Marie-Louise Ayres: My name is Marie-Louise Ayres and it's my privilege to be the Director General of the Library. Now, to make sure everybody enjoys their evening, please turn your mobile phones to silent, and in fact, Christos and I have just been reminded to put ours on silent as well.

In welcoming you here, I recognise and acknowledge the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples as the traditional owners of the land on which we gathered today. And I pay my respects to Elders past, present, and emerging, and through them to all Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Our First Nations peoples were the original storytellers and keepers of history and culture, and that's a legacy that this library really strives to honour today.

Tonight we are here to enjoy the 2025 Ray Mathew lecture established in 2009 to support and promote Australian writing, the lecture is generously funded by the Ray Mathew and Ava Coleman Trust in memory of a poet, novelist and playwright who spent the first 30 years of his life in Australia and the last overseas mostly in New York. Ray is almost forgotten as a writer today, and given that we the National Library are in the business of remembering, it's terrific that this annual lecture keeps his name and his work alive.

Previous May Ray Mathew lecturers have included Geraldine Brooks, Andrea Goldsmith, Thomas Keneally, and Morris Gleitzman, and we now add to this impressive list, Chris Tsiolkas, one of Australia's most talented and impactful writers. A prodigious talent, an award-winning author who has written novels, plays, and film scripts, and whose works have been adapted for both stage and screen.

And Christos we hold your works in 13 languages, and I know there've been translations into maybe at least another 9 languages. They've escaped our collecting net for now. Thank you. It wasn't in your direction, but it's wonderful to see Australian writing being translated into Greek, obviously, Slovenian, Polish, Italian. Just seeing the way that Australian stories are carried around the world through other people's languages, I think is really quite thrilling. Christos's writing has been described as galvanising and unputdownable. And his works require the reader to think deeply, question widely and reflect honestly about communities, ethnicity, family, friendship, class, and nationhood.

Tonight, Christos will explore the complex issue of fence-sitting and we should note that Christo's most recent novel published in 2023 was 'The In-Between'. Once seen as a cop out, he says, he'll explore fence-sitting in the modern world and its place in the creative arts. In his own words, I don't have the answers. I do have all the questions. So Christos we can't wait to hear them. Please join me in welcoming Christos Tsiolkas.

Christos Tsiolkas: What a generous and lovely introduction. Thank you so much. I'm getting over a cold, so I have to apologise if I'm a little bit croaky. I will make sure that I'm well hydrated.

I want to begin by acknowledging that Ngunnawal and Ngambri people and in the acknowledgement in that paying of respect to say that there may be some issues that are complex or difficult that I'm going to talk about tonight about being a writer at this current moment. What is absolutely thrilling is that in the 30 plus years that I've been doing this, that the writing of First Nations people in this country is flowering to such a magnificent extent that it is our literature in our film, on us theatre stages in our art galleries. It's so different to the world I entered as a young writer in the mid 1990s. And I am really proud and humbled to be part of a storytelling tradition that goes back so, so, so many millennia.

I also really want to thank the National Library of Australia, to everyone. Sharon in particular who has been looking after me. Everyone here at the National Library, everyone involved with the Ray Mathew Lecture. Public libraries I often say, we often say a lot of us often say they're one of the few spaces that have evaded the economic rationalists, that they're still spaces of public utility. This is, I loved reading, my parents did their best to get me books, but they didn't have the privilege of education. They showed me the library and it was in the library that I first read the books that made me think maybe one day I can do this. Can I write? And that space of the library is so very, very important culturally, and I'm very honoured to be part of this.

And I want to thank you. Preparing a lecture is a dawning process and a great responsibility. I need to thank you all for taking the time to attend this lecture to give me your attention. I hope that what I have to say tonight is of interest and that it sparks a conversation and a debate. I think the debate is so very important. That's what I'm looking forward to at the end, there will be a space for question answers. Well, a question for a conversation, a conversation of good faith, which is not to say that we have to agree with each other, but that we trust each other, that there are important things to do with culture that we need to discuss honestly, faithfully.

I'm also taking very seriously the responsibility to Ray Mathew who bequeathed this lecture to the Australian public. I've been thinking very much about this, how what I want to say needs to be centred on the work that Mathew did and the work that I do, that is the work, the labour of writing. Whether as a writer of fiction or as a playwright, I want this lecture to be about writing to honour something called fiction.

So over the last few weeks and months, really, I've been thinking a lot about fiction, about why I love it and why I want to defend it tonight. If I'm acutely aware of the responsibility attended to this lecture, I'm also equally aware of the privilege. For me as with the best writing, this is an opportunity to think out loud. I don't wish to pretend that my observation and thoughts are completely formed, that they are not a saleable by doubts and questions. Again, this is the grace of being able to be involved in a discussion and debate with you all. It's precisely because of the importance of this notion of thinking out loud, presented by the lecture that I feel excited and I feel daunted. As I hope to make clear in this talk, I think doubt one of the most important strategies that a writer can use both in a more formal essayistic, essay form, such as this lecture, as well as in the work we write as fiction.

So I went around and round in my head for weeks about what would be the form of, what form would this lecture take. I came up with the idea of fence-sitting precisely because it embodied something about the necessity of doubt that I think is being lost in our current intellectual debates. This is an age of certainty, enabled by partisan cultural spaces that prioritise the declamatory over the questioning, the either or over the, maybe possibly. In the classroom at writers festivals, in criticism and in journalism, doubt is viewed with suspicion that it is always prevarication or worse as compliance.

