And it is a folly to try to craft a novel for the screen, to write a novel with a screen contract in mind.

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

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

Personal finances are like people’s personal health, crucial and tragic to the sufferer but tedious to the listener.

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.

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.

So nonetheless given the importance that was placed on sport in Australia, I wanted to be part of that scene, particularly since I had felt very strongly in my early schooling being marginalised even in the Catholic school.