Brett Evans

Thanks, mate.

Now, what's your latest historical interest, Brett?

POWs.

I'm doing a documentary at the moment about an artefact that is kept in the Australian War Memorial's collection and it was made by a prisoner of war of the Japanese in the 1940s and it's a recipe book, which is a very unlikely thing, I think, for a prisoner of war to make, but that's what they did and I have to explain why he made it and how he made it and the story of how he came to be a prisoner of war.

So that's the project.

Probably Chloe Hooper's The Arsonist.

She's the woman who's going to replace Helen Garner writing nonfiction about crime, I think.

It's an extraordinarily well-written book and it's a brilliant piece of research because in the end she never got to interview the man who it's about.

He's an arsonist, one of the people accused and eventually found guilty of setting a fire during the Black Saturday fires in Victoria.

And she recreates the whole thing from documents mainly and some interviews.

It's an extraordinary book, yeah.

What about you, Anthea?

Does she always get like this?

Oh, yes.

It's winter.

Is that what it is?

It's the cold weather.

Yeah.

I don't want to be me.

I don't want to be Dave Martin, loser, parked at his mailbox under the river gum, two beers dry from Stoney Creek Pub, half a state from Sarah, and at least 18 months from Useful.