David Malouf

He's the author of so many classic Australian works of fiction.

He's also a poet and an essayist.

And as an essayist, he writes beautifully about a particular foreign country.

None of us can ever travel to that place because it is Australia.

the Australia of his childhood in the 1940s.

I was born decades after David and I can only recognise that older Australia through the memories of my grandparents.

This is the Australia of plain food, of busy houses with neighbours coming in and out all day, where Protestants and Catholics found it hard to attend each other's weddings, let alone intermarry.

The Australia where people amuse themselves of an evening by listening to music or quiz shows on the radio and playing the piano or sitting down to a round of bridge.

This is in Australia where children would start the day looking pristine and come home filthy and were given spoonfuls of cod liver oil and milk of magnesia for their health.

When I try to explain this world to my children, they just think I'm being weird and I suspect they think I'm making it all up.

David Maloof remembers all of this with evident fondness, but he's not sentimental about it.

And it's true that he welcomes much of the change for the past six decades.

I just love talking with him about this stuff because he's writing about another Australia that happened right here where we live today.

For this, his 80th year, there's a new collection of his essays called A First Place and a new volume of his poetry called Earth Hour.

Happy birthday, David Maloof.

Thank you, Richard.

We are in the ABC studios in Brisbane right now, in South Brisbane.

We're just about three blocks or so from the spot where your family home once was, where you grew up.

Is it strange to be here sitting in like this?

Unrecognisable.