I grew up in a half-built suburb on the outskirts of Melbourne. Stories lurked everywhere: in the swamp at the bottom of the hill, the building sites surrounding my home, and the endless, awkward hours at school. Once I learned to read, I began writing the stories down. As an eleven-year-old heathen, I talked my way out of the weekly RE class in order to write in the library. Those hours bashing away on the librarian’s clunky Olivetti typewriter were my happiest at school.

I wrote everything: fantasy and science fiction, thrillers and spy stories, including a John le Carré rip off, complete with atrocious English accents: “Beany, the drug operation’s gone rotten, the tip off was a bad egg, a no goer.” But a common thread ran through it all, and is still central to my work today—the observing outsider. In going through my writing for this blog, I unearthed a story from primary school about a blind man; one from my early teens with mute protagonist; and, from my late teens, one featuring a girl who becomes invisible: “I spent the day watching, observing others’ blindness of me. I was unnoticed, unseen. I was invisible. I said not one word the entire day. No-one noticed.”

 

Last year my debut novel, Resurrection Bay, was published. It features a profoundly deaf detective, Caleb Zelic, who, to quote the blurb, “has always lived on the outside – watching, picking up telltale signs people hide in a smile, a cough, a kiss.”

Put together like that, it all looks a bit troubling, but luckily I’m a writer, so I get to call it a unifying theme.