Helloooooo….
From Then to Now
I was born in Perth, Western Australia. After growing up in Sydney, I studied Nuclear Medicine fresh out of school. I finished the degree, but managed just a year as a hospital tech before I left to tour the globe, living in towns and cities in North America and Europe, waiting tables, working as a liftie, landscaping. I climbed up rocks, and slid down mountains. I hitchhiked across Canada. I slept half the summer on a beach in Southern Crete, then a German winter as a Landschaftsgärtner, only to escape the snow for a few months in Tobago before heading back to Australia.
This travel put the fire of philosophy and ideas into me. As I moved about, I devoured the essential local books. In America it was Kerouac and Kesey, Frank O’Hara and Tom Robbins. In Europe it was Camus and de’Beauvoir and whatever philosophy I could lay my hands on. In Trinidad a local I was chatting to on the bus gave me an anthology of West Indian poetry, and I must have read each poem in that battered volume more than twenty times. After two and a half years I returned to Sydney to dive into university, doing a communications degree, then a PhD in philosophy (metaphysics and aesthetics), and later teaching philosophy at Macquarie University, as well as writing and cultural theory at The University of Technology, Sydney.
As an academic, I worked closely with the late Australian poet Martin Harrison, until his death in 2014, and did my research under Robert Sinnerbrink and Jean-Philippe Deranty. Mid PhD, I returned from a year in Paris at the Sorbonne, and met the love of my life, the authoress, goddess and all round badass, Tara Moss. We got married and created a small, perfect being. We called her Sapphira, for her sapphire eyes. I wrote a few books - the novel Beyond the Frame’s Edge, and the poetry collection Awake at the Wheel, which won the 2016 Anne Elder Award.
In 2018 we moved from our home in Blackheath, New South Wales, to Canada, settling in Portage Inlet in Victoria, a beautiful slice of heaven where Garry Oaks hang over the water. My latest novel is The Fatal Dance, which came out with Harper Collins in 2021. Current projects include a collection of essays, some poems, and the early stages of the next novel.
I established Portage Photographic in 2023 and I am actively looking for freelance clients for photography, video, copy writing, structural editing and strategic comms. Please reach out if you think I can help you solve a communications problem, or just to say Hello.