Brunel Street.

It is the year of Star Wars and Saturday Night Fever, and because I am busy with studying and working and finding somewhere to live, I miss the two blockbusters, and never, ever see them. It is also the year of Annie Hall, and I do see it, but not in that year. It is 1977.

My first landlord is one of several Georges. Rentals in the inner north-western suburbs are often owned by Greek immigrants, but this George is a short Sicilian; his only Greekness being a comical Thalia face. Having seen a classified ad in the Saturday Age, I push open the angled glass door of Abbot and Dean, Real Estate Agents and Property Managers, in Rose Street on the Monday morning and sign a twelve-month lease. That squiggle decides it: I'm leaving home, bye-bye: age nineteen.

The bungalow is a board-and-batten square with soft green panels enframed in white timber below a raked roof, crouching in semi-seclusion amongst trees in the back yard of a house on a sloping corner block at the river end of Aberfeldie. Leaf-obscured, it looks like a scaled-down rustic farmhouse, and is reached via its own private driveway from the bottom of the block.

When I enter the bungalow for the first time, dappled sunlight comes in with me. It is a start, and although I do not know it, it might never be bettered. As I grapple with time's unravelling knots, and trans-exist through other abodes seemingly all owned by various Georges, that first Arcadian flat, be it ever so clichéd, refuses to dislodge itself as my own benchmark for a place in which to live: must have north or west sun; must have shade in summer; must be quiet and peaceful; must have properly working doors and windows in good repair that do not slam, jam or stick; must be clean and show no evidence of prior tenants' activities of any sort; must carry the memories that I manufacture in its environs into the future; must be surrounded (as well as the trees) by dappled lawn on which an infant can creep among red and brown leaves beneath the shushing canopies from which they fall. In other words, impossible. But thanks to George and his grinning visage, not impossible this first time.

Faux-mystical and unrealistic demands aside, I have taken care of practicalities. There is a kerosene heater and crockery and a washing machine. A clothesline twirls in the yard, away from the trees. At one end of the living room I have fashioned lilac silhouette bricks and pine boards into bookshelves which, where insufficient books stretch its length, hold punctuating bottle-green Décor plastic pots of trailing ivy or pin-cushion cacti. 

The child and his mother arrive a few weeks later; the former on Earth and the latter from her family home a mile away on the hill below Essendon station. Life begins, in several new ways.