Today it's 25 years since I first came to Australia. I was thinking of working up a statement of what this might mean but somehow, in the event, the anniversary seems without any significance at all. Oh, well.

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Meanwhile, this amused me. It's from a review, in Overland, of Chronicle of the Unsung (2004):

Imagine W. G. Sebald turned vagabond hippy.

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I've always counted myself lucky that I didn't read Sebald until after I'd written The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont(1999), particularly the first section of that book. It meant I could recognise an affinity rather than fall under the spell of a (possibly overpowering) influence.

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It was The Rings of Saturn, still, in my opinion, the best of his books, that I read, in a Harvill edition translated by Michael Hulse, with a cover that is a detail of a Whistler painting: Harmony in Blue and Silver, Trouville. At first it seemed strange to me, that choice of cover image, but not any more.

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This book was published in 1998 but I don't remember when I bought it - 1999? 2000? - although I do remember where: at Clay's Bookshop in Potts Point. The German edition (1995), I found out recently, has a sub-title - English pilgrimage - omitted from the translation. I don't know why.

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It was raining hard, the City looked grey and unappealing. It kept on raining for two solid weeks while I squelched back and forth from the Springfield Lodge in Kings Cross to the Combined Services taxi depot in Glenmore Road, Paddington, learning how to do that.

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One day the sun came out and there, across the road from the hotel, was an old friend, Vic Filmer, sitting on a bench, talking to himself, as he is wont to do. I hadn't seen Vic for years. Come to thnk of it, I haven't seen Vic for years. I should give him a call.