February 1 I was interviewed for a Creative Clunes short film on the Life Cycle of the Book. Leslie Falkiner-Rose interviewed me about reviewing and being reviewed. I admitted that I don’t mind being reviewed negatively by those I disregard or dislike – prefer it even. I mentioned John Forbes’s taunt on the eve of the publication of my first book: that I wouldn’t like his review when it appeared next day. (So I obliged Forbesy by never reading the review. I often wish writers – sensitive souls – would do likewise.) When Leslie asked me about online reviewing (Amazon, Goodreads, and such), I couldn’t resist: ‘There’s something to be said for expertise, and reflection.’ 

February 9 Never did I think to address the Rotarians, but so I did this morning, at the invitation of one of our patrons. They asked me to speak for twenty minutes: I did so precisely, fluently, without notes. I have become shockingly glib. Thence to the retirement village for Mum’s reassessment for the Home Care Package. The assessor was sympathetic, thorough, and clearly shocked by Mum’s condition. Mum told us she now weighs thirty-nine kilos. 

February 12 So back we go into lockdown, of the severe kind we endured last year. Everyone is consternated. I am not sure why. This is what I expected: repeated lockdowns, around the country, while we continue to accept citizens returning from infected countries and house them in hotels in the CBD. What do the authorities expect? Perhaps our smug federal government will finally shoulder its responsibilities and come up with new quarantine measures and facilities, rather than leaving it up to state premiers.

February 18 Lockdown ended today, after few new cases. We sent March to press.

February 21 Remarkable dream in which my parents decided to euthanise themselves and tried to persuade me to do the same. I balked at the end and awaited news of their demise – and all the media hullabaloo that would surely follow.

February 23 Watched a wonderfully trashy film called Woman of Straw with Sean Connery and Gina Lollobrigida – and Ralph Richardson saying the most indecent and racist things. 

February 24 In a dream I was in Adelaide with John Coetzee and others. John asked me what disappointed me most. Humanity, I replied rather formally – eschewing my usual pragmatic reply. Benignly, interestedly, guardedly, JMC asked me if I thought I felt this way because I hadn’t – here he was very tactful – engaged in many intimate conversations for some time. By which he probably meant psychoanalysis.

Judith Herrin, the medieval historian in Oxford, has replied to my email in which I showed her Michael Champion’s review of her new book on Ravenna. Judith was pleased but thought it overly generous. We reminisced about Jeffrey Tate’s Ring Cycle in Cologne, back in 2004, which is where we met. She and Anthony Barnett, founder of Charter 88, had got to know Jeffrey in 1998 when he conducted the Ring in Adelaide. This sent me back to my 2004 journal. Here is a passage written on our return from Germany in November 2004: 

A remarkable thing is happening in my head: I cannot stop the Wagner. All the way back on the plane I kept hearing bits of the Ring, especially Siegfried’s Funeral Music, which Jeffrey conducted wonderfully – possibly the most transforming few minutes I have ever spent in the theatre. C. is exactly the same: he hears it all the time, too.

After each performance in Cologne we all had supper in a pub where they sand down the tables every day: delicious Kölsch (the local beer) and herring. A director at the Metropolitan Opera joined us. Bruce Baby, as we dubbed him, earned a smack from Jeffrey for criticising the admittedly woeful Siegfried, whose performance in the opera of that name lives in the memory, for all the wrong reasons. I doubt whether Bruce Baby had ever heard of Australia. Certainly he didn’t endear himself to the several Australians in the party when he asked us if we had heard of Mark Twain.

February 25 Since we all wonder, in the age of Covid, if we have drinking problems, we were heartened by a New Statesman report that Queen Elizabeth consumes four cocktails each day – a regal example. She will outlive us all.

February 26 Having decided not to go to the Adelaide Festival, I offered Dorothy Driver my ticket to A German Life – the Christopher Hampton play starring Robyn Nevin. Dorothy agreed that my JMC dream was intriguing. Acutely, she asked me how I would normally reply to John’s question. I said I would express regret that I had never done something truly useful with my life. My dreams I described as operatic (Verdian, murderous).

Mary-Kay Wilmers has retired after thirty years as sole editor of LRB (which she still owns). There is a rather smug interview on the podcast with the great Andrew O’Hagan. Wilmers is hilarious about fiction reviewing, which she considers facile and bloodless – the last vestige of the welfare state, as she puts it. Certain words she abhors then excises (e.g. ‘moving’, ‘poignant’). Like us she always trims ‘amidst’, but I am not sure how vigilant she is about ‘very’, which we nearly always remove. (Only Kate Llewellyn has noticed this. She once greeted me as ‘the enemy of very’.)

February 27 To Middle Park for a long walk. When I asked a sullen old Greek fisherman what he hoped to catch on Kerford Pier, he looked at me as if I were about to assassinate him – or arrest him (we all fear arrest these days) – but eventually proffered ‘Snapper’.

Having raced through Edward St Aubyn’s Double Blind, I have gone back to Never Mind, first of the Patrick Melrose books, to see if the new one is as good as I think it is, comparatively. Never Mind is a far superior, because terrifying, book. But the new novel is wonderfully satirical, and oddly moving. I wish St Aubyn hadn’t abandoned ‘whom’, though.

