I used to wait for my writing to come back. I was quite happy organising shows, and being part of the art’ world, but I wondered when my writing would come back to me – and when it did, it came back with a whoop, with a bang. And it changed everything. It offered me a very powerful alternative, and I took that chance.

The way I now review art books and talk about art is, I hope, more accessible and available, because I think that just, writing about art for the art world can be a harrowing experience.

When my first book came out, Australian Women Artists, it was very very successful, sold out in five minutes and I did author tours – I was twenty-eight and it was all a big deal.

I’d also been teaching for several years and working on my MA on Joy Hester, and it seemed like I’d reached the end of something, instead of the beginning. I’d been writing art criticism consistently since I was twenty-two, and I think that in this country you can get quite a lot of success early, you can get noticed quickly, and particularly as an art critic, because there are not many around, you can become the focus of a lot of energy and interest quite fast. And I ended up feeling trapped by that; I could almost see a future for myself, where I was already this spokesperson for women artists and I could keep going along that path, until I was fifty, but it didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

And the fiction-writing came back. It was very intense for me, that change. It was a big change. It wasn’t as though I’d been quietly crafting short stories for ten years and working up to it. It all happened in about three weeks – I began writing my first novel. And I realised that I also wanted to make quite a lot of changes in my life. I can remember listening, one eerie evening, to ABC Radio and there was an interview with Christopher Koch, and he was saying that what you really have to do, if you want to be a writer, is, for a period, to resign your job. And it seemed that if I was going to honour what had happened, that’s what I’d have to do.

I think I was idealistic. I wanted to immerse myself totally in the task at hand. I saw it as a whole way of life. When I wrote Speaking I was thinking about an era ending. It was looking back to the 1970s and the way ideas had changed people’s lives during that time, people committed to ideas about politics, society, living, relationships. I wanted to represent those ideas in some way. Though the book is human, in the sense that it’s about characters battling it out with each other in dialogue, it’s also a way of representing a certain time and a certain group of people who had committed themselves to working out ideas, even if it was painful. These ideas of change and transformation and confrontation seem to be things I return to in all my novels. There are points where you change and they can be painful and they can be illuminating, but somehow the individual follows them through.

There is something particular about your novels in terms of landscape. The setting is important. Is that in order to control this discussion of ideas which otherwise could become vast?

In Lullaby I think it is because the interior journeys the characters are on are so intense and their interior lives are so intense, the landscape is a beneficent environment. It is a place of beauty and a place where the characters go to in order to leave behind some of these burdens. In Company of Images and the other novels, all of those people belonged in a world, even if they are uncomfortable in that world, it’s like an ecosystem, they feed off each other. In Lullaby, the characters are quite marginalised – they don’t really belong anywhere. They are all searching for somewhere to belong, and they are all shifting and changing and trying to trace a pattern of connection. Where they are in the country, at St Helen’s, is a fictional place, it doesn’t really exist. It interested me that I was now writing about people who had left that congested cityscape and existed in a more diffuse environment.

It’s not that diffuse though, is it, because there are still networks, and there is that image of people around a kitchen table, people coming and going in a community of an extended family. It’s almost idealistic, a nostalgic image.

The image of two women talking recurs, and I think it is an image of reconciliation, an image of being able to realise yourself through a connection with another human being.

As in therapy. But you leave that vague.

Yes, Bea is seeing a psychiatrist, but I decide to blue that a little, because I didn’t want to make it a big point. I chose to make the character of the psychiatrist quite vague, not to turn her into a character. I felt that the book already had enough big characters and big stories that if she were a big character and story it could almost be a book in its own right, Bea and the therapist. Nor did I want to make therapy a kind of narrative with a hallelujah chorus, because I don’t think therapy is like that. For all the characters in Lullaby the inner journeys that they go on to discover are really the small moments of revelation that we all encounter, they are not the life-changing experiences – hey, I’m healed. It’s simply not like that. Bea going into therapy is an uncomfortable act – people get embarrassed, it seems so self-indulgent. But it acted as a catalyst for her writing. and I wanted to present it as the psychiatrist being almost like a magician figure, an illusory figure who asks the right questions and strange answers come out, surprising, difficult answers, memories pop up that-shock her, and I think this is the process of therapy.

She is able to get Bea to speak about what she has never spoken about, to remember, and so to begin to create her own sense of history, and that’s the important thing for all the characters in the novel, for Queenie, for Bea and for Jack, to create a sense of their own history, which they do through writing. My impulse to write the book was, why do I write? Why do I keep writing? Why does anybody keep writing? Are there particular stories you want to tell? – Is it irrational? Or is it somewhere between rational and irrational? What is the impulse? And as I began to write the book I realised that none of the characters wrote for a public. The act of writing for all of them is very private. And I hadn’t expected that, but that’s what came out, the act of writing as private. And I wanted to take on the therapy thing, because I think it gets levelled at artists and writers and poets –you know, well, come on, it’s really ‘just therapy’ isn’t it. Well, is it?

But if you discovered the privacy of this act of writing, how on earth did it get involved in the big topic for Australia today, which is black/white relationships? It’s hardly a private discussion.

No, I found that unusual, myself. I hadn’t planned to write about Queenie. It started off with just the voice, Bea’s voice, and then there was another voice, which was the voice of a counsellor or therapist, and then the scene shifted and I could see her sitting with Queenie, and I thought, oh no, she’s a koori, I don’t believe it! And there was this whole koori family around her. For the first year I tried to write the koori characters out of the book, because I thought, I don’t have any right to do this. I can’t do it, I can’t tell their stories, I can’t speak in their voices, I can’t imagine their imagination and I can’t tell their history. But I couldn’t somehow move them. They were there.

So I thought, ok, if they’re there for a reason, perhaps I should start doing my homework and find out a few things. What do I know about black Australia? I realised that what I actually knew was all up north. It was Uluru, the Kimberleys, Arnhem Land, land rights, uranium mining, Papunya, dot painting. Nothing to do with Melbourne, Victoria. I attended Eve Feisl’s lectures out at the Koori Research Centre at Monash, and read everything I could, but the real hit for me was an installation at the Museum of Victoria called the Koori Keeping Place – it’s a terrific installation. They’ve got up on the wall as part of that display the Massacre Map, a map of Victoria showing where all the massacres were – you look at it, and you never look at Victoria in the same way again. It completely alters your sense of what towns represent. Towns like Bairnsdale and Port Fairy which are now holiday destinations, where massacres took place.

All this changed everything. Not that I feel that I have any right to write about Aboriginal people, I still feel I don’t. I’m still asking myself the same questions, l’m not at peace about that at all. All I know is that I didn’t set out to do it, but stuck with it. And Queenie was always such an engaging character, she was always just there. Strong, and she seemed to have so many stories to offer me. But I certainly felt that language is a site of racism and I was dealing with a lot of my own prejudices, my own glibness, and naive assumptions.

After a while, I began to think, well, why isn’t everyone writing about Aboriginal people, why do we cut them out, why aren’t we doing all this homework that we need to do in order to write, why don’t more writers ask all these questions?