Charlotte Wood

It's this incredibly ambitious place full of people from all different walks of the research life.

And Steve Simpson, who's a biologist, who is the director of the Charles Perkins Centre, decided that they wanted to have a creative writer in residence to basically just be there and hang around and be available, not even be available, just to brush up against scientists.

And you were the first.

I was the first.

So nobody knew what it was going to do.

And I applied with this project, the book about older women.

And I said in my application, I'm not going to be... I mean, I actually really thought I had no chance of getting it.

And so I was very frank in my application and said...

I have zero interest in being a kind of mouthpiece for health messages and all that stuff.

That is so not interesting to me.

But if you are genuinely interested in what artists do, this is what artists do.

You know, they take risks, they connect unlike things, they, and I had various other things.

And Steve at the interview said, that's exactly what we do here.

He said, this whole place is a monument to risk.

None of us know.

Basically, the approaches to chronic health that we have taken as a society are not working.

So we are here to blow it all up and try new things.

So it's a very exciting place to be.

We need more of those collaborations.

Amazing.