Michael McGirr

Most of us were taught at school to understand the difference between discovery and invention. Both words imply finding, but discovery meant finding something that already existed ‘out there’ in the concrete world; inventions were found in the imagination. Explorers discovered; scientists invented.

This is a book about pain. In December 1999, Arthur Reilly was diagnosed with life-threatening cancer. The methods of relief offered to him, principally morphine, had drastic side-effects which undermined what pleasure he might have found in living. For four months, he lost weight and showed little interest in his usual activities. He became depressed and contemplated suicide.

It wasn’t long before myths and legends grew up around the story of St Francis of Assisi. James Cowan is right to suggest that this process began before Francis died and that Francis himself allowed or willed it to happen. He may even have encouraged it: ‘Francis endeavoured to make a metaphor out of his own life.’

Antarctica feeds the Australian imagination. The two continents are mirror images of each other: dry and largely barren, both managed to elude European description for longer than just about anywhere else. They are yin and yang; hot and cold.

In the sixteenth century a Swiss physician and alchemist by the name of Paracelsus claimed that everything was potentially poisonous, as long as you took enough of it: ‘the right dose differentiates a poison and a remedy.’ There is plenty of evidence to support this point of view. Legal claims for damages caused by asbestos and passive smoking are reminders that what may be a safe environment for some can be toxic for others. Indeed, one of the most common forms of contemporary poisoning is known as an ‘overdose’. The substance was fine. The amount was wrong.

I wouldn’t have minded being a fly on the wall when Valerie Wilson did the research for this book. It began life as a PhD project in the University of Melbourne’s Business School. Wilson wanted to find out what underlying attitude people had to money. She should have asked me. I love the stuff. Just don’t see enough of it.

About ten years ago, the British writer, Paul Johnson, published a book called Intellectuals. He had evidently formed a low impression of the species. If you look up ‘intellectual’ in the index you won’t find a list of learned personalities, nor of publications, nor of universities or academic societies. Instead you’ll find references to aggressiveness, violence, cowardice, cruelty, dishonesty, egoism, hypocrisy, vanity, snobbery, intolerance, self-pity and so on. If you think the index is nasty, wait till you try the book.

It was during the writers’ week of the Adelaide Festival in 1992 that I first heard the so-called Australian sense of humour described as ‘Slavic’. This intrigued me at the time; now it troubles me. That week in March 1992 turned out to be the one during which sharp lines were finally drawn in Sarajevo and the attack on Bosanski Brod signalled the outbreak of war in Bosnia. Although it is difficult to weigh the significance of such events to take much notice, the least you can say is that it was a bad week for the whole idea of nationalism.

Some time ago, I was curious about steam cars and found an advertisement, dating from the 1920s, for the sole Victorian distributor of the Stanley Steamer. The address was Flinders Lane, the street in Melbourne which exudes more personality than most of the others combined. I discovered that the building in question had been turned into a printshop. But its origins as a motor garage were obvious. Such unprepossessing buildings as service stations survive more by good luck and stubbornness than by design. So I was strangely impressed. All the more so because Flinders Lane now boasts a boutique hotel with a swimming pool that overhangs the street. You can paddle out and look down on the traffic swimming below you like the lost city of Atlantis.