Yet however comforting and peaceful beach-combing is, it ends up like the sea, as disturbing as it is reassuring. In dark moments I believe that walking on a beach at low tide is to be looking for death, or at least anticipating it. You will only find the dead, the spilled and the cast-off. Things torn free of their life or their place.

If we love the sea as much as we claim to we'll do everything we possibly can to keep it healthy. Otherwise we might as well take up golf.

We live in specific places. We are marked by a place.

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 desert is a spiritual place, we vaguely understand, and the sea the mere playground of our hedonism.

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.

Life is wild by definition. And organic existence is violent. Though I find this hard to accept. And I know it goes against the cultural grain of therapeutic smoothing so dominant in what we like to call 'cultural discourse'.