May 2026. My new novel, The Night Parrots (Wakefield Press), is due in May 2026. Set in Hermannsburg Mission in 1922, it's the story of fifty-year-old Pastor Martin Gerlach, his wife Alma and their fourteen-year-old son Benno.
In the years since his arrival, Martin has built up the biggest, and most influential mission in Australia. But Martin’s heart is failing. His legs have swollen, and he can barely walk. He’s constantly in pain. One of his offsiders, Ludwig, runs (for two days) to Alice Springs to send a telegram to the Lutheran Board in Adelaide: ‘Send help’. The reply comes that Martin will have to find his own way to town. A few days later, Martin climbs aboard a dray and settles into a roped-down chair. He’s joined by Alma, Benno, the school teacher, Ignatz, ‘Blind’ Silas, Ludwig, and seventeen-year-old Jamy. As a crowd sings them off, they leave the mission – the dray, a cart, spare horses. They face eight days along the Finke River to get to Horseshoe Bend, a station and hotel close to the railhead at Oodnadatta.
The novel describes this journey. Martin, torn between God (deserting him) and the guilt of lost lives, lost culture; Alma, always stoic; Silas (saved, as a child, from an inter-tribal conflict that claimed his mother), preaching a gospel that has nothing to do with his people; Ignatz, hiding his own secrets. But mostly, Benno, seeing his father’s suffering, realising he’s helpless to fix the problem, or even talk to Martin about what’s happening. This is the core of the novel – learning (at an age of rapid change) to face death, to find words to help his father, to deal with his own fear.
In the years since his arrival, Martin has built up the biggest, and most influential mission in Australia. But Martin’s heart is failing. His legs have swollen, and he can barely walk. He’s constantly in pain. One of his offsiders, Ludwig, runs (for two days) to Alice Springs to send a telegram to the Lutheran Board in Adelaide: ‘Send help’. The reply comes that Martin will have to find his own way to town. A few days later, Martin climbs aboard a dray and settles into a roped-down chair. He’s joined by Alma, Benno, the school teacher, Ignatz, ‘Blind’ Silas, Ludwig, and seventeen-year-old Jamy. As a crowd sings them off, they leave the mission – the dray, a cart, spare horses. They face eight days along the Finke River to get to Horseshoe Bend, a station and hotel close to the railhead at Oodnadatta.
The novel describes this journey. Martin, torn between God (deserting him) and the guilt of lost lives, lost culture; Alma, always stoic; Silas (saved, as a child, from an inter-tribal conflict that claimed his mother), preaching a gospel that has nothing to do with his people; Ignatz, hiding his own secrets. But mostly, Benno, seeing his father’s suffering, realising he’s helpless to fix the problem, or even talk to Martin about what’s happening. This is the core of the novel – learning (at an age of rapid change) to face death, to find words to help his father, to deal with his own fear.
November 2025. A piece in The Australian linking examples of state overreach to the thoughts of the great philosophers.
November 2025. A story in Quadrant in which the protagonist, Stephen Orr, is arrested for watching a Nazi rally in Adelaide, Australia. DI Kolumbus's examination of Orr's government-generated biography (written by 'Winto', a LLM trained on the works of Tim Winton) shows he is, indeed, and without any further argument, a bad egg.
September 2025. The four-and-a-half-mat room is a story about a writer trapped in a basement. It's my attempt at a writing autobiography, and is part of a longer collection called Thirteen Views of Nowhere. The story is published by David A. Bishop at the very excellent #Ranger Magazine.
September 2025. The day he met Gustav Olafsson is a story about a woman's inability to continue living in the face of her accumulated doubts and fears. You can read it here in 3:AM Magazine.
July 2025. Why are libraries obsessed with throwing out books and replacing them with nice office furniture? I talk about our continued stupidification in the Australian, here.
July 2025. The more you are going home is a short essay I wrote for the wonderful Island Magazine about (I think) past lives, Diane Arbus, and postcards. It's one of a series of equally strange pieces that make up the probably-never-to-be-published experimental collection, Uncanny (Unheimlich).
March 2025. I spoke at Adelaide Writers' Week about my 2024 novel Shining Like the Sun. Here it is on Spotify if you have an hour spare!
February 2025. Another piece in The Australian about why people don't read (or write) the "big books" anymore.
January 2025. Lockheed is a story about a cleaning woman who has been living in Elvis Presley's scrapped 1962 Lockheed 1329 Jetstar in a New Mexico boneyard since the seventies. Published by Sarasota's Magazine 1.
January 2025. Travel magazine Sojournal have published my take on Himmler's fist concentration camp, Sachsenhausen, a short train trip out of Berlin.
November 2024. This piece in The Australian is my take on French parachutist Franz Reichelt, the art of washing elephants, and why writing fiction isn't good for your health (or mind).
October 2024. Here's another Ern Malley chat I had with Mair Bosworth on BBC Radio 4's Poetry Detective.
January 2024. I wrote this essay in the Glasgow Review of Books about the German (early) modernist playwright Georg Buchner, and especially his play-in-fragments, Woyzeck. I also talked about a few similar writers (ranging all the way to the twentieth century).
