David Malouf

Did it slip away just one day, I wonder?

No, it changed because a lot of new people came and showed us other ways of living.

I think the main thing it was was because we slowly woke up to the notion that we weren't living in the...

counties in England or in Scotland or Ireland, that the climate was completely different so that we better change our clothes and our eating habits to something that fitted more with where we actually were rather than where we had come from.

When I was little, I used to know every inch of my family home.

I used to, you know, I think my sister did as well.

You know, like most kids, we crawled all over it and knew it much better than our parents did.

Do you still have that memory of your family home, which was only two doors down from your grandparents' shop?

Yeah.

Look, people are always asking you what it's like to be 80.

And all I can say about that is that you just have more years and more ages that you can go back to in memory and find yourself existing in.

So I have a very, very clear memory of what it was like to be four or five or eight or ten or whatever it is in that particular house.

And the fact that we moved from that house and then had a quite different style of living later

makes it easier to go back to those memories because the particular light of that house, the particular kind of relationship with weather and sky that a tin roof provides...

especially in a subtropical climate like Brisbane.

You know, it's easy to think your way back into the skin of that little kid back there in those rooms under that roof with that particular relationship of light and dark that the house had.

Openness seemed to be the biggest feature of it, the way you describe it.

Openness.

Yes.

Well, the house is open to the street in one way because it has verandas.