As Freud said, a normally functioning adult has to get two things right: Love and Work. My memoirs recount my stumbling along those two roads. An academic's life story mightn't seem very entertaining, but I lived in interesting times, my career spanning the rise and fall of Australian universities.

Not that I'm fretting about a lost Golden Age of academe – I had plenty to complain about in the pre-corporate universities. Not about the institutions themselves so much as some of the eccentrics who populated them – many of whom are now dead, which helps when you are writing your memoirs as accurately as you can. The working title is ‘Sky Goose', which is the Cantonese word for ‘swan' (tin ngor). I chose that because it was in Hong Kong that this goose took to the skies, a swan. Love and Work were as right as they were likely to be in his life.

CYMRU AM BYTH! WALES FOR EVER! I ARRIVE AT NEWCASTLE UNI

Part of my memoirs have been incorporated in a rather larger enterprise. My great-great grandfather Abraham Biggs arrived in Hobart Town in 1833, with his wife Eliza and six children, and thereafter they produced seven more. Abraham was a hell-fire and brimstone Methodist lay preacher who sought, at Lt. Governor George Arthur's request, to wean the convicts from the demon drink with the Mighty Hammer of God's Word (it didn't work). Abraham begat Alfred who begat Walter who begat Oscar who begat me, the last of this Tasmanian line.

My Forefather Abraham and His Seed is well on the way. This is not just a family history; I embed the stories of each of the afore-mentioned in the socio-political context of the Tasmania in which each lived. I discover that Arthur's Van Diemen's Land and Lennon's Tasmania have more than a little in common.

A DIVINE CURE FOR DRUNKENNESS SORTING OUT ALFRED