British author and journalist Will Self, in town for the Melbourne Writers Festival, is unashamedly not a fan of the city.
"Frankly, Australian cities don't interest me; Melbourne and Sydney – and I know Brisbane a bit – they've all got their corners but I wouldn't come here to visit Melbourne," he said on Thursday, ahead of his first festival appearance discussing the death of the novel.
Arguably best known for his novels - he's written 16 works of fiction, including 2012's Booker Prize-nominated Umbrella - Self is also a prominent commentator (and academic) on urbanism and describes himself as a "writer of place".
"I wouldn't come here to go to Melbourne but I sure as shit would come here to see Uluru or Arnhem Land," he said.
Self's father emigrated to Australia in the early 1980s, living in Canberra, where he worked as an academic, and Self lived in the Northern Territory in 1983 working for the government, an experience that shaped his love of "place".
"I love Australia, it's the most astonishing country – but what is astonishing about it is exactly the tyranny of distance that white Australian culture is always trying to defeat," he says.
It's our Indigenous history and culture that he finds most fascinating.
"I do love it when I get here - there's an easiness and egalitarianism, a directness; it's much better than Europe - there isn't all that complex jousting, what class are you from, what are your statuses. That's a relief," he says.
"And I think the side of white Australia that's engaged with the physical reality of the country, even if they're engaged with it in ways that environmentalists would find disturbing - they're pastoralists, or in the extractive industries - it's still an engagement with the physical reality of the country."
But he finds our "denial about the Indigenous genocide" and current political landscape dispiriting.
The perception of Australia in Europe and North America has changed in recent years, he says.
"There was a point at which Australia was on the up, but that high tide seems to have been past and there is a kind of falling back," he says.
"The Abbott government has tried to play the terror card, the immigration card – it makes Australia seem like a kind of tinpot USA or Britain. In 1996 I came here, not long after Mabo and autonomy was really in the air then – it's gone now. This thing about Abbott going to Cape York and putting this referendum up on constitutional recognition of Indigenous people – it's flim-flam. It doesn't actually mean anything."
Self says he doesn't blame current generations of white Australia, that it's an intractable position.
"There is no meeting of minds and now the traditional culture is more or less gone, wrecked. It's a very sad state of affairs but what's frustrating to the outsider is that the political rhetoric now has a neo-liberal tinge," he says. "It's essentially 'they're welfare dependents and how do we create welfare-to-work situations'."
Will Self will deliver the Melbourne Writers Festival closing address at Deakin Edge, Federation Square, on Sunday August 30, at 6pm.
