Interview with Paul Ham

Interviewer: Firstly Paul, thanks for agreeing to this interview.

Paul Ham: It's a pleasure.

Interviewer: What have been your inspirations for writing? Why 'Kokoda', why 'Vietnam'?

Paul: Well, I've always somehow instinctively felt that I could write from when I was at school. I felt that it's something that I could do. You sort of get a feeling of what you're good at, at a fairly early age, I think. I used to read compositions to the class and a few poems and things and I just felt comfortable with it. And I certainly, as I got into secondary school, I started to think about things I may want to write about, at some distant place in the future. I had ideas for novels and certainly stories of war and about our history and, coupled with that feeling that I could write, was the fascination with history. I always loved history at school. We had great history teachers who enlivened it for us and brought the reality back to us: of what it meant to be in World War I or what it meant to be in the Australian Outback trying to build a nation; what it meant to be in New Guinea in the Kokoda Track – that particularly, the Kokoda experience. The school I went to used to send cadets over the Track. They stopped it a few years before I was meant to go, but it always slightly haunted me … about what it would have been like. I think that's carried on into my adult years and I was determined, as a historian, to go back and revisit that experience.