I am certain of one thing: the endeavour to write at full stretch is worthwhile. At the heart of it, for me, is an attempt to communicate perceptions. Sometimes these perceptions arc so instinctive, so fragile, that I have to embody them in ‘fictions’ which will explain them more clearly to me as well as to anyone else. At other times I understand them very clearly indeed and see my task as one of trying to communicate them to as wide an audience as possible.

There is, in this sense, ‘public’ and ‘private’ writing. Public writing includes essays, biography, journalism, drama, criticism, and what might be called prophecy; it is a form of discourse. Private writing includes poetry, the novel, short stories, letters and autobiography; it is typically a form of self-expression. These are generalisations, and therefore probably invalid; you could argue that anything which is written to be published is public writing: and self-expression can be a form of communication. Clearly the two forms interfuse.

Yet there is a rough sort of truth, or at least usefulness, to the distinction. I started off, for instance, as a private writer, writing poetry at school and for Hermes magazine at Sydney University; later I wrote short stories while sleeping on a friend's floor in an Earls Court bedsitter, and in a snowed-in mountaineer's cottage in Snowdonia. In the last few years I've found myself moving towards the public mode, partly because 1 see it as a form of political commitment; also, I like discussion and the didactic. But I’ve continued to write novels, short stories and scripts in the ‘imaginative’ mode; indeed, I’ve never really had any doubt about the primacy of imaginative over non-imaginative literature. (When I began writing the author 1 admired most, after Joyce, was Virginia Woolf and my early short stories and novels were an attempt to move away from narrative towards a static fictional form. These days the non-fiction writer I feel closest to is Orwell).

I have always been interested in forms. I like Alain Robbe-Grillet’s statement: ‘To speak of the content of a novel as something independent of its form comes down to striking the genre as a whole from the realm of art ... There are not, for a writer, two possible ways to write a book. When he thinks of a future novel it is always a way of writing which first of all occupies his mind, and demands his hand ...’ That certainly applies to me. If I want to write something the first question (which is usually answered instinctively) is: what form?

If I want to write something about. for instance, the nature of relationships within a marriage, I turn naturally to fiction. My first novel. Don't Talk To Me About Love, and my latest series of short stories, in the last issue of Westerly, attempt to grapple with precisely that.

If 1 want to write about social or political ideas then I move naturally towards non-fiction. The essay is the perfect form for this, and so over the years I’ve written three books of essays; the latest. Soundtrack for the Eighties, has just been published by Hodder & Stoughton. A good deal of contemporary journalism, of course, is really the essay-in-disguise, and certainly much of what I write is in that form, even though it may appear in the guise of a profile, article or piece of literary criticism. This annoys many people who still hold to the ideal of objectivity in such writing, as though such a thing were possible. If objectivity means focussing on the thing itself (person, book, situation) and attempting to understand, describe or judge it fairly, I agree. But finally a writer has to take some stance towards what he is writing about, has to be committed, and the very form of the essay makes that clear; it is a vehicle for the expression of opinion.

What’s become clear to me over the years is that I am mainly interested in ideas, and books become a way of exploring and arguing about those ideas. Hence Profile of Australia, People, Politics & Pop, The Australian People, etc. Our family have always been great arguers and discussers; they take politics and society and intellectual concepts very seriously, even though the style is often lighthearted. I usually know what I want to write about before I start writing; the origin of a book is usually an idea or insight – which I want to develop and embody in what I write. Even my novels and short stories are basically conceptual; e.g. The See-Through Revolver was, in part, about what is a moral act in a corrupt society.

Maybe what I’ve written about popular culture is a good example of what I’m talking about. (It’s interesting that Orwell was one of the first writers to analyse popular culture carefully and derive political lessons from it.) Much of my writing on subjects like jazz, surfing, cartooning, rock ’n’ roll and suburbia has been a celebrationof that culture’s forms and rituals because I respond to them; I mean, that’s my background, that’s where I come from. I grew up in Jamberoo, Gundagai, Haberfield, Rose Bay, Bondi, London, Woollahra, New York, Repentance Creek and now I’m back in Bondi Junction; all along the way I’ve chronicled that experience, using whatever form came to hand: book, essay, rock opera, novel, social tract, diatribe, film script, short story, poem, advertisement, letter, blurb, diary and even articles like this. One of the formal problems has been to find a literary style or medium which is responsive to the tension and intensity of the experience without academicizing. But behind that celebration have been some very clear and, I believe, important social and political ideas.

