MINISTER FOR THE ARTS, TONY BURKE: Thank you so much, Larissa. It’s very generous. I deeply appreciate that. To Aunty Dr Caroline Hughes, thank you so much for welcoming us to country. There is no word in the English language more generous than the word welcome. I will never understand the more recent attitude of some people being cranky about being welcomed. And I do hope as a nation over time, the generosity that you showed- you don't have to welcome us. You do, and the generosity that you show is something that all Australians get better at showing in return both to yourself and to each other.

Ben Law, thank you so much for being here again. Larissa, can I say in your role as Chair of Writing Australia, last time we met for these awards, it was the first time these awards had been run by Writing Australia. And so last time it was a novelty, it was new. Now it's part of the cultural infrastructure of Australia. It's just how we do things now. And the fact that Writing Australia wasn't just an organisational shift that Adrian Collette drove through Creative Australia, but rather it was something that we legislated and said structurally this will always be, means that we now have that sort of level of independence and expertise and dedication to the work of writing in Australia, which I think stands us in a structural position which we should never underestimate how much having those structures in place actually gives a better foundation.

As well as acknowledging Adrian, I should acknowledge Stephen Arnott as well from the Office of the Arts, and Alison Dellit. We've met online but not in person yet. And of course, the Arts Envoy, my friend Susan Templeman.

In the welcome to country there was mention of Narnia. And just by chance, only a few months ago, as I was working through reading, I realised I hadn't read that series since I was a child, and so I rocketed through them all again. And in the seventh novel, The Last Battle, there's a line as they go into the stable. Instantly they're in this weird Aslan paradise where none of the normal rules of physics are applying anymore. And there's this line that's repeated a couple of times, that the inside is bigger than the outside, as a reference to the stable. That's the story of every work of literature – the inside is bigger than the outside. And I think that's what we honour today in the various art forms that we're talking about. Every other art form that we deal with, and I'm pretty selfish, I love them all. There are some that I probably engage with more than others. I certainly don't engage with dance as a practitioner.

But if it's dance and you're in the audience, you're relying on your senses of sight to see the movement, sound to hear. Music, you've got sound. Visual art, it's what you see. But what you do in writing engages all five senses without providing a literal presentation of any of them. What we see is in our mind – what we smell, what we breathe, the temperature we feel, is all created in a world where for everybody who engages with your work, they'll see it slightly differently, they'll hear slightly different music, but for all of them they will have an experience as real as if they had lived it themselves. And you in some ways more than any other art form allow us to see into the mind of our neighbours and into the emotional rollercoaster of their lives, because everything lives within the mind. That's the gift that you provide.

And it means that often on reflection, the personal nature of the experience and the closeness we'll feel for a character or person that we know through the pages that we've turned is far more real sometimes than a character we've seen on screen, where we've been offered the literal, but never offered the full window to the emotional that is possible in the work that you do.

I engage with a lot of Australian writing. I love it dearly. I feel like even two books that aren't nominated today that I've recently read this year, both A Brilliant Life and Discipline, each of them telling the stories of different communities which are spoken more about then are listened to themselves. And that window into understanding different lives, one through biography, one through fiction, but fiction that's not too far from actual conversations happening in homes right now, is what cultural policy always asks for, which is to better know ourselves, to better see each other, and for the world to better know us.

Today is particularly special because today there is a circle that is completed in the poetry section. Some of you will know from previous speeches that I've given, that since I was about 18, I read a poem every day out loud. And it's a random selection, although for all of you who are nominated in the poetry selection, for the last few weeks it has been your poetry books that I've had on the desk, picking up random pages each day and reading them out loud. When I first attended the Prime Minister's Literary Awards, I was a brand new arts minister, just appointed, about to be thrown out in 2013. I discovered at these awards a simple rule, which I presume someone repeats it each time, which is I announce someone's name, we all applaud, they come up, they thank me for the award, give a speech bagging me, and that's sort of part of the rule. And everyone's got opinions, and that's okay. I'm on for it. I keep coming back for the job. But one of the winners in that first year was a poet who had written a collection of poems called Jam Tree Gully. John Kinsella, who is nominated again today. Since that time, because I told back in 2013 the same passion I have about reading poetry out loud each day, John asked for my email address. And occasionally it's opinions, but usually it's poetry.

