I am not part of that earlier Australian generation who set off on a deliberate search for fame and fortune in distant lands. My generation was the first that didn't need to. By the 1980's when I left home, our culture had grown deep enough and wide enough to encompass all but the most rarefied of ambitions.

When you're writing non-fiction, you go as far as you can go, and then ethically you have to stop. You can't go. You can't suppose. You can't imagine. And I think there's something in human nature that wants to finish the story.

We are not the only animal that mourns; apes do, and elephants, and dogs. Yet we are the only one that tortures.

My mother's family were full-on Irish Catholics - faith in an elaborate old fashioned, highly conservative and madly baroque style. I sort of fell out of the tribe over women's rights and social justice issues when I was just 13 years old.

Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.

Here we are, alive, and you and I will have to make it what we can.

I think that you can honour the sacrifices of a common soldier without glorifying war.