Richard Flanagan
Richard Flanagan
Richard Miller Flanaganis an Australian novelist from Tasmania. "Considered by many to be the finest Australian novelist of his generation", according to The Economist, each of his novels has attracted major praise and received numerous awards and honours. He also has written and directed feature films. He won the 2014 Man Booker Prize...
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionNovelist
CountryAustralia
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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.
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I went to study at Oxford University in the 1980s on an imperial scholarship instituted by Cecil Rhodes.
history report
History, like journalism, is ever a journey outwards, and you must report back what you find and no more.
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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.
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Under Howard, federal government support for black Australia slowly dried up. Services were slashed, native title restricted.
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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.'
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God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.
I get more optimistic as I get older.
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Look at the history of literature, and you find the history of beauty on the one hand and the IOUs on the other.
I read incessantly, searching for the things that might move me.
allow hope people realised recognise wished
I realised that if I wished to write about the dark and not allow for hope, people would recognise it as false - because hope is the nub of what we are.
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I am an admirer of haiku, and I'm a great admirer of Japanese literature in general.
I never know what I am writing. The moment you know what you're writing, you're writing nothing worth reading.
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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.