Tony Birch

We had a huge pile of comics at home.

And every night after tea, the kids, and even I think my mum and dad, we would read comics religiously.

And when we'd read them to the point where we knew every comic, every story, we would take our pile of comics around to Brunswick Street to a place called the Book Depot.

So there was, I think, a whole series of these across Melbourne called the Melbourne Book Depot.

and you could take your, say, 50 comics in to the bookshop and you could exchange them for 25 comics, so like a two-for-one.

So you might get 25 comics for free and you might get 25 comics and buy another 25 comics and have the original 50.

So we were always recycling our comics.

We always had a very large supply of comics and they were probably, until I joined a library...

it would have been the only form of reading that I did was to read comics.

And certainly at home, the only form of reading we had were comics and newspapers.

The Sporting Globe, my dad religiously read the Sporting Globe.

So we didn't read books.

Comics were a key to our sort of literary education.

It's pretty complex.

I mean, at a simple level, it might seem odd.

Being a young kid at some level, it was incredibly adventurous.

By that, I mean that we moved out of Fitzroy at the end of 1966, and just after that, they started to build what is known as the Affidavit Gardens Estate, which is that high-rise estate off Gertrude and Brunswick Street.

So it actually took the Housing Commission about seven years to acquire, in the old measurement, about 13 acres that comprised that estate.

So what that meant for a kid growing up is that there were always empty houses around you.

There were always houses around you that were being demolished.