March 2 Stayed home and edited in a frenzy. Two good commentaries: Claudio Bozzi on the decline of faith in science in the US, Tim Byrne on how theatre is responding to the pandemic; if it has a future. Frank Bongiorno, in a review, has much fun with David Kemp’s latest tome. 

Humorous exchange with Andrea Goldsmith. She’s appalled that I have never read Bellow, whom she reveres. Once I tried The Adventures of Augie March, much commended by Geordie Williamson, only to find it unwelcoming. But we’re agreed on Philip Roth. I have been rereading all the late, short novels prior to reviewing Blake Bailey’s biography of Roth. They stand up much better than I recalled.

Sarah Holland-Batt, our Chair, was on the front page of the Oz, including a wonderful photo of Sarah and her father, who was treated monstrously in a home. She has a stinging Op–Ed inside.

March 9 It felt odd returning to the Melbourne Recital Centre – our first visit since 2019. The concert was in the Salon, socially distanced. Ronald Farren-Price was much fêted. We sat in the front row with Andrea Goldsmith, another of his old students. Because of her hearing problems, Andy detests masks; she can’t lip-read. (She writes interestingly about her deafness in a new review; how she disguised it for years on being diagnosed at the age of twenty-three – when she was still a speech pathologist.)

First, Anna Goldsworthy read her new piece about the Kreutzer Sonata, then she was joined by Andrew Haveron, concertmaster of the SSO. The concert was exceptional. We went home ahead, later joined by Chloe Hooper and Anna Krien and the musicians. Never had I had a Guadagnini violin in the house. I peppered Andrew with questions about the SSO and liked his style. He is looking forward to Simone Young’s tenure as chief conductor, commencing next year, and said there will be more opera.

March 21 We went to the NGV and admired some of Joseph Brown’s pictures in the wing named after him – that foolish indulgence when Gerard Vaughan was director. When will they integrate Brown’s bounty and free up that space?

March 22 We have moved Mum to a nursing home. Respite they call it.

March 23 The ABR/JNI Editorial Cadetship has closed with a total of 118 applications. 

March 25 After work we had a drink at Southbank. Suddenly about sixty police marched past, heavily armed, there to guard slightly fewer genial Extinction Rebellion demonstrators who were bound for the News Corp headquarters, where they promptly lay down in the foyer, wonderfully precise, as if they did it every night. 

April 7 This evening I saw The Father, with luminous performances from Olivia Colman and Anthony Hopkins. Those closing minutes will stay with me for a long time. I came home and needed a stiff drink.

April 8 Woke early and finished Alfred Döblin’s little book of reportage, Two Women and a Poisoning, based on a remarkable trial in Berlin in 1923, six years before his great novel of Berlin. Much excitement about James Jiang’s appointment as our new JNI editorial cadet. 

Visited Mum after work. She was in bed, at 5.45 pm. I begin to feel bitter about what life has done to my brother and now my mother.

April 9 Today I read The Humbling, perhaps the slightest of Roth’s late novels, though not without qualities, including those zestful conversational riffs when his characters pursue his relentless art of persuasion.

April 10 All my life I have wanted to send a bottle of wine to another table. This evening I sent one interstate, to the Jasmin in Adelaide, where C. was dining with Ann Oliver. I can hear Ann’s sublime cackle from here.

Headed to Carlton late morning to see White Riot at the Nova. I chatted with Mark Rubbo (slimmer, newly bearded). We commiserated about 2020. Mark jokingly said he’s suffering from a form of PTSD. Aren’t we all?

April 11 Michael Morley and I exchanged several ironic emails. I told him about a tour that C. is leading in Adelaide, which took them to Carrick Hill. Upstairs there is a special exhibition – lawn mowers.

I reread Claire Bloom’s memoir – more Roth research. Hell hath no fury.

April 12 Early to the office, Mum’s situation being dire after an aspiration attack. I had to ask Jack and Amy to lead the first Monash publishing masterclass. There was much to do – several arts reviews, including Malcolm Gillies on the new National Opera’s La Clemenza, in Canberra – clearly an event. But I felt absurd tearing around and fretting over the magazine. I recalled the day of my brother’s funeral, twenty-two years ago. That morning I attended an OUP board meeting. I think I blamed my boss at the time, but it was my choice to stay so businesslike, so efficient. Such a company man, as one colleague observed at the time.

I reached the nursing home at 2 pm. Mum looked so twisted on her bed – unbelievably small and desolate. It is inexpressibly heartbreaking. We came home and had a Middle Eastern meal across the road. The loudness of the other diners made me want to commit murder.

April 14 Cynthia Ozick has a magisterial review of the Roth biography, which is already attracting a remarkable critical literature. One quote from American Pastoral moved me: ‘It’s the damn poignancy of everything that rocks me a little.’ 

May 23 I’ve been reading Bernard Shaw’s music criticism in the indispensable Bodley Head edition (all three fat volumes). There’s a charming anecdote in Dan H. Laurence’s introduction about Greer Garson ‘wheedling’ Shaw (then aged ninety-four) into accompanying her at the piano in a bevy of music-hall ditties. (Shaw, who played and sang for his wife at the Bechstein for thirty years, stopped when she died.) It’s hard to disagree with Laurence: ‘The musical journalism he produced is probably as brilliant as any that literate man can ever hope to see. Just try to name another critical journalist in the English language who remains as readable after nearly a century.’