In choosing as my theme fence-setting, I wanted to advocate for a position of doubt as thoughtfulness, as attention. And I wanted to be playful. I started with a draught that took a moment from my childhood when I was a very young boy in inner city Melbourne such a long time ago that the inner city was both working class and migrant. I was going to tell you the story of the back fence of our house made of old wood palings that seemed so enormous to me as a little child. I was envious of older cousins who managed to scale the fence whose feet magically found the exact right spot on the horizontal plank and with one powerful exertion they would grab the top of the fence, hoist themselves up and dropped to the other side, and they would disappear. How I used to envy them.

The fence was a marker between infancy and something elusive, both tantalising and frightening. Something called growing up. I was going to tell you of that magical day that my arms and legs suddenly found strength, and though I slipped a few times, though I got a splinter in the pad of one of my fingers. I finally had climbed that fence. And tell you of the excitement I had felt sitting on the boundary between home and the world beyond. I remember looking down and there was terror at how immense, how frightening the drop to the alley below seemed. My cousins were calling out, jump, Christos jump.

And I wanted to tell you of something magical I saw a top of the old fence in Richmond. Across from my house on the other side of the alley, there were a block of flats. I knew the alley and I knew those flats. We played footy in the alley as kids, both Aussie footy and real footy as my parents called soccer. And we played cricket there, which neither of my parents understood. I'd even hidden on the concrete stairwell to the flats during a game of hide and seek.

Yet on top of that fence I suddenly found that I could look across to the windows on the other side, see into a bedroom and into a small galley kitchen. There were colourful ceramic cats piled on the sill. Years later, watching Hitchcock's masterpiece 'Rear Window' on the TV, I found myself jolted upright, the memory of my first climb flooding back. I hadn't seen a murder. I hadn't even seen a human being in those flats yet sitting there on top of the fence, I had an inkling that there were stories to be told. I wondered who lay on that single bed, who was it that loved cats so much? My cousins were still calling for me to jump. I closed my eyes, gripped the fence, and I jumped.

So that moment was going to be the beginning of the talk. Yet something happened as I started taking notes, sifting through memories, starting to write these paragraphs. I received a flurry of texts from someone who used to be a friend, a friend for over 30 years. He had read the subject of my lecture tonight and he was furious with me. So that's what you've become Tsiolkas, he began, a fucking sell out too scared to take sides. The message finished in triumphant indignation. Well, we all now know the coward you have become. The words now and coward were capitalised, and the sentence completed with a flourish of exclamation marks, those ubiquitous markers of outrage and bile for keyboard warriors.

I'm not a fool. I understand very well the provocation in the subject of this talk. There is carnage in Gaza and alongside it, there is an upwell of antisemitism that has shocked me in its verocity, it's poisonous tenacity. Two weeks ago, there were fascists marching in my city, fascists who violently attacked a camp set up to proclaim the historic sovereignty, sovereignty of Aboriginal peoples on this land. The world is burning, authoritarians are in power, the world over and I want to talk about sitting on the fence. My friend's venom was a [unclear]. How dare you.

I'd wanted to tell you the story of my childhood to find a way to express something of all of this that was not bound in rage. I'm so sick of rage at its violence at its [unclear]. Yet the furious texts had the desired effects. I too became enraged. I too wanted to hate. Instead, I took a step back. I had to find a way to answer these charges of complicity without surrendering to rage. I ripped up what I had written and I started again.
I need to explain to you all why I feel this suspicion of rage, of why I think it might be compromising our writing, our culture, our journalism, and our shared humanity. So I began again.

This time we have another memory, but this one a little more recent. It is 2019 and my partner Wayne and I are in Budapest. The last time I'd been in that city was 1990. That year of immense, I think we can say it right, world shattering change that began with the velvet revolutions that tore apart the communist world that dominated Eastern Europe. Back then I'd only managed one night in the city. Though the communist regimes a tumble, the city was still caught in the strangeness, the excitement and trepidation of revolution.

My memory of it is that it was full of grey. When I attempted to find a hotel room, I was shunted from building to building until finally it was explained to me that the only possible accommodation was at the outskirts of the city. I ended up in an old army barrack sharing a bunk bed with a young Swedish tourist who had contracted food poisoning. The poor guy was constantly retching heading to the toilet, which stank and had overfilled with vomit, piss and shit. After a sleepless night, I caught the first bus back to the central station and bought myself a ticket that I hoped would get me to [unclear].

In 2019, almost 30 years later, that astonishing city of two parts, the Buda and the Pest on either side of the Danube seemed unrecognisable. The beauty was astonishing. Friends had recommended we visit the museum of Communism and Wayne and I dutifully negotiated the metro and bus that took us out to the city's outskirts. As we left the dazzling city behind and the bus speeded on a highway that dissected open fields, I turned to Wayne. Mate I think I've been here before, but it was impossible to tell if this indeed had been the site of my stay so long ago. History as is its want had eradicated that certainty of memory.

The Museum of Communism was a disappointment. There were a few statues of Lenin covered in bird shit, signage that was falling apart. The English words indecipherable from the erosion over years of rain, sleet and snow. It was a strange experience walking through that park. In the early 1990s. The communist presence still had real power even as it had collapsed. Back then, the statues of Lenin Marx seemed to contain an element of charisma. In the West ee were assured that the revolution. In the West, we were assured that the revolutions, upturn, the Soviet states had vanquished communism for good. Yet in 1990 that promise or that fret was still unsettled.

