I was sitting under the shading boughs of an old fig tree that grew in the quadrangle of Moorabbin Tech, sheltering from the intensifying heat of the mid‑November sun. There was no one else around, for all of the other students and teachers were rightfully attending their classes of the prelunch period. I was alone there with my thoughts, but I can tell you that those thoughts were not of a sort likely to alter the course of human history. Mostly they were vague and distracted, hazy things—fantasies of television heroes rushing to rescue me from my present predicament, dreams of nuclear attack destroying the school before I had to face the music, hopes of miracles. I could not have known that one of the last‑mentioned events was just about to happen.

Gregory Samsa woke from uneasy dreams one morning to find himself changed into a giant bug. He was lying on his back, which was of a shell-like hardness, and when he lifted his head a little he could see his dome-shaped brown belly, banded with what looked like reinforcing arches, on top of which his quilt, while threatening to slip off completely at any moment, still maintained a precarious hold. His many legs, pitifully thin in relation to the rest of him, threshed ineffectually before his eyes.
‘What’s happened to me?’ he thought. This was no dream. His room, a normal human room except that it was rather too small, lay peacefully between the four familiar walls.
Gregory’s gaze shifted to the window, and the murky weather-raindrops beat audibly on the zinc windowsill   made him feel quite melancholy. ‘Why don’t I go back to sleep for a bit and forget all the fooling about?’ he thought, but this was impossible: he liked to sleep on his right side, and in his present state he was unable to assume that position. Try as he might to throw himself over to the right, he always rocked back into his previous position. He must have made a hundred attempts; he shut his eyes to keep out the sight of all those toiling legs; and he gave up only when he became aware of a faint, dull ache in his side of a kind he had never felt before.
    Kafka’s Metamorphosis is a great yarn, better than any of his other stories by a long chalk. Back in 1961, it was on the school curriculum and I had previously read it—the sad tale of a man turned into an insect. My imagination did the rest. For it was said that I was responsible for the death of the Tech Drag teacher. But I blame Kafka.
    It is often said that Kafka died before he was famous (or became famous because he was dead) but it isn’t so. Only his three novels and one volume of stories were published posthumously—he published several volumes of stories that were very successful. That was why Max Brod knew he was on a winner when he defied Kafka’s dying wish to destroy his unpublished works.