May 27 We learned early that the lockdown will commence this evening. Once again our office will remain open. Lockdown of course means we can’t visit Elsie, potentially for weeks.  

May 28 The streets are empty. People seem resigned to lockdown, used to the drill.

May 30 I’d forgotten how time drags during lockdown. One of the infections occurred in a Melbourne aged care facility (a worker, not a resident). Now that I am familiar with the sector, I understand how traumatic it must have been for residents (cognitively impaired or not), detained in their rooms with no visitors and irregular contact with staff. 

June 2 I have persuaded Patricia Fullerton to allow us to publish her charming, idiosyncratic memoir of her visit to the collection of Hilma af Klint in 1996, long before the world discovered this artist, who now seems likely to disrupt the art-historical landscape, having prefigured the early Abstractionists – Kandinsky and all – by ten years. Trish must be one of the first people to see the work.

June 3 This evening I wrote to Patrick McCaughey and told him that our chat about Cy Twombly is our most popular podcast of the year. But James Boyce’s one on the disgusting salmon-farming industry, prompted by Richard Flanagan’s new book, is gaining on us fast. 

Last night Malcolm Gillies attended the AWO’s first concert, in Canberra, and today we published his laudatory review. Then Ian Dickson’s appalled review of the new Cherry Orchard at Belvoir arrived. 

June 9 Elsie had a fall. Her doctor suspects she has fractured her hip – ribs too, possibly. This is what we were dreading. Mum will be moved to hospital shortly for x-rays. Access to her in hospital during lockdown is doubtful. 

June 11 Sheila Fitzpatrick and Billy Griffiths and I met to choose the two Calibre winners, from a shortlist of three. We did it by phone, as Billy Griffiths is still without power in Mount Macedon, two days after the storm. Anita Punton’s essay ‘May Day’ firmed in everyone’s estimation and ultimately came second. Theodore Ell’s essay ‘Façades of Lebanon’ was a clear winner. Then I made Theodore very happy indeed. Like others before him, he said it was the best thing that had ever happened to him. Sometimes I think Beejay Silcox knows all the interesting people in the world. It was she who encouraged Theodore to turn his accounts of the Beirut explosion into a Calibre essay. Both married to diplomats, they are close friends.

June 12 The best laid plans of mice and men … We had all sorts of plans for the long weekend, including a birthday dinner at Di Stasio and a film or two, but these were suspended this afternoon when Michael Carr told Grace that someone with Covid visited Boyd on Tuesday. Earlier, we dashed to Cabrini to see Mum briefly as they loaded her into an ambulance before returning her to the nursing home. When she finally emerged on a stretcher, she looked unbelievably tiny beneath a massive bouquet of flowers. A nurse told us she was much loved in Five West.

June 15 David Malouf rang, sounding chipper. He wanted to wish us well for this week’s event at the Judith Neilson Institute in Sydney, so I explained that it’s been cancelled. David told me about the new HOTA Gallery at Surfers Paradise. We will miss him when he comes down for the concert version of Voss in August (we hope to be in Sydney), but we’re planning to hear the Adelaide repeat in September. As ever, David had all the dates in his head. 

June 16 This evening we watched the new documentary on Nureyev. I thought I knew all there was to know about the Russian (or Tarter), but this was illuminating. Then we realised it was sixty years ago to the day since Nureyev’s defection to the West. 

June 17 I am rereading Nostromo: densest and most ‘inscrutable’ of novels. (How many times did Conrad use that word?) So rarely does one feel a novelist knows the dismal, corrupt, irreformable ways of the world (e.g. the brilliant, subtle, brief scene when Charles Gould visits, and bribes, the local supremo who mistakes Donizetti for Mozart).

Lockdown restrictions ease tomorrow night; now Sydney seems vulnerable again. I have no doubt we will go on enduring these lockdowns every few months, around the country, to some degree of severity.

June 18 Aggravations, I realise now, are necessary spurs – a kind of modus vivendi. They energise me. Was my father – whom in so many ways I resemble, I also now realise – the same? Like me, he had two jobs for most of his life, and as a football coach he worked with hundreds of young people. Did slackness or incompetence embolden him? I would like to ask him now.

June 20 Ian Dickson is devastated to learn that James Merrill, whose letters he is reviewing for me, had seen eighteen operas by the time he was twelve. Ian thought he was doing well.

July 7 We are staying in Daylesford – a small cottage on Hart’s Lane. It’s freezing but we put on our heavy coats and scarves and pretend we’re in Europe. The kitchen is well appointed (copper even), so C. is in his element. I finished Gideon Haigh’s book on Dr Evatt and Dennis Altman’s one on tenacious monarchies before greatly enjoying Nicolas Rothwell’s essays in Quicksilver. His essay on the Europeans in Australian – Leichardt, Lawrence, etc. – is exceptionally good.

July 8 My eldest great-nephew’s twenty-first. When I asked him what he wants for his birthday, Lachlan, who still calls me Uncle Peter, said he would like to come for dinner at our place following a tour of the NGV with C. as his guide. 

We drove to Castlemaine and called on Cathrine Harboe-Ree, now happily ensconced there. We reminisced about ABR, of which Cathrine was deputy chair in the 1990s (eventful years). She marvels that anyone still speaks to me after thirty years in publishing. 

