Christos Tsiolkas

Thank you.

Flowers open, winter's spoken.

The same world, but the view is changed.

So this is real?

This is all real.

I haven't heard about that.

It's a real pleasure.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, look, that was a definitive book for me and I just remember devouring that book.

It was.

And look, they were incredibly, both of them were very lovely and gracious people.

But I think, as I explain in the book,

There was a certain discomfort, partly because the festival had asked me to do a mini curation of the theme of Australia as part of that festival.

And I did want to talk about the complexity of what I think Australia is.

But I had no idea of what Shelton had represented and

I describe it, I think, in the essay as the widest part of England I've ever been to.

Gee, that's pretty wide.

And it was, in a sense, all the questions I had about...

Australian history, British history, the colonial history of our country, the colonial relationship between the two places, all those things were very, very prominent in my head as I was talking at that festival.

And then that question about Patrick White, because I had just very recently returned to Patrick White after a long period of...