Getting to know me 🎶

It’s taken me about 77 years to get to this point so there’s lots to talk about, some of it boring and most of it chaotic.

The highlights are straight forward:

• Wanted to write from about grade 6 but that ambition was beaten out of me by a nun. Eventually, after the 25^th anniversary of liberation from that ghetto, some of my fellow escapees asked if I was still writing as they enjoyed my stories. That prompted me to revise my induced banishment from the literary world and I started again. Despite life frequently getting in the way, I am now making up for wasted time;
• Damaged my spine in 1966 and spent the next 40 years ranging from three years in and out of hospital to culminating by puddling around in a wheelchair for the last 12 of them. With the assistance of a Scenar device, I regained my mobility in 2006.
• Ordained a catholic priest in 1970 and posted to a parish where my predecessor molested at least 8 children and a sexual predator to at least one of the mothers. I informed my archbishop and was told to shut up or get out. I got out. I should have gone to the police but they don’t have a good record either.
• Married Midge in 1972 and we have enjoyed a crazy life together. She is an amazing woman and I am forever grateful for her love, humour, patience and tenacity ─ it’s not fun pushing someone around in a wheelchair. Thank you for being you, Midge.
• I graduated as a social worker in 1979 and did the professional thing for a number of years including running the Queensland Council of Social Services (QCOSS), Director of a Villa for Intellectually Disabled, working with drug addicts, socially disadvantaged and the abused. Child abuse has always been my main preoccupation and is always just below the surface in my writing if not explicitly at the heart of it.
• I never really fitted into the welfare scene as I found the practices too restrictive. For example, it seemed obvious to me that as youth unemployment was a major concern, the focus needed to be on creating employment rather than administering unemployment benefit. So, Midge and I started a grounds maintenance business (an odd choice for someone with a spinal injury but inspired by my specialist who said I must keep superbly fit). As time passed, we moved from youth to prisoners, the largest concentration of child abuse victims around. Surprise. Surprise.
• For the next few years, I taught computing inside several prisons trying my best to foster their self-respect as well as providing an avenue to gain a qualification for employment after release. With a gaggle of likeminded others, we began an integrated program that ranged from education through to community integration, including employment. The program was short lived as the principal at the college that employed me spent a bucketload on renovating his office and closed the prisons project but not before we had reduced the recidivism rate for the participants to zero. Now unemployed myself and with the stresses of coping with my failing mobility and the responsibilities of supporting my family of four children, I broke down and the muddle of doing whatever work I could find began. I became a man for all seasons and finally had to accept a disability pension in 1995.
• Much has happened since then including two major heart surgeries, one in 2006 and the other in 2018. Now I m getting my writing ready to hand on.
• I hope you enjoy what I have to offer. I do not write about disability and social injustice; I write stories that illustrate their consequences. As writers love to say: “Show, don’t tell.”

Lotsa

Here’s a bit about me as well as my mentor, Marji Hill

https://youtu.be/EcnFEne3QTU