July 9 Refreshed after our sojourn in Daylesford, we rose early and were home by 10.30 am. I spent a couple of hours at Boyd, catching up, then called on Mum, who was waiting for me in the foyer. (‘I missed him,’ I heard her say to one of the nurses as I left.)

July 10 Sydney is in for it now: fifty cases yesterday. A month-long lockdown seems inevitable.

July 11 I went on with Julia Parry’s book on Elizabeth Bowen: those fascinating tensions and torsions between her and the caddish Humphry House (Parry’s grandfather), and that great passage where Bowen addresses him as the committed writer she always is, even in bed with him. ‘Remember that you had Elizabeth Bowen to contend with – I mean, a confirmed writer. Someone accustomed to getting herself, or himself, across without outside opposition … One spends one’s time objectifying one’s inner life, and projecting one’s thought and emotion into a form – a book … Because it is hard for me (being a writer before I am a woman) to realize that anything – friendship or love especially – in which I participate imaginatively isn’t a book too.’ Parry’s not a brilliant writer, but this doesn’t matter when the story is as fascinating as Parry’s triangulated one about her grandparents and the inspiredly selfish Bowen. 

July 15 Suddenly, we’re back into lockdown, wretched news which lowered everyone. I badly wanted to go out partying, and took C. to 38 Chairs for a Negroni. One year ago I confidently predicted that by this stage in 2021 we’d have gone through five lockdowns. And so we have. They all thought I was mad.

July 16 How fortunate we are at ABR to be able to stay open, again, because of our magazine status. I’m not sure I could have managed remotely (hard to teach an old dog new tricks). This afternoon the Jolley judges took fifteen minutes (not two hours as when they decided the shortlist) to choose Camilla Chaudhary as the winner.

At 5.30 pm the nursing home rang to say that Mum had fallen again, in the bathroom.

July 19 Everyone’s being circumspect, as the local numbers continue (sixteen today) and as NSW goes from bad to worse (still 100 daily). I didn’t leave the office once and travelled both ways on empty trams. At work I took a call from a gentleman wanting to know if his business could stay open. 

July 23 Thank goodness we didn’t go to the Prahran Market on Saturday. Had we done so we’d now be in isolation for a fortnight. Now we’re all being wary.

ANU wants me to proceed with the publishing seminar next Tuesday, despite the cancellation of my visit to Canberra. We’ll do so via Zoom. They have thirty takers. We’ve also had a good response to the first of our editorial information sessions.

July 24 Never had I thought to watch the Olympics, but that’s what we did – even the rowing. Meanwhile, stupid anti-lockdown, anti-everything protests in Sydney and Melbourne: thousands of morons and exhibitionists. I remembered this quote from Elizabeth Strout’s novel My Name Is Lucy Barton: ‘It has been my experience throughout life that the people who have been given the most by our government – education, food, rent subsidies – are the ones who are most apt to find fault with the whole idea of government.’

July 25 I was fascinated by an article in NYT about a mystic Chilean photographer, Sergio Larrain, devotee of Henri Cartier-Bresson, and as good, I should say. I must get his book of London photos. Flying through Damon Galgut’s new novel, The Promise. Marc Mierowsky at Melbourne University, an admirer, will review it for me. 

We inspected Mum’s unit before it goes on the market. I never want to see it again – too sad. Then we dropped some things outside the nursing home, including a long letter. It’s odd to be writing again to Mum. It brings back memories of my long missives from Europe in the 1970s. I remember Dad telling me that she threw one of them across the room, desperate to know my news but defeated by my handwriting – ‘Arabic’, she called it.

July 26 A thumping donation has arrived. When I thanked the donor, he said: ‘I can afford it, and it gives me great pleasure.’ 

Damien Maher, a young Australian in Oxford, proffered the best excuse I’ve heard in my three decades as a publisher when apologising for being late with a review. He’s been hit by a car but will submit it by Sunday! 

July 27 Woke at five, anxious and forensic. I have a seminar to lead in five hours’ time. Then I finished Decline and Fall. As I did when I was young and learning to write, I found myself marking every second limpid line:

Many a young reporter was handsomely commended for the luxuriance of his adjectives.
Up and down the shining lift shafts, in and out of the rooms and along the labyrinthine corridors of the great house he moved in a golden mist.
Mrs Best-Chetwynde reappeared from her little bout of veronal, fresh and exquisite as a seventeenth-century lyric.

The ANU seminar went well, helped by James’s astute contributions. Already there have been some good publishing outcomes. 

July 28 We both visited the nursing home at 10.30 am, the manager having given us permission to see Mum downstairs, away from the other residents. Sandy brought her down. Ineffably frail, she was quite emotional when she saw me. I told her I’d never had such an effect on anyone before.

July 31 Saw Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for about the thirtieth time, always good to see it at the cinema. Afterwards we went to Carlton and met Donata and Domenico Carrazza at Readings. I congratulated Donata on buying the Collins bookshop in Mildura. I think back now with fondness on my stint as manager of the MUMUS bookshop in the 1980s. My parents were shopkeepers, and it suited me, maybe does still. 

