But my father incorrectly registered me under the name Thomas Michael. At home and in the world my mother and father called me Michael. It suited my nature to have an untouched and unsuspected legal first name in reserve, though two-named possibilities did not tease me at that stage nor need delay us here. For this is not an exhaustive tale of boyhood but of the one reckless, sweet, divinely hectic and subtly hormonal year. That is, in my case, 1952. It seems to outweigh the other years, to be the most succulent and the most dangerous. Its consequences, lightly embarked on, have not to this day ceased to tease, govern and turn on me. At sixteen, I was in the business of defying gravity in an unlikely place called Homebush. I think it might have been named this because it had once been a tangle of scrub not much more than fifteen miles west of Sydney and encountered by nineteenth-century colonial gentry as they rode west or came up the Parramatta River to their country homes in Strathfield.
