Wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born
It was of course totally impossible to turn Andy Griffiths’ and Terry Denton’s best-selling children’s book,The 13-Storey Treehouse, into a play. Apart from a multi-level treehouse with a bowling alley, a secret underground laboratory and a tank full of man-eating sharks, the story requires a mermaid, a ...
no one leaves home unless
One of the frustrating parts of writing a book is that once it is finished it’s set in stone while the rest of the world keeps on spinning out of control. Since I signed off on the final proofs ofWebtopiaover summer, what I describe as the ‘worldwide wreck of ...
Whenever I tell someone I’m writing about madness they often nod agreeably – and then double-take. Did you say ‘madness’? I quickly fill the silence, which I assume comes from confusion and not disinterest, with my elevator pitch: my book,Bedlam at Botany Bay, is a history of madness in ...
The story of Charmian Clift and George Johnston and their dream of a life of creative freedom on a Greek island first caught my attention over twenty years ago. Like so many other Australians, I found my imagination fired by the scale of their love story, the scale of their ...
Why would anyone become so all-consumed that they’d work on a book non-stop till they were down to their last $20? That’s what happened to me writingThe Snowy: A History. I turned thirty as I started tracking down migrants from some forty European countries who had worked on ...
In the early 1950s, the Cold War was casting its shadow across the whole world, while people were waiting for the Space Age to begin. And so it did, but without the jetpacks, holidays on the Moon and robot helpers that everyone was hoping for. The catalyst was one of ...
