Since leaving art school in 1985 I've been earning a living from creative work, and I've always been inspired by the same thing: the search for purity. A way of building a wall around an idea, or a thought, or even a feeling. Writing is like that too - having something to say, and finding a way to say it in the clearest and most precise terms possible.

It really surprised me when I found out how many books had been written about Kokoda. Histories, memoirs, novels, and The Australian War Memorial has made many of the Australian army battalion diaries accessible on the internet. These make sobering reading. But they tell the whole story of Kokoda first hand. Anyway, once I had read everything I could get my hands on, I started writing. Most of the book was written on the train - having two kids and two jobs, there was never really any other time for writing except on my way to and from work.

When I was growing up, my parents were very close friends with a couple called Les and Dorothy Armitage. Les was a 39th battalion veteran, and when I was old enough to understand, my father would sometimes tell me his stories. Later, when I went to college, my best friend from those years was John Canty, whose father (James Canty) was also a 39th veteran. He was photographed by Damien Parer on the track during the campaign. You often see this image reproduced in connection with Kokoda. So, I knew the story, and I knew what it meant to those who were touched by it.

I worry sometimes that ANZAC day tends to draw people apart. I think it's right that we honour our veterans in the way we do. But I also know there were some who found no solace in those commemorations. During World War I my grandfather spent four years in a prisoner-of-war camp in Poland. And one of my great-uncles was seriously wounded three times. Once at Gallipoli and twice in France. Another uncle was court-martialed for striking his sergeant. Soon after his hearing he was sent back to his battalion where he was killed in action at Polygon Wood. When my grandfather and the surviving uncle returned to civilian life they never wanted to have anything much to do with ANZAC day. They didn't think it was wrong, but they just wanted to leave that part of their life behind them. I'm fascinated with how their veteran experience is woven into the world-view of those of us who never saw or experienced what they experienced. I was hoping I might be able to depict its complexity in Break of Day.

My father's cousins, two brothers and their sister, ran a sheep property in the Western District of Victoria. They were on that land since the First World War. They never married, and with no kids around the place didn't seem to change very much over the years. I loved going there when I was young. You could stand out in the paddocks and get a real sense of the sky moving over the earth, and of the wind coming across the open plains in the west. I think I have a sort of reverence for my parents' generation: growing up in the Depression, going through a war, and then building a nation. They accepted their circumstances, and felt a sense of belonging to their time. It just doesn't seem that simple today. We often feel so disconnected and powerless, and this can express itself in a fear of everything that is beyond our control.

It's a funny thing: kids and sport. Bradman was before my time, but I have such rich memories of being six or seven years old and going to sleep on a Saturday night, secure in the knowledge that the Carlton Football Club had achieved victory that day. I think Bradman did the same thing for a lot of boys during the 1930s, and God knows, they had very little else to be secure in. I love cricket. It's a great game. But I have to be honest and admit that like Murray Barrett I am absolutely petrified of being hit by the ball.

Okay, I'm really going to resist the urge to list a whole lot of books written by people who are now dead. So, for younger readers, anything by Robin Klein; she's a real insider, an author who really 'gets' kids. For older readers, Sonya Hartnett's The Silver Donkey and Of a Boy have writing that is beautifully and masterfully crafted, and Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, Never Let Me Go is an intriguing book that just about anyone could read. But the book that has had the biggest impact on me recently was Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. Nothing much happens in this book, and yet it contains a complete expression of what it means to be human and to be so wonderfully flawed in that humanity.

The lyrics of Eric Bogle's song, And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda are so wonderfully ambiguous (you can find them on the web if you just google the title). There is a deep reverence for the soldiers who fought at Gallipoli, but there is also a questioning of why they went, and what it all meant when they returned. There are a lot of different answers to those questions, and I think as a nation we have come to accept the diversity of responses, even when they challenge us. I can only hope my novel lets us all take in the deep breath of sorrow, pity and awe, and know that family and friendships are perhaps the most precious gifts we will ever have.