There was a certain predictability to the arguments that flared when Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. For the most part, they were variations of the arguments that have shadowed him from the beginning of his career, twisted echoes of a million late-night dormitory discussions about whether his lyrics are ‘poetry’. The oddly revealing thing about them was the extent to which those who disapproved of the decision seemed unable or unwilling to disentangle the question of whether or not he deserved the award from the question of whether or not it was appropriate to bestow it upon someone like him ⎯ which is to say, a mere songwriter, someone whose work falls outside a traditional definition of ‘literature’, someone with the temerity to have succeeded in a popular medium that has allowed his work to reach millions of people and exert a huge cultural influence.

Which poets have most influenced you?

Influence is transient – it changes all the time. I can’t always pinpoint it directly or say which poets might be most influential on my poems. From the mid-1960s I read everything – the French, the Dadaists, the Eastern Europeans, Vladimir Mayakovsky. Gertrude Stein reigned supreme for me, then Mina Loy. I was energised by many North Americans from Emily Dickinson to Diane di Prima and the Beats, to the so-called ‘New York School’, to Rachel Blau DuPlessis and the so-called ‘post-avant’, to Claudia Rankine’s cutting lyrical documentaries. The Sydney Women Writers Workshop (aka the ‘No Regrets’ group) in the late 1970s had a significant effect. Over the years my poetry has been under the influence of plenty of Australians. Ken Bolton is my best critic.

Why do you write?

Because I love doing it and because at times I’ve been changed for the better as a result of reading great novels. Bohemia Beach is about a successful woman who is also an alcoholic. My love of Prague aside, I was inspired to challenge the novelistic cliché of the happy-go-lucky female drunk: bad things can happen to women who drink.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Yes. I go through periods when I record them on a notepad I keep beside my bed. I dream of adapting my novel The River Ophelia for the screen.

There are cases in which it seems, on the face of it, unambiguously right to restore stolen or misappropriated cultural objects to their original setting or at least to their last known address: we can think of the lamentable looting of museums and archaeological sites during the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, and the riots of the pitifully misnamed Arab Spring. And yet because their original sites may still be extremely insecure, some such artefacts are best preserved in the safekeeping of Western institutions until stability returns to their homelands.

There are other instances in which the collection and removal of artefacts, especially tribal ones, have certainly saved them from destruction: the Aboriginal items lent to the National Museum of Australia by the British Museum for the Encounters exhibition (2015–16) were collected by missionaries and travellers from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, and would otherwise have been discarded and allowed to perish. Unless one is committed to the idea of tribal cultures existing in a prehistoric present without past or future, continually repeating and remaking and re-enacting, preserving examples of their arts and crafts seems commendable.