A Spasmodic Career Concealing a Master Plan

I had decided from a very young age to live my life in seven year cycles. I preferred approaching the meaning of my life analogically rather than digitally, just adding the years was too mechanical. On reaching the age of thirty-five I assumed I would have accumulated enough experience by reading promiscuously, backpacking in the USA, Europe and the Middle East and living in England, Canada, Iran and Australia, to have absorbed enough to cease being a voyeur and could “come out” like a débutante and join in the games of intellectual and political “one-upmanship”.

 

In 1967, to the surprise of those who knew me at this point in my life, I gave up a flourishing career as the university’s “commissar” of cultural events in Western Australia to move to the University of NSW in Sydney to become the first qualified academic lecturer in Australia in the mushrooming new field of sociology. I was not quite sure where my new action role would take me, but whatever it was it must culminate when I entered the final of the seven year cycles.