David Malouf died this week. I feel at a loss. Of course, I didn’t know him. But he’s always been there, in a way. Twenty years ago, when I was in year eleven, my English teacher set Fly Away Peter as a novel we had to read. He, my English teacher, was a prolific reader, and strode each week into class with a different novel in hand, reading while we were working, paying casual attention to his wards while he placed himself in the pages. He said, when we started reading and studying the book, that it was his favourite of all. High praise from someone so well read.

I didn’t read it. I didn’t read anything set in any English class in any year, save Amadeus because that was about Mozart. But I remember the languid beginning of the protagonist — whose name I can’t recall; is it Peter? — watching a plane fly lazily on the horizon. I remember it was about war, and I remember the teacher speaking really ferociously, if that’s the right word, about the war and the experience of soldiers in the war. I remember calling him, the author, Peter Malouf, and the novel Fly Away David, to make my friends laugh. I was very funny.

I moved to Brisbane after school. It had always been exciting to me, as a city. It had always seemed foreign. It felt sophisticated, like it had roots that had spread into the earth it sat on, unlike the Gold Coast, which was flimsy weed grass with roots shallower than its sandy topsoil. Brisbane was the city of Malouf, I remembered, and it felt that, especially in West End, he was there, in the same way that I imagine the devout of Milan feel about Saint Ambrose — that the city is just an extension of the person; that the city is his legacy, in a way.

When I went to study in Italy, I visited Tuscany, and I remembered my English teacher telling us that David Malouf lived in some town in the Tuscan hills, writing his novels longhand in notebooks, and he was called by the locals ‘il professore’. It sounded to me exaggerated (it wasn’t), and yet, there he was, in mind as I climbed, slowly, into the steep hills around Carrara.

Years later I read Finding Babylon. It’s extraordinary. And, later still, part of 13 Edmonstone Street. He gave Queensland a poetry I had not associated with the state; he did the same to Brisbane. His writing sanctified the state and the city, like Janet Frame’s had Otago and Dunedin. These out-of-the-way places, these cities where literature and art sprouts feebly from the dry earth, had these people who can write sentences — real sentences. Sentences that make you sigh, sentences that you have to read aloud just for the feeling of them passing your lips, that make you feel like you have missed the beauty of things in the everyday of the city that you live in.

Maybe I’m overblowing it. But I’m sad he’s gone. I was sad when Seamus Heaney went because I felt like those alive to of beauty are rare. I felt like this when my English teacher passed away suddenly, too. Like I should have made more of them when they were still around. It’s a strange regret. Malouf wouldn’t have cared if I’d have not read his books, or hadn’t have emailed him. But it feels like Brisbane is at a loss. A couple of years ago, I went to 13 Edmonstone Street to see what was there – just the most banal, squat, steel-and-glass horror. The same sort of dreadfully building that you find in any Australian city: completely timeless, completely anonymous. And yet it feels even moreso, for the loss of the memory of what was once there – like the city is thinner, like it is less foreign, less than it was.