In Thodōros Angelopoulos's 1999 film, 'Ulysses Gaze', a barge takes an immense statue of lenon down the Danube. The statue once stood tall proudly as a beacon to the future. It has been toppled and has been taken to the graveyard where monuments go to die. Yet something remarkable happens in the film as the barge slowly carries its load down the ancient river. On the riverbanks, the peasants watching suddenly fall to their knees and they start praying.

That film always, begins another memory for me or another recollection. A few years later in the mid 90s when I'm in North London with a friend and we visit Carl's Marxist grave at Highgate Cemetery. We were all comrades by then the word required quotation marks around it. In the 1980s we had been contributors to a Marxist magazine. We had written about the inevitable collapse of communism, of capitalism, sorry. We took photos posing against Marx's grave, having a bit of a laugh. There's still a photo of me with my arm wrapped around Marx's bust.

Suddenly we were aware of a family looking at us sternly. They were clearly eastern European. Their features unmistakably slovic. The women's hairs covered in scarves that are recognised as Balkan. My first thought was that they had experienced the violence and dislocation of communism and were sternly disapproving of these two men making a joke of their history. My friend and I sheepishly jumped off the grave. Then we watched as the family placed bouquets of flowers on Karl's Marxist term as the woman kneeled before it and crossed herself in the Orthodox Christian manner. It was a truly shocking image. The incongruity of Christian peasant faith and prayer being directed towards Marx, the Jewish intellectual that alongside Charles Darwin laid the foundations of the atheism and secularism that was to dominate the ensuing century.

That moment of shock has never left me. It became foundational as an inspiration to a novel I wrote called 'Dead Europe'. It remains unshakable still for here I am still talking about it.

But in the Museum of Communism, the statues and monuments had lost all their power. They seemed as irrelevant as laughable as the statues to British explorers that dot my city in Melbourne. They too no longer speak to us.

There was a small auditorium at the park adjacent to the entrance. When we first arrived, it had been closed unattended. We noticed a woman unlocking the doors. We paid our foreigns and entered. It was a cinema, tiny, and we were the only people there. A card flashed on the screen in Hungarian and in English. It stated that we were about to see a collection of training films from the AVH, the Secret State Police, the Hungarian equivalent to the KGB. They were black and white from the 60s and 70s. Untranslated uncurated. One shot began another started, no attempt at continuity or structure. We watched as suited men and women showed how to plant bugs into telephones, how to keep vigilant distance from figures they were following. One piece of footage seemed to be indicating How do we entrap gay men and then blackmail them into spying on their friends and family? The tiny cinema, the awful repetition of numbing state surveillance, it started making us both feel dirty. It was the banality of something called terror, no scenes of violence, of torture, just the constant valorization of spying, of not allowing one space free of constant observation.

After a while, we left feeling dirty on the bus back into the city. We were silent. It was as if someone had caught us in a porno cinema. Later that night, having dinner, reflecting back on the visit, I started to get emotional. Wayne listened to me as I tried to make sense of the anger I was feeling, an anger that was in part directed at my fellow writers. My experiences of travelling through Eastern Europe first as a very young man in 1990 and then again through the 90s have been some of the most sobering of my life. For as a writer, I'm part of a progressive left-wing milieu, which identifies itself as being on the side of the angels. And I'm immensely drawn to the radical works of fiction at art that have denounced the terrors of colonialism, of misogyny, of racism, of homophobia. Yet I had once advocated for a system of belief that enacted its own terror and its own dehumanisation.

I should have known that that terror was embedded in the foundational revolutionary violence of the French Revolution has reemerged the subsequent revolutions and blighted attempts at transformation across Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, the Middle East. We have to be responsible to that history, I said to Wayne. He smiled sadly at me and he said that night on the Buda side of the city looking down at the placid waters of the Danube filled with tourist cruise boats. I remember him saying, you wear that responsibility heavily, Chris.

I do. I think we shall all should. And in part that explains my investment in doubt. I believe that if we are to advocate a politics and an aesthetic that valorizes the left wing, the progressive justice, we are bound to take seriously the inhumanity embedded in so many attempts at transformation. And I was wrong and I might be wrong again. That doesn't mean I don't have political faith, but as with religious faith, to not question, to not listen to oppositional perspectives, to not read from writers and thinkers who may not necessarily share our worldview is to allow our beliefs and practises to become atrophied.

Another word for that is fundamentalist. All fundamentalists, whether religious or political or aesthetic, deny the humanity of others. This was the great insight of Hannah Arendtin her monumental work, 'The Origins of Totalitarianism'. The national socialist divided the world in terms of race. The Bolsheviks divided the world in terms of class. Enormous human suffering was justified by such divisions.

And so I want to be very precise here. It's important for you in order to understand why I was feeling so despairing that night in Budapest of what I was experiencing that evening after the excursion to the Museum of Communism. If we as writers wish to hold conservatives and the right wing responsible for the inanity of the climate wars, for the denial of the murderous legacy of colonisation in our country, Australia and of colonisation everywhere. If we want to hold right wing ideologies responsible for the heinous legacies of racism and misogyny and rampant capital exploitation, then we also have to hold that mirror to ourselves.

The terror of [unclear], the rise of a vitriolic cancel culture in our artistic and academic institutions. We have to face that mirror and refute the comfort that comes from thinking we are the elect and that those who don't think the same way as we do are wrong. That we are always right. I'll repeat it. I have been wrong and I will be wrong again.

