I was there only for a few days in about April or May 1970. I remember that I felt for the first time that we had arrived in the West (we'd been backpacking across Asia). Istanbul felt like a western city, but I can't really put a finger on why it felt like that. Perhaps it was because we knew we'd set foot on European soil for the first time. The grand bazaar or whatever it is called, was an unpleasant experience. Men would come out of their shops into the narrow alleys, grab you by the arm and attempt to drag you into their carpet shop. I'd never encountered such behaviour before (nor have I since). I did buy a ring (long since lost). It had four interwoven strands in silver and was very popular among the backpacking fraternity at the time.

We took a ferry to a village where I was stunned by the beauty of the old wooden houses. The ferry dropped us in a cobbled square with large shade trees and benches, surrounded by these timber architectural masterpieces. All along the waterfront there were huge timber palazzi right on the water's edge. Pamuk recounts how frequently they burned down. I remember that the ferry went crab-wise across the current. I used to have a photo of my then partner, wearing the sheepskin coat he'd bought in Afghanistan, sitting in this boat crossing the Bosphorus.

Things of which I have no recollection whatsoever include where we stayed, the railway station where I know we took the train to Edirne and Bulgaria. I don't recall going to any of the famous mosques or the Haghia Sophia, though I do have a vague recollection of the famous Istanbul skyline which they dominated.

By the time we arrived in Istanbul, we'd been travelling by bus across Turkey for a couple of days. We'd stayed in a cheap, but unnerving hotel in Erzerum. They put us in a room with 10 beds - there was no choice and I was the only female in a room with 9 men, 5 of whom were total strangers and two more I'd known for only about a week. There was a shower in the bath down the hall (more of a labyrinth than a hall), but the bath was full of bricks, so not really usable. The bus dropped us there - obviously a deal the driver had with the hotel owner - and it was night, so we didn't have much incentive to go looking for another place to stay. Looking back on it, I think that as a female I simply wasn't supposed to be there.

One of our group (a friend with whom my partner and I had been travelling since we left home) was whipped across the back by a passing cart-driver as we left the bus to go into one of the roadside restaurants for lunch. The food was fantastic. I don't think I'd ever had such good food as in these cheap Turkish roadside eateries - but it was hard to find the same stuff in Istanbul. We must've gone from Erzerum to Istanbul in one day - I have a vague recollection of Ankara, of passing a bunch of concrete tower blocks.

The other night I was discussing the Italian south again with my two friends. One mentioned the time his father had purchased his first pair of trousers. This had occurred in about 1957 and the father (who was aged about 10) had been working, tending cows, for several years already. I was dumbfoundedly wondering what he'd worn before that, but it turns out it was only the first pair of newish, unpatched, second-hand trousers. They were white and were worn only on special occasions. He'd wanted to buy a hat with his savings, but they were insufficient, so it had to be trousers. Having met the man in question - he is now my age - I found it quite hard to believe that he was ever so poor.

Ship loads of people left that region in the 1950s, precisely because of that kind of poverty. They traded everything that was close and familiar for what might have been a truly ghastly life in a foreign country. From my own childhood I remember three such Italians. I have no idea where they came from (most likely Calabria). There were two brothers, Renzo and Taviano, who worked as farm labourers on a farm where my family used to stay during school holidays. I don't remember a lot about Renzo, who was married. But I remember his younger brother Taviano who wasn't. When I was about 16 Taviano drowned in the dam and I'm now wondering if it was suicide. Taviano must have been in his 20s when we first started going there, when I was about 5. For a decade he was just a wonderful guy that entertained us kids endlessly (there were 7 of us from 3 families - 2 girls and 5 boys). Looking back on it, I realize that he must have been desperately lonely stuck out there in the bush with no wife, no prospect of a wife and no kids except us - we only turned up during school holidays - and maybe Renzo's kids. I don't remember Renzo having any kids though (I should quiz my mother about that). My parents, I found out decades later, suspected Taviano of being a child molester. Because he apparently wanted to spend time with us kids. A similar suspicion was held against, the third Italian, a gardener that my parents hired from time to time. I used to traipse around the garden after him while he pruned fruit trees and actually bothered to talk to me (or probably I should say 'listen to me'). So they sacked him on suspicion of being a child molester. My only experience of actual would-be child molesters is that they were Anglo, one a friend of my parents and one a complete stranger.