Popular culture is yet another demonstration of the centrality of the mass of people to our culture, and society, and (though this is yet to come) our political argument, and in this I feel very close to people like Ian Turner, Stuart Hall, Wilfrid Mellers and others. What we have to do is enfranchise people everywhere in those activities which have previously been the closed preserve of politicians, artists, and intellectuals; writing is the best way I can do that.

I am, of course, committed to the right of all people to have access to ideas, books, and the arts in general. The paradox is that as the concepts you deal with as a writer become more subtle and more complex – even if, correspondingly, more important – your audience is likely to dwindle. Someone like Bruce Petty faces exactly the same problem: how do you communicate increasingly intricate political, social and economics – concepts to a mass audience – and it is the ‘mass’, above all, which needs them because only then will they be able to free themselves and become actors instead of subjects of manipulation.

There isn’t an easy answer: I sometimes wonder if there is one at all, except that of universal higher education, and public control of the mass media, and perhaps experimentation with alternative forms like film, photography and cartooning. As a writer I think you have to stay true to the complexities of your subject and strive for whatever audience you can reach ... which, as poets know, can be disheartening and even destructive experience.

Which brings me to the question of how you can continue to do good work in a cultural climate which is often indifferent, ignorant or actively hostile. One solution is the expatriate one; you head for or write for New York or London, as I have in the past, and achieve an incomparably wider and more sophisticated audience there. If you look at some of the most highly regarded non-fiction writers in the United States at the moment – say, Mailer, Didion, Wolfe and others – you find high-tech style, no real ideas, and a deadly apoliticism, but to challenge the Ascendancy you have to turn yourself into an American; I decided to come back. Often you’ve got your hands full fighting off editors who want to rewrite everything you’ve done; , Douglas Stewart, whom I respect, tried to edit the first chapter of Don’t Talk To Me About Love to make it stylistically more conventional, another editor tried to turn Up Against The Wall, America into claptrap journalism; a third went through a manuscript and turned every ‘which’ to ‘that’ and inserted perhaps half a thousand commas. Siren voices suggest you turn completely to film scripts, as though the form (novel/short story/essay) were irrelevant. You have to resist publishers who come up with great ‘commercial’ ideas. You talk to friends, keep writing, and wonder who the hell is reading it.

‘Craig McGregor is a moralist’, Lucy Frost wrote in a review of The Australian People. She made it sound like an accusation. Oh well, 1 suppose it’s better a standpoint than that of Cynic or Epicurean or Syndicalist/ Nihilist or Dispassionate Observer Of The Great Comedy Of Life. Now look, Lucy, I dunno about being a moralist, but I’ve always had a very clear idea of what is fair and unfair, though of course I’ve never lived up to it, and before I became a writer I thought vaguely of being a politician so I could change the world but then I came to think I was a better writer than politician and I could achieve much the same through writing anyhow.

The superstructure for this endeavour was provided by John Anderson, whose pluralist analysis of social organisation is one which, basically, I still hold to but which provided, for me, an explanation of how literature affects and alters the dynamic tension of our elastic society. Strange: some Andersonians retreated into libertarianism; I decided to grab the elastic. Virtually everything I have learnt or understood since then I have tried to communicate, in the hope that it stretches the world we live in in the right direction. And I try to stay alive. You could call it a life’s work.

Just then I got a cable. From London. ‘PLUTO PRESS WISH PUBLISH UK EDITION BOOK OF ESSAYS. WISH PUBLISH CHAPTERS ENTITLED UP AGAINSTTHE WALL, BLUES IN HARLEM, CULTURE IS ACTIVITY, LAMENT FOR LOUIS, PROVINCIAL CULTURE, SOUNDTRACK FOR A BAD MOVIE. JAZZ: STARTING TO THINK, ON EQUALITY, AND HEGEMONY.’ The circle widens. Sometimes I feel all right about being a writer.