David Malouf has a love-hate relationship with television.
The writer was a young man when he saw the way TV forced Australians to talk about things other than the cricket.
It was 1968 and the Brisbane-born teacher had just returned home after living and working in Europe.
He was delighted to see Australian living rooms transformed into places of debate and discussion, where families were presented with ideas and stories beyond their quarter-acre suburban block.
Suddenly black people, gay and lesbian people, prostitutes, thinkers, dissidents and women with "very, very forthright opinions" were given a voice.
"I'd grown up in a world where if you were well brought up, you were always told that you do not discuss religion, politics or sex with anyone," he told AAP.
"I came back to Australia and there was a little box that talked about those things incessantly and that was a huge liberation."
Fast forward to 2014 and the eve of his 80th birthday, and Malouf has a very different view of the electronic fireplace that "never shuts up".
"I now think that television has really been the source of the lowering of debate," he says.
The worst culprits are the ones we've elected, he says.
"Politicians perform on television. They just repeat themselves endlessly, they don't want to be questioned and they don't want to think."
But Malouf says he doesn't want to point the finger at infotainment or the 24-hour news cycle that demands words and talking heads.
Instead, he'd like to see people ask more questions and delve and discover instead of sidestepping and spinning.
That's what drives Malouf to write and it's the dominant theme behind A First Place, a collection of essays and writings that will mark the author's 80th birthday on March 20.
It combines history, geopolitics and memoir to provide an insight into one of Australia's most prolific contemporary writers and the country that shaped him.
Malouf believes Australia's privileged position in the developed world has dulled our sense of empathy and robbed us of perspective.
One of the nation's greatest accomplishments has also been the root of its apathy, he says.
In more than 150 years of power, not a single change of government has been marred by violence or war.
"You can count on one hand the number of places you can say that of," says the author.
"The worst thing about Australia is a kind of blindness to how unjust, poverty-stricken, repressed and oppressed most people are," he says.
"Australia is such a rare place and I don't think we know it. I don't think people are aware of how privileged they are."
The attitude of Australians towards asylum seekers suggests many are still oblivious to what happens outside the cocoon, Malouf says.
"I don't think people say to themselves, 'I have actually done very little to earn this or deserve this privilege, which I have because I live in a particular place which is unusually fortunate and most of the world is unfortunate'," Malouf says.
"What you hope as a writer is your setting it all down will make people look at their own lives and ask questions about what kind of country we want to be, questions about how we came to be the country we are.
"If the book makes people aware of those questions and the variety and density of their own answers, then it would have been a good thing."
* David Malouf's latest book, A First Place, is published by Random House Australia. RRP $29.99
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