Our prime minister could embrace and forgive the people who killed our beloved sons and fathers, and so he should, but he could not, would not, apologise to the Aboriginal people for 200 years of murder and abuse. The battle against the Turks, he said in Gallipoli, was our history, our tradition. The war against the Aboriginals, he had already said at home, had happened long ago. The battle had made us; the war that won the continent was best forgotten

Good writing of course requires talent, and no one can teach you to have talent.

I have never begun a novel which wasn't going to stretch me further than I had ever stretched before.

I did not know that history is like a blood stain that keeps on showing on the wall no matter how many new owners take possession, no matter how many times we pint over it.

I have written a memoir here and there, and that takes its own form of selfishness and courage. However, generally speaking, I have no interest in writing about my own life or intruding in the privacy of those around me.

I'm always the one with the activist friends. I've been an activist very little.

One has to be able to twist and change and distort characters, play with them like clay, so everything fits together. Real people don't permit you to do that.