But being a child in the 1950s had its compensations. There were children everywhere. We roamed at large; we played in pairs and in gangs, in backyards and on street corners. Later, I explored the streets of the town barefoot on my bike. On special weekends, two or three of us might ride into the country, skidding and bumping across dirt roads to reach a favourite outcrop of rocks or a causeway where we could paddle.

My parents, to their credit, did not discourage my ‘tomboy’ streak. I had a half-share in the clockwork train and the Meccano set. I tagged along on excursions with the local geological society, ever-so-gently chipping away at a mudstone outcrop to unearth its fossil treasures, or spitting on the river stones to see their colours. And on clear nights I spent long hours outside on the lawn, equipped with binoculars, star-map and torch, trying to hold one wavering image after another in view long enough to give me some claim over its source; I never succeeded.

Somewhere in all this I learnt to read, and would regularly sally out to the local library. When I graduated to the adults’ section, I found a peculiar system of censorship in force. To borrow a book from the ‘fiction’ section cost five cents; but ‘literature’ was free. As I had no money, I immersed myself in ‘literature’: half – or maybe only a quarter – comprehending, I ploughed through Tolstoy, risked Dostoevsky (and with it my fragile adolescent sanity), balked at Mann, and revelled at Faulkner; I read drama from anywhere; even discovered, to my delight, Gwen Harwood’s poetry. But there were large blanks, some of which I am still trying to fill.

At school, I seemed destined for a science course until my second-last year, when a friend who was studying history showed me a record of some of the evidence given by child workers to the British Factories Commission of 1833.The children spoke in monosyllables, but the document was one of the most powerful I had seen. I decided that I simply had to take up history. To do so, I dropped maths. Exit the science career.

I went on to university in Canberra. For some time I had been chafing at the narrowness of life in an environment where anonymity was impossible. The exhilarating thing about university was meeting other refugees. I also began to re-evaluate the competitiveness that had kept me going through school. Suddenly I had to cooperate to survive. A loose group of us, all overawed by our lecturers’ seemingly limitless knowledge and the accents in which they imparted it, formed an alliance of our own. By the middle of first term we had devised a lecture roster; we took it in turns to attend, equipped with multiple sheets of carbon paper. Living in a beehive of a college, I became nocturnal, sitting up most of the night reading, playing cards, scribbling out essays and talking, talking, talking, then barely scraping into late morning lectures with my hair still wet. When the first-year results came out, the alliance had swept the pool. I stopped feeling overawed.

From then on, university became a routine. By the end of my third year, I was beginning to feel the same small-town claustrophobia that had oppressed me at school. When an opportunity came to take a year off and do research in what was then Rhodesia, I grasped it with relief. This was 1974.The first half of the year I spent getting to know the contours of a thoroughly unjust regime. It amazed me; nothing in my experience had prepared me for a society where rudeness, petty cruelty and violence were a way of life. Censorship was everywhere. Once, at a cricket match, I overheard some farmers from the north west discussing the progress of the war; but before I could work out what they were saying a policeman, who must have been listening from under the stands, intervened to shut them up. I learnt to read newspapers for what they disclosed in spite of themselves (a talent I later found useful for reading the Australian press).

When I returned to Australia, it seemed a different country from the one where I had spent my childhood. Its warts were more prominent; but the change was not only in me. The labour market had slumped. Before I left, there had been casual work for the taking; when I returned, there was nothing. I scraped my way through the second half of the year doing a few hours’ work here and there, taking whatever I could get. The university, too, was changing. It was embroiled in a bitter conflict, with the students demanding internal democracy and most of the staff jealously defending their academic prerogatives. I spent my final year there in the backwash of this struggle. The Labor government was falling apart, and we all knew there were no academic jobs at the end of the road.

After a year reading and arguing about Althusser and Foucault, I went into the Public Service. A few days later Gough Whitlam lost the I 975 election. It was not a good time to join the bureaucracy. The government was obsessed with cutting costs; public servants who had come into administer Whitlam’s largesse were left with the unenviable task of trying to administer cuts as equitably as possible. I could do no more than join this rearguard action. I had a painstaking superior, who carefully explained to me why he had changed every sentence I wrote. He taught me to write well-structured prose at break-neck speed. But it became increasingly clear that there was little hope of the conservative tide turning. I lasted a bit over a year; then, tired of being cast in the role of devil’s advocate, escaped back to university.

The return to university was a disappointment. Among the postgraduates, I found little of the collective spirit of inquiry and debate that had sustained me in my undergraduate years. We were all working in our own cubbyholes, with little in common. By this time, I, like most of the other postgraduates, had married, and we all lived in our own private worlds. Fortunately for me, my private world was more fun than most. The two of us were living in a precinct that had for years been scheduled for demolition, sharing a tiny, decrepit house with a floating population of friends. It was a completely unstructured household. Even the food was paid for on an honour system, and yet somehow it worked. My husband was studying physics, and the two of us could work through the night in his laboratory, leaving through the frost at dawn and catching the first bus back home to find the household’s morning shift already eating breakfast.

In my undergraduate years, like many of my contemporaries, I had attended moratorium marches and stood on the picket lines at the South African embassy, but I had been reluctant to become identified with any formal organisation. However, my last stint in the public service had brought me in touch with the youth services sector, and when I left I was asked to join the National Youth Council. Seeing a chance to put in my two-bob’s worth without the frustrations of working in the bureaucracy, I agreed. Three years of increasingly hectic activity followed. In the midst of it I moved to Melbourne to run the office during an interregnum and to assist in a frenetic, last-ditch campaign against a proposal that young people should work for the dole. My master’s thesis languished; I finished the text only in a last-minute rush, two days before my first daughter was born.

Since then, I have learned a lot: about the necessity of patience, of giving myself space for play, of never standing on my dignity. While I still have trouble thinking of myself as a mother, I have delighted in rediscovering what it is like to be a child, to take a long, clear-eyed look at the world and to set aside some of my own preconceptions. Above all, children keep changing: they have forced me to do the same.

Juggling the demands of home and work is a complex business, but for me it has been a source of strength, each acting as a welcome respite from the other. I have had the luxury of being able to phase my way back into work – first teaching and working on my doctorate, later working as an archivist, history editor and all-purpose research adviser, and now taking on Meanjin. I am looking to the future with some excitement, and not a little trepidation. Editing a journal, as people keep reminding me, is a big job. I know I am bound to make mistakes; I only hope others will have the forbearance to tolerate them. I am going in with mind and eyes open. A close friend of mine with a taste for conundrum used occasionally to point out that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who believe there are two kinds of people and those who don’t. I don’t. There lies the appeal of working at something as wide-ranging as Meanjin.