A New Novel

As a child growing up in Australia in the 1950s and 60s, the idea of war seemed extremely remote. The Second World War was hardly over, yet in my mind it was an event as much in the past as the siege of Troy, and the ‘Great War’ the setting of my new book, was, for all intents and purposes, a pre-historic conflict. The discovery of my father's army slouch hat in a backyard shed, the occasional encountering of limping army veterans from both wars, and the annual ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) march down St Kilda Road to the Shrine of Remembrance, did little to arouse my interest in what seemed to be distant events. After all, we lived in the post-war world, and in what in a popular book titled the "Lucky Country" – a land not only blessed with nature's bounty, but also a borderless land, and, as such, a land without neighbouring disputes that might wash over into it. The far-off brewing conflicts in Asia, the Middle East and Central Europe were a world away and seemed irrelevant. It was only in the later 60s that the conflict in Vietnam grew into so monstrous a presence that this complacent society was shaken out of its preoccupation with sports, cars, food and fashions, and newspapers had to contend with disasters even greater than bushfires and floods. For me personally, this coincided with a gradual-developing maturity that lifted me out of my own circumscribed world of school, beaches, gardens and games, and awakened in me the realisation that the world was a dangerous place, that even this distant part of it was like a dormant volcano that might suddenly be aroused, and that international events might entirely shatter my insouciance.