And you can't help but worry for them, love them, want for them - those who go on down the close, foetid galleries of time and space without you.

It is always amusing to me and delightful of course that my books sell so well in America and other parts of the world. I can't imagine what people must think as they read my books in Poland. Or in Hebrew and Greek. People are reading all the stories which are about bits of Western Australia.

The beachcomber goes looking for trouble, everything he finds is a sign of trouble. The writer is the same; without trouble he has nothing to work with, so he picks over the tide line, over the bits and pieces of people's lives with grim fascination.

I wanted to be a writer all my life. Since I was 10. And then at a certain point I began to assume I was one, which is rich, I know. I didn't meet a writer until I was nearly an adult, so I had no idea what I'd bet the farm on.

There is nowhere else I'd rather be, nothing else I would prefer to be doing. I am at the beach looking west with the continent behind me as the sun tracks down to the sea. I have my bearings.

I just sit here and tell the story as though I can't help it. There's always something in the day that reminds me, that sets me off all hot and guilty and scared and rambling and wistful, like I am now.

I went to school for 12 years, and uni for four, but I learnt more about human existence in the 30 hours it took my first child to be born than I did in all those years of study.