During my adolescence I read almost nothing. I lived on farms. When I was 19 someone gave me a copy of Patrick White’s novel The Vivisector and it blew my head off.

White’s style captured me, his acerbic poetry and mordant (almost cruel) representations of art and artists and society people in Sydney. Characters come and go in vivid takes and take-downs (by the author) in what I later realised was White’s typical satire and grotesquerie—the latter as a kind of gothic lightning.