Going Away is full of traveller's tales, the kinds that only seem bizarre when you're back home, so it's impossible not to ask, did these things happen to you?

Basically, they did, or things like them. But more bizarre things happened which I didn't write about. Either I couldn't make them credible or they detracted from the balance of the novel. The book was never meant to be a collection of anecdotes.

Travellers of this variety, the ‘I'm young and I'm questing' variety, are pretty horrible really. Why brave the horribles for your first novel?

I like young people who are questing. I like people who are prepared to explore and take risks, particularly people who are prepared to risk their definitions of themselves. I don't like people who are ostentatious about it (I would hope the book is humorous on this very point) because they're trapped in a prison of their own making. In the vernacular, they're wankers. But I like the metaphor of the journey. I hope I travel until I die.

The obvious question: what's Stephen looking for by going away?

Home. That's what the name of the book is in Irish (‘Abhaile’). I did think of calling the book ‘Going Home’, but that's the name of a collection of stories by the Aboriginal writer, Archie Weller. Good book, too.

And what does he find?

When l was growing up and at university, there was a belief that Australian intellectuals and artists had to ‘go away’ to achieve fulfilment. It was the Milan Kundera - ‘Life is Elsewhere’ principle. It still has currency. Most intellectual discussion and literary debate is Eurocentric. This is a book about an Australian who goes away, and finds he has to come back. In a sense, my book ends at the beginning: Through travelling the world, the central character perhaps learns how to travel in his own world, that is, Australia. I believe a lot of Australians, myself-included to an extent, have yet to discover this country.

Tasmania gets another serve in this novel. And so does Catholic education. How do you think both these parts of the novel will be received in the Irish translation of Going Away?

I very much hope this book isn't a case of Tasmania getting ‘another serve’. I see a lot of intellectual dishonesty in attitudes towards Tasmania. Tasmanian history is Australian history writ particularly vividly and concisely. Tasmania is the book's background; its character is part of the narrator's character. If he had been a Victorian or a Queenslander, the same principle would have applied. Nor is the theme of Catholic education meant to be as important as that of a boy beginning the transition to manhood in an exclusively male adolescent subculture (that is, boarding school). How will the book be received in Ireland? My translator, Louis de Paor, sees it as being in the tradition of Irish language writing. Irish is not a bookish language; it's a language which is heard and spoken. My book is an Irish-Australian story told by an Irish-Australian voice. Writing it, I was more conscious of telling a story than of writing a novel. Both of us are also interested in the aboriginal aspects of Gaelic culture.

We wouldn't, of course, get through a Martin Flanagan novel without some footy. You've received lavish praise for the way you write about sport: why does it hit a chord, do you think?

I don't see the book as being written in my voice. It's written in the voice of a confused, and at times desperate young man in his early twenties. He grabs at what makes sense, without necessarily knowing why. One of the biggest temptations I had to fight in writing the book was to explain his actions. The reason I chose to write it in the first person was because I thought it made the action more immediate, less thoughtful, if you like. I regard each thing I do in writing as a step towards something else. If the next novel I write is the one I have in mind, it will be different in almost every respect.

How do you see the relationship between journalism and fiction?

Journalism, for me, is essentially learning about the world. It's about abandoning your preconceptions, or seeking to, and looking at what it is you're actually confronted with. As a form of writing, it's incredibly old. The Faber Book of Reportage starts with Plato's account of the death of Socrates and goes through to James Fenton's account-of Marcos's downfall. There are all sorts of practical problems associated with journalism, particularly in this country, but that's basically how I see it in principle. Fiction, for me, is the inner investigation, the inner construction. Fiction need answer no rules other than its own. It's closer to myth.

Who made the best Sachertorte in the world? Andrew Riemer’s mum. The recipe is lost now, but it came from the Ursuline nuns in Sopron, a small Hungarian town where Andrew Riemer’s mother grew up. This information comes early in The Hapsburg Cafe, which is an account of the author’s second visit to the places of his childhood (the first account being recorded in Inside Outside). I waited and waited for him to go to the Ursuline Convent in Sopron and get the recipe, but the duffer never did. Even though he called a part of the book ‘Remembrance of Things Past’. Men. What’s a Madeleine when you could have a Sachertorte?

A new series called Interpretations, published by Melbourne University Press, aims to provide up-to-date introductions to recent theories and critical practices in the humanities and social sciences. Series Editor, Ken Ruthven, answers some questions about the role and reception of critical writing.

Does the brief introduction to the series, which says it is ‘clearly written and up-to-date’, respond to the constant criticism that critical theory uses élite language?

