Talking with another writer. Where are we? What is it we write? And where does it come from? No, what is this area we find ourselves approaching which hasn’t been named yet? What is Australian about it?

It’s the intensely personal, the intimate, its production. The production of the most personal sounding and realistic seeming work. When you read it do you really think I’m being personal? Do you feel like I do, that no matter how you try and sneak up on it or reveal it, your ‘self’, what you really are, is always elusive. What is this thing that I am. Is it elusive because it’s non-verbal or too complex? Is it the question we ask ourselves which is unanswerable and the means by which we’re controlled. That we’ve been led to think it’s a question when it’s just Life, like that song, That’s Life, that’s what all the people say. That question that religion and quasi-religion answers.

Capricorns are very suited to the drudgery of office life, that’s why they all put up with it and why I’m a whinger because I’m an aries with aquarius rising and pisces moon. I have no respect for rules. Not that I have no respect for them. I forget that they are there, because I’m so concerned about the self-imposed ethics I’m constantly striving to adhere to. The reason I’m a writer is because of the mercury/moon conjunction, so important in a writer’s horoscope. And on the other hand, although groups of people are so important to me, my conjunction of saturn, mars and pluto in leo, directly opposite the aquarius rising make me a constant, almost impervious and irresistible force for other people, one to be absorbed and reacted against violently, particularly for those neptunian individuals I attract who live out the weak side of my character I can never express, the pisces moon. Does this lay my character bare for you? It seems quite accurate but I still can’t make the connection. As though the train’s roaring past too fast for me to jump on. Or like the bus stop outside work where my bus, one of my two buses, never comes until I’ve waited for ten minutes at least. And I always feel, every afternoon, that everyone on the bus stop gets their bus before I get mine. I only live fifteen minutes walk from work but I find myself waiting fifteen minutes for the right bus, the one that goes about one hundred and fifty metres closer to home than all the others. Why do I do this? I do it when I feel too tired to walk. I stand on the bus stop in the heat or the cold or the wind, hating it, getting more exhausted by the minute. As well the bus fare seems expensive but relative to what? As well there are never any seats on my bus. It seems like an insoluble problem.