August 3 Dawnings, before dawn. I’m awake with the rubbish bins, always fascinating the city’s preliminary shivers and dronings. Marvellous to rise to Montale – abandoned for years (a Montiliano again). Then this beautiful passage about death in Galgut’s novel In a Strange Room. All my life, fundamentally, I have been resisting the strangeness and severances of death – especially with regard to my parents, my mother. All my industry, all my poetry in a way, has been a form of resistance, of delay. Only now, when she is already gone in a sense, gone from me, herself, do I begin to accept the inevitable:

A journey is a gesture inscribed in a space, it vanishes even as it’s made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there. The roads you went down yesterday are full of different people now, none of them knows who you are. In the room you slept in last night a stranger lies in the bed. Dust covers over your footprints, the marks of your fingers are wiped off the door, from the floor and table the bits and pieces of evidence that you might have dropped are swept up and thrown away and they never come back again. The very air closes behind you like water and soon your presence, which felt so weighty and permanent, has completely gone. Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.

August 4 I am reading Tim Bonyhady’s new book on godforsaken Afghanistan, currently being overrun, again, by the vermin Taliban after the US withdrawal (much good that adventure did anyone).

August 5 Coffee with Paul Dalgarno this morning after he accepted a couple of books for review. Inevitably we discussed the pandemic, wondering when lockdown might recommence – a week, two? Within hours the state government has announced another lockdown – from 8 pm! So much for our dinner at Three Idiots in Richmond with Paul Kildea. I asked Anders Villani if he wanted to cry off from drinks, but we went ahead and met at the fromagerie near Readings. Lygon Street was packed (we sat on the footpath). It was like Carnevale, everyone buzzy. It’s all too believable – there’s a kind of acceptance. I have no doubt we’ll go through this for months to come. On the way home I went to Three Idiots and collected a mountain of takeaway Indian – in solidarity.

August 8 I have begun Guilty Thing, the biography of De Quincey by Frances Wilson, whose book on D.H. Lawrence is such a phenomenon.

August 9 All people can talk about – lament – is the lockdown. Everyone is so abject, so leaden. Much interest in Theodore Ell’s essay and podcast following his appearance on Geraldine Doogue’s radio program on Saturday. 

Completed the census this evening. How many more times?

August 10 Not for a while have I been up at 3.30 am. I guess it’s the Jolley Prize ceremony that’s woken me up – and life. It went well, of course, ably produced and co-compered by Jack Callil on the switch, at Boyd, just the two of us, with an audience of eighty or so. Seven speakers and no fluffs. It was over in less than an hour. Less is more.

August 11 Long chat with Houellebecq scholar David Jack about an article on Giorgio Agamben and the pandemic for the October issue. Controversial though the subject may be and loath though I am to give succour to anti-vaxxers, it’s time ABR published something on this endless submission, or is it servitude? Meanwhile the government has extended the lockdown for another week.

August 12 Watched the original Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Both of us would have sworn Guinness was in his eighties. He was sixty-five when he made it! I saw him as Dean Swift in London in 1976 – Yahoo was the name of the play.

August 15 In the window at the Avenue Bookstore I spied another of those small Princeton compilations from the Classics. I thought the title was How to Be Continent. Putting on my glasses, I realised it was How to Be Content (which is much harder). 

August 16 My mother’s ninety-fifth birthday. None of us could quite believe we had been allowed to enter the nursing home. We sat in a small sunny room near Reception, decorated it with balloons and such. When Mum arrived in a wheelchair she said she never expected to see us again. As always she wanted news about everyone. She sat with Andrew, her great-grandson, who leaves for Denver University on Thursday and will be away for four years. She asked him to write to her, but not in Spanish (two of his new roommates are Spanish.) Home, I began Burning Man and revisited Woolf’s short, brilliant essay on De Quincey’s Confessions.

August 19 Much correspondence with David Mason about DHL. He has written a brilliant review of Burning Man for The Hudson Review, less enamoured than Geordie Williamson, but still admiring. David reveres DHL and despises the ‘sunderers’ (Lawrence’s term) from Kate Millett on. I told him that Lawrence’s poem ‘Bibbles’ reminded me, for the first time, of Sylvia Plath. He said that Plath loved DHL, mainly because Tom Hughes did. James Jiang noted that Marianne Moore (the subject of his PhD) admired Lawrence too. Little wonder when one revisits poems like ‘The Ship of Death’.

Today was, the tabloids proclaim, our 200th in lockdown. There were sixty cases here, almost 700 in NSW, which is now clearly out of control. I won’t be surprised if we are incarcerated for another 200 days.

August 23 Finished Burning Man and read Auden’s essay on DHL in The Dyer’s Hand. Auden, though almost as silly in his private talk as Lawrence, is always the most sensible of literary critics. Here he is on writers: ‘Very few writers can be engagé because life does not engage them: for better or worse, they do not quite belong to the City.’ It’s a point I tried to make in a review of one of Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell novels: how unusual Mantel was in really understanding the machinations of power.

August 26 I am loving Kangaroo, with its hilarious portrait of Australians. When Somers and his wife try to find a bungalow in Bondi he remarks on all the ‘impossible names’, woundedly.

John Rickard has reviewed Dennis Altman’s book on the strange persistence of monarchy. In it he notes that the long-lived Thai king, outraged by Rodgers and Hammerstein, banned The King and I. It went ahead here, though (not even ‘Ming’ could stop it). John was in the cast of the first Australian production, in 1962.

