In a way Australia is like Catholicism. The company is sometimes questionable and the landscape is grotesque. But you always come back.

I must apologise because I know all writers have memories of being on the outer because it's the children on the side of the playground who become the dangerous writers.

But I was also a brat. I used to belong to a gang that went looking for fights with other gangs.

And I found both literature and the church very dramatic presences in the world of the 1950s.

It is not too fantastic to say that he desired them with some of the absolute passion that characterised the exposed and flaming heart of Jesus which hung on Emilie's wall. Since this narrative has tried to avoid the canonisation of the Herr Direktor, the idea of the sensual Oskar as the desirer of souls has to be proved.

I thought I'd definitely be a writer, whatever I did.

But re-reading Voss also demonstrates again that although White wasn't 'a nice man', and indeed was—perhaps rightly—scathingly dismissive of my and other Australian writers' work and origins unless they were his friends, he was a genius, and Voss one of the finest works of the modernist era and of the past century.