Panting and groaning at the summit, we could not see a single thing. The sites of cavalry charges, battered barns, artillery barrages and last-ditch stands were utterly enveloped in mist and drizzle. Frank was exultant, revelling in both the weird beauty of the scene and the patent absurdity of our outing.

There was classic Frank, in a few puffs and quips, in bursts of laughter juxtaposed with a wry, knowing frown. He was always keen to experiment, always ready to give anything a go.

Frank was never simply curious, but rather intensely, immersively engaged in whatever he was doing, whether research or writing, eating or drinking, gender or sexuality. I once complimented Frank on his ability to sense, then pick and ride waves - literary and social waves both. He grizzled at me, arguing that he made waves, did not merely surf them.

Frank had a point. Although he lived in Canberra only intermittently, Frank established himself as one of the great chroniclers of our city.

The trilogy for which he will long be remembered (Grand Days, Dark Palace, and Cold Light) brought its heroine back from Geneva between the wars to a hard-scrabble, rough-and-ready version of our national capital.

If Frank made Canberra more intricate and its people more intriguing than we otherwise seem, well, that was what he thought we amounted to. Frank would on occasion contend that Australia was conducting a sincere and sophisticated experiment in civics.

Asked about his riffs, Jimi Hendrix remarked that improvisation was all very well, provided that flair was backed up by thousands of hours of work as well as a profound respect for your craft. Frank knew exactly how that equation worked.

Beneath his diffidence and behind his irony, Frank was a most serious thinker and writer. Way back in his career, buried within The Electrical Experience, he insisted that "the rule inherent in all crafts is the obligation, the exhortation, the stricture to improve one's techniques, tools, to find the best way, to deliver the goods". Frank lived by that hard, high standard.

We might forget how much Frank grew as a writer by losing sight of how much Australia grew as a country during his lifetime.

One of Frank's first stories was published in the final edition of Man magazine. He denounced sex censorship in his university magazine (Tharunka), edited the AWU's newspaper, and escaped his home town of Nowra for the libertarianism of the Balmain push. Balmain, though, remained in easy driving distance of Nowra.

Frank cherished his roots. His early novel, The Americans, Baby, provoked howls of indignation from wowsers (always a favourite target) for its depictions of extravagant sex, cross-dressing and casual encounters. Now its subject matter is ubiquitous on the net.

In the same way, Frank's arguments for "pluralism without fear" (in 1984 especially) were bold and brave at that time. Amidst the early delusions of the Hawke government, many fewer of us then assailed our "rather scrappy obnoxious 19^th century gentility together with wealth measures of respectability".

Frank took pleasure in pushing some points too far. He once argued for designated Noisy Nights in cities, a national Hunting Park, and the declaration of St Kilda and Kings Cross as free zones outside moral regulation. Not even the internet has as yet dragged us that far.

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He was difficult to classify. Penguin appeared to give up when it categorised Days of Wine and Rage as history, sociology and anthropology, presumably with a dash of satire and literature tossed in as ballast. Frank's own disposition to send himself up or put himself down made tagging his work and typecasting the author more problematic still. Which other serious novelist wrote a book about the martini?

Tales about the Balmain push, ones written "with the words going out and around the bottle and back again", may have had a limited shelf life. The Edith trilogy does not. Nor does Frank's book of collected riffs on Henry Lawson's story about the drover's wife, a late work of which Frank was justly proud.

Back we come, as generations of future readers will be, to the Edith trilogy. Those are grand, picaresque novels, in which a remarkably created heroine develops, learns, loves and suffers.

I once tried to classify Frank as a decadent, romantic optimist. Those three words fit oddly together. Frank's Edith was tempted by all three, by decadence, romance and optimism - but not entirely.

She remains not just a tribute to Frank's imagination and empathy but to his notions of how our last century - but not our capital - went wrong.

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