At 80, I’m just a bit older than Meanjin.

Born into the British Empire, we both started out in Brisbane where, in December 1940, journalist Clem Christesen AM OBE published the first Meanjin Papers. Days later (3 January 1941) the 6th Division of the 2nd AIF, which, like the 1st Australian Imperial Force of 1914–18, had been training in Palestine, engaged with Italian forces at Bardia, the first occasion where our ground troops were seriously committed in World War II. I’d arrived in the preceding October, the month in which the Battle of Britain ended. Some 35 Australian pilots (ten died) flew in that conflict over Will Shakespeare’s ‘sceptered isle’—this fortress built by nature for itself against infection and the hand of war—that my Essex-born, Brisbane-resident maternal grandparents, Bert and Emma Byford, still referred to as ‘home’.