I know I’m going to sound like a boring old fart, but are we becoming a disposable culture, or what? We throw out everything from old cars to ex-prime ministers. This is a Bad Thing. Our continued growth as a lively, vigorous society depends on our having strong foundations. There could have been no Kylie Minogue had there not been a Little Pattie. No Brett Whiteley without a Sidney Nolan. No Anson Cameron without a Joseph Furphy (literally as well as artistically – they are related).

I can only write my books because Nan Chauncy and Joan Phipson went down the path before me. And no doubt they, in their turn, read Mary Grant Bruce and Ethel Turner.

As members of a reading and writing community, we have an obligation to keep alive the best stories of our predecessors. Now that I’ve turned fifty there’s probably a bit of self-interest at work too. I don’t want to end up like David Martin who, late in his life, said to me, rather sadly: ‘I wish they’d still invite me to literary festivals, just so I can have the pleasure of refusing.’

We’re always whingeing about publishers not supporting anything that’s more than six months old, but perhaps it’s because we book-buyers don’t show enough interest in our literary forbears. I hope this new series pushes the pendulum back the other way a little.