am obsessed by the limitations of
time - not only that it is running out for me personally, but for Western civilisation as a
whole, and his retarded colony in particular. Whether I am deluded or not, it can only pay to
pull ourselves together. Everything is happening too quickly. The pressure of circumstances
and certain specfic aspects of our plastic culture don't give us time to develop the art of
thinking. Catchwords are popped into flabby minds by the media. The telly seduces us with