and a few more

What was I doing at the time? In 1978 I had entered into a screenwriting partnership with Terry Larsen (who had written the script for Michael Thornhill’s movie The FJ Holden). We worked all through this period until I started teaching in 1983. Screenwriting was a weird experience: working at subsistence level for producers who would jet off for the States or Europe at a moment’s notice. Over the period we made a living, more or less, through the odd film grant or production deal though in the end nothing we worked on together would ever become a movie. Still, it was a useful experience. Without it I might not have been able to structure a long work. In 1979 I started work at the WEA Library with Librarian Barbara Brooks and worked there part-time for eighteen months or so. In between gigs I was funded by the poor person’s Literature Board (a.k.a. Social Security). Then in late 1983 I worked for a semester at what was then the Canberra College of Advanced Education (subsequently the University of Canberra) as a lecturer in Media Studies (I had previously taught Media, in 1976, at Swinburne, home of Australia’s first media theory course). After that position I advanced in the world to be the cleaner at Gleebooks, a position I held until late 1985, broken by a few months when a Victorian government grant sent me off to Gippsland to research The Ash Range.