M y grandfather, Spencer Lowe, was a rather truculent character by all accounts well-versed in all the usual Edwardian chauvanisms. If it wasn’t a Catholic conspiracy it was a Jewish one. If not the children of Abraham, then it was something branded in the Asiatic mind that compelled the poor devils to tunnel under the very foundations of the Australian way. Etc etc. I never met the man, thus the avatar-like quality that will have to suffice until we delve deeper together. This is, after all, an essay/memoir, not a novel where character often hinges on prior (read authorial) knowledge. In his sole surviving diary, from a year that resonates with us now for all the wrong reasons, 1919, I seem to discern a restless inquiring mind contrapuntal as the age, a bright young man finding his way in a large forbidding, plague-bound city. Towards a singular enterprise and an enduring love. My grandfather, it hardly needs be mentioned, hailed from a generation that had witnessed first hand the d