I get more optimistic as I get older.
Under Howard, federal government support for black Australia slowly dried up. Services were slashed, native title restricted.
I am, of course, greatly honoured to win the Booker, which is one of the great literary prizes in the world.
Writing my novel ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North,’ I came to conclude that great crimes like the Death Railway did not begin with the first beating or murder on that grim line of horror in 1943.
Everything about The Bradshaws is controversial, fluid, uncertain: their age – perhaps 30,000 years old, perhaps older, perhaps more recent – who painted them, what they mean.
I said in my acceptance speech that I hope that readers remember this not as the year I won the Booker, but the year that there were six extraordinary books on the shortlist.
The number of those identifying as Aborigine in Tasmania rapidly rose in the late 20th century.
There’s always been something deeply disturbing about the Abbott government’s attitude to women.
What is missed when people talk about books is the moment of grace when the reader creates the book, lends it the authority of their life and soul. The books I love are me, have become me.
For much of the latter part of the 20th century, Australia seemed to be opening up to something large and good. It believed itself a generous country, the land of the ‘fair go.’
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