David Malouf

I'd written many poems and published many poems and a couple of volumes of poems before I felt that something I had written in prose was worth keeping and publishing.

It was some stories first and then it was Jono, yes.

Oh, they were very, very supportive.

I mean, my mother was a great reader and we often read together.

I mean, when the war was on, we went to Scarborough, which is a small swimming place in south of Brisbane.

And there, my mother and I belonged to the local library in Redcliffe.

And every book that she borrowed from there, I read.

So we shared a huge amount of reading.

And she went on doing that when I went to university and brought home the books that I was now reading or the books that were set.

She read every single one of them.

So we had a very, very close relationship.

about reading and about talking about reading and she and the woman who was really our housekeeper nurse, they used to read novels aloud to one another every afternoon and that was another time when I sort of sat quietly in the room and listened.

Oh yes, she wouldn't let us use Australian slang much, and I mean we were not allowed to call a shilling a bob, and there were certain things we couldn't do.

We were not allowed to put but at the end of the sentence, which is what kids in Queensland certainly do as part of the local dialect.

And so she was very, very conscious of the language we were using, yeah.

Oh, I think she would recognise that as being a necessary use of the local dialect.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Partly, I think it started with the city itself.

And the city is the third character in the book, you know, often discussed by the two people and rejected utterly.

by the Jono character, and also half rejected by the narrator, but the narrator realizes that that's what he's been given.