As it happened, it was the imaginary world that broadened first, and in a very tangible sense. One family night at the movies—not our usual venue of the Empress, but instead the more prestigious Regent cinema in Toorak Road. The program began as usual with newsreels and then an extraordinary image appeared, a black and white view of some city street with cars and people bustling about only something had gone wrong and they were all remarkably skinny. Suddenly the image expanded dramatically to left and right for an amazing distance on this giant new screen and the people and cars filled out to their right proportions. I thought I was going mad.
    But they repeated the trick several times—a chubby aeroplane taking off transformed into the beautiful elongated grace of a Super Continental, a skinny deer feeding in a narrow field widened out into a full grown elk, a view of a deep narrow ravine stretched wide into the Grand Canyon. Miracles, right there before my eyes! It was called Cinemascope.
    That first wide-screen movie was The Robe, of which I remembered nothing except the accidentally hilarious scene at the end in which Richard Burton and Jean Simmons, having been condemned to death, march off upward to heaven. It was all full of that stuff of Sunday School, set in Churchland, and I refused on principle to be one little bit interested. Anyway, I was so busy being completely over-awed by the gigantic images on the screen that I paid no heed to their content whatsoever. It was the greatest thing I’d ever seen.
    It was based on a book by Lloyd C. Douglas which was possibly the last best-selling Christian novel ever, and certainly the most beautifully illustrated.