Two of the most remarkable novels I've read over the last five years since returning from Eastern Europe are written by writers who grew up in East Germany. One is 'The Tower' by Uwe Tellkamp written in 2008. The other is 'Kairos', the Greek word meaning time, a more recent novel written by Jenny Erpenbeck. They're both set in the 1980s, the last decade of the German democratic republic. The tower was recommended to me by a friend who'd been born in the GDR and was a young adult when Germany was reunified.

Tellkamp's novel is difficult formally and thematically. It is multi voice, and a multi generational story that uses repetition and an almost mind-numbing close description of details. The look of a street of shadows, the veneer of a desk. He does so to suggest that paranoia and stifling of liberty within the East German state. I don't think I've ever read a novel of such claustrophobic intensity. Reading it I didn't feel dirty as I did as I had been in that squalid little theatre in the Museum of Communism in Budapest, but I did feel ashamed. What kept me going as a reader? What deflected from the risk of tedium inherent in Tellkamp's deliberate and formally abstract prose was a submerged yet always attendant anger. I didn't feel dirty, but I felt ashamed.

The left wing figures in 'The Tower' are diluted at best. Often they're venal using the righteously framed politics to settle scores with enemies and were potential rivals. It is as if reading the novel a voice was coldly whispering in my ear, yes. Not only were you wrong, you were willfully ignorantly wrong.

Erpenbeck's novel has greater mercy. If in the end the inhumanity and corruption of the GDR are exposed made it irrefutable to both the main character and to us as readers. There is also remarkable detailing of the quotidian realities of living in the communist state. Now that the GDR has disappeared, these ordinary everyday realities have a patina of wonder to them as if we have stepped back into some imagined wonderland. Something as ordinary as taking a train, navigating a divided city has some of that strangeness of Alice through the looking glass.

'Kairos is a more disciplined novel than 'The Tower'. Erpenbeck's greatest risk is to frame this story of the dying days of a state around a sudden masochistic affair that takes place between the narrator and an older man. I was initially resistant to that choice dubious as to whether it was too obvious, almost a cliche of the relationship between the state and the individual under totalitarianism. What convinced me, apart from the precise beauty of the writing, is that Erpenbeck complicates a story refuses the too easy reduction of human behaviour and human belief into a story of victim and oppressor, the easy moralism of good versus evil. It would be a monstrous misreading of 'Kairos' to get to the end and not be dismayed, even despairing at the blindness of the protagonist to the maleness embodied in the starcy state, 'Kairos' indicates that even good people can be wrong, mistaken, allow malevolence to flourish. I didn't feel dirty reading the novel, nor did I feel ashamed. I felt deeply sorrowful.

For me the experience of reading 'The Tower' and 'Kairos' in quick succession embodies something of the experience of fence-sitting, that provocative rage inducing concept that brings to mind wishy-washy politics and the washing of hands from any engagement in the reality of suffering and injustice. Do I look down and submit to the unquestionably legitimate negation of all progressive politics embodied in 'The Tower''s condemnation of the miserable reach of socialist and progressive ideology? Tellkamp's sacred rage, rage is almost sacred at the annihilation of liberty and freedoms he thinks are inherent in such beliefs or do I look across to a less caustic, less damning version of misplaced faith that Jenny Erpenbeck writes about in 'Kairos'?

Yet to different effects both novels affirm something essential about living under authoritarian regimes that yes, terror is being beaten up in a prison cell, that it is being clubbed by police at a demonstration, but it is also being made to scrutinise every statement, every throwaway line of a colleague of work, of a family member at a birthday. All of this is terror. It is automatically assuming that any work you read, play you see, film you watch, song you hear must be inspected for possible subversion. It is the fear that any descent from orthodoxy is inherently suspicious.

There are enough censors in a world. I don't think we writers need to be censors. I fear this policing of dissent is now increasingly prevalent in Australian arts and letters. Again, I want to be clear, I'm not advocating a cash against a passionate faith in something, be that passion for a truly ecological sustainable future, a reconciled post-colonial Australia, an end to the catastrophic loss of life in Palestine. But if the outage felt by so of the, or at the outrage felt by so many of us at the resurgence of istic antisemitism across the left and right.

Yet that question could I be wrong, is one I think is crucial for we writers to keep at the forefront of our conscience when we write. So I am advocating fence-sitting as a pause, a necessary stillness required to think through the implications of where we land when we jump off that fence. That advocating of a pause is I believe even more necessary in a media age where digital technology and AI are escalating the proliferation of sound bites and sloganeering that attempt to reduce the complexity of political phenomena to good versus evil.

And this is why I advocate for fiction, for playwriting, for any artistic endeavour, unlike a tweet, a TikTok video, a slogan on a t-shirt, the posing of writing requires time, innumerable moments of pause and reflection. It demands thoughtfulness and thoughtfulness opens up the space for questions and for doubt. I trusted reading Erpenbeck and I trusted reading Tellkamp for if their works are so very different and their conclusions are so very dissimilar. It is evident that they took the question of responding to history and to terror and to regret seriously. That one of them is progressive politically and one is a conservative. Doesn't matter. The work matters, the writing matters, the labours of reading them seriously diligently, of stopping, reflecting on the language and what the language expresses, that matters. That is the pause of sitting on the fence.

