There is always a stage between novels, when the obsessions and passions that fuelled one book abate. Sometimes they are even tamed; more often they have exhausted the writer and must be put aside until they emerge, renewed, to disturb the imagination again.

In 2005 I published a novel called Dead Europe that had taken me seven years to write. I have described it as my exorcising the "Europeanness" that is one aspect of my identity and consciousness as an Australian. It was a dark novel, both in its themes of recurring racism and antisemitism, and in trying to give voice to the melancholy and loss that is at the heart of the immigrant and refugee experience. The novel was written at night, set in sombre and haunted spaces. Having finished it I wanted to be in the light again, in that vast and harsh but vivid Australian light that I miss so dearly when I have spent time away from home. Having cleaved myself of my European heritage – or so I thought – I wanted to write an Australian story, one that spoke to the Australia I knew.

I wanted to return to the suburbs, those vilified spaces that are not quite the city and not quite the country, in which the majority of Australians live. These suburbs define a nation that was created simultaneously with the birth of the car: the suburbs as portrayed in Neighbours and Home & Away. But I needed to give voice to the reality of the contemporary Australian suburb, one of high-street shops in which one can hear dozens of languages, populated by generations who have never felt an allegiance to a colonial British and Celtic history. My parents live in a suburb three stations away from Ramsey Street; their neighbours are Chinese, Vietnamese, Egyptian, Maltese and Greek. I live in the northern suburbs of the city, where from my backyard I can see the spires of Catholic and Orthodox churches, the minaret of a mosque. Having said farewell to Europe in my last book, I was hungry to write about an Australia I rarely saw represented on the pages of Australian literature or on screen.

I wanted to write about complacency, the fact that Australia at the turn of the century had become one of the wealthiest and most prosperous nations on the planet. We had become richer, we had become fatter, but it also seemed that we had become less generous and less egalitarian because of this prosperity. The multiculturalism and resulting vigour that I wanted to champion in my writing was being challenged by the rise of populist, xenophobic parties and politicians who decried the loss of "British" Australia and reacted vehemently against the increasing self-confidence of both immigrant and Indigenous Australians. Such politics were distressing for myself and for my circle of friends and family. At the same time I was aware that in the push-pull between a vision of a cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic Australia and the resentments such a vision gave rise to, there was something exciting and dangerous occurring: contradictions are a wonderful source for stories and ideas. The great waves of post-first world war immigration, the impact of feminism, the assertion of Aboriginal sovereignty; all these were a challenge to the masculine myth of mateship that was such a strong part of the culture. It was also a challenge to the founding racial injustice of this new nation, the enshrining in the first legislation passed at the Federation of the White Australia Policy, a policy only fully dismantled in my own lifetime. But was it also a challenge to the social cohesion that had been in place for close to a century? How were we to make sense of these contradictions? What did it say about us as a people, as a nation, as a culture? The more questions I had, the more excited I became about the novel. These questions put fire in my belly.

I wanted to rediscover my joy in writing, I wanted to leave behind the heaviness and despair of Dead Europe. All of us who are writers are immensely privileged to work with our imagination, to be allowed the freedom of creativity. I wanted to write through myself but not only about myself. I wished to write in the voices of women and men, in the voice of an ageing immigrant and the voice of a young girl about to enter adulthood. The cast of characters came easily to me. I began sketches and a first draft, I started to populate my world. But I didn't know at this stage whether I had a novel or a collection of short stories; I didn't have the spine that would hold all these disparate voices and experiences in place.

Some moments occur as gifts to a writer. I had such a moment when I attended a barbecue at my parents' house on a late spring afternoon, the backyard full of the smell of charred meat, the perfume of roasted capsicum and eggplant. A friend's young son was playing at my mother's feet as she was rushing around her small kitchen. She kept telling him to stop, to take care, but he was an energetic three-year old and at one point he opened up a cupboard and upset pots and saucepans all over the kitchen floor. My mother, exasperated, turned around, lifted the boy and gave him the most gentle of smacks on his bum. His reaction astonished us all: he placed his hands on his hips, looked up at my mother and said, "Don't! No one has the right to touch my body without my permission." My mother took a step back and then said, "You naughty, I smack you." Then she lifted the boy up and gave him a hug. Everyone in the kitchen, and that included the boy's mother, fell about laughing.

There was nothing vicious in my mother's gentle smack, nothing of the violence and rage that is there in the novel when Harry slaps Hugo. It is important to convince my readers of that. But on the drive back home, all I could think of was the look of mutual incomprehension on my mother's face and the boy's face when they were staring at each other. The adult was a migrant to Australia, who was raised in a Balkan village where women were denied education, where patriarchal authority was total. The young boy was being raised in a world where gender, sexuality, childhood and adulthood were in a constant state of change. How to make sense of both these experiences of Australia? How to make sense of what now was middle-class life, of what was suburbia? I had the beginning of my novel, I knew now how to make all these characters and stories work and interact and battle together. I had been handed a gift. I started writing and it felt like flying; it felt as though I was writing a novel in brilliant daylight.