Beyond the Equator: An Australian Memoir

Description

‘I see traces in my past that point to what the world has now become.’

Like many young Australians in the 1960s Nick Hasluck set sail for London, in his case for a post-graduate law degree, but looking also for new horizons and ways to be a writer. From a seedy room at the International Language Club he explored the ‘Kangaroo Valley’ party scene around Earl’s Court – until he met a girl from the Cotswolds who was to change his life, a romance leading to misadventures in Europe and eventually to a job in Fleet Street.

Britain was opening up to him in unexpected ways. He recalls combative speakers at the Oxford Union – Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Tariq Ali – and luminaries in other places such as Menzies, Profumo, Field Marshal Slim and the controversial jurists, Hailsham and Denning. Along the way, Hasluck writes skilfully of becoming a lawyer, then a Judge, and also a well-known novelist.

In this eloquent memoir the mind of the lawyer is constantly enriched by the style of the writer. To a lively storyteller the world beyond the equator is still the miracle it always was.