When I was in my mid-teens a group of my friends decided that we wanted to have our own Lunar Club. A friend Mark A. and I had both read Ben Franklins Autobiography and we liked the idea of getting together around a table and discussing weird and wonderful ideas. It was much easier then .. there was no Internet, so when you learnt things you actually had to trawl through information instead of just getting any old answer that popped up among the advertising. You did learn things then.

We used to sit around a large low round table at Meg’s house in Mosman smoking pot and sharing the beer her older brother had bought us. We used large sheets of butcher’s paper to nut out our trains of thought as white-boards hadn’t been invented yet, and keep us all on track .. which was also much easier then. We had longer spans of concentration; no mobile phones, no Home Affairs … Mark and I were both dictionary collectors even back then, a habit I’ve never been able to break. They were interesting and good times – much more open than today. We didn’t have such fears of courageous conversations and no punishment was held continually over one’s head just for thinking. Australia was, well, not a legislated democracy but the people were democratic and after all that is what makes a Democracy.

“Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being, in the peace of the people, with malice aforethought, either expressed or implied. The unlawful killing may be perpetrated by poisoning, striking, starving, drowning, stabbing, shooting, or by any other of the various means by which human nature may be overcome, and death thereby occasioned. Express malice is that deliberate intention unlawfully to take away the life of a fellow creature, which is manifested by external circumstances capable of proof. Malice shall be implied when no considerable provocation appears, or when all the circumstances of the killing show an abandoned and malignant heart.“

One of us would bring such snippets of information as this and we’d all work through the myriad of implications and hidden ideas within. Of course at times the snippet was pure foolishness – a passage of Lewis Carroll’s, the utterances of Eeyor the Donkey or Foghorn Leghorn – but our butcher’s paper kept us to the points and it would be amazing to the youth of today just what insights to humanity can be hidden in such things.

There were less serious things to worry about than we’re told there are today. We hadn’t such fears of each other, we hadn’t even contemplated such things as the privatisation of Welfare, or Society’s Security, we still belonged to the whole wide world and hadn’t begun to think of ourselves as an island whose only job was to spread pollution and fear across the boundless oceans … Ah, those were the days. The days of brave Ulysses.