What comes out
while the work is being made

The Work

The Now

It has been a long journey from the then to the now.

The work didn't come from having sorted things out. It came from somewhere in the middle of sorting them. This is where the work comes from. Not from a tidy resolution, but from the process of arriving at one.

Every piece of fiction starts somewhere real — an emotion, a texture, a question that won't leave you alone. The stories here began in art. Art is the one universal construct that holds across borders, cultures, languages, and decades. It was there at the beginning of this work and it runs through all of it. Not as decoration. As architecture.

The fiction explores a world where lives intersect with extraordinary circumstances and extraordinary people. The narrator moves through decades and cities, accumulating experience that is sometimes comic, sometimes dark, occasionally both at once. What drives the work is not the world it depicts but what that world costs the person moving through it — and what survives.

Two people said things at the right moment. They would not remember saying them. The work exists partly because of that.

Along the way there has been an attempt to pass something forward — to open doors, offer words, make space for others to find their own. That impulse is in the fiction too.

This is what was made from the part I was given.

Before the warren

What came before the warren

I grew up in Sydney. In my early twenties I fell into a crowd that moved through the same clubs and bars as people who would later become household names — some internationally. I won't list them. That's not the point. The point is that by the time I was twenty-two I'd shaken hands with a Prime Minister, a Governor General, a State Premier, and Sir Elton John. Alison Moyet got narky with me. These things happened.

It was enough to convince me the entertainment industry was where I needed to be. Then my father died, and I remembered everything Robin Williams said on a Tuesday afternoon in San Francisco, and everything Annie Lennox said over frying pans in Muswell Hill. I stopped producing other people's work and started making my own.

Context

On Church, and why the work exists

Church isn't a building.

When Tina Arena released Church in 2021, she wasn't talking about architecture or doctrine. She was talking about a specific interior place — the room that stays lit when everything outside has gone dark. The part of you that predates the damage and will probably outlast it. You don't find it by going somewhere. You find it by going inward.

The world that year had made a compelling argument for needing it. Not a gentle one.

This work comes from the same room. The fiction, the music, the art — it all started there. In the church without a congregation. In the self as its own sanctuary.

That's what she was singing about. That's where this came from.

The Work

Step Back and the problem with memory

The fiction is set in real cities across real decades but it's not memoir and it's not journalism.

The danger — the only real danger — is when the writing starts softening the emotional truth of its characters rather than committing to it. That's when it dies.

Sydney 1992 is the hardest. Not because the memories are dark. Because some of them aren't, and I resent that.

Music

What One More Day was written from

Ten tracks from loss. That's the whole brief. I didn't write them to process anything — I wrote them because the alternative was silence, and silence in those weeks felt like agreement.

D's Lament is the track I can't listen to in full. Not because it hurts. Because it's accurate — and accuracy, in grief, is harder than beauty.