AustLit

'I was reluctant to try share house living again; being thrown out of the Abercrombie Street house had affected me more deeply than I thought. My room in the Harold Park Hotel wasn’t a viable option either. It wasn’t the quality of the room that was the problem. When I first went to check the place out I’d braced myself for pub squalor, but to my surprise the room had been recently refurbished, in cheap synthetic everything, it was true, but at least it was clean and new. But apart from the bed there was hardly any furniture, not even a bar fridge, and even though the weather was mild, the milk I bought for my cereal – which I was just about living on – curdled overnight. Also, the pub was next to one of Sydney’s major racetracks, and it was impossible to study over the booming PA. I’d sit at the floor at the end of the single bed, surrounded by piles of library books on topics ranging from the cinema of Luis Buñuel to intermediate French grammar, unable to block out the voices of the race commentators. These delivered near stream-of-consciousness monologues that built to frenzied climaxes made up of the winning horses’ names – Sea Peony, Rusted Sunset, Achilles – manically repeated over and over again.' (Introduction)