Anyway, some time in the 1980s or '90s a lot of these immigrants from the '50s started to go home to retire. There, while they felt like fish out of water, having spent 30-40 years becoming Aussies, they found the life of their old friends and family transformed. In material terms the present population of the south don't live much better or worse than working class families in Australia. So unless you're one of the tiny minority who was actually able to turn the migration process into a gold mine, it's not at all clear that the massive personal trauma of the migration experience was worth it.

Young people tend to dream about a better future (well so do old people, but they tend to approach things a bit differently). Young people are more likely than old people to take risks, whether it's in politics or in starting up some amazing new technological wunder-widget business or walking to the south pole. The male of the species is particularly prone to this kind of adventure. And of course, in the small percentage of cases where it works out, the changes can be wonderful.

When I look at my own generation, we went through exactly this kind of radical risk-taking dream. I'm just now reading Eric Hobsbawm's autobiography and he did the same thing (though for him, being a teenager - and Jewish to boot - in late Weimar Germany, there was a great deal more at stake than anything facing the 1960s generation). I didn't think about it at the time, but I later realised that what really radicalized me was feminism. Even though the anti-war movement came first, it was the sheer feeling of oppression that I got from my parents' and the whole society's expectations of me as a female that motivated me from the guts rather than from a simply intellectual stance. Of course we were also the first generation that had enough financial independence to tell the parents where to get off (youth unemployment? what's that?). It was the age of Ageism that really began back then.

The radicalism of the 60s was, however, pretty much a failure. We played a minor role in helping to end the war in Vietnam, but couldn't stop the next one. Feminism made a few inroads, but a couple of decades later the same battles are being fought all over again (and the really big change that came about as far as women are concerned - the entry of women into the workforce - was not a result of feminist agitation at all). The civil rights movement in the US had successes, but 40 years later African Americans are still the victims of racial prejudice and most live near the bottom of the social scale. By the end of the '70s, or possibly earlier, the movement had dissipated - fractured into thousands of single issue campaigns all condemning each other for choosing the wrong issue. In fact the fracturing had already begun when feminists broke ranks with the male chauvinist pigs who ran the left back then, while for Hobsbawm's generation it had begun even earlier (in 1956) when the world Communist movement comprehensively lost its power to exercise leadership, even of itself, let alone the broader left. In my hometown, near the campus, there was an ironic graffiti commenting on this fracturing. It proclaimed the slogan "land rights for gay whales!" The '60s leaders went to work for the state, retired into a drug-induced stupor (occasionally both of the above), or began writing instead of revolting.

The lesson that most of us took out of the '60s and early '70s was that change is incremental and the power of the state is pretty overwhelming. Unlike Hobsbawm's earlier generation of communists, we'd had no plan to seize state power. We hadn't been interested in it and so it defeated us. People who remained activist after the 70s went one of two ways - they went into politics, with the idea that if you want to bring about incremental change you have to be in a place where you have the power to do it (i.e., from within the state apparatus), or they went into local or single-issue activism, with the idea that incremental change can come about only by building a grassroots movement in your one single area. Hillary Rodham clearly took the former path and she tried to make the point the other day that one can't succeed without the other: i.e., without the civil rights movement there wouldn't have been the popular backing for change, but without the president the legislation wouldn't have gotten through. I don't forget either, how much we hated and despised LBJ back then. He outraged our morality and was impossibly compromised by the war. At the same time, Johnson, far more than Kennedy, had gone into office with a vision for change (the 'Great Society') that was totally undermined by the war that Kennedy had basically started. (Such are the rewards of power in America: the president who loses the war loses the country.) For some incomprehensible reason, it is Kennedy who is remembered as the visionary.

