Okay, let’s keep it all simple. I was born in 1955, in Tailem Bend, South Australia, and grew up around the Malinong/Coomandook areas on a small farm. I went to Coomandook Area School, then on to Mitchell Park Boys Tech and through Flinders University. I graduated with BA(hons) and DipEd in 1977 and started teaching in 1978 at Stuart High School in Whyalla. Since then I’ve taught at Aberfoyle Park High, Hallett Cove R-12, Jerudong International School and currently at Concordia College where I’m Head of English.
I started writing at age 7 or 8 in Grades 2 and 3, and regularly got into the school magazine, but didn’t officially have a published work – a poem in Neon Signs to the Mutes – until 1977. Still, I wrote often, and I wrote lots of things – cartoons, poems, songs, stories, articles, essays. In 1979 I started writing a teenage novel, but stopped because it just seemed impossible given my full-time jobs as a teacher and a new parent.
I wrote a musical in 1983, but it never went anywhere. I also wrote several hundred game scenarios for Dungeons and Dragon style roleplay which were successfully played. In 1987, I started writing a fantasy novel, but again I gave up the idea when I attended a conference and found out how impossible it is to get published.
It was only through the interest of a friend, Graham Phillips, who put me in touch with Roxarne Burns at Pan Macmillan, that I finally finished a manuscript and sent it away. In 1990, that manuscript was bought by Pan Macmillan Australia and a contract established for a trilogy to be called Andrakis. Guardians was published in 1992, followed by Kingmaker and Dragonlords in 1993.
In 1995, The Last Wizard, a standalone was published and shortlisted for the inaugural Aurealis awards.
From 1996-2000, I focussed on writing short stories in several anthologies and magazines, and a teenage novel, Joy Ride, which was published by Wakefield Press in 1999.
In 2000, HarperCollins Australia contracted the Ashuak Chronicles project which I had begun in 1996. Blood was released in 2002, followed by Passion and Freedom in 2003. HarperCollins also published a teenage novel, Caught in the Headlights in 2003.
I’ve had, and still have, a host of interests. I’ve acted in amateur theatre with Axis Theatre company in productions of Black Comedy (as Brindsley Miller), The Zoo Story, This Old Man Came Rolling Home (as Georgie), When We are Married, and also in musicals – Riff Raff (as Spinner), Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and Pippin (as Charlemagne). I played and coached several sports, including A grade football, District basketball, and State League volleyball. I play guitar badly and sing even worse.