Different tenses and perspectives offer you different things. It helps to distinguish the world that they are in.

Somewhere a bicycle bell rings. Somewhere else there's a war on. Somewhere else people turn to shadows and powder in an instant and the streets turn to funnels and light the sky with their burning. Somewhere a war is over.

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.

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.

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.

I was in my thirties before I learnt that I too would prefer not to see what I could no longer have

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