Obama has obviously now drawn the same lesson - grassroots movements don't bring about change until the legislature and/or executive are moved to do something about it. So he has decided to get his hands dirty in the dirtiest political scene in the world (possibly excepting Italy). What is he going to do when he gets there? I don't know and neither does anybody else - the only clue is that he has a gang of W. Clinton advisers which should augur well for a new brand of clean politics shouldn't it? Anyway he's getting there by weaving himself into the dreams, that all Americans to the left of centre have, of a better system. He's especially weaving himself into the dreams of the young and the African-Americans for a radical kind of change. I'm sure he believes and is very sincere about his own spin, but that's basically what it is - fine, oratorical spin. And where he does have policies, they are not much likely to produce change in the system. H. Clinton, on the other hand, has been mired in the stink for decades and there's no way she can spin her way out of it. She knows she has to get out of Iraq and, if she wants a second term she'll have to do it early (the president who loses the war loses the country). She knows she has somehow to restore the prospects of millions of working people whose lives have been wrecked by the Bush regime (with the capable assistance of Greenspan/Bernanke) in the middle of a situation where the US is gradually losing its economic clout (much harder to succeed on this one). She is predictable. There won't be any grand gestures, and there won't be any risk taking. Paradoxically, though, I think she offers more real hope for the truly downtrodden than the dream weaver does. Maybe I'm wrong - and I hope I am because Obama could win this nomination. Maybe he knows more about the stinky stuff than he's letting on. Or maybe he'll be one of that small percentage of high risk players who makes it. The last time we got a 'nice' person for president it was Jimmy Carter (though I will admit that Obama is smarter than Carter).

I'm old. I lost my idealism amidst the wash-up of the '60s and early '70s. I remain unmoved by 'hope', 'inspiration' and 'change', however sincerely expressed. I will feel very sad if Hillary loses, not for her, but for my generation - because it will be just another nail in the coffin of the old dreams. If Obama wins, I'll be crossing my fingers (without great expectations) for the dreams of the next generation.

Today the clan is celebrating (but that could be the wrong word) its 150th anniversary of arriving in this country. They have gathered in Adelaide where the original ancestor was first Clerk of the House (the state House of Assembly). I pleaded too much pressure of work, which is true, but won't have gone down too well, especially since they probably know that I didn't want to participate.

My brother was given the task of organizing it and making a speech about the history of the ancestors. He has sent me several emails about the struggles he has had with various uncles (or maybe cousins) as well as my father. Well, he never got on too well with dad and has decided there is only one uncle/cousin he actually likes. He feuded bitterly with another uncle who insisted on excluding one whole branch of the clan from the invitation list, mainly, it seems, because they're descended from somebody's daughter and therefore don't share the family name. This rule apparently doesn't apply to descendants of other people's daughters - one of whom, a male of course, was even allowed onto the organizing committee. My brother and father also had a row over dad's war service (something to do with the war ending before he could get himself sent overseas).

I must ask my brother if he mentioned the story I told him, namely, that this illustrious Clerk ancestor was also a serious alcoholic. I learned this many years ago from a colleague in History who was researching the early state parliament. Not that it probably mattered much when just about every white man in the colony was drinking themselves into a stupor.

None of this means that my mother's family was any less fucked up, but at least they forgot their 150th altogether.

Been in Phnom Penh in the midst of a coup d'etat (March 1970).

Rode buses across Afghanistan.

Had to be rescued after getting lost in the Australian bush.

Had my photo on the front page of Nhan Dan.

Stood in the street to wave to Fidel Castro (the bastard didn't even look at me!).

Had an interview with Hun Sen.

Ridden a motorbike on a dirt track through the jungle in Cambodia.

Won four gold medals at the state swimming championships as a teenager.

Stood in a field of opium poppies.

Met Yevgeny Yevtushenko.