I was lucky enough to be a child during the renaissance of Australian children's literature, when people like Ivan Southall, Colin Thiele, Lilith Norman and Wrightson were pumping out hugely inspiring stuff.

In primary school, I was bored witless by Australian history.

When you're a dweeb, when you're really young, it stands out. But as everybody gets older and more conservative, it's not an issue any more.

I always had a soft spot for Sherlock Holmes and used to imagine helping him out.

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.

Most child actors were lucky enough to get the part in the first place.