The city was asleep on its right side and shaking with violent nightmares. Long puffs of snoring came out of the chimneys. Its feet were sticking out because the clouds did not cover it altogether. There was a hole in them, and the white feathers ‘were falling out. The city had untied all the bridges like so many buttons to feel at ease. Wherever there was a lamplight the city scratched itself until it went out. Trees, houses, telegraph poles, lay on their side. The rag picker walked among the roots, the cellars, the breathing sewers, the open pipe works, […]

Ever hear how I bowled Victor Trumper for a duck ? he asked. —No, I said. —He was a beautiful bat, he said. He had wrists like steel and he moved like a panther. The ball sped from his bat as though fired by a cannon. The three of us were sitting on the verandah of the pub at Yerran­derie in the Burragorang Valley in the late afternoon. The sun fell full on the fourteen hundred foot sandstone cliff behind us but the rest of the valley was already dark. A road ran past the pub and the wheeltracks were […]