[All were] pivotal stories in the Australian narrative ... And obviously there is something elemental about the stories, and if that is the case, they speak across time to us today.

The historical fact is that cinema was constituted as such by becoming narrative, by presenting a story, and by rejecting its other possible directions. The approximation which follows is that, from that point, the sequences of images and even each image, a single shot, are assimilated to propositions or rather oral utterances [...].

When I returned home soon afterwards, it was with a newly awakened sense of what Australian literature was good for: helping us define ourselves in relation to an Anglo past and American present, for example, or airing the wounds suffered by indigenous Australia, or inhabiting those new frictions that result from our expanding cultural pluralism. Above all, it could teach us to dwell more easily in a landscape that did not accord with the metaphors and myth-kitty that was our northern inheritance.

...the proliferation of luminous fungi or iridescent crystals in deep caves where the torchlessly improvident hero needs to see is one of the most obvious intrusions of narrative causality into the physical universe.

I was just absorbed by the narrative,

...stories want to be told. Stories have a power of their own ... you can't write a story until you've felt it. Breathed it in. Walked with your characters. Talked with them.