from a manuscript that varies from woeful to interesting, but didn't win the Vogel Prize.

My Dad was too old to fight in the Vietnam war, and I was too young. Well, he could have gone, technically, but by then there was us - I turned two on March 16, 1968, the day the Americans were shooting two-year-old boys at My Lai.

(On my desk there are two black-and-white photographs side by side: me wearing a silver party hat with a strap of elastic cutting into my chubby cheeks, grinning at a huge cake in the shape of a clown's face in the centre of a table heaped with sausage rolls, cupcakes and tall jugs of lemonade, lit by the glow of a circle of candles; a road in Vietnam blocked by a pile of bodies of which about half are women, about half are babies and toddlers, and they are so closely piled together that it's hard to tell what arms and legs go with what. At the top of the photograph, further down the road, is a child, maybe two, who is either wearing a long-sleeved top or covered with dark blood - you can't tell - with long naked legs stretched out across the sand behind him.)

Dad’s Dad had gone to sea in the second world war, despite a lifetime tendency to motion sickness; Pop vomited his way across the Indian Ocean and back for King and Country

Dad didn't go to war; he fought his own battle for Australia in the billing department of the Postmaster General against inefficiencies, in the garden of 34 Clarke Street, Glen Waverley against couch grass, and, with his brothers, he struggled to build a Good Life for our families in our backyards, in the form of brick-paving patios and barbecue pits.