For at least the next fortnight Eastman, 68, hopes first for privacy and some rest and recuperation. He had originally hoped for a short trip abroad, in a familiar but long-ago environment, away from people who might recognise him, people who might bait him and people who might incite others to violence against him. He's hardly paranoid in thinking there are people in the real world who want to do him violence.

But a disengagement from the immediate environment is, for the moment at least, prevented by the terms of his bail. He will still have his head down, if forced to be circumspect about how he wanders in freedom for the first time in 19 years.

It will be after a complete holiday and escape from his torments that he again focuses on the possibility of a new trial, which seems unlikely; questions of compensation; and efforts to call to account some of those he sees as responsible for a serious miscarriage of justice. That account is not primarily revenge but a desire to prevent other miscarriages of justice, because he is convinced that little has been learnt by police or prosecutors from the affair.

If he is angry, uninclined to forgive, forget or understand, it is a long time since he has seemed fuelled by a great rage, and delivered bluster, abuse and extravagant threats. In the years up to his incarceration, that verbal violence was visited on hundreds of people in Canberra, and was often doubly frightening, because Eastman, once he got your number, did not hesitate to call again and again, often more angry and irrationally abusive as it continued.

He intimidated with words, and, sometimes, with physical threats. Many people reported them to police, who responded with criminal charges of making threats - these charges fell into abeyance after he was convicted of murder. Yet many others, including myself, thought his tirades tiresome and tedious - and in respect of abuse directed to my wife and child - unforgivable, but never actually feared he would do anything, other than do it again. If Eastman really meant violence to a thousandth of the people he threatened 25 years ago, Canberra would have resembled the end of the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

Eastman was pushed from the public service in the late 1970s when a paranoid mental condition, which may have been congenital, became manifest. Even before this happened, his brilliance had been admired, but his difficulties in interacting with people had been obvious. He had a sharp tongue and problems with maintaining friendships, particularly with women. He was shy and a loner, but one who pushed himself into interests, activities, languages and reading so as to meet people and talk. Mostly he was perfectly mannered and pleasant, if, I am told, somewhat slow to read signals and body language.

He has a first-rate brain and breadth of interests, and, as a self-taught lawyer through his troubles in the Winchester case, was often able to run rings around some of the best advocates in the land. That he was so lucid has made many insist that he has always been perfectly sane, only pretending mental problems as part of a tactic.

Even when his condition, whatever it was, seemed most florid, he was a person of careful logic and judgment on almost any topic other than himself and his own interests. It was not so much a lack of insight or even of capacity to recognise how others might see him, but a complete incapacity to weigh competing interests or concerns against others. This lack of balance, tendency to make mountains out of molehills and to be distracted by minor irritants has been responsible for repeated forensic suicide including arguments with his own lawyers, whose professional opinions he has rated no more highly than his own, judges and others. If he's been faking that for the 30 or so years I have known him, he's a fabulous actor.

He had even more problems adapting and fitting in in jail, particularly at first. Both warders and other prisoners disliked his prickly manner, insistence on his rights and unwillingness to let any matter pass.

He was frequently threatened, and not a few prison warders and jail officials made it clear they would not protect him, sometimes indeed, joining prisoners in taunting him. He was shoved and pushed and had property taken from him. Bullies note what gets a reaction, and, strangely, a good many of the taunts, of a sexual nature, resembled those made earlier by close-surveillance detectives, men with connections in the prison system.

In his early years in jail, his mental condition deteriorated and he was suicidal and sometimes in prison hospitals. Authorities moved him from prison to prison because of, they claimed, problems of fitting him in, and also, of sharing the burden he was said to represent.

In due course, he settled at least to a point where he was managing an enormous range of litigation against his conviction, as well as doing everything he could to keep in touch with current events.

Mostly he was among a category of prisoners thought at risk from other prisoners, but, generally, he developed a modus vivendi by which he was less the focus of attention. He was never a model prisoner and was always regarded as difficult because he did not hesitate to complain, but it was not he who was at the bottom of any misbehaviour. In more recent times, some prison officials have even been kind and friendly.

Prison has little room for intellectuals of middle-class background, and it is a reproach to both the NSW and the much-vaunted ACT prison system that it was never able to find work suited to his skills or adopt any sort of program for rehabilitation, or reintegration with the community. He did some literacy teaching, but, otherwise, the best work he could get involved making mynah bird traps.

It has been a repeated aspect of any representations made on his behalf, whether by me or others, or with the ACT or NSW, that prison officials have seemed to go out of their way to ignore requests, whether for fear of making Eastman some exception to all of their general rules - the one-size-fits-all rule at the core of ACT penology - or because his intelligence was supposed to mean that he could manipulate outsiders - if never, of course, able to fool skilled prison administrators.

As some relief against the pressure of being followed constantly in open police surveillance, and occasional confrontations engineered by police in the hope that he might "crack" and do something inculpatory, Eastman took up a project in the early 1990s which produced important bibliographical scholarship on the documents creating the nation of Australia.

One could imagine a similar labour of love in a period which, for most people, would be retirement. But Eastman may want quiet, and, ultimately, escape from the constant reminders of his nightmares. He also wants employment, occupation and something to engage his mind, to allow him again into some conversation with the world, if, probably, a world in which he will always be better with ideas and things than people.

Even if one accepts his claim of innocence, few would deny that his own personality compounded his problems. He is now calmer, more obviously in control of himself, and no longer replete with florid paranoid manifestations. But he is conscious that many of those with whom he has clashed are not anxious to renew relationships.

His terror is not of a retrial, but of the efforts of some of his tormentors to renew the harassment that was part of the police investigative strategy. A strategy designed to rattle, and perhaps punish him. It was a strategy accompanied, as Justice Martin noted, by harassing phone calls from the police station, and by drunken police phone calls by senior investigators to Eastman's lawyers. Eastman does not worry, as such about being followed around by members of the old team, all now retired, but of having his address leaked by police and being made a subject of regular humiliation and torment by journalists, self-appointed vigilantes and busybodies.

With or without a retrial, his troubles have been made worse by the aside from Justice Martin, the man ultimately responsible for the quashing of his conviction. Eastman, Martin said, was probably guilty, but he had a nagging doubt about it. And, in any event, Eastman suffered from a miscarriage of justice because actions by the prosecution of withholding information denied him a fair trial.

Few accused people are ever found innocent. A finding of not guilty is a finding that the requirements of the law, which requires proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, has not been satisfied. When police drop investigations against politicians because a jury is unlikely to convict, they are not necessarily saying that nothing, or nothing blameworthy, happened but that they cannot prove anything beyond a reasonable doubt. When juries acquit newspaper executives, it is rarely because the person concerned has obviously done nothing wrong, but because conscious wrongdoing cannot be proven.

Even those who believe Eastman guilty, who want to see a retrial, and who want him back in jail should want all that to happen in a calm environment, free of the sort of prejudice that raised so many of the doubts in the first place. Efforts to poison the well of public opinion are likely to be counterproductive.

Jack Waterford has remained in contact with Eastman through most of his incarceration.