About Me

Who's He?

I used to have a fairly lengthy piece on my website explaining who I was, what music I liked, it even had a brief overview of my goalscoring record in junior football (a hat trick! he scored a hat trick!). But there are enough words in my journal for you to get to know me if you want to. Here are the basics.

Sometime around 29 years ago, my eyes saw their first glimpses of Atlantic coast. Newfoundland shores. A little fishing village that we soon fled. Soon after, they ran out of fish and the town was left as an empty shell. Oil took my childhood around the world, from Canada to Scotland and then, as a bright-eyed 12 year old, to the forbidding psycho-tropics of Darwin. Eventually, after my family wore out those suicidal climes, we rode the coastline down to Perth, where (via time living in London and travelling through India, Vietnam etc) I remain today. Unshaven, usually, and always a little distracted.

I am a writer, freelance and otherwise, published in places both corporate and not. There were daily newspapers, glossies, street press, all of those things. I spent many long years chained to the student media beast, and I was once editor of Australia's largest university magazine, Curtin University's Grok. It was there I got a taste for the things that happen to words when they are mediated, printed, radiated, bled, whatever. In Western Australia, I've written regularly for The West Australian, Scoop Magazine and the sadly defunct Hype Magazine, where I was resident film critic. And also the music guy when the lo-fi stuff dropped in the tray. This site used to have a vast archive of a good few hundred published articles, but I am currently attempting to incorporate them into the main journal so things are easier to search and navigate. They'll be back, when I'm looking for more writing work.

During my time figuring out student media, I also managed to get myself a first-class Honours degree in Cultural Studies and English. I wrote mostly about graffiti, radical theories of protest, culture jamming, Andre the Giant, the Situationists, and most of the other things you'll see me ranting, raving and polemicising about in my journal entries. I'm currently trying to think of a good PhD topic. The honours used to be up here and will be again soon.

During the day, I work am a director of Papercut Media, a web and publications company with a real focus on arts, community, not-for-profit and government work. We've been running for about seven years, and I've had the opportunity to do some pretty amazing things, from editing and ghost-writing books to developing national community-driven websites with tens of thousands of visitors using little more than a text editor and a network connection. We've been profiled in many publications as an example of young people succeeding in business (the three directors all the same age, young young tykes), including a book by the Australia Council. The great thing about Papercut is that we have an ethos and we stick to it, and by doing so we get to work with great people on amazing projects, and we are now at a point where we can show up to work in the mornings with our souls intact and (usually) leave the same way at the end of the day. Have a look at the website, anyway, it'll give you a better idea than my words.

You can also hear me at various times of the week on RTRfm presenting shows such as Out to Lunch and occasionally Morning Magazine, a mash of current affairs, talks, arts and all kinds of everything mixed with a little too much sad country and Big Star for anybody's liking but my own. I used to host Morning Mag regularly for about three years, but got a bit tired. On Friday mornings sometime between 10 and 11am, you'll also hear me on The Movie Squad, RTR's regular film review segment which I present with Paul Grace and rotating guest critics. Much of my recent writing work, particularly the interview transcripts, is sourced from my radio work. I also sit as an elected member of the board at the station, because I love it to bits and it's in my blood.

I am co-founder of The Concrete Organisation, a not-for-profit arts organisation devoted to injecting some life and cultural identity into the stagnant grey fatalism of this city we're all currently calling home. There are some great projects on the go over at Concrete (which is run out of the Papercut bunker), but here is not the place to explain them.

I used to drive an old Mini Clubman, then I drove a new Mini, but one of Northbridge's more unsavoury nightfolk decided to borrow it (and most of my other possessions) and wrapped it up in a nice traffic light before giving it back. For a while you would see me zipping around the city on a 125cc Vespa, and loving every minute of it, but then a nasty accident put an end to that. I have a fatal weakness for (real) football, and I supported Chelsea even when they weren't rich, or good. I am learning the harmonica, screen printing, and French.

The most precious things in my world are every single book in my library (it's grown enough to be called that), a 1927 portable Underwood typewriter (and a 2004 Apple Powerbook, which does more of the writing heavy lifting, but not so joyfully), my tabby cat and my friends. The sticky carpet in the Hyde Park Hotel is semi-precious, and the dream of a country run by a government that understands the modern world is something I also hold so closely to my heart. I own a house, a picnic table and every episode ever broadcast of Twin Peaks and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Interests, obsessions, loves and likes can be ascertained through close scientific analysis of all journal entries.