This month feels like my ‘coming out!’  As a writer! 🙂

I have a short story and a blog post being published in the prestigious literary journal Westerly,  and after many years of procrastinating I am finally launching this website. As well, I’m in the Kimberley region researching a character for my PhD novel.

I wish to thank Shaun Tan for the kind use of his images on this website. Tan is an award winning Australian artist and visual story teller with numerous and beautiful books her has created over more than a decade.  I have collected Tan’s work ever since I discovered his book the Red Tree in 2001. In a room in my house, I have original Tan drawings mounted on the wall; and they blink at me sometimes from my peripheral vision. Sometimes I will stand and look at them.

One of those drawings is the larger than life port figures meeting in the middle of the river that I have used on my website. From Tan’s book, The arrival (2006),  these figures that are dramatically different, as if from other worlds, meet each other in the new world they have arrived, holding hands in greeting. Around them is the chaos of the port’s arrivals and departures. But in the middle of the river, the quiet precious moment of their difference meeting, potentially through empathy and compassion, is enlarged by Tan (link).

Tan’s work seems to emerge from the quiet sounds of potential, the quiet that we don’t always remember to listen to, that exists between people and all life.

Tan has a way of talking to the pain, magic, sublime, absurd and the wonder of the world we live in. While Tan tells visual stories, I wish to imagine with my voice, in word images, with the same wonder and possibility of the quiet potential inside and around all of us, that might help us imagine new worlds and futures together. While we live on one planet, a diversity of world views, and solutions seems to me to be key.

I wish also to thank Kim Wingerei for this website. Kim is a friend, and an author and blogger on subjects related to democracy, human rights and media power. A former businessman and entrepreneur, he has recently established an Independent media website, which is gaining traction and supporting the power of media to make a difference in our world.

For the past two weeks, I have been connecting to the remote and ancient worlds of the Kimberley.

The kites spiral in circles. They  give the blue sky a shape of its movement, its spiral currents, the way it might glide and glide.

I’m here in the Kimberly country. I’m exploring a new a way to belong in Australia. The dirt is the colour of blood. The vegetation rests in a fine grey green wind. Everything is soft here. Soft to walk on. Soft to the eyes and ear.

I have coined the expression – “How can compassion be the country where difference can belong?”

My future blog posts will be an exploration of writing, including nature writing and my writing themes of compassion, difference and belonging in Australia. I’m interested in Buddhism and its potential extrapolation into theories of posthumanism, including Indigenous philosophy of deep time. I’m interested in how we can value all life, not just human; how we can be both the same and different. In a world reduced to monocultures;  I’m interested in exploring how diversity can be a thing of celebration and individual expansion.