It was so like old times that Henry found himself smiling down at Olek and Mance, playing to her, capable of ignoring the rest. It did seem for those seconds that the earth had at last been pacified by music.

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

But in practice Australia - the pluralism of Australia - sorry the sectarianism to an extent stopped at the time you took your uniform off after coming home from school.

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

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.

And I think my sexuality was heavily repressed by the church, by the, you know, the design of the mortal sins.

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