After The Monkey and the Dragon came out, I had a couple of ideas for novels in mind;but I was so angry about the whole ‘children overboard’ business, the Tampa, and our treatment of asylum seekers, I wanted to do something which addressed that issue first. I had been interested in writing for theatre for a long time, and it occurred to me that what I wanted to do was to write a comedy with a very punchy message about asylum seekers. I came up with the idea for Seeking Djira, which is about a bunch of self-obsessed Australian writers at a writers' centre who are unexpectedly confronted with an asylum seeker who has escaped from Villawood [a detention centre in Sydney]. Everyone's very confused about who the other people are: he thinks he's stumbled into some weird, dysfunctional family, and they think that he's the famous Middle Eastern poet who they're expecting. So it's a comedy of errors, written in the style of a classic bedroom farce. Anyway, I was starting to write this play when I realised I'd never met an asylum seeker, and had no idea how to do the character. I went to Villawood with the intention of going only a few times, to do some research. But I became very involved with the people I met and so, since November 2001, my whole life has revolved around asylum seekers.