He makes demands to which you want to respond

He rewards close reading.'' Maloney pinpoints the documentary-like quality of Truth. ''You couldn't look at the processes of the internal operation of Victoria Police the same way after reading Truth. His imagined reality feels more real than any number of Ombudsman reports.'' And crime writer Michael Robotham says Temple has the finest ear for dialogue in Australia.''The great thing about him winning is that a lot of people will read Truth and realise that he's a brilliant social commentator and a stand-out writer.'' Temple has always taken the view that a writer can do anything with crime. In Truth he is interested in power and its exercise. ''What I see as the disintegration of things, the way every step forward carries with it its own slide backwards, that all the things we try to do even with the best of intentions are doomed.'' And the bleak political world he unmasks in the book? Simply the way he sees it. ''It is the perception of reality. What is the reality itself? People don't really know.'' The reality that intruded into the writing of the book was Black Saturday. He wanted to set the book in the summer when the state was a furnace. ''I like the image of the heat and the fires and then all that personal stuff coming in, tangled and retangled, old crimes coming to the surface and family disintegration,'' he told The Age when the book was published. But after February 7, 2009 he stopped. ''I ground to a halt. I didn't know what to do. I thought this is so awful. I was taken aback when it happened. I thought somehow I had brought this about in a strange way for a split second.'' He wrote other things for a while but returned to the book. The fires play a significant role, particularly towards the end, a part he had already written. ''In the end I thought 'go for your life'. It's not in any way disrespectful.'' A distinctive characteristic of a Temple book is the way he writes about men and the emotional bonds between them. Jack Irish has a chorus of old boys - the Fitzroy Youth Club - with whom he drinks at the Prince Rosetta Stone Chinese of Prussia and suffers at the football. In The Broken Shore, the central relationship is between the dispirited policeman Joe Cashin and a swaggy who turns up at his property, Dave Rebb. And in Truth, Villani is trying to come to terms with his tortuous relationship with his brothers and father. These are all ways that Temple examines the notion of loyalty and contrasts it with themes of greed, power and corruption. He grew up in a small town near South Africa's border with Botswana. At school he was something of a spelling champion and one day on the way home from picking up a prize he was ambushed by a couple of older boys and bashed. The incident planted in his mind the germ of an idea - to put words and crime together. He was never happy in South Africa. First there was the ongoing antagonism between the Afrikaners and the English speakers, ''the despised rooineks'', which for boys of his age meant continual fights. Then, of course, there was apartheid. A few years ago, he told me: ''You are complicit. I always felt complicit. I feel guilty to this day. I think if you live in a country, basically you share the dominant values of a country although you may disagree on issues all the time. So you should. Nevertheless there is no feeling that your country is wrong, that your country is at fault. You may think the governments are at fault, or sections of the population are misguided, but you don't blame Australia. It remains your home. ''If you can't have that feeling, if you feel that something about those of your countrymen - those of them that make all the decisions - is badly flawed and that they've tarred you with it, you can have no real love of country.'' Temple and his wife, Anita, left for Germany in 1977 and two years later he got a job as education editor on The Sydney Morning Herald. He moved from there to teach journalism at what is now Charles Sturt University in Bathurst and then to Melbourne to edit the now defunct Australian Society magazine, and eventually to set up the editing and publishing course at RMIT. He was mightily impressed by Melbourne. Shortly after arriving he was taken one Friday afternoon to a Carlton pub by Brian Johns, the then head of Penguin. It struck him that every intellectual, every writer, every academic in town was there. Were they talking books? Ideas? Politics? No, it was all football.

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