AustLit

'Ozzie Cambridge certainly had a lot of books. Even when he first appeared on the scene. Later he would call it his obsession, this collecting. But when he fi rst appeared it was more a young man’s hurry to be an authority, to acquire the weight and bulk necessary to occupy the role. How he got the role was not at all clear to me. This was another of the eternal mysteries never revealed. In a general sense an explanation could be offered, but the specifics were shrouded, as always. In previous eras you had a patron who placed you in position. And in Ozzie’s case there was a university person who had spotted him as a student, not that the university person was of much weight himself nor that the position was much of a position, a little magazine, one rift with plots and coups, and Ozzie was brought along. Not that he wrote anything, neither stories nor poems. But he came into that world of the editors, the review editors, deciding what went in or more important, what didn’t, and assembling the beginnings of a magnificent library of hard backed review copies. It was part of a network, these people who were around the magazine and around the university and around the pub, all comparatively young, few of them, looking back on it, actually producing very much, but getting themselves onto committees and editorial boards and film funds and adult education programmes, yes, these were the early years of networking before the term was coined, the actuality achieved before the word.' (Introduction)