I've talked about this and it's important that I will talk about it again because there's something in my own family history that is crucial to understanding why I'm drawn to the notion of fence-sitting for this lecture. The fence, of course, is a demarcation of boundary and soul of exclusion, at its ugliest at its most vile. We see it in the notion of an Australian continent fenced off from the immigrant intruder, that horrible cartoon of fuck off we're full. Yet the fence is also a boundary and for many of us we were born into and we navigate boundaries. I think most of the most important and wondrous writing coming from our nation at the moment is from people who are acutely aware of boundary, of the margin.

As a child of Greek immigrants and of factory workers, I was conscious from so early of the dedication of language of class and ethnicity, I had to learn to speak between two languages. What I now see as a terrific opportunity for me as a writer. And in that sense there is nothing very unique about my story. So many of us here, thankfully, are the children and grandchildren of immigrants. But what was special about my family circumstances and something I didn't appreciate until I was much older was that my mother and father, both of the peasant class, were from families that were on either side of the civil war in Greece. My mother's family were communists and socialists, my father's anti-communist. I grew up in a household where politics and arguments were happening around the table all the time. Both my parents loved entertaining. My mother was and is a great cook, which I have to say, I am a Greek boy and so the house, especially on the weekend, would be filled with music, laughter and argument. My mother was and is much more forthright than my father was, and I was galvanised by the stories of the miseries and ugliness of the civil war.

That was the connecting thread between my parents. That was what made them able to argue without spite, without hatred. They both knew that monstrous acts were committed by both sides in the war. Nevertheless, I was drawn to my mother's side of politics. One of my earliest memories is of her crying when told that her brother had disappeared in Athens. I may have been 5, I may have been 6. We didn't have a phone in the house. There was an older Australian neighbour a few doors down and she would often be awoken in the middle of the night by calls from Greece, Italy, Yugoslavia. She'd put on a nightie and come knocking on the door. Quick, quick, George. Quick, quick, George. Yeah, I think it's your sister. I think it's Greece. My mother still calls that woman a saint. She said, I've met a saint, that woman was a saint to us.

It was one such night when we were all awoken by her knock. My parents went to answer. I remember hearing my mother's sobs as they were walking back up the street. My uncle, an activist and unionist in Athens, had disappeared and it was feared that had been taken by the military police attached to the then military dictatorship. In those early years we all slept in the same room. My parents on their big bed, my brother and I wrapped arm in arm in a single bed. I pretended to be asleep, but I was listening. I heard my mother expres her fears, her terror that her brother would be tortured, that he would be killed. He wasn't killed. He was tortured.

Years later when I was a young adult, this same uncle took me to the gates of the military prison where he had been held. He explained how he'd been tied up, beaten on the soles of his feet so brutally that years later he still walked with a limp. But he considered himself lucky that he hadn't been murdered. That was terror and those stories were integral to making me left wing.

My father, however rarely discussed his childhood. It was only at his death when one of his cousins who lived in Sydney came to stay with us over the funeral and wake period that I discovered that he had left the village as a 13-year-old and worked as a bellhop in a hotel in Patra for a couple of years. Never heard that. He was one of 12 children born in poverty, a shepherd as a child, a worker from early teens. His story seems so as wondrous as Alice threw that looking glass to his children, to me, my brother, and to his grandchildren. It was only as an adult in Greece that I discovered the reason why his peasant family were right wingers. His older brother who is the man I'm named after, had the misfortune to be drafted into the army during the civil war. For the communist gorillas that made him automatically the enemy. He was beheaded on the a mountain close to the village where he had been born. It was my father who was charged by the family to go and collect the body. My father was 17.

The story gutted me. It still does. I had to rethink all of my accepted notions of right and wrong of politics. It was the same humbling emotions I felt travelling through an Eastern Europe just emerging from the blight of Soviet rule. When I returned to Australia and expressed to my father my sorrow, what he had experienced, he became furious at his siblings that they had told me of this. This is why I migrated here Christos, he said, so you and your brother need not know any of this. So this is a man who was able to love a woman who didn't share his politics. This was a man who was able to hold both things in his hands. That the terror committed by one side, excuse me, creates an equal heartbreak, an equal suffering, an equal pain to the terror inflicted by the other side. This is the great gift that both my parents bestowed on me.

Can you understand then why I might at times lack sympathy for the outrage, calling outs and blacklistings and self-righteous condemnations of the new age digital warriors? That there is another side, another perspective, a duty to compassion that comes from borders and from margins. Again, the duty of a pause. Again, the requirement we have as right is to try at least to comprehend the humanity of the other. We might fail but at least try to comprehend. And more so I think the duty we have is not to compare suffering to a sports game, with each terror, each death, each annihilation a goal on the scoreboard.

And then there was something that changed for me as a reader when I returned from that long year away in Greece, in eastern Europe in 1990. I'd started to shed the notion of good and evil. One I had imbued from religion and which on abandoning God, are still attached to my engagement with politics. That puritanical notion of their being the elect, those who are right and then the damned those who are mistaken, it started to seem increasingly dangerous to me. I always laugh with Wayne that in this mania for decolonizing everything, the one thing I would love to decolonize is the puritan [unclear] underpinning to some much political language. I would love to decolonize that.

I found that I had started to read differently. I think of Solzhenitsyn who I used to say I hated, proudly I hated before I even read him. I remember as a teenager being forced at school to read 'A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' through gritted teeth. I didn't want to like it. I'd heard he was anti-communist and I was going to make damn sure I didn't like it. I pronounced it boring to my teacher. After I returned from Europe, I picked it up again. I was moved by the simplicity of how the writer explained physical and moral suffering. I was broken by how even in the most malevolent of places there was still an aspiration of hope. I had learned something. I wasn't merely reading to have myself and my world and my views reaffirmed.

