David Malouf

If you owned land, you were a gentleman, you could vote, you could make the laws.

So here, these people who've been criminals in one place are being made landed peasants in another.

If there was an experiment, it pretty quickly began to produce some really interesting and radical results.

For example, convicts sent over here.

It was really widely thought at the time that...

The convict stain was something, criminality was inherent and it was something you'd pass down to your genes.

But convicts brought out here and set up a nation that is one of the most law-abiding societies in the world for all our kind of images, lawless larrikins.

You know, we obey the law in this country, don't we?

Yes.

Well, look, maybe, you know, I mean, the vast majority of those convicts actually reformed and their children, after all, were free.

And I think that first generation, as we see in all the literature, they were very, very proud to be the first native-born settlers of the country and regarded themselves as superior to the people who simply came in

and were not born here.

So the native-born was a very, very important distinction.

It's your 80th birthday this week, as I've said several times now.

Recently, Martin Amis was on the program, the author Martin Amis, who's now in his 60s, and I talked a bit about getting older with him, and he said...

Once you reach the end of your 40s, you think to yourself, oh, that went a bit quick.

And then he says, then you think it's only going to get thinner and thinner.

But then when you get into your early 50s, he said, there's this whole new suite of rooms in your house opens up, which is the past because you realize you have a past.

And I was just struck.

You said something very similar to that early on.