Although the last book employs elaborate devices to disguise what is fact and what is fiction, it does provide an outline of her life. If I was going to believe in the incredible, I thought I might as well go the whole hog. In the end, though, she didn't. I think, basically, I just had too many doubts about the existence of a God who really cared about human beings. She is passionately opposed to the contemporary belief in the virtue of selfishness, saying that if we don't look out for one another, we're done for.
Selfishness is a dead end.
The paradox is that it doesn't end up giving you what it promised. We're on this lonely spaceship and if we don't look after each other there's no point coming home. Home for Scott is the Tasman peninsula south of Hobart, an area that summons to mind images of the west coast of Ireland. Scott's large federation home, which she shares with her son Marcus, was basically a chook shed when she found it in 1986. By then, Michael Scott had died, and, to her profound dismay, she could see that universities were in the process of jettisoning their humanist tradition and becoming appendages of the economy.