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

The principle was, death should not be entered like some snug harbor. It should be an unambiguous refusal to surrender.

He was one of those men who, even in the years of peace, would have advised his congregation that while God may well be honored by the inflexibility of the pious, he might also be honored by the flexibility of the sensible.

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.

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.

It's only when you abandon your ambitions that they become possible.

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