Is this fencing or is it something else? Is it patience? I think it is being able to look over the fence and acknowledge the neighbour. I will never share Solzhenitsyn spiritual certainty and I will always be suspicious of the idealisation of nationhood that is there in so much of his work. Yet I can now metaphorically shake his hand. Actually more appropriate to say his bow. And I can acknowledge the wisdom of his writing and his experience and his astonishing ability to communicate a legacy of suffering. You don't have to sit on the fence, but I do think we need to read across the fence.

I'm an old man. A younger friend said to me the other day, nah, I'm not going to bother with reading white cis straight male writers anymore. I think she put in the adjective straight to mollify me. I laughed and I cheekily recommended her Andrew Hagen and David Peace, 2 straight male, cis white writers that I love. I wasn't outrage. Hers is not a position I would take as I hope I have explained in what I've said above. For closing the joy or beauty or wisdom, the insight or pleasure we receive as readers from writers who are not like ourselves is I think a mistake. Yet as someone who's been writing for a long time in this culture, I'm also excited that the voices from the margins, from the other side of fences that are now available to us as readers. And I'm not unaware of a privilege I have, a privilege not bound by categories of identity, but one of place and time. That I was able to start writing before the dominance of social media, before the scrutiny, surveillance and self-righteous judgement afforded by such technology. It's a harsher time for writers to make a living, to get their books out there, to speak out to not always agree.

So I'm old, I'm turning 60 next month. And I'm aware that there are experiences and artwork and media work out there that has passed me by. A few months ago I got sick with pneumonia and ended up in a hospital for three days. My main takeaway from that experience was how fortunate I am to live in a country where we have a national health system. Yes, the medical staff were overworked, harried, but they were also generous. They were disciplined and kind.

However, by the third day of my stay, I was climbing the walls and when a nurse came into the ward and asked, is it okay if we make you a test case for visiting medical students? I agreed immediately. Not making this up, I ended up being a test patient for four groups of medical students that day. One lovely young man asked me, Christos, how are you feeling? I explained that I was feeling much better. The fever had gone and that I was grateful for the medical care I was receiving. And then I added, it has made me think about my mortality that I'm getting old, that my body can't do as much as it once did. I can't forget the look of shock on the young man's face. No, no. It was like that. He repeated, you're not old. It was as if that word old was an insult.

I tried to explain that it was inevitable, ageing, and that it didn't need to be terrifying. I also added that when I was a young boy and this is really true, walking the streets of my neighbourhood in Melbourne, I used to look at the old Yia-Yia and Pappous on their porches drinking their coffee, invariably smoking their cigarettes as they looked out onto the world. And I used to think it would be nice to do that one day, just sit, watch the world go by. But I dunno if I convinced the medical student.

Years ago reading 'The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century', that remarkable book about 20th century classical music by Alex Ross, I was struck by a comment from the Finnish composer, Sebelius. He knew that the romantic music he was composing mid 20th century was distinctly out of fashion, that he was being dismissed by the avant-garde. He had come to terms with this estrangement. All that he desired was a space to make his own where he could write the music he wanted to write and needed to write. No longer caught up in the vagaries of fashion, he stepped away. It's not an insult to be asked to step away, it's an insult to demand that we stop writing, that anyone stop writing.

I'm aware maybe a bit like the medical student that some of the younger members of this audience listening to me tonight might be asking, what has this wandering through the 20th century got to do with me, with my world now, with what is happening in the world now? Very good questions. My reply would be that history is necessary. Truth telling is necessary. That also means that progressives and left wingers who dominate the arts and cultural industries also need to know our own history of the possibilities that we've created, but also the terrors we've created and the mistakes we've made. Pausing, doubting, questioning. These are necessary.

And youth becomes age. I was really moved about 20 years ago, 'The Film Comment' that great film magazine had done a special on May 68 that enormously challenging time, particularly in France but worldwide, and they were asking contemporary filmmakers to respond to May 68. And [unclear], who I think is a remarkable director, I loved his films. He was talking about a film called 'Far from Vietnam', a documentary, a compendium of short films made by some of the best directors of that time who were so who were responding immediately to May 68. And I wrote that he was shocked that filmmakers he loved, he respected like Chris Mark, the great documentary filmmaker like Michelangelo Antonioni, one of the greatest artists who ever worked in film, could go to China in the cultural revolution and not see the violence and terror there.

You will never know how history is going to look back on us. Years ago when I was a bolshy van glorious young writer, I was at a writer's festival and I met David Malouf. I had loved his writing from high school, but in that arrogance of youth, I remember being dismissive of him. Dismissive of him for not being more vocal politically as a writer from a migrant background as a gay man, I wanted to him to be out. I'm ashamed of that super dismissal now, of how ignorant it was and how dismissive I was of its terror, the terror of something called the closet and of how Malouf has worked so hard, so beautifully, so uncompromisingly in telling us about the world in every piece of fiction he has ever written. When later I read his novel 'Ransom', I just knew I had read something great, of all time. and I was shattered. In that novel he tells one small moment from the Iliad when Preem approaches a still enraged Achilles who has just killed Preem 'sson Hector, forgive me. Achilles has also desecrated Hector's body and refuses to give it over to Preem for the proper funeral rights. Achilles is maddened by the death of his beloved at Hector's hand. 'Ransom' is a work that I have kept returning to since my father died 13 years ago. It is the work that reminds me of my parents' great gift to me. That of compassion, of understanding the other side, of not revelling in rage. I think compassion is greater, more important than rage, but maybe that's an old man speaking.

