AustLit

'Even to have imagined that the push, the world of the Libertarians, as they called themselves, was a site of the exotic seems, from this distance, something in which the search for the appropriate word can only fail. Absurd, bizarre, comic, daft, extraordinary, an alphabet of possibilities begins to assemble, though with no decision, no certainty, just indication of, if not fi rm deprecation, amused equivocation. And yet within the possibilities known to me, within what was perceived as available, at the time, and entirely without refl ection, neither forethought nor foreboding, it was new, sensual, exciting. If it now looks different what can I remark except to remove that ‘if.’ Certainly it now looks different. But at the time it provided its allures, pursued as they were in a haze of unconsciousness, unawareness, oblivion. How else could allures prove effective?' (Introduction)