Richard Flanagan

If war illuminates love, love offers the possibility of allowing some light to be brought back out of the shadows. It's almost as if they buttress and make possible an understanding of each other.

Within white Australia, there was a growing movement for what was known as reconciliation - a movement that peaked with millions marching in 2000 to demand the government say sorry for past injustices.

The past is there, but life is circular. I have a strong sense of the circularity of time.

Since woodchipping began 32 years ago, Tasmanians have watched as one extraordinary place after another has been sacrificed. Beautiful places, holy places, lost not only to them, but forever.

Under Howard, federal government support for black Australia slowly dried up. Services were slashed, native title restricted.

If 30 Australians drowned in Sydney Harbour, it would be a national tragedy. But when 30 or more refugees drown off the Australian coast, it is a political question.

There is a crisis that is not political - an epidemic of loneliness, of sadness - and we're completely unequal to dealing with it.

John Howard, willing to apologise to home owners for rising interest rates, would not say sorry to Aborigines. He refused to condone what he referred to as 'a black armband version' of history, preferring a jingoistic nationalism.

I was one of six kids; my grandmother lived with us. We had an aunt who used to have nerves, and all her kids would turn up and live with us.

Through the 1990s, the fracturing of Tasmanian Aboriginal politics was given impetus by the ongoing corruption of a number of black organisations started under federal government programmes, with large amounts of public money being lost.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North' is one of the most famous books of all Japanese literature, written by the great poet Basho in 1689.

I'm a successful novelist, and I've been a lucky one, so I don't want to cry the poor mouth. Writing has never been easy.