The young child that was so elated when he finally scaled the backyard fence hasn't forgotten the surprise and wonder of sitting on that fence of looking across to that alley, seeing the world anew. But eventually he did drop to the other side. He went off exploring. He came back, he kept exploring.

One of the most important books I've read over the last few years is called 'Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes'. It is a series of essays about intellectuals and the 20th century who tried to find middle paths between the extremes of violence of both the left and the right. The author is Aurelian Craiutu, an academic now living in the USA, but who was born and raised in Soviet era Romania.

Anyone with any knowledge of history knows that of all the communist regimes, the Romanian might have been the most awful. Their human dignity ceased to be of any value. Trying to steer a path through and against partisanship isn't a cop out for Craiutu. It's an ethical necessity and it's been a tonic to read this book to be introduced to thinkers. I should have read a long time ago, thinkers who believe that there was a way of being just in this world without succumbing to the terrors, the annihilation demanded by regimes across the left and the right. One of the thinkers he examines is [unclear], an Italian humanist writer who tried to navigate between the violence of resurgent fascism and the appalling left nihilism exemplified by the terrorist Red Brigade. [unclear] wrote, moderation is a word I'm not ashamed of using as long as it is interpreted positively as the opposite of extremism and not negatively as the opposite of radicalism.

I'm not sure that such a sentiment would appease my friend who was so withering about the subject of my talk. Yet that ability to understand that one can still work in radical ways, think in radical ways, write in radical ways, act and love and think in radical ways that don't submit to extremism to the nullification of the other is now a guide for me.

I'm not proposing we always sit on the fence. However, I am suggesting that as writers, playwrights, intellectuals, we are required to doubt and we are required to question. And we need that space. I'm not sure our cultural institutions, our writers festivals are doing all they can to create such spaces. At the moment, late in [unclear], her protagonist observes a group of people debating politics. She writes of the argument in the party group of the [unclear] Society there is a debate about evolution versus revolution. Change the system from inside or outside. Do the young have to be taught patience or the old reminded of their former impatience? Can I leave you with that question? Thank you very much and do forgive me for being so croaky.

Marie-Louise Ayres: I was actually going to say I think you did remarkably well given that you're feeling quite unwell. Christos thank you very much. And I was listening to words that were coming up throughout your lecture. We heard early on grace and that sense of actually perhaps affording others grace too when we're thinking about not immediately leaping to conclusions about who is on what side. I was listening to these and thinking about these kind of enduring terms that we use in those, that we've used in the past and in the present, in the kind of spiritual sense. So actually are ones that I think we can bring into the world of public discourse as well.

So I think we'd like to say thank you very much for your lecture. Now we've got a few minutes and we've got somebody who's nearly out of a voice, so if you would like to ask a question, please do wait until, put your hand up, wait until a microphone comes to you so that it can be recorded. And okay, we've got a question up here and over to you, Christos.

Christos Tsiolkas: Thank you so much. And I'm going to say though I'm croaky I actually am looking forward to this because I do want to stress that I think debate is really important. That notion of argument in good faith is really, really important and that thing I began with that we're all thinking out loud at the moment. I think one of the things that I've been nervous about over the last couple of years at things like writers festivals is that notion of thinking out loud has become suspect.

Audience member 1: Thank you, Christos. It was fantastic. This is a simple question. What happened when you jumped off the fence? Was one of the top blue stone alleys in Richmond, was it or?

Christos Tsiolkas: It was in blue stone alley. I just remember the thrill. As I said, I actually had, I was just so aware of all the rage in the world at the moment that I thought I was going to be playful, thought I was going to deliver a much more playful speech about those experiences. But that there was going to be a warning in it because at one time when I did jump over the fence, it was summer, I didn't have shoes on and I landed on a plank of wood and a nail went right through my foot and I ended up in hospital. So that was going to be a warning about why it's important to pause and have a look.

But yeah, no, no it was, I think I grew up in a neighbourhood that is no longer available to, I mean I'm boring old generation Xer, but I knew everyone in the street, everyone's parents worked in 2, 3, 4 factories that all our parents worked in. So it meant that you had, even though most of my mothers and my father's family were back in Greece, it meant you had almost an immediate family that was the neighbourhood. So yeah, that's the alley where we played in.

Another time I was going to write about that too is I do remember, I think they were sharpies, but my parents called them bogie. They were like these two people having sex in the alley and we were like little kids and we were just looking and I do remember him saying, if you're going to keep looking, you're going to have to pay. And we scurrying off. I don't think that would happen anymore either.

Marie-Louise Ayres: That's great. Okay, any other questions tonight? We will have the opportunity more informally upstairs. We've got one here.

Audience member 2: Hi Chris. Great talk. I've got a question. I'm going to steal the mic because I'm holding it with social media as you talked about and people skimming news articles and now Google just giving a quick AI overview of whatever people search for these days. Do you think people aren't taking the time to even think about issues properly before taking a side? And just being very siloed and that the technology is helping that to happen?

Christos Tsiolkas: I have actually written about this. After the refugee crisis in Europe I remember that image of that young Syrian boy washed up on the beach in Turkey. And I was jetlagged, I had just travelled and I did something that I try not to do is I started looking at the comments and within five comments it no longer became about a little boy. It became about people hating each other. I think, I knew it was a provocation to talk something like fence-sitting.

