H. will take no money from us. It is a sore point and we have given up offering to help him while he establishes himself again. The loss of the aircraft factory was a cruel blow to him and now he must start to build up again. He is selling cars for Barret's, the Ford agents, working very hard indeed poor dear. He is also building a house although where or what it is he will not tell us. It is to be my wedding present from him.

Dear Dicksy, he is so kind. He looks after Mummy so nicely and does not complain when she wants to be driven here or there or become impatient when she wants to crawl along at five miles an hour, so slowly that men in horse-drawn wagons want to overtake and shout abuse at us. Hedoes clench his fists around the steering wheel and look like he could bite a rat, but he is quite lamb-like and does nothing nasty.

I have a lovely room overlooking Collins Street and I see all manner of celebrity walking below. Alfred Deakin, a fat old man, was at dinner last night (not at our table) and Herbert was kind enough to get his autograph for Mummy which was so nice of him, because he is not a groveller and the incident must have caused him pain.

I am writing ceaselessly. I am due for flying lessons on every Wednesday morning. I go to the theatre and the galleries. I remember the things that you taught me, Dicksy. I think of you as a true friend. If you will not answer my letters properly at least send me a postcard, unsigned if you wish, to let me know that you are, at least, opening the envelopes.

With much love and affection, your friend, Phoebe 63 Melbourne, in case you did not know, has its charms: botanical gardens, splendid churches, a high-domed public library where an old man can read the newspapers and stay cool on a hot day, etc. But there is no use denying that it is a flat place, divided up into a grid of streets by a draughtsman with a ruler and set square. The names of streets are just as orderly. King precedes William, neatly, exactly parallel. Queen lies straight in bed beside Elizabeth and meets Bourke (the explorer) and Latrobe (the governor) briefly on corners whose angles measure precisely 90 degrees.

Melbourne has a railway station famous for showing fifteen clocks on its front door, like a Victorian matron with a passion for punctuality, all bustle, crinolines and dirty underwear. It has Collins Street which is famous, in Melbourne at least, for resembling Paris, by which it is meant that the street has trees and exclusive shops where women in black with violently red lips and too much powder on their ageing cheeks are able to intimidate women like Molly McGrath by calling them "modom".

Oh, it's a good enough town, but it can take a while to realize it.

There is a passion in Melbourne you might not easily notice on a casual visit and I must not make it sound a dull thing, or sneer at it, for it is a passion I share – Melbourne has a passion for owning land and building houses. There is nothing the people of Melbourne care for as much as their red-tiled roofs, their lemon tree in the back garden, their hens, their Sunday dinners. You will not learn much about the city strolling around the deserted streets on a Sunday, no more than you will learn about an ants' nest by walking over it. Thus, when I seek something peaceful to think of, some quiet corner to escape into, I do not think of sandy beaches or rivers or green paddocks, I imagine myself in a suburban street in Melbourne on a chilly autumn afternoon, the postman blowing his whistle, a dog crossing the road to pee on those three-feet-wide strips of grass beside the road that are known as "nature strips".

The people of Melbourne understand the value of a piece of land. They do not leave it around for thistles to grow on, or cars to be dumped on. And this makes it a very difficult place for a man with no money to take possession of his necessary acre.

When Molly, Phoebe and I took up residence in the Oriental Hotel in Collins Street, Melbourne, there was pressure applied to me to accept money from the McGrath Estate in order to purchase land. I will not say I was not tempted, but I am proud to say I did not succumb. I found my land, and took it, although its legal owners (the Church of England) were not aware of it at the time.

What the Church of England wanted with those poor mudflats on the Maribyrnong River I will never know, but anyone could see that it was no site for a cathedral and was of no use for anything but what I intended. It was a place where you could set up a windsock, land a craft, build a house and not expect to be troubled unless you asked for electricity to be connected.

The Maribyrnong is, in places, a pretty river, but as it snakes down through Flemington and pushes out through the flats to the bay it is neglected and dirty, enriched by the effluent from the Footscray abattoirs.

I took possession of my land by circling above it.

"There's my land," I shouted. Not once. Three times.

Phoebe had no goggles. Her eyes so streamed with wind-drawn tears that she could see nothing but the misty confluence of grass and water: brown and green like a runny watercolour.

Later, over cucumber sandwiches at the Oriental, she described my land quite lyrically.

Now if I had never seen Jack's house in Western Avenue, never known a tower, a music room, a library, I may well have built my usual type of structure, something like the place I made for the girl in Bacchus Marsh, or the slab hut I built for the barmaid up at Blackwood. I could not have dug a hole, of course, because the land was not suitable. But I may have set up a series of rainwater tanks, connected them with short passages, and covered the whole with earth for insulation. It would have lasted a year or two. However, you cannot ask women who have lived in a house with a tower to feel comfortable inside a burrow and I was not such a fool as to try to persuade them. On the other hand, I had no money. I could not even pay my keep at the Oriental Hotel and it offended me.

You see, my dear Annette, it was not the way you thought it was – I was not about to milk them dry, buy French champagne, visit actresses, contract syphilis and pass it on, talk sharp, dress slick, steal the Hispano Suiza or use the widow's fortune to buy an Avro 504 and leave them at home to knit while I flew across the world and got myself written up in papers from Rangoon to Edinburgh.

It was Molly and Phoebe who spent the money. By God, they loved it. There were boxes in the theatre, dinners in the hotel, new hats and dresses and picnics in the Dandenongs. I kept a notebook and recorded what they spent on me, and I got a job.

I have put off discussing the job. It was not what I wanted. But tell me what else I was to do? I hated that clever Yankee bastard, but there was no easier motor car to sell. Yes, yes, I took my book of cuttings round to Colonel Tarrant who had the Ford agency in Exhibition Street and he hired me on the spot. I worked right off the floor, which I had never done before, and I cannot say I enjoyed the city style of selling cars. It did not suit me. I would rather have been standing in paddocks ring-barking with the O'Hagens, in some room lit by hurricane lamps while the daughter of the house played the piano accordion. I would have happily suffered indigestion from bad food, done my card tricks, told some yarns, and taken my time to make a sale.

All of this, I tell you now. But for twelve months I did this work and did not let any of my feelings make themselves known to me. I could not. My great talent in life was my enthusiasm and I drew on it relentlessly, careless of how I spent it. I poured it over my new life with the same reckless style with which Molly poured creme de menthe over her treacle pudding, not giving a damn for the pounds it added or the pounds it cost. I was protector and provider, or intended to be, and the role, of course, took its toll on me. A portrait taken at the time shows the increasing depth of the wrinkles around my eyes which the retoucher's well-meaning brush made more, not less, noticeable. My black hair was already showing flecks of grey and receding in such a way as to make a long promontory of what had once been admired as a "widow's peak".