I next came to Melbourne at nineteen meet the family and friends of Ron, the man I was to marry. I wore a homemade overcoat trimmed here and there with bits of fox. My hair was tied back with a ribbon. What a rube I must have looked.

My mother had insisted that Ron and I stay at different places (in 1986 what a laugh THAT is). Some of the time we did and some we didn’t. On the Sunday morning Ron took me to a shop at the comer of Glenferrie Road and Chrystobel Crescent where his friend Martin Smith ran a picture framing business.

Martin was a tall good-looking man with a mop of brown hair and, the day I met him, reindeer on the front of his jumper. His charm, his intellect and integrity held a crowd of poets and artists in suspension around him the way a juggler’s skill holds a flow of oranges and flowerpots. He was their inspiration.

Martin made frames ‘on tick’ for many painters who later became famous and some of them wealthy. Most didn’t pay up until after his death when they donated works for a memorial exhibition which was held at George’s Gallery with the proceeds going to Martin’s wife and children. Better late than never, I suppose, but better surely not to have been late at all.

My first visit to Martin’s shop opened a door into a world I’d previously only dreamed existed. For many years he and his wife Rosie were my inspiration too. (Though John McLaren was the man who lectured me – pushed me? – into becoming a writer, or more correctly, to go on being one.) When Ron and I and baby­making-three, went to Red Cliffs on the Murray then to the Goulburn Valley to live, much of our social life still revolved around the Smith family.

Ron was one of Martin’s poets. Each time we moved I think he destroyed a batch of poetry and today as far as I know the only piece in existence is a four-line stanza in the front of a book he gave me:

Walk by night –

When heavy hawthorns

And subtle lilacs

Promise silent dawns

Bright with broom.

(‘Crescent Grove ‘50.’)

The good news is that four or five hundred of Martin Smith’s poems still exist – written on tissue paper and things like that and waiting for some student of poetry to come along and edit them. They’ll be worth the effort.

My return to Melbourne in 1984 turned out to be something of a rude awakening. I was shocked to find that many Victorian drivers yelled abuse at my Queensland number plates. I’d thought that only Banana-Benders behaved in such a way. Rents were ridiculously high. A hundred and ten dollars a week for a Dickensian dump in North Fitzroy, so damp that new paint was peeling from the walls before the painters had moved out.

I was sacked without so much as a Kiss-me-Foot from working on the film script of a novel of mine. I must admit though that after the first shock that experience was like making a break from the tyranny of Gulag and finding you’d got away with it. Next I bust up with my publishers. (Another Girls’ Own escape?)

On the credit side I found a flat in Ivanhoe with a stunning view of Melbourne. It’s in an old red brick mansion and I’m honoured out of my sox to be living there. During World War II it was divided up for officers so we call it Brideshead – what else? My son, grown-up but still fancy-free, lives in Murrumbeena. He takes me to Japanese restaurants and Persian carpet sales. We fight in the traffic and later, laughing, eat gelati in Lygon Street.

There are things I love about Melbourne, things I feel I couldn’t do without – the company of people I’ve known for almost thirty years, the trees, the elegant streets and buildings, the wit of conversation and the wit of kids on suburban trains. Just the same I keep dashing up to the country to look at the Murray and the Goulburn. Sometimes I even go to look at the old redgum under which I parked my car for all the years I worked in Shepparton. (When I started there the town was all dust and fruit smell. Now it’s so clean it sparkles at you.) I had my best times there. And my worst. Ron died at Shepparton, and when I left, I left a lot of myself behind.

Then there’s that other place, the strip north of the Tweed and now that I’m a southerner again I keep going back to see friends there and look at the mad exciting mess that’s the Gold Coast. I like to see the teenage frails with their tans and buttock-length blond hair as they saunter in and out of hotels and apartment blocks. If you look hard enough you sometimes see the skinny little soul of one hiding at the back of her ravishingly painted eyes. I like the grey squirrel couples too – always a woman with a smaller husband – fossicking for nuts in the supermarket.

Behind the Gold Coast is the Lamington Plateau with its rain forest and views so eye-popping that at last you understand why Queenslanders are so proud of their State. As far as terrestrial, beauty is concerned they have every right to be; though it seems that they haven’t yet realised the greatest compliment they can pay it is to leave it alone.

There’s still another place I’d like to call home – Byron Bay with its series of Japanese-looking beaches and mountains meeting the sea. I saw a woman there riding a bike along the main street with her eyes closed. That’s what I call relaxed living.

I have a friend who lives at Byron Bay in a house he designed himself. The sitting-room follows the sweep of the ocean, the bathroom is cedar and jade-slate. At night as you sit on the balcony and watch the moon come up out of the Pacific you know that if you put out your hand you’ll touch God.

If I don’t end my days there I’ll be surprised.