I’ve been invited to participate in The Great Mental Health Debate tomorrow at the University of Sydney. My fellow panellists include: Professor Caroline Hunt, Psychology Department at the University of Sydney; Rosie Swanton, youth involvement coordinator at ReachOut; representatives from the Black Dog Institute and headspace; and student representatives. Feel free to come along. I’ll […]

“I think society is one of the greatest impediments an artist can possibly have. I rather think that Duchamp concurred with this view. When I was young and needed help, society wouldn’t give it, because it had no confidence in what I was doing. But when, through my perseverance, society took an interest, then it wanted me not to do the next thing, but to repeat what I had done before. At every point society acts to keep you from doing what you have to do.”

— John Cage

From an interview published in: Moira Roth, Difference/Indifference: musings on postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V., Amsterdam, 1998, p. 72.

If you’re in Melbourne, come along to the launch of The Sleepers Almanac No. 9 on Monday 7 April. The anthology will be launched by Jess McGuire and I’ll be reading from my short story, ‘Civility Place’, which is about a guy who works as a lawyer in a 1,200-storey glass tower. There will also be readings from […]

When I decided, almost two years ago, to pioneer the career move of corporate lawyer to lollipop lady, I became acutely aware that people around me had conflicting opinions as to whether or not I was wasting my potential. As a twentysomething lawyer in a top-tier Australian firm, I worked in an air-conditioned glass tower […]

My short story, ‘The Three-Dimensional Yellow Man’ is out today in the 3D Yellow Man Edition of The Lifted Brow (Digital Edition Volume 5 Issue 1).   It’s about a one-dimensional yellow ninja who steps out of a 3D film and into a plush red theatre on George Street, to the bemusement of local cinemagoers. The story was […]

  It was only when a one-dimensional yellow man stepped out of a cinema screen and into a plush red theatre on George Street that audience members began to blink rapidly behind their 3D glasses. The film from which the man had emerged was Return of the White Ninja 3D.  Although the film was in 3D, […]

‘As we count up from one, three is the first most interesting number.’ — Michael Cunningham   Nothing is known of Ralph’s childhood except that he once dived between the legs of a monk, trying to see if there was orange underwear under those orange robes. The monk, laughing, had scooped the little boy up […]