And one of the reasons I do, I'm so glad I read 'Faces of Moderation', is that Craiutu deals with that nervousness we have about that subject head on. I think he has a legitimacy in how he does it that comes from that Romanian history. To say, look, I've come from a place where the extremities of fascism and the extremities of communism created so much suffering. And that to walk a moderate line isn't to be necessarily sitting in the fence in the way we see it, but to be questioning, to pause, I think, I am not a Luddite. I mean I have my phone, I don't want to receive information from comments on social media because I don't believe that the majority of people have really thought through what they're talking about.

I mean, I'll use this an example. It's been kind of trying to navigate what is happening in Israel and Palestine has been really difficult. I've copped some flack because I have tried to hold both histories in my hands. But I remember having an argument with a young woman who was passionate and understandably furious of the carnage, as I said, that is happening in Palestine. But I said something about the Christians as well as the Muslim Palestinians and she said, there's no Christian Palestinians and this is a woman who has been posting on fucking, sorry on social media. That ignorance is, I think, shameful.

Marie-Louise Ayres: Okay, one more question in the front here. We'll take one more. Thank you.

Christos Tsiolkas: I'm happy to take.

Marie-Louise Ayres: Yes, I know you might want to do it without the microphone too.

Christos Tsiolkas: Sorry.

Marie-Louise Ayres: No.

Audience member 3: I'm trying to formulate how to put this together as I'm thinking about this because it's reasonably complex and I wonder whether to some extent you actually completed the lecture when you started it by talking about your fence-sitting experience. You talked about the idea of being a young person too young on the other side, on the other side, about being grown up. And whether just as you just said, the person didn't know why, are people sometimes afraid by jumping the fence that will grow up and once you learn something you can't unlearn it. And perhaps they don't want to do that and or by jumping the fence they necessarily change social groups, social cliquez and so necessarily they have become different people and perhaps they don't find that new group representative of who they believe they are.

Christos Tsiolkas: I think that is really true. I think there is a separation that happens. I did talk about leaving and coming back. I think you can do that. I think it's hard. I mean you present a lecture such as this. I know it's really, really, really difficult. What do you do with a fist? What do you do with someone whose only response to you is going to be the fist? That can't be explained away with what I've talked about tonight, and maybe partly that I do believe in those religious notions of grace, that I do believe compassion is one of the most important things we share as human beings. Look, I do believe that it is one of the great virtues, compassion that most people are not like that.

And so there have been people who, when I was younger, left, I just thought that they don't think like me, they're really conservative or they've got ideas that are really racist or whatever I thought, and then particularly moments of grief or sickness or you realise that people can't be reduced to just those simple categories. When my father was dying, for example, a cousin that I have argued since year dot, we think so differently was the one who was most there for me and for my family and for my father. And I think that is important.

In 'Faces of Moderation' I had never heard of the English philosopher [unclear] who he writes about in the book who said yes in war, in extreme suffering. That is the most important moment is what is happening there, but for most of us, what is most important is how we are towards a lover, our child, our parent, our neighbour, our friend. Those are the things that we have to hold really as important. And God forbid that we are in those extreme situations where the choices become something else. Which is I am really fortunate. I dunno what that is, my parents do, but I don't know what that is. But I do think you can return, I guess. I hope that explains, is something close to what you were asking.

Audience member 3: [unclear]

Christos Tsiolkas: It's really hard to lose the certainty of a position. I rushed through it in a way in the lecture, but the abandoning of a faith in the utopian notions of socialism, that it was that confrontation that it was for the people I met in East Germany, the people I met in what was then Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, that it was actually a suffering. It wasn't overnight, it was a long process and I'm still working through it. I'm still trying to make sense of that experience. It is the fear going, well if I'm wrong, what do I believe in? Things then become a little less certain. But I don't, and I guess even though I'm on what you would call an agnostic, I guess having a faith in something called compassion is a way of me holding onto something.

Marie-Louise Ayres: Okay. Well look, I think we've run out of time now, but I just wanted to kind of finish by saying a couple of things. I was thinking about another great Australian writer, of course, Dorothy Hewitt, who spent decades having to investigate for herself that absolute belief in a regime that she, and of course, that she was willfully blind about it. So it's interesting thinking about that through path in Australian literature.

And probably the last thing I'd like to say, Christos is for those of us working in the cultural sector at the moment, it is feeling dangerous that in the last few years we have seen really very, very extremely strong views being launched quite quickly, whether it's writers festivals, libraries, museums, in a way that in my career I have not seen before. And it does move at the speed of light. Social media is implicated because of that speed.

And of course, for those of us who are in the public sector, and have to abide by certain norms of behaviour, there's also an amazing power misbalance because you just can't respond in kind, nor should you.

Christos Tsiolkas: Nor should you.

Marie-Louise Ayres: Nor should we. So these are issues that, in fact, I talked to my staff about in this room just last week, that we're in a quite different time. And the only comfort I take from this in our space is that if writing didn't matter, if listening to writers didn't matter, if libraries didn't matter, then actually this would not be where the kind of target of some anger is going. It's a small comfort, but it's one.

And for giving us, I think, a real sense of not comfort, but discomfort, unease, encouraging us to kind sit in that unease instead of being emphatically on one side or the other, I'm going to say thank you very much for choosing fence-sitting tonight, because I think you have really opened up thinking for those in the audience, those who are watching online, and for those who will watch later. So please, everybody join me in thanking Christos for a wonderful lecture.

Christos Tsiolkas: Thank you so much.