What's new?
March 2019. My next novel, This Excellent Machine, is due out soon. It's about growing up Hillcrest, and all that involves.
Clem Whelan's got a problem: trapped in the suburbs in the Sunnyboy summer of 1984 he has to decide what to do with his life. Matriculation? He's more than able, but not remotely interested. Become a writer? His failed lawyer neighbour Peter encourages him, but maybe it's just another dead end? To make sense of the world, Clem uses his telescope to spy on his neighbours. From his wall, John Lennon gives him advice; his sister (busy with her Feres Trabilsie hairdressing apprenticeship) tells him he's a pervert; his best friend, Curtis, gets hooked on sex and Dante and, as the year progresses and the essays go unwritten, he starts to understand the excellence of it all.
Here is a generous review from Lisa Hill at ANZ LitLovers
Marcel (Proust), Milan (Kundera) and Me (me), in the Sydney Morning Herald
Read an extract here in InDaily
Another extract from The Adelaide Review.
Review from the excellent Helen Eddy at ReadPlus
Clem Whelan's got a problem: trapped in the suburbs in the Sunnyboy summer of 1984 he has to decide what to do with his life. Matriculation? He's more than able, but not remotely interested. Become a writer? His failed lawyer neighbour Peter encourages him, but maybe it's just another dead end? To make sense of the world, Clem uses his telescope to spy on his neighbours. From his wall, John Lennon gives him advice; his sister (busy with her Feres Trabilsie hairdressing apprenticeship) tells him he's a pervert; his best friend, Curtis, gets hooked on sex and Dante and, as the year progresses and the essays go unwritten, he starts to understand the excellence of it all.
Here is a generous review from Lisa Hill at ANZ LitLovers
Marcel (Proust), Milan (Kundera) and Me (me), in the Sydney Morning Herald
Read an extract here in InDaily
Another extract from The Adelaide Review.
Review from the excellent Helen Eddy at ReadPlus
February 2019. Another Adelaide Review piece I wrote about the death of the social contract. Or, in other words, how much your government doesn't really love you.
The late cultural theorist, Mark Fisher, described a corporate-political lovefest that aims to “keep us in a state of panicked anxiety … and radical competitive individualism so that we can’t act together and gain a collective agency”. Instead, functioning individually, wired into a world where technology will save us, connect us to a community of the like-minded, encourage our creativity and sense of self-worth. But what we’re really left with is a semi-medicated existence where, all of a sudden, and for no reason, we feel like crying.
The late cultural theorist, Mark Fisher, described a corporate-political lovefest that aims to “keep us in a state of panicked anxiety … and radical competitive individualism so that we can’t act together and gain a collective agency”. Instead, functioning individually, wired into a world where technology will save us, connect us to a community of the like-minded, encourage our creativity and sense of self-worth. But what we’re really left with is a semi-medicated existence where, all of a sudden, and for no reason, we feel like crying.
January 2019. Here are four short features I wrote about a few of my favourite books. All were published in Indaily.
1. Under the Volcano
2. Wise Blood
3. Blutsbruder
4. Pedro Paramo
1. Under the Volcano
2. Wise Blood
3. Blutsbruder
4. Pedro Paramo
November 2018. My play for voices, Westward Ho!, has just been listed for performance/purchase with Australian Plays. It concerns an ageing greyhound trainer, and a twelve-year-old boy who saves him from death by leading him back over a strange version of his life. It premiered in 2012 with the Centre for International Theatre, produced and directed by theatre legend Guy Masterson and the brilliant Joanne Hartstone.
She was buried in the Parklands. By her husband, who’d clanged her on the head with a shovel. Used it to bury her, at three in the morning, when it was all quiet. She just talked and talked and talked, never stopped. And in the end, he’d had enough. So he murdered her. Caved in her skull, right at the back. Put her in his bread van and drove to a quiet spot, dug a hole, dragged her into it, and without a word of a lie, she was still talkin’ as he covered her with dirt…
She was buried in the Parklands. By her husband, who’d clanged her on the head with a shovel. Used it to bury her, at three in the morning, when it was all quiet. She just talked and talked and talked, never stopped. And in the end, he’d had enough. So he murdered her. Caved in her skull, right at the back. Put her in his bread van and drove to a quiet spot, dug a hole, dragged her into it, and without a word of a lie, she was still talkin’ as he covered her with dirt…
November 2018. Incredible Floridas longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award (see Fiction).
Photo from my breakdown on the road to Ballyvaughan.
Photo from my breakdown on the road to Ballyvaughan.
September 2018. The new Westerly online edition has a South Australian focus, including work by Jill Jones, Amy T Matthews and Thom Sullivan, as well as an excerpt from my next novel, This Excellent Machine. Download for free here.
