Richard Flanagan

In 1995, the Paul Keating Labor government commissioned an inquiry into the forcible removal of Aboriginal children.

The survival of extraordinary creatures such as the giant Tasmanian freshwater crayfish - the largest in the world - is in doubt because of logging.

In Tasmania, an island the size of Ireland whose primeval forests astonished 19th-century Europeans, an incomprehensible ecological tragedy is being played out.

Unlike some mainland black groups, Tasmanian Aborigines now have no traditional tribal culture left. It was taken from them with great violence and great rapidity.

The number of those identifying as Aborigine in Tasmania rapidly rose in the late 20th century.

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.

Nothing seemed to offer more striking proof to the late Victorian mind of the infernal truth of social Darwinism than the supposed demise of the Tasmanian Aborigines.

I went to study at Oxford University in the 1980s on an imperial scholarship instituted by Cecil Rhodes.

Through my youth, there was imposed on us a culture relentlessly English. English books were all you could buy; English television filled our screens, and in consequence, England seemed to matter in a way that our world didn't.

What supposedly bound that Commonwealth together was a mysterious shared identity - Britishness.

I was born too late and missed the dream of empire. Its shadow, the Commonwealth, coincides with my life but rarely connected with it.

I have met Aborigines younger than me who used to hide every time anyone official came round their camp for fear of being taken away.

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.

Logging is an industry driven solely by greed. It prospers with government support and subsidies, and it is accelerating its rate of destruction, so that Tasmania is now the largest hardwood chip exporter in the world.

In the late 19th century, the theory that the Aborigines were an inferior race that was doomed to die out became accepted as fact.

For much of the latter part of the 20th century, Australia seemed to be opening up to something large and good. It believed itself a generous country, the land of the 'fair go.'

Under Malcolm Fraser's Liberal governments in the 1970s, large numbers of refugees fleeing Vietnam in wretched boats were taken in without any great fuss.

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.

It may be that the carbon tax is the final chapter in the strange death of Labor Australia.

A Labor prime minister, Julia Gillard, who does believe in climate change, nevertheless advised her predecessor, Kevin Rudd, to abandon his emissions trading scheme.

Black Saturday reminded many Australians of what they know only too well: that of all the advanced economies, Australia is perhaps the one most vulnerable to climate change.

The 2007 Labor campaign was the most presidential in Australian history, with a slogan - Kevin07 - exceeded in its banality only by its success.

Everything about The Bradshaws is controversial, fluid, uncertain: their age - perhaps 30,000 years old, perhaps older, perhaps more recent - who painted them, what they mean.

The Bradshaws suggests an extraordinary civilisation that existed long before modern man reached the British Isles.

'The Bradshaws' is the appropriately inappropriate English title given to an enigma - some hundreds of thousands of mysterious rock art paintings scattered through the wilds of the Kimberley, an area larger than Germany in the remote, scarcely populated northwest of Australia.

You can spend a day in a library and feel: 'Great, I've done a day's work.' But it's only research, not writing.

My father, unusually for a PoW, talked about his experiences, but he talked about them in a very limited way.

Perhaps the virtue of coming from a place like Tasmania is that you had the great gift of knowing that you were not the centre of things, yet life was no less where you were.

My mother hoped I'd be a plumber.

I love all forms of music. I even like music I dislike, because the music you dislike is like going to a strange country, and it forces you to rethink everything and to appreciate its particular joys.

My secret skill is baking bread. My mother was a farmer's daughter and still made bread every day when I was a child. She would have me knead the dough when I got home from school.

I am the happiest writing and being with the people I love.

I hate the way my life has been inexplicably overwhelmed by questionnaires. Life is so much stranger and so much more beautiful than the lists that reduce it to an anorexic assembly of tics and obsessions.

I think all novels are contemporary. When people went to see 'Antony-Cleopatra' at the Globe in the 16th century, they were not going to get a history lesson on the Roman Empire. It was about love, sex, and also about dynastic troubles.

Generally, literary prizes are significant not for who the winner is but the discussion they create around books.

I am, of course, greatly honoured to win the Booker, which is one of the great literary prizes in the world.

I said in my acceptance speech that I hope that readers remember this not as the year I won the Booker, but the year that there were six extraordinary books on the shortlist.

I had long wanted to write a love story, and I had long - wisely, I felt - shirked the challenge because I felt it the hardest story of all to write.

My ancestors came from Co Roscommon, transported to Van Diemen's Land for stealing food.

I was struck by the way Europeans see history as something neatly linear. For me, it's not that; it's not some kind of straight railway.

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

Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life, horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is.

In Australia, the Man Booker is sometimes seen as something of a chicken raffle.

Shakespeare was completely fictionalising the people who were then the great celebrities of English.

In reading, you sense the divine: the things that are larger and greater and more mysterious than yourself.

A novel is a journey into your own soul, and you seek there to discover those things that you share with all others.

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

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.

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.

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.