There were not 567 agents and 5,345 editors who imagined, rightly or wrongly, that their lives depended on discovering my unknown self, running me to ground at my Olivetti Lettera 24, breaking me through, publishing me too early, and losing interest when my second book did not fulfill the quirky promise of the first. There was no one to network with or suck up to. Writing after work at the kitchen table, I was risking nothing except my sentences. Melbourne was ideal-there was something almost pure in writing literature in a time and place where you never expected to make a dime, something glorious and futile in attempting to make Australian literature when, as everybody in London knew, Australian literature did not exist.

Of this splendid city, Ava Gardner is reputed to have said, “If the world needed an enema, Melbourne would be the place to give it.” Many of us who came to live in Melbourne thought she maybe had a point. As a 64-year-old New Yorker, I still carry the Marshian world inside my head, a world where you never expected to be published outside your own backyard, where $10 was what you were paid for a story in a magazine. I am a Marshian, from Bacchus Marsh, Australia, a place where the commonly accepted rules of alternate-side parking and literary publishing have never applied. Photo: From left, Stuart O’Sullivan/Orchard by Getty Images for New York Magazine courtesy of Peter Carey

Peter Carey in his home in New York, and in Australia, 1976.

Brave writer katch