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Living in the inner suburbs of Sydney, it is easy to become blasé about homosexuality. Gay men are everywhere: streets, cafés, shops, neighbouring houses, dog parks, and gyms. I live near Surry Hills Shopping Centre, an otherwise unspectacular mini-mall. Early evening, however, the supermarket aisles are choked with well-groomed gay men making a show of checking out the produce. I have to confess, after the initial voyeuristic delight, I have come to find this concentration of gay men tiresome. The tanned skin, the razor sharp hair-styles, the muscles, the tattoos and, most annoyingly, the ubiquitous army pants – they blur into a crowd of cosmopolitan conformity. As I crankily push around the shopping cart, clad in my shapeless tracksuit pants and wine-stained T-shirt, I have to suppress the desire to run down the odd unsuspecting homosexual, dangerously separated from his pack.

It is now thirty years since James McAuley died, and more has been written about him in that time than about any other Australian poet. Poets are not usually of great biographical importance unless they are also caught up in historical and political events, or are a kind of phenomenon like Byron or Rimbaud. McAuley was not a man of action, but he was associated with a number of events which were significant in Australian development and culture; and a large, some would say inordinate, part of his life and energy went into politics and polemics. He became something of a public figure, and, as he himself recognised, the lives of such figures quickly become public property. Any book about him is bound to be of interest.

For almost half of the twentieth century, train passengers travelling into Sydney from the western suburbs and beyond could observe a large sign, painted in drop-shadow lettering, on the vast blank brick wall of an industrial building facing the tracks between Redfern and Central. It carried the message: TEAGUE’S HAMBURGER ROLLS – WHAT YOU EAT TODAY, WALKS AND TALKS TOMORROW.