Mostly Ireland notices complacencies of thought and timidities of action, and the absence of big dreams. His fiction is a ruthless expose of the self-deceptions which inform popular Australian mythology. All must be questioned. When the old myths fail to activate the imagination, they must be replaced. All heroic models must be dispensed with the moment they cease to provide heroic individuality, the moment their use-by date is passed.
Hierarchies exist to be subverted.
All is flow and interdependency, the characters from one novel reappear in another, threads of debate carry through, and the political project becomes virtually indistinguishable from the transgressive artistic project. The pursuit and production of meaning is an end in itself, and every end signifies a new beginning, a wonder and possibility. What we do in the next thousand years will be the stuff of myths to those who come long after us. Being alive is process, change, becoming. It is in the essential nature of aliveness to expand.