And now, we're now in the 14th year of John on days that he knows have been particularly dark or challenging, either for me or the country, sending me some poetry to read out loud. To see Ghost of Myself as one of the collections of poetry that I've been able to read over the last few weeks and that I'll continue to read, has been an absolute delight and a turning of the circle for me right back to that first time that I had the privilege to be able to speak at these awards.

Some of the work, when I talk about us knowing Australia, some of it is work where we know Australia better by taking the story away from Australia. Whether it is, as one of the writers represented here today to have an Australian woman travelling to The Hague and working there on war crimes and then that affecting her life back in Australia, we are a nation that interacts with the world. And so the interaction and the part of it being set overseas still is part of an Australian story. The First Nations stories, where every year there are more and more that are coming forward as clearly outstanding works that need to be considered and shortlisted, that move around time in ways that non-First Nations literature finds very difficult to do. But I remember Linda Burney used to always refer, when she was a member of parliament, to time not being linear but being circular. And seeing that come out in so many works of writing is something that has been so terribly special.

The Australian Wars, and I know it's edited by a number of people, there are some stories which need to be told and retold and retold so that at some point they actually cut through in the national consciousness. I had previously read The Sydney Wars and The Tasmanian Wars, and then when I saw Rachel's documentary when it was put on about the Australian Wars, I saw brought in a different format to the books that I'd read, the stories then being told to another audience. And now, with The Australian Wars, something that's been nominated here this evening, to have the situation where those stories are again being told in a different form but being told again, and again, and again.

Some stories are truly a creature of their time. I read many months ago, not knowing who was going to be nominated tonight, Tom McIlroy's book about Blue Poles, Jackson Pollock and Gough Whitman. Imagine a time in history in this country when you could make a major arts decision and there would be a culture war.

Such things have happened in history. But one of the things that that does is not simply tell the story of history, but the engagement that I have with Blue Poles when I visit the National Gallery, as I do often, and not realising until I'd read the book, I'd always gone to look at Blue Poles and hadn't had an appreciation of the work on his left being the work from his partner, the work on the right being another Pollock, and seeing the relationship and understanding more of the story behind the art. I don't understand that because I'm Arts Minister, I understand it because someone wrote a book, and that took me deeper.

A lot of what we have engages beautifully. And I've spoken with people, but there are stories that engage with all the creatures, all the beautiful animals that are around Uluru that gather when it rains. There's stories about a foal, there's stories about bees, there's stories about an octopus as well. But there's one children's book that I, and I just want to finish on this, because I think this children's book, when I read it, really touched the challenge that we're dealing with in this moment in time. And it's called Bored. One of the things that I think is a real challenge for all of us – we’d like to say, challenge for the children these days, it's actually a challenge for all of us – is we often don't allow ourselves to get bored anymore. The moment we're waiting for something, the phone comes out and we scroll. The moments where we used to just sit and be bored and daydream and allow our minds to create without ever making an active decision, we've largely allowed that to be taken from us. And effectively there is nothing that the world could need more now than imagination and creativity. And to see a children's book taking the beauty of doing something with boredom that takes you to imagination, that then makes you realise when someone wants you to do something, you are too busy because the stories going on in your head are so exciting is, I feel, and I never would have thought a book called Bored was a call to action, but it is.

Making sure that we make space for great writers to tease that imagination, to give us pictures we haven't seen, to meet people we haven't met, to go through emotions and challenges that may never be our own but we know them because someone through the beauty of words has invited us in and created a world through that stable door that was bigger on the inside than it was on the outside, is a space that unless we fight for, we will lose. And we can't lose that, because when we lose imagination, we lose empathy and we lose our capacity to go beyond ourselves.

All of you. no matter which area of the literature you are involved with, take us somewhere that we would not otherwise go because you have issued that invitation. There has never been a time more when your work is more important to this country than it is now. I'm glad at this moment we finally have a structural body, dedicated within Australia with all the authority of government, to promote your place in Australian culture and in Australian society. The world has never needed you more. Australia has never needed you more. Structurally, we’ve never been set up better, but that doesn’t mean it’s not going to be hard. The dedication that you do should give every single Australian hope. Congratulations every one of you, in part for the awards, but mainly thank you for what you do.