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Actually, parts of New Zealand remind me of Suffolk. There's not many flat bits, but just the atmosphere there. There's a kind of a core tranquility about it, a kind of assuredness that this is fairly close to approaching the perfect way to be.

There is no place in the world like Australia. Not even its beautiful neighbor New Zealand.

I wonder if it is Australia's great distance from more populated land masses that allows its inhabitants to be left to their own devices, to be incredibly creative and, at times, to be wonderfully weird.

Fifty years ago people were talking about Sydney's sprawl, but nobody does anything about it.

There are parts of New Zealand that I absolutely fell in love with that I will miss going back to, but I kind of think that is the part that can continue and will continue on. I don't imagine I'll stop going back to New Zealand, because I feel part of the fabric there, really.

I stress the uniqueness of the Australian landscape and its metaphysical and mythic content.

East Yorkshire, to the uninitiated, just looks like a lot of little hills. But it does have these marvelous valleys that were caused by glaciers, not rivers. So it is unusual.

I really want to see New Zealand; it's a beautiful place.

I see the great continuities in New Zealand history as being decency and common sense and up until now when we've confronted these things we've been able to talk them through, and I'm sure we will with this issue as well.

This is the difficulty about talking about it without sounding big-headed, but you cannot speak of New Zealand now without my involvement in what it has become.