David Malouf

There were different kinds of drinks from the ones we had once had.

Cocktails.

That's right.

Cocktails arrived.

All of those things happened.

It was such a change.

And then your family shifted their circumstances too, didn't they?

The old home you'd had in South Brisbane, your mum started her own business and you were able to move to the...

further outlying, more prosperous suburb, if you like, of Hamilton.

Yes, where we had at last, as my father would always have wanted, a brick house.

A brick house.

Which he designed and built.

But one of the things that had happened was that South Brisbane had been

rezoned as a factory zone, not a residential area.

And the result of that is an interesting one.

It meant that the government, because it was a factory area, and the government were able to acquire

all of it to turn into the Expo site and then to turn actually into the South Bank.

So really what we owe in the city, the South Bank and all of that great development there too, is the fact that the Black Americans came and made all that side of the city undesirable.

You write quite a bit about Australia and Australian history and how we see ourselves in your essays in the first place.

There's lots of really lovely and interesting ideas there.