When I was growing up, every Sunday was a rest day, so after church, we'd get all my cousins and sisters together, and my parents would take us all shop hopping. We'd go to all the different shops, and Target was always the last on the list; we'd walk in, and Mum would say, 'Go on, go crazy!'

There's been moments where I've felt, as an indigenous woman growing up in Australia, there's been that kind of rivalry of being indigenous... I've had that experience of someone saying, 'I don't know if she's going to go that far.'

I've always looked up to Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey for their outstanding vocal performances. I've always been inspired by them.

When I go back home, I am just Jess, no-one special.

The silver lining of those years when I was trying to get 'Tinkers' published but couldn't were the years when I had to decide, Why do I want to be a writer? I realized that writing is the thing itself; writing is not a means to publication, writing is not a predicate of publication, so I spent years making art for art's sake.

I'm not a playwright; I'm a writer who loves theater.

But, after all, the aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.