Your forthcoming book with Black Inc., Unsettled, publishes in April. Where did the inspiration for Unsettled come from, and how does this book fit into your ongoing writing about Australia, past and present? 

Being a non-indigenous Australian brings up some hard-to-answer questions.  We’ve benefited from the violence towards Aboriginal people that was done in the past, but we didn’t do it, so where does that leave us?  Should we feel guilty, or just say it was all too long ago? How can we acknowledge the injustices of the past and find a way forward?

I’m not the only person to be unsettled by those questions. But mostly I think we look away from them — they’re too hard and confronting to deal with. 

In all my novels set in colonial Australia I’ve been circling that unsettledness, and used my own family stories as a way into those questions. This time the impulse was to come out from behind the screen of fiction.  

I decided to do a road trip — a kind of pilgrimage — to all the places mentioned in the family stories. I’d re-run the stories in my mind one more time, but this time I’d be standing where they happened — right on the land that was taken — and I’d widen the frame to include the people who were there when my forebears took it. I’d try to see the whole picture and understand what it meant. Not to condemn, not to accuse. And not to wallow in guilt. Just to let myself really look, and see where that might lead. 

Your 2005 novel The Secret River is a work of fiction, based on the life of a real person — one of your ancestors — whereas Unsettled is a work of non-fiction, blending the personal and historical. If you compare the writing processes for each book, did they involve very different approaches?

In the fiction, I was using the family story to try to tell a bigger one, a national one. My ancestors had their individual stories, of course, but they were also representative of the history they were part of.  I could use them, as fictional characters, as a way to explore those big issues. But I didn’t have to engage in a personal way with who they were or what they might have done. 

The fiction took a lot of research, a lot of talking to people, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, and a lot of walking on the land the story had happened on. But it was always about a story much bigger than my own.

Unsettled is personal and close to home. This isn’t me pushing characters and events around — it’s just me, standing on a piece of ground and looking around and saying, My forebear took this. Right here is where that abstract ‘dispossession’ was done — by particular individuals, to other particular individuals.  Let me truly acknowledge that history and see where that takes me.  

The book is quite personal, in that your forebears were ‘on the sharp edge of the moving blade that was colonisation.’ Can you say what it was like to face this uncomfortable truth?

It was confronting. As I did the journey that the book describes I felt grief, shame, sorrow, anger, despair. They were feelings I’d kept at a distance while writing the fiction — I think I was afraid they might be overwhelming if I let them in.  

But once I let myself feel them, there was also a kind of simplicity to what had seemed complicated. To look straight-on at a wrong, and let yourself feel the full sorrow of it, feels like the clearing of a whole lot of obstacles from the path. I’m still working out just what that path is and where it might go, but I’m not muddling around hiding in the bushes any more. 

You have for many years been a significant and influential voice in Australian literature. In what ways has the Australian literary landscape evolved over the years? Where do you see it going from here? 

The most important shift is that Aboriginal voices are now a big part of our national literary voice. Their voices and their stories were silenced for two hundred years. Now they’re being heard in many forms: fiction, non-fiction and scholarly writing, but also visual arts, music and dance. 

Could you name one book (or author) that, more than any other, has somehow changed or inspired your own writing? 

When I was growing up, Australian fiction was all ripping yarns or rollicking entertainment. You went to European or American writing for deep writing about important subjects. Reading Patrick White when I was a teenager made me realise that Australian writing could be about the big questions too. Right here, where I lived in the suburbs of Australia, was a place where the mysteries and dilemmas of being human could be worked through in fiction.  

You’re a productive writer — that goes without saying — but how do you spend your time when you’re not writing? It might be hard to imagine, but what might you be doing if you weren’t a writer?

I have a nerdy streak — I love finding out about things in the real world, how they work, why they’re the way they are. Like many writers, I’d have loved to be an archaeologist, standing on a bit of ground and uncovering the scraps of the human life that had happened there, and trying to extrapolate from them to a bigger picture.

Do you have any advice for writers who are starting out or in the early stages of their careers?

My advice is just a version of the usual: write what you know. Write what you’re passionate about, even if you think no one else will want to read it. They will. If you care, readers will too. And get a day job, so you’re free to write what you care about without worrying that it won't pay the rent.

What do you hope readers take away from reading Unsettled?

That journey I took was a kind of homemade truth-telling — a kind of DIY, personal effort to come to grips with what it means to be here. I hope readers will be inspired to do  something similar. Their journeys will be different from mine — but whether they (or their forebears) arrived here two hundred or two years ago, I hope the book might encourage them to think about their own place here.