IF I AM to write the true history of the Circus, I must start by telling you how my girlfriend ran off with the silent clown. ‘Harpo!’ we called out to him across the border from South Australia, my loyal friends nursing my ego.

The drama had unfolded in Sydney, city of adventure, romance and tragedy, where the summer rain pelts down on the Moreton Bay figs and the sultry air breeds emotion. We lay in a bedroom in Newtown – not the three of us, but it may as well have been. I had come over from Adelaide to visit her, my newly touring circus girl, but on our first night as we lay there in the darkness it was clear that something, as they say in the movies, had changed forever.