There may be a certain resistance to this kind of regionalism among readers who generally prefer the familiar, but from my point of view, crucial in terms of getting the words on paper, I see it as a liberating influence. The great advantage of creating your own fictional domain is that you are not restricted by reality. The parallels – it sounds a bit precious to say so – but you have someone like John O’Hara creating a Gibbsville in Pennsylvania, William Faulkner creating his fictional county, and the Latin American writers are particularly given to this.

Which is why this further book which continues to explore this fictional setting of the Baie de Baudin and Blosseville and the off-shore islands of Gournay and Dupuis is simply a way of commenting on current Australian concerns, but not necessarily being limited to the points of detail which often seem to be such a sticking point.

The island remains in the distance, and the symbol of the panoptique, the all-seeing prison, is therefore at a remove from the main action.

There is a conscious construct in this book of the panoptique as the slightly mysterious and exotic other realm which is off-shore and therefore constantly in view of the characters as they go about doing things in Blosseville. It is meant to be a haunting presence.

It is also relevant to the broad legal theme, to show the legal system in action, and as Foucault noted so persuasively in his writings, the panoptique always represents the dark side of the law. You have a framework of apparently egalitarian rules and regulations but for those who actually disappear into the prison system there is this other shadowy construct of manipulation and power.

That’s what I’m hinting at in the geography, which is that off-shore there is this other side of the law.

Revenant, the creator of the panoptique, is meant to embody a theme I’ve explored in essays and other books, namely the kind of central ambiguity which is usually found at the heart of any controversy. You take a case such as the Lindy Chamberlain case. A violent controversy but a central ambiguity at the heart of the matter that no one is sure about. Revenant is meant to embody that ambiguity, in terms of his own career which fluctuates wildly from success to ill fortune and in his writing, because on the one hand he is a servant of the establishment in creating the panoptique, on the other hand he is described as the leading dissident of the era and falls foul of the local establishment in the colonial period.

He is meant to be rather shadowy and ambiguous, and that is how Michael Cheyne perceives him, researching him out of curiosity.

Is it right to say that one of Cheyne’ s problems is he wants clarity but he finds complexity?

Yes. It’s this kind of tension that always exists between the world of law and the world of literature. It’s why people become impatient with lawyers because they are always trying in their legal work to remove ambiguity. You draft documents with precision so there is no room for doubt. You hand down judgements which are written with precision so that people can’t seize upon ragged emotional ends and inflate them, or become confused. That is what lawyers tend to strive for in their daily work, but any observer, and particularly observers with literary interests, would be conscious of the fact that reality is never so cut and dried, or neat. And that is what literature is all about. The kind of quirky unpredictable exotic side of things.

Cheyne is a moral person; he believes in ‘goodness’.

His belief in goodness, I think, comes from a time when there was more certainty, things were less open to question. Both as a result of the impact of the electronic age, and just a general shift in intellectual styles, the protagonist is now, like many people adrift, not knowing where things are heading. But basically he still does try to cling to what he perceives to be decent and essential.

But like many lawyers who are in this shadowy world, at the cutting edge of where the law impacts upon people, it’s a world of sophistry. It’s a question which is asked of lawyers again and again, it seems to be the question that endless fascinates people – it is for that reason I have made it a centrepiece of the plot – and that is the age-old question, how can you act for someone you know is guilty. Lawyers have no trouble with that question. It seems to be something that stands out a mile to the person in the street. But for most lawyers they say, well, this doesn’t in practice present a problem.

That may just be a commentary on the fact that they are so used to sophistry and fine shades of meaning and rationalisation, and so on, but what they are really saying is, you take your instructions, there usually are two sides of the story, you tend to accept your client’s case as part of the business of acting as a spokesperson for that client and unless the evidence is very clearly opposed to what the client is telling you, there is usually some basis on which to put up the client’s story, because every story does have problems. Even the most honest man will tell a story and the lawyer will be obliged to take up with him certain inconsistencies. Every story is bedevilled.

Sophistry is important. One of the most entertaining parts of the book deals with the bullying judge.

The whole style of courts has changed from when I started. The bullying judge was a very familiar figure, in that era when I first started practising law twenty-five, thirty years ago, but that has now changed. The judge in the book is from that era; the modern day, younger judge is an entirely different caste of mind. They rarely tend to out-debate people. For the sake of a good solid confrontational drama, I preferred to present the old style judge.

Despite all the bullying and the problems with the law, there is, in the book, some kind of triumph for the ‘good’ man, for Michael. Is this hopeful?

One does expect to see some kind of change in the central characters. Cheyne is at something of a crossroads in his life for one reason or another and he learns certain things as the story goes along. One of those things is a recognition or an underlining of something he knew, that any lawyer, like any citizen has a role to play in standing up and confronting a misuse of power. It’s not so much the notion of goodness but of civic responsibility, an ethic which Michael Cheyne is having to examine.

I guess the real problem that surfaced so clearly in the 1980s, both in the West Coast and in the other states was the whole notion of people, both ordinary citizens and advisers and professional people abdicating their responsibilities by turning into grovelling toadies who were prepared to dance to the tune of whoever was in power. Through the sifting of the wreckage by various Royal Commissions it has perhaps dawned on people that there is a need to blow the whistle, and to stand up and be counted, and to say what is on your mind, even though it may be unfashionable.

There are two powerful scenes of verbal confrontation, but only one is reported in detail. Why did you choose to avoid the second scene between the lawyer and the bullying judge?

I like the notion of refuting, or subverting expectations. It’s odd that the overall impression people have of books I write is that they are fairly orthodox and conventional, but where I in fact get into a lot of trouble is that I am often consciously subverting expectations in a way that people tend to resent a bit.

The other element is this: when Michael Cheyne is about to do battle again, we shift to one of the drug dealers being interrogated and beaten up in a fairly violent way. I wanted to make the point that although you get a confrontation in an apparently civilised way, in an apparently civilised forum, at the core of it all is a kind of brutal confrontation where someone is going to get done over. That is at the core of the whole legal system, disguised by veneers, but someone is going to get done over. There’s a sense of anarchy at the core which tantalises me, but most lawyers simply won’t admit to it, and they would find everything I’ve just said offensive because they see the legal system as this magnificent edifice that has cleared away all the ragged edges. But there are a whole lot of disappointed people out there, or people sitting behind bars who don’t see the legal system as the miracle system they would have us believe it is.