hen you shall see the abomination of desolation, which was spoken of by Daniel the Prophet, standing in the holy place (he that readeth, let him understand)...

These words, like most of the words of my religion, had many meanings. Whenever I heard these words as a child, I was standing myself in the holy place: in a large weatherboard church in McCrae Street, Bendigo; or in a tiny church with poles propping its walls on the continuation inland of the Great Ocean Road at Nirranda; or in the fibro-cement and weatherboard church-school in Landells Road, Pascoe Vale. I was standing in the holy place and hearing the words, but I had my missal open in my hands – I was also reading. I was he who reads: he who was commanded to understand.

Around me in the church, hundreds of other people – children and adults – were reading the same words that I was reading. Yet I had no doubt that I was the one commanded to understand; I was of all those readers the true reader.

I was the true reader because I had always known that everything I read was true. If it was not true in the district between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri, or wherever I happened to be standing or sitting when I read, still it was true in some district elsewhere.

When I had read those words in weatherboard churches or in the fibro-cement and weatherboard church-school, I had understood that all the districts of the world would one day be destroyed. At some time before the end, the people of all the districts of the world would flee from their homes; they would flee with their few sticks of furniture and their rags of clothes, but they would not escape. The people of every district would suffer, and the females would suffer worst. Then, while the people were still fleeing, they would see Jesus himself: the person who had first spoken the words that had later been written by Matthew. The people trying to escape would see, towards the end, the true speaker of the words they had once read, coming in the clouds of heaven with much power and majesty.

Whenever I had read the gospel for the last Sunday after Pentecost I had seen a sky darkening, men and their wives and children fleeing, and then the grey clouds of heaven drifting towards the people. But without lifting my eyes from the page, I knew that the sky was mostly blue over the district where I was standing; I knew that men were pushing lawnmowers across their backyards and women were opening the doors of ovens and then pouring cups of water into baking-dishes where legs of lamb or rolls of beef were roasting. I knew that these men and women saw no clouds drifting towards them. (Inland)