September 1 I did enjoy my podcast interview with Frances Wilson (the Lawrence biographer). These podcasts are taxing, but this one was fun. She was mordant about earlier biographers. ‘They write about him as if he were a normal person, not the weirdest man who ever lived.’

September 5 I began Geoff Dyer’s book Out of Sheer Rage, which is about writing a book – or rather not writing – a book about Lawrence. I had watched his online conversation with Frances Wilson at the LRB bookshop and was duly charmed, by both of them. I assumed his book would be conventional, but it’s anything but – a kind of anti-book worthy of his hero. At first I thought it reflexively Murnanian and repetitious; then his humour won me over. I’m sure Frances wrote her book with a sense of how Dyer had upped the ante.

September 7 C. is bolting through War and Peace, for the third time. First time he read it for the love story, then the history – now the battles. I’m reading Giorgio Agamben’s rather shorter book Where Are We Now? The epidemic as politics. David Jack has given me a fascinating essay on the Italian philosopher’s libertarian response to the pandemic. ‘And what is a society that values nothing more than survival?’ I think DHL would have approved. Wouldn’t he and Nietzsche despise this timorous, platitudinous age? 

September 10 Mum’s insurer has written to her asking if she is thinking of ‘getting into golf’! Visits to the nursing home are no longer possible, following a Covid case in one of the homes (no other details). 

September 11 NSW’s premier, Our Glad, daily rallies the troops and congratulates them on how well they are doing. Today it was 1,600 cases and eight more deaths. This is why she has suspended her daily press conferences.

Frances Wilson, pleased to learn how well our podcast is doing, seemed delighted when I invited her to review for ABR. She will start with Eric Wilson’s new book on Charles Lamb. I sent her the photos of Wyewurk I took all those decades ago. 

Whizzing through David Storey’s amazing posthumous memoir of existential terror and mental illness (A Stinging Delight), all caused, it seems, by the death of his brother while David was in utero.

Stupendous amounts of newsprint devoted to the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. What of all the horrors caused by US mendacity or ineptitude?

Late walk near the Shrine, refreshing. The startling verdancy of oaks.

We don’t even remotely fantasise about planning ahead any more – restaurants, parties, travel. Anything.

September 12 We’re so bored we’ve begun to haunt cemeteries. This morning we visited the Melbourne General Cemetery and then the streets of Princes Park. Near Arnold Street we met Gideon Haigh. He was amused by Australia’s hypocritical outrage about Afghanistan: the decision not to play a test against the national team. I congratulated Gideon on his book on Dr Evatt. He thought it time to resurrect Evatt. But not a good time for sales, though. Mark Rubbo reports a forty per cent downturn in sales this year.

September 18 Finished Pride and Prejudice, sufficiently awed by its formal and claustrophobic perfection. (Such ironies: they pelt at us like squash balls.)

September 19 Call from the nursing home last night. They couldn’t find ER’s hearing aids. This morning they located them. Without them, because of her nerve deafness, she is marooned.

September 20 Nice responses to Mindy Gill’s being named as our latest Rising Star. I am reading Christopher Elias’s book Gossip Men, about J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, and Roy Cohn: odious trio. 

September 21 The fourth series of The Crown has rightly won many Emmys, including one for Gillian Anderson. A young interviewer asked the diva whether she had discussed her performance with Mrs Thatcher. Anderson paused then said that she hadn’t spoken to Margaret lately. It reminded me of the time we went to a media preview of the biopic Hoover. A young publicist stood up and referred to ‘the great J. Edgar Hoover’ to titters from the older cinéastes. 

September 22 This morning proved to be as dramatic as recent weeks. I worked at home and was sitting at my desk when it began to shudder. Then the building shook. I assumed it was about to collapse and tore down the stairs to get away, not putting on my shoes but remembering to grab my mask (we are well trained). Outside I met other neighbours. We gathered in the drive wondering what on earth had happened. C. rang to say they had felt it at Boyd, which had been evacuated. Then word reached us that they had felt it in Ballarat and Horsham and Canberra so we knew it was an earthquake – Victoria’s severest one in years, it turned out.

Then I was summoned to the nursing home. This time I was able to enter Mum’s room – so much better. Mum was sound asleep and could not be woken for forty-five minutes. When she stirred she wanted to know that everyone was all right. I imagine her last words will be enquiries about others – not a bad way to go. She had slept through the earthquake. It said everything, in a way. The woman who loved news more than anyone I’ve ever known – our Reuters Rose – was oblivious. 

September 24 Public holiday for the absent grand final. Hundreds of cases every day – 740 today after a record tally yesterday. I think everyone has given up.

C., finishing Voss this afternoon, enjoyed this passage about Miss Linley: ‘Dedicated to culture, this immortelle recoiled from poetry, almost as if it had been contrived as part of an elaborate practical joke, and might shoot out without warning, to smack her in the middle of her withered soul. She was happier with established prose.’

Saw Mum at midday. An Indian aide was feeding her lunch, superbly patiently, morsel by morsel – all of it, remarkably – then a cup of ice cream – Mum smiling thanks and encouragement; poignant watching her being fed because of memories of watching her feed my brother, smiling thanks and encouragement. Jen, the nurse on duty, was wearing a Collingwood guernsey. Mum seemed cheerful. We communicated mostly via the board, testing my cacography. 

