Not surprisingly, when I visited Britain on the completion of my degree, I found it was no longer ‘home’. And after a year’s study at the University of St Andrews, in Scotland, I returned to Africa with a real sense of belonging there.

I had in the meantime married a South African and together we spent the next ten years travelling, doing part-time jobs and then living idly off our savings, and alternately supporting each other while we studied further. What took me back to university, this time in Johannesburg, was the decision to become a librarian. But somehow that never eventuated. A good Honours degree led to the offer of a tutorship in English, which led to a higher degree, a lectureship, and so on. And without ever having said to myself, ‘I shall become …’, I found I was an academic – and quite happy to be so, because prior to leaving Africa it never seriously occurred to me to become a writer as well.

In retrospect, I can see that my final departure from Africa was nearly as drastic in its effect as my originally going there. I didn’t think it would be like that. I didn’t agonise, for instance, over the business of leaving. I had for several years been working at the University of South Africa, where I had some involvement in African education. As with many people in my position, I justified staying on by keeping an internal balance sheet of the moral pros and cons. For a while the pros had it; then, quite suddenly, and for a whole host of reasons, I decided that to continue living and working there would do more harm than good to the cause of African freedom. So I left and went first to New Zealand.

What I hadn’t reckoned with was the weight of regret I would take with me. I’d always thought I was above such emotion as nostalgia; whereas the truth was, I suffered from it very badly indeed. For a year or more I hardly saw New Zealand: I was too busy trying to fend off memories which were disturbing precisely because they were memories, and not the present reality.

My wife, Alison, had only limited sympathy for my plight. She perceived, quite correctly, that I was to some extent sentimentalising the past; and just as correctly, she left me alone to sort out my feelings. I did so in a time-honoured way: I sat down and tried to come to terms with the past by writing about it. Those first sketches, perhaps inevitably, grew into short stories, the short stories gradually gave way to a novel – and once again, without my ever saying, ‘I shall become ...’, I was writing regularly.

The crucial factor in that transition, of course, was not my sitting down pen in hand, but the half-conscious decision to tum reminiscence into fiction. I can see now why it happened, though it wasn’t so obvious at the time. Memories, like the lives of which they are a part, are too untidy, too inconclusive, to be left in their original state. For various quirkish human reasons, they make better sense and are easier to digest if they are tampered with, given the form and significance which raw experience so often lacks. There’s another consideration too: I found that paradoxically I could understand my own past better when I ceased to regard it as mine; when I projected it onto somebody quite different from myself; somebody who judged and responded in ways I never would. In other words, I moved towards the realisation that often the demons are best exorcised when authors choose not to write about themselves, but about other, fictitious characters ‘out there’. That, I know, is not a new idea; but it is one which I had to unearth practically and not always pleasantly.

While this process was going on, I moved with my family (in 1976) to Australia: to a teaching post at the University of New England, where I still work. By then I was finishing my first novel, Voices from the River, and had gone beyond the stage of ‘Let’s lay the ghost of the past’. Rather late in the day compared with most writers, I had discovered not only that I enjoyed writing fiction, but that it was meaningful regardless of whether it related directly to my own past.

That was just as well, because my move to Australia killed off any lingering nostalgia I may have brought with me. The sheer size of this country, its extremes of climate, its landscapes, were reassuringly close to what I’d known; and I soon felt settled (as did my wife and son) and happier than I had for years. If that were not enough, not long after our arrival in Armidale my wife and I decided to adopt a baby girl (our second son had died shortly before our departure from South Africa), and her very real and demanding presence, perhaps more than anything else, completed the process of assimilation.

It was about then that I consciously began writing contrasting African and Australian stories, building up a collection that would later surface under the title Africa and After. That was also the time, with my first novel already in the pipeline, that I began writing for children.

I can offer no wholly convincing reason for this new direction. Given that I didn’t read at all as a child (unless you count comics) and knew al­most nothing about children’s books, it was an odd course to take. The only thing I’m certain of is what started me thinking about kids’ books, and that was my son’s dissatisfaction, at the age of ten or eleven, with the novels he was reading. In his view too many novels failed to sustain interest or suspense, while others failed to achieve any satisfying resolution. I can dis­tinctly remember being fascinated by what he had to say. I can even remember thinking that it might be challenging to try to write a book which met his criteria. What I can’t remember is what drove me beyond the interest stage and prompted me actually to venture into such unknown territory.

It’s especially puzzling when I consider how I approached the task. For despite my academic training, I didn’t start by going to the library to see what everyone else was doing. Instead, I locked myself away for a few days and attempted to recapture (to re­remember, as it were) the kinds of experience that had excited me as a child. It was that dredging-up process which gave me the main ideas and images for my first children’s novel, Forbidden Paths of Thual; and even now I continue to subject prospective ideas to the same memory test. If my sense of the youthful me doesn’t respond favourably to them, they are dropped. That may not be an objective approach, but it’s one I couldn’t happily do without.

But to return to the central issue: although I’m hazy about what started me writing for children, I’m reasonably clear about what keeps me working in that field. For one thing, it has expanded my previously naive conception of story and shown me how action can in itself become the meaning centre of a novel. (This conception of action is a common element in novels as otherwise diverse as Master of the Grove and Papio, or The Hunting of Shadroth and The Green Piper.) More than that, writing for children leaves me freer than in my adult work to play with genre and mixed forms; it enables me to pursue themes and topics that don’t meet with a ready adult response; it forces upon me an ‘other’ or childlike point of view – or to phrase that differently, it forces the adult self, which is always the writing self, to confront and come to terms with a much younger, less assured manner of perceiving and experiencing; and so I might go on. I hope I’ve said enough to make it plain that I’m now as committed to children’s as to adult fiction.

I might add that the two modes are curiously complementary; and increasingly there is a spillover of ideas from one mode to the other. If there is any slight tension, it is between fiction and my critical work, and then only because of shortage of time. With a full­time job as a university teacher, and usually with· two novels on the go at once, I find that my critical writing is being pushed more and more into a comer.

As for the future – more of the same, I suspect. Hopefully, I shall continue to write a diversity of fiction – fantasy, so-called ‘mainstream’ novels, etc. And for a specific purpose: because it strikes me that in a society made up of a myriad of sub­cultures, there is no longer any agreed mainstream course for the writer to follow. The detective or the fantasy novel, just as much as the traditional novel of human relationships, reflects an important aspect of our world and offers considerable scope for the serious writer. Within these broad parameters, I daresay I shall go on dipping into my African past, but less and less so. Already a book like The Beast of Heaven owes a great deal to the Australian landscape; while a recently completed children’s novel, Taronga, is set wholly in Australia. For me this latter novel is a significant milestone – final proof that past and present are no longer in conflict. To bend a quota­tion from T.S. Eliot, completing it was, in one very basic sense, truly to arrive where I started.

Reading back over this, I see I’ve said nothing about such vital issues as either knock-backs from publishers or my occasional successes. I’ve had my fair share of both: at one extreme, my determination not to write the same kind of book twice, but rather to experiment with different fictional models, has sometimes given me a bumpy ride through the publishing and reviewing worlds; at the other extreme, winning various literary prizes and being shortlisted for others has smoothed my path somewhat. All in all, I have no serious complaints about such mixed fortunes; and I’ll consider myself fortunate rather than otherwise if I encounter the same mix in the future.