Andrew Leigh (Fenner, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to honour David Malouf AO, one of the great makers of Australian literature, who died on 22 April 2026 at the age of 92. Some writers describe a nation and some enlarge it. David Malouf did both. He widened the imaginative map of Australia and did so with a prose style so exact that many of his sentences seemed less written than tuned. Born in Brisbane in 1934, Malouf grew up in a city often treated by the southern capitals as a place of verandahs, heat and provincial manners. Malouf turned it into one of the great literary landscapes of Australia. In Johnno, Brisbane became a place of memory, desire, comedy and loss. It gained weather, depth, danger and metaphysics. The jacarandas acquired a syntax.

As the son of a Lebanese Christian father and an English mother descended from Sephardic Jews, Malouf had an instinctive sense that identity is a set of crossings rather than a sealed compartment. Australia, in his work, became a country of inheritances and unsettled borders. His fiction understood that people carry histories they can scarcely name and that a nation is made as much by what it half remembers as by what it declares. Malouf's range was astonishing. He was a poet, novelist, essayist and librettist. For most writers, that would be a crowded CV; for Malouf, it seemed the natural result of having more than one instrument in the house.

He wrote in conversation with the great dead and the vividly living. An Imaginary Life returned to Ovid in exile; Ransom returned to Homer. He inherited a literary landscape in which Patrick White had shown that Australian fiction could bear the weight of myth and metaphysics. Yet David Malouf found his own light, which was quieter, more sensuous and more hospitable to ambiguity. Among later writers, Nam Le and Christos Tsiolkas have written of him with evident admiration. That's a mark of a major writer. He gives other writers permission to become more fully themselves.

David Malouf's major books now form part of the architecture of Australian letters.

Fly Away Peter found in the First World War a terrible collision between beauty and violence. The Great World, winner of the Miles Franklin Award, traced friendship and survival through war and its aftermath. Remembering Babylon, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, gave Australian readers one of the most searching accounts of colonial fear, belonging and estrangement. Ransom retold the journey of Priam to Achilles, finding in the ancient story a modern grammar of grief.

David Malouf's genius was often to notice the moral force of a small gesture—a meeting, a memory, a boy looking from a window, a king kneeling before an enemy. He knew that civilisation is built not only in parliaments and courts but in acts of recognition. In Remembering Babylon, Gemmy Fairley's fractured cry:

Do not shoot, I am a B-b-british object!—

is comic, painful and politically exact. In a handful of words, Malouf catches the absurdity of empire with a human being trying to save himself by turning himself into property. In An Imaginary Life, he imagined Ovid hears the plea to 'cross the river into your empire'. That sentence could stand as an invitation to read Malouf himself. His books ask us to cross borders of language, class, race and time.

The honours were many. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia, won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, became a fellow in the Royal Society of Literature and received the Australia Council award for lifetime achievement in literature. Yet Malouf wore distinction lightly. He had the rare ability to be both grand and modest—a difficult combination among writers and almost an endangered species among politicians. There was wit in him, too, the wit of precision rather than performance. He could draw on Homer and Ovid, then bring the reader back to a Brisbane street—a patch of light, a bird in a yard or a silence between friends. He reminded us that erudition is most powerful when it travels economy class.

In his Boyer Lectures, David Malouf spoke as a public thinker as well as an artist. He understood that literature is one of the ways that society tests its moral imagination. Good writing asks us to inhabit the minds of others. In a democracy, that's a habit worth cultivating. For Australian writers, David Malouf helped prove that local material could carry the weight of world literature. He showed that Brisbane could speak to Rome and Troy, that the subtropics could converse with antiquity and that Aussie sentences could hold their own anywhere. For Australian readers, he offered something rarer than reassurance; he offered enlargement. He made us more attentive to language, memory, landscape and the uneasy bargains of history. He asked us to look harder, and he trusted us to follow.

David Malouf gave Australia books of enduring beauty and seriousness. I'll never regard Brisbane without thinking of his writing, just as I can't go to a Western Australian beach without thinking of Tim Winton's. Malouf leaves a body of work that will continue to unsettle, console and instruct. His sentences will keep their music. His characters will keep walking through our minds. Brisbane, because of him, will always be a little more mysterious, a little more luminous and considerably better written.

See this speech in context