AustLit

'It was an international conference on Masques and Masquing, a way to claim an overseas trip, or part thereof, from research funds or against tax. Everyone had a role, everyone was listed on the conference programme, a stiff powder blue production with deckle edges, a wedding invitation crossed with a menu for a Chinese restaurant. Even the people reading grace before meals got a credit. Convenors and chairpersons and responders and panellists, the raw material of a hundred and fifty curricula vitae, the raw material of a hundred and fi fty lives. At one point I’d backed out. I wrote and said I’d be quite happy to be a chairperson or panellist or something, I hadn’t realised about reading grace, but I’d like to withdraw my paper. But they seemed to have sufficient chairpersons and panellists and suchlike so they wouldn’t let me off the hook, ever so politely. So a hot summer writing a paper. And there I was in an undergraduate’s room emptied for the vacation, it was like being a freshman again, a new room, knowing no one, nothing to do except look out of the window till the bell tolled for dinner. Then the exquisite hell of communality, the risk of who you might fi nd yourself sitting next to, what silences or what terrors that might give rise to. It was palpable, the terrors were imprinted on the room, embedded in the ancient timbers, saturating the fabrics.' (Introduction)