 I'm Michael Fully Love of the Lowy Institute and I'm here with a guest of the Lowy Institute, my friend Richard Flanagan, one of Australia's finest novelists. Thank you very much, Richard, for coming to speak to us today. Thank you, Michael. Can I ask you about this magnificent novel that you've written, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which I found formidable and powerful and compelling and very moving. Why did you write this book and what's it about? My father was a prisoner of war of the Japanese and he worked on the infamous Burma Thai Death Railway and I'd written several novels and at a certain point I realised I'd kept returning to the story trying to write it and failing and my father had grown old and frail and I realised I had to return to it and finish it but it was really the book I had to write if I was ever to write another book. So it tells the story of one man who ends up a leader in one camp of Australian POWs and follows him through his life but it also follows through their various lives, some of the prisoners and also some of their captors, the Japanese officers, the Korean guards and tries to build up a picture of war, love, guilt, memory and all that strange chaos I suppose that haunts us all. And the central character, Dorigo Evans, is a really memorable figure who I guess is based partly on or draws on the life of Leary Dunlop and you and I were talking a minute ago and we were saying that it's interesting that of all the scrapes Australia's been involved in as a country probably the most celebrated war hero was a doctor, Sir Weary Dunlop. Tell us a little bit maybe about Dorigo Evans as a character and then on Weary Dunlop what do you think it might say about Australia that we've plucked him from the ranks? Well that's two very distinct questions and because they're two aptly different people really Dorigo Evans, as for Bear said, Madame Bovery, same war Dorigo Evans, same war, he's an invention composed of many parts and all of them I suppose refracted through the prism of my own soul his early story is very much my father's early story growing up the child of a literate in a remote Tasmanian country town his war story is similar to Weary Dunlop's because my father was one of Dunlop's thousand that now near mythical group but Dunlop was only one of a number of extraordinary doctor leaders of the prisoners of war and they all performed very similarly they were extraordinary, self-sacrificing, courageous and they were revered by their men both at the time and afterwards Dunlop simply became the most famous of them and he was an extraordinary figure but the post-war life I invented for Dorigo Evans is a fiction and I guess really the point that really distinguishes Dorigo Evans from Weary Dunlop is Weary Dunlop is too extraordinary a character for fiction his feats which we were discussing earlier were so remarkable so outlandish that to put them in a novel would invite the criticism of both absurdity, sentimentality over dramatisation but I guess we invented God to explain the miraculous truth of ourselves as human beings but a poor novelist like me has to make do with the plausibility of believable lies and so I invented Dorigo Evans your second question as to why has Weary Dunlop become such a figure I think has a lot to do with who we are as Australians rather than who Weary Dunlop was every society, every history throws up a myriad of characters, achievements but it is interesting that other cultures choose warrior heroes to explain war to them we found a man who was a doctor and whose courage manifested itself in standing up for others in situations of the greatest adversity, distress and misery I think one of his men said that he was a lighthouse of rationality in a world gone entirely mad another said that we knew if Weary would all go under he speaks to something about us as Australians something about our communal instincts which still even to this day seems stronger than perhaps some other societies and yet he also speaks to a non-conformity that masquerades as authority so he's a very strange and paradoxical figure I think he is a story that will continue to grow and it's a good story for us to continue to think about and explore Finally can I ask you about the war in which your novel is set, the Second World War I know when I was growing up the Second World War loomed quite large I think in Australian memories of our history my father also was a Second World War veteran so it was very important to me it seems to me in the last couple of decades that it's been overshadowed somewhat in our official remembrances by the First World War does that balance need to be redressed do you think? Well it's not whether it should be redressed I mean the history of it is that political decisions were made to celebrate the First World War as the great founding myth of Australia it was made first by the Hawke government and later by the Howard government and so these were conscious political decisions about how our history would be divined interestingly Paul Keating took a different position which was the Second World War was really the point at which modern Australia begins Personally I think the idea that the Second World War is when modern Australia comes into being in which its true origins begin it's when it withdraws from the English Imperium and sets up an alliance with a new Imperium, that of America but that's going to be the defining relationship until now even with the new tensions we have with their relationship with China it was when we first engaged with Asia it is when we come to understand whether we wish to or not that we're going to be part of Asia and it's when also the ruling classes here come to recognise that Australia must modernise and must reinvent itself that it couldn't exist as a sort of just an outstation of English commerce and English culture so I do think in every sense the Australia we're in now is a consequence of the Second World War rather than of the first which really is an extraordinarily tragic and the largest tragedy Australia's ever endured since Europeans arrived but it speaks, the First World War speaks to the past the Second World War speaks to our future Richard Flanagan thank you very much for visiting Bly Street for visiting the Lowy Institute congratulations on your book and good luck with it Thank you very much for having me