Brisbane in the mid-1940s was reeling in the new postwar energy. Reconstruction was the theme. Returned servicemen, ‘rehabilitation students’, of a kind that would never hitherto have had the chance of tertiary education, crowded out the old University buildings down in George Street. Migrants arriving from Europe showed us new ways of living. Some of us who were young and idealistic felt that it was up to us to bring about changes in our society, particularly in its reception of painting and poetry, and to trigger an awareness of new forms of education and public thinking. We eagerly read the books of our century, still far from school or university curriculum, that had power to shock and stir. We read our contemporaries in Britain and America. State High, a selective academic school, encouraged independent thinkers and nurtured a nest of subversives keen enough to start up a schoolyard magazine, critical and creative in content, that moved out into open publication. It was Barjai, ‘meeting place’—an Aboriginal name in line with two other Brisbane publications, Meanjin Papers and Galmahra, the University magazine. I was still at that school when the war ended, had already had poems published in Barjai, and had met up with other contributors who clubbed together to form an artistic driving force. 

I walked out of school with a Better Citizenship scholarship and just enough eyesight to look as though I could see. Retrospection juggles the jigsaw map together, the routes taken that got me from Barjai to Blackman, Church Fellowship to Communist job meetings, Argonauts Club to Arts degree, dance nights at the Blind Institute to a blind pension of my own.