Interviews

At night I sit on the brick patio of a beach house at Currarong with a garden of flannel flowers and kangaroo paws. I listen to the ocean through a windbreak of low eucalypts and banksias, just a hundred paces away.

Generally where I am right now, in my study writing, but also in the garden. It is very uncomplicated. 

Our reading needs change, and the books we revisit constantly grow in number, but if I must choose, I will nominate Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) for the way it forced me to confront the ugly fact that the works of so many of the (male) writers I admired – specifically Norman Mailer, D.H. Lawrence, and Henry Miller – were predicated on a deep hatred of women. This changed me forever.

Hours on each line, weeks on a stanza, months on the whole poem, but with long breaks between. Most poets spend most of their time not writing poetry, and it has to be this way.

When young, I was smitten with the cricket writing of Neville Cardus. I’m bound to say that his sickly sentimentality and special pleading have not aged well.

I put an advertisement in the London Times newspaper in 1964 or thereabouts, which stated ‘Australian BA, typing, wants job in publishing’. I got three offers and accepted one, which was being a menial for a sponsored book editor at Hutchinson’s. But my real pathway was my mother and father, both great readers; I grew up surrounded by books.

It’s always about a question; the book is my attempt at answering it. The learning curve is what lures me to the desk each day.

Lawrence Durrell. At fifteen, I loved his prose so much, I wanted to eat the book; now I want to chuck all that purple nonsense into the bin.

The greatest pleasure is helping authors make their work the best version of itself. There is no greatest challenge, I am glad to say, although sometimes expectations need to be ‘managed’.

The act of writing impedes my writing. The books I write in my head are perfect. Unfortunately, translating them onto the page ruins them.