September 25 Watched the grand final, quite an amazing game. Just when we all assumed the Bulldogs would pull away in the third quarter – a famous victory, exciting to watch. At halftime we had sausage rolls, devilled eggs and angels on horseback: good butch fare. Inevitably, thoughts of the last time Melbourne won a grand final, when Norm Smith’s side pipped Collingwood during Dad’s first year as coach. I can still feel the Southern Stand rock during Ray Gabelich’s mighty run to put us in front moments before the end.

October 3 Began the day with some essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, hoping she had written about Austen but somehow doubtful. Here she is on Faulkner – his ‘hallucinated imagination’. Now I must read Sanctuary, which she rates, with typical precision, as one of his ‘six or seven’ masterpieces. Hardwick is drily hilarious about Berenson, whom anyone could visit at I Tatti, such was his need for American company, news, she hypothesises. ‘You had a belated feeling you were seeing the matinee of a play that had been running for eight decades.’

This afternoon I worked on poetry for two hours – the old clerical method: moving from one draft to another, advancing them, finding old ones I had forgotten – even finishing another two poems in The Catullan Rag, which now runs to more than a hundred. David McCooey wants me to publish an annotated edition, but that may have to wait until after my death!

October 4 Awake at four and at my desk an hour later, head racing – lively week ahead. Enjoyed Hermione Lee’s essay on the multiple biographical versions of Austen. No one was as malicious as Austen (only Gwen Harwood perhaps, who must have liked her). Here is Austen on Mrs Hall of Sherbourn, who ‘was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, oweing to a fright – I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.’ Now I am reading Edward Said on Austen, much admiring his lapidary prose (James Jiang writes about Said for our November issue).

October 5 We ended up with 1,300 Porter entries – same as last year. 

October 6 Began the day early with more Hermione Lee on life-writing, this time an essay on ‘How to end it all’. I liked these last words of English evangelical Caroline Leakey: ‘Farewell, dear drawing-room, you have long been devoted to God.’ Lee concludes drolly: ‘Perhaps I should have called this essay “From Champagne to Complan”.’ (Chekhov supposedly took champagne at the end; Larkin, stuck in the lavatory, called for Complan.)

October 7 When I offered a contributor Evelyn Juers’s book The Dancer, she declined, saying that the only time she ever went to the ballet she was asked to leave because of her snoring.

Alighting from the tram coming home (same driver even), I was nearly cleaned up by a car at Tivoli Road for the second night in a row. It’s dangerous out there.

October 8 Recent Work Poetry has published Paul Hetherington’s Chinese edition of Australian poetry. I have two poems in it, ‘The Subject of Feeling’ and ‘The Condemned Tree’ (my only environmental poem). James has recorded the former, in Mandarin. It seems awfully longer than the English version. James liked my use of the word ‘giddified’ (the ‘giddified wreck’ from which my brother was prised) but wondered how the translator coped.

October 9 The twentieth anniversary of the launch of Rose Boys. Lots of memories of that day at Victoria Park. Everyone seemed to be there, including champions whom I idolised as a child, all queueing up with my friends and relations. I thought of inscribing Bernie Quinlan’s copy ‘To the cynosure of every eye’ but wasn’t sure how this would be received. 

At least I can say I have signed autographs at Victoria Park. 

Determined to create a Rose Boy cocktail for the occasion, I wrote to Ian Dickson, who recommended ‘rosemary for remembrance’. 

October 10 Long, anguished, strangely inevitable dream about my mother, from which I would waken, half-conscious, with relief, only to return to it. I was looking after her, taking her out, returning her to the nursing home, surprised at one point that I had allowed her to drive, worried for her, myself. She was somewhat younger – recognisable – and at one point she began singing to me in that beautiful, unforced voice I had almost forgotten – exactly as she would always sing around the house when I was a child. So I have heard her again.

October 11 I was sure I’d read all of Philip Roth, but somehow I missed The Professor of Desire, the first David Kepesh novel. Now I am relishing its post-Portnoyan indecencies. 

October 15 ABR’s Adelaide Festival trip, which we began promoting yesterday, has sold out. We even have a waitlist. 

October 17 Lockdown ends, so they say, on Friday.

November 1 Last night I dreamt I slept outside Mum’s nursing home, waiting to be let in. 

November 4 Delighted to hear that Damon Galgut has won the Booker Prize.

November 5 Finished Sean Kelly’s withering study of Scott Morrison on the tram and promptly emailed my congratulations. I told him it was a necessary, chastening book. Sean is moving to Melbourne in January – perhaps one of fourteen people inclined to do so.

November 6 Our first venture into town since the Second Punic War. At Hill of Content I bought Everyman’s thumping edition of DHL’s stories. Began Teju Cole’s Black Paper, which opens with a thrilling chapter on Caravaggio. Now I really must visit Messina.

November 8 Worrying and tedious loss of Outlook after a case of Malware (whatever that is). The whole day was consumed by it.

November 12 Lunched at the Carlton Wine Room with Nathan Hollier. I congratulated him on MUP’s brilliant year. Nathan told me that Stuart Macintyre’s cancer is at the palliative stage. He is publishing a Festschrift of sorts. Graeme Davison has a chapter on The Oxford Companion to Australian History, which I commissioned Stuart, Graeme Davison and John Hirst to edit. 

November 16 After our fortnightly staff meeting we reviewed the year, nominating favourite issues, covers, features, programs, and discussing features that hadn’t worked and ones we might add – a fruitful and enjoyable exercise. We are planning a new politics column – and crosswords!