As books by Christopher Norris and Jonathan Culler indicate, even the most complicated types of critical theory can be written about clearly, providing those who undertake such tasks include among their expository skills a mastery of English syntax. Sentences that require to be read twice before they can be understood will be edited out of the Interpretations series. Each book will explain the meanings of appropriate technical terms as they come up, and then use them wherever necessary without further ado. This procedure will depend, of course, on cooperation between writers capable of explaining what they’re on about and readers willing to grant the humanities what has never been denied the sciences, namely, the right to introduce new technical terms in order to articulate new types of knowledge. I believe it’s time to put an end to those recurrent standoffs staged by the Australian media between philistine journos out of their depth in the newer critical discourses and arrogant critical theorists who (to adapt a phrase of Sir Peter Medawar) behave like voluptuaries of the higher forms of incomprehension. What any reader of an Interpretations book will learn is how to use a particular set of critical terms in order to engage with otherwise elusive or obscure issues.

Each book in the series will focus on some aspect of those new developments in the humanities and social sciences which have come into existence by the application of critical theory to traditional preoccupations in these fields. As you know, there was no ‘critical theory’ in the current sense before the late 1960s. And although a few Australian intellectuals were engaging with this largely French phenomenon in the 1970s, it was not until the 1980s that tertiary institutions here started to offer courses on critical theory, and their campus bookshops began to stock the very first guidebooks to it written in English. The series will be up-to-date to the degree that critical theory itself is a recent phenomenon continuously in the bibliographies for the benefit of readers who want to go into matters more thoroughly.

MUP announced the change of general editor, following Stephen Knight’s departure for the UK, by suggesting that ‘Sailing the seas depends upon the helmsman’. How do you see your role?

The nautical metaphor wouldn’t be my favourite choice, although I suppose the general editor might be imagined as steering the series through discursive seas made treacherous in the 1990s by ideological conflicts. Personally, I prefer to think of the series as a space in which some of the newer developments in the humanities and social sciences can be discussed and analysed by people who know about them for the benefit of those of us who do not. In that case, the task of a general editor is to ensure that the available space is filled over the years by as many varieties of the new as possible.

Are these titles in the series literary, social or cultural theory?

To put the question this way is to assume that knowledge can be compartmentalised in ways made familiar by a traditional fragmentation of the humanities into those discrete disciplines which are institutionalised in university departments with names such as History or Philosophy or English. Had there not been problems with such disciplinary arrangements, interdisciplinarity would never have flourished. Such moves were accelerated when scholars located in different disciplinary departments began to study the same critical theorists and to collaborate in the production of certain types of knowledge that don’t ‘belong’ in any of those traditional departments. The Interpretations series will try to accommodate well-informed studies of such highly theorised practices, irrespective of how they might be categorised, on the assumption that they will be of varying interest to people from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds.

What kinds of topics will be covered?

No restrictions are envisaged, provided topics are of contemporary interest and written about in ways that make clear both the theoretical grounds that constitute them, and the critical methods employed in exploring them.

What’s the relevance of the series, and to whom?

The series will not interest people who believe that the world went mad in 1968 and that we should do everything in our power to bring back the 1950s. People who are more curious than appalled by recent developments in the humanities and social sciences, however, might be expected to welcome a series of books that, without patronising their readers, explain and critique some current critical practices in a well-informed and non-threatening manner. By no means all such readers will be enrolled in tertiary courses of study.

Many books of theory produced in Australia are aimed at a very limited audience and are produced on very small budgets. Is there enough of a readership to make a series such as this viable?

Given the relatively small size of Australia’s population, the local market for such books is always going to be correspondingly small, which is one of the reasons why Melbourne University Press is seeking to have the series published by an American university press and by a British press. Nevertheless, two factors are worth bearing in mind. First, and with respect to the potential academic market, it should be noted that the arts faculties of tertiary institutions continue to experience no difficulty whatsoever in attracting students, in spite of the economic hardships they endure and the government’s attempt to lure them into science; and furthermore, that by far the most popular courses in arts faculties are those that engage with the newer forms of humanities and social sciences.

Second, there is an Australian intelligentsia outside the academies that frequents bookshops such as Readings in Melbourne or Gleebooks in Sydney and buys books on critical theory in such numbers as to make it commercially viable to stock them. Much of this material is imported from the USA and the UK. Some of it, however, is produced locally, and I hope that Interpretations will be perceived as an important contribution to that endeavour.

Verity Burgmann’s Power and Protest is an evocation of the major social movements that have arisen and thrived in Australia since the late 1960s, the black, women’s, lesbian and gay, peace and green movements. The writer is a well-known historian of Australian radicalism as well as a political scientist, and in combining history and politics she joins other social scientists such as Terry Irving, Judith Brett, James Walter, Murray Goot – an interesting tradition. In each chapter she offers an evocation of the various movements, outlining origins, developments, aspects, divisions, conflicts, difficulties, dilemmas, successes, achievements, as well as the opposition and resistance to these movements in the wider society. Burgmann writes with ease and energy, often with enjoyable irony and sarcasm. I liked her reference to Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) as ‘ovarious’. Power and Protest is entertaining as well as clear, and will surely prove indispensable for teaching.