Intro to Pieces

I’m a journalist and radio producer, author and editor, and by way of therapy, a sometimes cartoonist and stand-up comedian. 

I love the immediacy of radio, my professional home in the recent past, but still have a soft spot for newspapers and magazines, too, even when the wait is months. Something about seeing your stuff on the page, whether it’s one script, one article or the entire book.

In my youth, I served in the military, laboured on large-scale construction projects, worked in a TV studio, managed dance, theatre and music events, and co-developed personal safety programs that gained government backing.

In the US, I ran a migration program for the Australian Government, worked in international trade and investment, and explored the ‘dark side’—representing private companies to politicians, regulators and to the media. I’ve developed marketing programs for food products, manufacturers, sporting codes and retailers of many stripes. 

These experiences of real life and real people -- in the Army, building houses, raising children, starting life afresh in a foreign land, on a stage, in a courtroom, in a lecture theatre, behind the wheel, in front of royalty—have formed my understanding of the world.

Everyone is about listening and learning—and to my mind, telling. That telling might be something for a newspaper or a radio interview, a stand-up performance, a cartoon or a book.  Or even a website.

It is not good news, folks.

Climate change is here and more is coming. And in a stunning piece of chronological and cosmic coincidence, the White House is occupied by a man spectacularly ill-equipped to deal with it. 

These are not the only stories out there, just the biggest.

As a journalist, every day is a wrench to look away from the train wreck that is our news feed. Every platform, everywhere. For those of a biblical frame of mind, Armageddon has arrived.

Gob-smacking stupidity like a new coal mine in Australia when the world needs coal like it needs a fentanyl habit.

Europe busted up and twisted out of shape by Brexit, the dumbest of divorces. 

China on the rise, fast and let’s be honest, frightening. 

And from a polarized and paralysed USA, decisions so bad that WTF has been worn into a Tourettesian reflex, impotence choking our fury.

This website, then, sets out to offer clear headed perspectives of the world, a curation of first-class thinking and writing, even some hope that we humans might just survive beyond the next decade.

Having said that, I’ve sought out a little levity about those things that are not climate or politics. Sex and death remain popular, so I include some pieces—including my own—on those subjects.

My suggestion, folks, is you read them aloud as the waters rise.

There’s some duplication here, by the way. Do you ever only tell a joke once?