Anyway, on a humid, sleepless night in Sydney this week, with the sudden fright and pessimism of someone presently writing a novel set one hundred years ago, I faced up to my assignment and had a dialogue with the past.

Well, I tried to – to think about time-frames and fiction. But what came into my head was to worry how in tune I was with the people at the other end of the fiction process. How much did readers really care about questions of national identity? Or times and settings? I know we really write for ourselves and not for critical or commercial acclaim – heaven forbid! – but these are the sorts of questions that flood in when you can’t sleep.

You know you’re in trouble when you’re 60,000 words into a novel set one hundred years ago, and you’re worrying about Reader Response Theory at 4am. How could you possibly gauge what time-frame people prefer to read about? Well, presumably the book buyers vote with their dollars. Their $29.95. For what it’s worth, at 4am, in my mind, I conducted my own poll.

I recalled that of my own books, my novels set in the past, Our Sunshine and The Savage Crows, received the most enthusiastic critical reception and became set texts and so on. On the other hand, those books set in the present, or interested in contemporary concerns and attitudes, The Bodysurfers, Fortune, A Cry in the Jungle Bar and so on, did not get the same decibels of critical applause, but in sales terms blasted the historical ones out of the water.

My 4am chop logic concluded that – as far as my books are concerned, anyway – the literary establishment prefers the past, and readers like the present. Having made myself thoroughly depressed, I kicked and thrashed some more and tried to pin down what I felt about the past. I came to the conclusion that when I (and maybe Australians generally) think of the past we’re really thinking of myth.

I think there are always two Australian myths fighting for precedence: the Myth of Landscape and the Myth of Character. For me, the Myth of Landscape also divides into two opposing myths: the Beach or the Bush or, as I like to think of it, the Shark versus the Dingo.

The Myth of Character is largely made of those legends that have been created by folklore. As Stanislaw Lec says in one of my favourite quotations, ‘Myth is gossip grown old.’ In this category you probably would put our few legendary human beings: Ned Kelly, the Gallipoli digger, an assortment of usually hard-done-by sportsmen and women, and the occasional horse.

In this country, rather more comprehensively, we are all inheritors of the Myth of Landscape. Unlike other urbanised, ‘new’ nations, our spiritual consciousness draws almost totally on elements and our environment.

Despite massive cultural inroads from America and Europe, the idea of ourselves we late-twentieth-century urbanites carry in our heads is still either based on – or reacting against – attitudes to water and fire held by bush stoics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It’s still a variation on the Australian Legend of Russel Ward.

Taking that a bit further, what I’m saying is that when we think of the past we really mean the outback. When we think of the present, we mean the city and the coast. Further, when we think of the past and the bush we’re thinking of Moral Notions, and when we think of the present and the city-coast we’re thinking Problems: politics, sex, crime, drugs.

In literary terms we learn that the present is crude and unstable and (shudder) post-modern, and probably produces serial killers. The past is stable, comfy, modernist, and much more likely to win the Miles Franklin.

We know that many novels, especially Patrick White’s Voss, have fixed the inland desert in the literary imagination as a place of redemptive suffering, where sacrifices of individual lives must be made for the greater good. From there it was an easy step to make to associate the bush with the Anzac spirit of struggle and perseverance against hopeless odds.

This romantic, nostalgic, idealised view of the bush and corresponding bad-mouthing of the city, have given rise to all sorts of interesting wrinkles in the contemporary Australian character, from the urgent need for Land Rovers in Paddington, to the attitudes of Les Murray.

I happen to believe that the Australian capital L Legend is outdated and that any national mystique based on the outback , the pastoral inland, has been faltering for at least three generations.

If we reflect for a moment, we must realise that in Australia there is no indication whatsoever ‘that from the deserts prophets come.’ What’s more likely to come out of the desert is Sir Sydney Kidman, or Vesteys, the ruthless British cattle growers – or maybe Kerry Packer machine-gunning wild horses, camels, and donkeys from a helicopter, like something out of Apocalypse Now.

From the deserts profits come, more like it.

Is our fascination (if that’s the word), with Dialogues with the Past just an unconscious hankering for the Canon, for the halcyon days of dead white European males?

Some post-modernists would point out that our present culture is the only thing we can really say anything about because it’s where we are now. That’s too restrictive for me. But if we are going to continue to fall back on the past as material for fiction – and this pep-talk applies to me, too – we have to allow the present, with all its complexities, easy entry.

Maybe dance with a few mischievous strangers instead of our mothers.