To slide into the domed reading room at ten each morning, specially in summer, off the hot street outside, was a sensation as delicious as dropping into the water off the concrete edge of the Fitzroy Baths.
It’s disturbing at my age to look at a young woman’s destructive behaviour and hear the echoes of it, of one’s own destructiveness in youth.
Writers seem to me to be people who need to retire from social life and do a lot of thinking about what’s happened – almost to calm themselves.
And always Melbourne, Melbourne, Melbourne, over and over the same photo in glaring greens and reds, of a tram, huffy, blunderous, manoeuvring itself with pole akimbo round the tight corner where Bourke Street enters Spring.
I think some people wished I’d kept myself out of the book. But I kind of insist on it because I want the reader to share my engagement with the material, if you like, not pretend that I’m doing it completely intellectually.
The rain began again. It fell heavily, easily, with no meaning or intention but the fulfilment of its own nature, which was to fall and fall.
On Melbourne summer mornings the green trams go rolling in stately progress down tunnels thick with leaves: the bright air carries along the avenue their patient chime, the chattering of their wheels.
Now, I – for several years while I was researching this book, I felt quite obsessed by thoughts about sentencing, punishment, how judges arrive at their decisions.
I’m full of restlessness. Not lonely, exactly – my head is racing with ideas. But it is that old treacherous feeling that real life is happening somewhere else, and I’m left out.
Well, I’m at some kind of crossroads in my life and I don’t know which way to take. It’s not about money, I mean, because I’m established enough now as a writer to get a reasonable advance if I wanted to do fiction.
The only thing that I was equipped for with my very mediocre college Arts degree was to get a job in teaching.
That’s one of the things I hope that the book can do, is to restore some dignity to Joe Cinque.
People demand a lot of the justice system and they demand things that it can’t deliver.
It’s a terrific privilege to be able to see into somebody else’s life.
I’m very disturbed by violence against women when it is violence.
But there are some wounds that can never be healed.
At the time it seemed like a natural development of my interest in what was going on around me in society.
I like poking my nose into other people’s lives.
I think writers are very anxious.