Australia was once a leader in taking global warming seriously. The former PM [Kevin Rudd] called it 'greatest moral challenge of our time'. But in the past couple of years the national consensus has been eroded and Australians are being encouraged by the polluters and their mates in Parliament to forget it was ever mentioned. It's heartbreaking.

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

It's sadness coming on like the old days, the vast seamless hopeless weight of sadness looking for a place to rest.

I can't make something 'useful' to me in a writing sense for a very long time. I don't have any journalistic instinct. And I do keep a journal, but it's neither very revealing nor fruitful for work. Stuff just bubbles up from the swamp later.

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.

In fiction 'issues' are accidental, sometimes incidental. The place and the people it creates are paramount.

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.