In the early seventies, the rock band Skyhooks asked ‘Whatever happened to the revolution?’ They answered themselves in the next line: ‘We all got stoned and it drifted away.’

Back in the early seventies it seemed that the rebellion of the sixties had resulted in something concrete. Whitlam was in power, the army had been withdrawn from Vietnam, the Australia Council had been established ... It was a good time to get stoned and watch things drift away, and that is precisely what a number of the main characters in Alan Wearne’s verse novel The Nightmarkets seem to have done.