Charlotte Wood

And Judy Harris is an incredible woman.

who is the private philanthropist who funds the Writer in Residence program.

So I think they're up to the fifth year now.

And Judy Harris has given $100,000 a year to pay a writer to be in this building to just

be there and see what happens.

So it's incredibly trusting of the creative process, which is kind of unheard of, that people will say, you're an artist, we want you here, do what you want.

We don't have to see anything, you don't have to make any KPIs, you don't have to do anything you don't want to do.

It was astonishing.

So I was there and I decided that I would just try and be as open as possible to whatever came my way in the creative process, which is unusual for me because I'd be normally very protective of my privacy about a work in the early stages.

But with this book I decided that while I was there, if anybody asked me about my work, I would talk to them about it.

So it was kind of scary as well.

So the things that came my way were unexpected things, like the dog came out of the Charles Perkins Centre.

And the dog Finn is absolutely central to the whole book, really.

He becomes this extremely important pivot for a whole lot of stuff.

Well, he's so useful because, and this came directly out of a conversation I had with an evolutionary biologist called David Robenheimer at the Centre, and he said in a way that I found quite alarmingly forthright at the time, he said, well, I'd like to see some evolutionary biology in this book of yours.

And I thought, well, bully for you.

There's not going to be any of you if you don't even know.

But because I'd made this commitment, I thought, okay, well, what is he talking about?

And said, I don't know what you're talking about.

His research is in nutrition in some kind of monkey in Borneo or somewhere.