Alister Kershaw was a member of the lively crew of poets, painters, musicians and marginal madcaps who made up Melbourne's artistic avant-garde in the Thirties and Forties. In this book he recalls some of the people he knew in those distant heydays.

Here are Albert Tucker and James Gleeson, who were savaged by Kershaw in a notorious satirical poem but who later became good friends of his. The youthful Max Harris is depicted with affectionate irony although his fellow publisher John Reed gets thoroughly roughed up, as does the Marxist critic Bernard Smith. Sir Sidney Nolan's admirers will be scandalised by Kershaw's disrespectful attitude, in marked contrast to his admiration for Adrian Lawlor - writer, painter and sublime eccentric.