Beginnings

It was 1979. I had just started a BA in Professional Writing at the University of Canberra, then a CAE. It was a pioneering course that allowed us to explore many forms of writing: articles, short stories, film scripts, radio plays and radio adaptions. It was creative as well as practical, trying hard to counter the romantic idea of being a writer with the reality of making a living in the arts.

To prepare us for submitting work professionally, all our course work had to be typed with double line spacing, wide margins and a word count included on the cover sheet. Publication of any course work was an automatic high distinction.

I published two short stories while working towards my degree, both in the Bulletin Literary Supplement, The Breaking Point (13 April 1982) and Skinning Peaches (21/28 December 1982).

The latter was included in an anthology The State of the Art the Mood of Contemporary Australia in Short Stories, edited by Frank Moorhouse (1983).

Thrilling though it was to see my words in print and to receive a cheque for their publication, it brought home to me just how hard it was to make a living as a writer, especially a creative writer.

The amount of work involved in crafting a piece, the long lead times to publication and the smallness of the remuneration, all these factors made me look more broadly at the craft of writing.

Becoming a wordsmith

Theses images are career relics. I wrote my first published short story on a 1933 Imperial type writer that I rescued from the tip; I bought myself a Brother portable sometime later and I oversaw the introduction of desktop publishing in a government department.

After two years of writing a few articles and short film scripts and keeping food on the table by working in hospitality, I had a lucky break. I was asked to fill in for a person who went on leave at short notice. The position was in publishing for an Australian Government department. In that short span of time I learnt the rudiments of publishing and was introduced to a whole new world of writing.

One job lead to another and over the years I researched, wrote and edited content for brochures, newsletters, articles, media releases, briefs, film and radio scripts, annual and other reports, corporate plans and performance measures, the web, technical and procedural documents, business cases, training materials as well as designing whole campaign strategies.

I honed my skills and learnt a writing discipline that has served me well. I wrote a book on annual reporting, The Don’t Panic Guide to Annual Report Production, which became a benchmark in Australian Government annual reporting for many years.

However, there was still a hankering to work on something for myself.

In 2005, I embarked on research that would lead to a PhD for my thesis, Constant Witness Reframing Images of the Second World War and then to the publication of The Dead Still Cry Out the story of a combat cameraman.