My clothes, I told the editor, were at present in transit to Ballarat where I had been on my way to investigate the establishment of a new aircraft factory. Now, forced to spend the time in Geelong while the craft underwent repairs, I was keen to conduct discussions with local business men. I had already, I was pleased to inform the editor, found a degree of intelligence and enthusiasm in regard to the idea which was quite extraordinary. I would not let myself be drawn on the possibility of switching the site from Ballarat to Geelong but the editor foundhimself bold enough to run the following headline which my host, bright red with pleasure, read to me at breakfast: "aviator's MISHAP MAY BRING NEW INDUSTRY TO GEELONG."

Jack McGrath was not only flattered to find himself described as intelligent but also gratified to learn that his new friend had flown the first air mail in South Australia. He read also that I had served in the Air Corps, was a "noted zoologist" and a "motoring enthusiast whose Hispano Suiza is currently on loan to a distinguished Ballarat family".

Photographs, supplied by yours truly, were also used by the Advertiser (this, mind you, at a time when photographs in the newspaper were a rarity). The most notable of these showed the Morris Farman "in three positions of flight in a storm above Digger's Rest Racecourse". Quite a lot of this information was correct.

A week later I was able to mail a postal order for twenty pounds to the publican in Darnham.

14

It was nine o'clock at night but the temperature was still above 90 degrees. There was no air in the room. There was not enough air anywhere. From the bathroom window in Villamente Street you could see the red glow in the sky: fires covered the Brisbane ranges at Anakie and Steiglitz.

The front room crawled with insects with long brown abdomens. They fell into the jug of sweet lemon squash and died there. Phoebe had placed a thin book of Swinburne's poetry on top of the jug, but the insects still managed to enter through the pouring lip.

Annette was limp and soaked with perspiration. Her grey dress was too heavy for the climate. It clung to the back of her knees and got stuck beneath her arms. Phoebe, on the other hand, did not seem at all affected. This irritated Annette. Phoebe was so wrapped up in her own feelings that she was insensitive to everything else, even the stinking heat. Phoebe also wore grey: a soft silky grey with a slightly paler grey scarf.

"For God's sake," Annette said, brushing insects away from Swinburne, "aren't you hot?"

"A little," Phoebe said, "but not much."

"It doesn't make sense." Annette knew how pasty she looked. Her hair was plastered against her forehead, a pimple was emerging from her chin, her top lip shone. "I don't think he's a herpetologist at all. A man of science, surely, does not keep his charges in a jute bag in his bedroom."

"Annette," Phoebe said, "where else would he keep it? We really have no proper facilities for boarding snakes."

"And yet," Annette said, "there you are with two of them."

(She is already defeated, before it has begun, while Phoebe is no more than a creamy shape in my dirty dreams.)

"You should be going back to school," Annette said.

Phoebe smiled. "Where I'm safe from nasty men?"

They sat side by side on the cane couch. Annette put her hand on Phoebe's but it was a sticky contact and not pleasant. She removed it.

"You could go to university."

"Ugh," Phoebe said. "How bourgeois."

She learned this sort of talk from Annette and it drove Annette crazy to have it thrown back at her.

"Last year you didn't know what bourgeois meant."

"But I know now," Phoebe said happily and Annette had to fight an impulse to disarrange that cool copper hair which her lover had piled high on her head, perhaps for the heat, perhaps to show her long lovely milky neck to Herbert Badgery.

"Do you really want to have babies and spend your life picking up after a man?" said Annette, who later omitted certain things from her description of Bohemian life in Paris.

"Who said anything about babies?" Phoebe said. "Or picking up. I only said I liked him. I said he was 'interesting'."

"I know what you find 'interesting', you little brat."

Annette had never met me, but she had already heard too much about this man whose only human imperfection was bow-legs. And even this was meant to be "interesting", as if they were shaped like this to accommodate what Phoebe liked to call a "door knocker" of extraordinary dimension.

She had heard (twice) already how Herbert Badgery had brought the Farman back from Balliang East to the airstrip at Belmont Common, how he had circled over Belmont and then flown up river to the woollen mills where he banked the machine before flying it beneath the bridge. What she didn't know is that I had done it for a bet. I got good odds because everyone remembered how Johnny O'Day had killed himself doing the same thing three months before.

It had all been in the Advertiser. Annette had read it the day before. But now Phoebe was telling the story a third time. She wasn't doing it for Annette's sake. She was yelling into an empty well, only wanting to hear her happiness amplified.

"You are going to make yourself very, very unhappy," Annette said.

But it was she who burst into tears, not Phoebe.

Phoebe tried to comfort her but she jerked away. She picked up the Swinburne and threw it at the wall.

"It's ridiculous," she screamed. "It's stupid. You haven't even spoken to him."

15

I did not like the Geelong snake, nor did I trust it. But I was stuck with it, this cranky creature in the hessian sack beneath my bed. I had considered "losing" it, but I'd already had some nasty experiences "losing" snakes. A lost snake can unhinge the most stable household and produce conditions that are most unfavourable for a man who wants to be put up. That aside, the McGraths were almost as proud of my relationship with the snake as they were of my connection with aviation. Jack brought an odd collection of characters home from the racetrack to view my performance with the snake. Sharp-looking punters and toffee-nosed horse owners all collected in Western Avenue and were as different from each other as the chairs they sat on. I was called upon to demonstrate my "pet". The manager of the National Bank, whose cast-off Pelaco shirt I wore, was nearly bitten on his beckoning index finger and was foolish enough to giggle about it.

You can do nothing to protect yourself from a brown snake except keep well away from it. You cannot milk its poison for (in summer especially) it'll have another batch ready in seconds. There would be no peace with the snake, no treaty. It would not become tame or even accept its captivity. All day long it pushed its head against the sack, as persistent as a blowfly against glass. It was a cunning thing and not capable of being bought off.

By the Wednesday morning I had found no one to supply me with either mice or frogs and I set off early to walk along the Melbourne Road where, one of the punters had told me, there was a soak with plenty of frogs in it. I left the Ford at home and walked. I always liked to walk. I strolled like a Gentleman.

I had observed, very early in life, that the way a man or woman walked gave a much better indication of their place in society than their accent. Although I was now very careful not to say "ain't" and "I never done it" and other habits of speech I had picked up working for Wongs at the Eastern Market, I was happy enough to use the natural nasal Australian accent which had so enraged that imaginary Englishman who sired me. I despised those people who pommified their speech but I was, always, very particular about my walk.