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Childhood sporting humiliations have left me with a dread of being in places where somebody might throw a ball towards me and expect me to do something with it.
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I’m the buffoon with the flailing arms thanking every last booklover who dropped some hard-earned money, cleared the diary for an hour, hopped in their car, paid for parking, found the right tent on the map, and came to hear me talk about the thing that makes my legs move.
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Joan Didion. Not sure what happened, to her or to me, but she lost me about twenty years ago.
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Mum and dad. I still need to talk to them. My kids, Marnie and Jack. Best meal was scallops and a few beers with my son at Huonville on a pontoon in the river.
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Cleaning out my flat recently I offloaded quite a few books that – after carrying them around for twenty years – I finally admitted I would probably never read again. Among them were quite a few Paul Auster novels. I had a huge crush on his work when I was younger, but feel they have outlived their appeal for me.
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Camping at Thurra River in the Croajingalong National Park, swimming in its tannin estuary, cooking fresh fish, gossiping while walking its long white beaches, watching the sea eagles soar.
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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.
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Generally where I am right now, in my study writing, but also in the garden. It is very uncomplicated.
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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.
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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.
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