November 18 Our first theatre since the MTC’s Emerald City early last year. The new As You Like It from the same company was much better – a tonic.  

November 26 David Epstein visited Boyd and took the Donald Horne omnibus for review. David, who was head of media during the Hawke–Keating years and briefly chief of staff to Rudd, now lives at a place called Cherokee, in a house whose substantial garden was designed by Von Mueller.  

November 27 Stephen Sondheim has died, aged ninety-one. The NYT obituary is encyclopedic. I always enjoy Anthony Burgess’s reviews – workmanlike in the best sense. Full of little jewels too, like this: ‘[Beckett’s] devotion to Joyce was extreme. Joyce was proud of his small feet, and Beckett tried to make his own feet as small in homage. The over-tight shoes were not merely a homage; they were a mode of self-excruciation wholly in keeping with the Beckettian view of life as a place of pain.’

November 28 So here we go again! Omicron – possibly resistant to vaccines – has been detected in South Africa, and it’s spreading fast. God help us.

To the Boorondara Sporting Complex for the grand final of the football wheelchair league, which the Robert Rose Foundation sponsors. There was a big crowd to watch Collingwood win narrowly. 

Tim Byrne has just sent me a passionate tribute to Stephen Sondheim.

To the Astor for Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy. Apart from all its other qualities, the sight of Ingrid Bergman – svelte, majestic – moving through those galleries I long to revisit would be quite enough.  

November 29 Another busy day at Boyd. What a team. Andrew Fuhrmann has given us an excellent review of the musical Moulin Rouge. Never did I think to end up reviewing something like Moulin Rouge!

Home early for once, I sat in the park and read The Merchant of Venice. It’s such a complex, doom-laden, saturnine play, full of morosity yet rising to magnificent poetry from Portia and Lorenzo, culminating in Shylock’s abrupt departure in the fourth act and the sadistic teasing of Portia over the rings, which I never enjoy.

December 3 I knew the day would bring more bad news, but I hadn’t guessed it would take the form of a complete lockdown at the nursing home. One of the residents has tested positive. All staff and residents (all double vaccinated) are being tested. This means no visitors of course, for at least fourteen days. 

December 6 To Sydney for the week: my first visit since March 2020, unbelievably. I’m based at the Judith Neilson Institute’s splendid headquarters in Chippendale. 

December 15 C. is reading Præterita, brave man. I have never read Ruskin, Gig Ryan’s hero. Gig told me recently about a brilliant typo which found its way onto the cover of a book she was meant to be extolling. ‘Andrew Rutherford stamps Horace’s concerns as eternally ours’ became ‘internally ours’. I capped this with the time that Barrett Reid of Overland changed my (improbable) line ‘Because I never married a bronchial woman with bad taste’ to ‘Because I never married a bronchial woman with good taste’.

December 18 I made the mistake of seeing The Lost Daughter, a fascinating film with Olivia Colman. The subject – complex mothers – was not perhaps ideal. After that I needed a steadying Poltergeist martini.

December 19 Jurate Sasnaitis is back from Perth. We set off to Carlton and found a table at Ronnie di Stasio’s new pizzeria off Lygon Street (he was seated behind us, beaming, in the corner). Then we headed to a massed Vagabond reading at Princes Hill in a disused railway station. Vagabond was launching six collections. Philip Mead stood in for John Kinsella. We spoke to Philip later; he’s been stranded in Canberra for much of the year. 

December 25 Visited Mum at 11 am. Things were pretty chaotic in the foyer where the man before us had just tested positive with his rapid antigen test, which we are required to do before entering the facility. I pitied the poor young receptionist who was understandably in a state as she retested the man (now negative), got him off the property, and liaised with her manager, who was probably about to sit down to Christmas lunch.

My summer of Shakespeare continues: Macbeth this time. To complement it I took down a favourite Highsmith: The Cry of the Owl. I may review the edition of Highsmith’s diaries and notebooks.

December 28 When I visited Mum she was as wakeful as I have seen her in some time. I told her about the astonishing end to the Melbourne Test this morning. Australia took six wickets to bowl England out for sixty-five, thus retaining the Ashes. It was all over in two days and half a session – wonderful to behold. Scott Boland, the new Indigenous bowler, took six wickets in his four overs. Then I told Mum that the queen finally looked old in her Christmas message, despite her brilliant red dress. Mum wasn’t surprised. ‘She’s ninety-five, four months older than me.’ 

Then she said, apropos of nothing, that life had dealt me a bad hand. I demurred; she looked away. 

December 29 Victoria recorded almost 4,000 infections, NSW over 10,000. The nursing home notified us that visits are limited to one nominated person per family for the foreseeable future. 

December 30 The news from around the world is terrible. All sorts of records are being set. Modellers have suggested that Australia could have 100,000 cases a day by February. Everything is once again uncertain.

To the nursing home this afternoon. Mum was wakeful at first but the PM’s press conference soon put her to sleep.  

December 31 Delivered the summer issue to Readings. Bernard Caleo, who reviews two graphic books in the new issue, was behind the counter. We did a high five. 

Punctilious, newcomer Constant Mews has sent me his review of a book on the making of the Bible. How I love getting my hands on other people’s text. Onwards!