For a while Australians were desperately trying to be cosmopolitan. I think it is a pointless exercise. Australian novels are those rooted in Australia, with Australian landscapes and colours. My work has always had bits of Western Australia in it. It is always here. The world comes to us.

It’s how I fill the time when nothing’s happening. Thinking too much, flirting with melancholy.

Every great moment of social change was once a confirmed impossibility. People's determination in the face of overwhelming odds has, time and again, triumphed over what seems impossible. This is what you tell yourself.

Surfing is sensual. It's a real-time engagement with the forces of nature, which happen to be echoes of the past (which after all, is all a wave really is). Briefly we defy gravity and ride the energy of storms from elsewhere. We are intensely alone as we do it and yet completely swallowed by something larger that enforces a sense of perspective and connectedness to the natural world. It's an experience we yearn to repeat so we go searching for it again and again and we spend years sitting in the water waiting for these radiating lines to come in across the event horizon.

The end of the world begins in the sea we love.

I grew up in a family that believed love was at work in the world. I guess that's a religious idea, though of course it needn't be.

People can make symbolic gestures but doesn't mean their life changes. One philanthropic moment doesn't make a life of renewal; of change.