David Malouf

So we had no, we could not understand how when we went to my grandparents, they were pouring this stuff all over everything they ate.

From the chemist.

Your mum was born in England.

My mother was born in England.

And your dad is the son of Lebanese migrants to Australia.

Was their meeting, was their marriage incredibly improbable?

In those days, pretty improbable, yeah.

So how did they meet?

Well, my father was a great sportsman and he played rugby league for Queensland.

And when he was probably about 18 or 19, he became a boxer.

And he was a very, very famous boxer.

I mean, I've got all the cuttings which my mother kept.

And I spent most of my childhood being stopped by people in the street, men in the street saying, you're Georgie Miller's boy, aren't you?

You know, the best fight I ever saw was your father's fight with Archie Bradley or whoever it was.

And so my grandfather, my mother's father, he was a descendant of a man called Daniel Mendoza, who in the late 18th century was more or less the inventor of modern boxing.

He was the first professional boxer.

Wow.

And he was a friend of Byron's and had a gym and so on.

And three or four of his...

children came to Australia, two of the boys for shoplifting and burglary and two of the girls for prostitution or something.