‘Old radicals become quietist’ a character in Valley of the Weed tells Plant, the appropriately-named private detective investigating the disappearance of a high-profile academic. ‘They stop socialising. Stay at home and surrender to the comforting millenarian conviction that change will come, but in its own time.’ One who has not surrendered is Michael Wilding, ex-vanguardist of Australia’s 1970s ‘new writing’, a post-modernist before the term existed, but now through force of events transmuting unwillingly into a kind of cultural conservative.