David Hill is a former chairman and managing director of the ABC, chairman of the Australian Football Association and chief executive of the NSW State Rail Authority. He has for many years campaigned for the British Museum to return the Parthenon sculptures to Greece. His new book, The Fair and Foul, is published by William Heinemann.

GRAPES OF WRATH

David Hill: Steinbeck captures the hardship of migration.

John Steinbeck

Set in the "dust bowl" of America's mid-west in the Great Depression, the novel tells a harrowing tale of the Joads and other families driven off their Oklahoma farms by severe drought and bank foreclosures and forced to embark on a terrible 2400-kilometre trek towards California in the hope of finding a better life. For me it dramatically displays the hardship and suffering faced by so many families over the centuries who have been forced by terrible circumstance to uproot their homes and migrate.