Melissa Lucashenko

I gave some of it to my kids and probably bought a decent car.

But yeah, I had money in the bank for the first time in years.

And that makes all the difference.

Oh, the Miles Franklin by a country mile.

Absolutely.

It was...

You know, Millionaire Hot Suit was very good timing and fun and gratifying, but The Miles is just stratospherically different.

Oh, that's a big question.

I am worried about social cohesion.

I think the logic of capitalism is ripping us apart and diminishing our humanity, you know.

The homelessness and the lack of decent housing for people to lead decent lives in is...

unprecedented in this era you know COVID exposed all kinds of rifts in the body politic

that have always been there but really laid that bare.

So how I'm feeling about the country is, well, in a perverse way, I feel quite optimistic, actually.

Why?

Yeah, why?

That's a good question, isn't it?

Maybe because I've just come back from the Newcastle blockade of the coal ships and I saw a kind of activism there and a determination there

of people that love the country to protect it and to take intelligent action.

I think climate, the climate crisis, you know, the fact that we live on a boiling planet is going to actually upend things, not just in the environmental sense but in the social and political sense.