What I’m Working on Now

What am I working on now? Too many things - I’m pretty creatively promiscuous if you can’t tell by this website. I’m doing a lot of research into collaborative art practice through a research project I established between The Parramatta Artists Studios and Western Sydney Univeristy called Testing Grounds. You can read about it here. I’ve just finished working on a couple of projects with Powerhouse Musuem- the next one to be released is called Parramatta Profiles and it’s a series of profiles about people doing ground-breaking, interesting, wonderful things in the Parramatta region, all written by fabulous postgraduate students at WSU.

I’ve been doing a lot of research on housing, suburbia and urbanisation. This led to a wonderful project I did with photographer Garry Trinh, who helped me photograph the houses on my street for an article I wrote for The Conversation, where I tried to record the stories of the houses that are disappearing and the people who live there. And I’ve been talking on The ABC a lot about what happens when we lose our suburbs.

Also, I’ve just got back from an epic conference on Enid Blyton in Germany because I’ve been toying for years with the idea of writing a contemporary appropriation of The Magic Faraway Tree, which explores many of the themes above. And also, Enid has so many fascinating controversies surrounding her which I’d really like to explore in some essays.

And lastly but not at all leastly, I recently finished a novel for adults called How to Be a Good Person. It’s about a social worker who is also a serial killer and all the reasons why people still think she’s a good person. It’s sort of a crime novel and sort of a social satire which looks at how we try to be authentically ethical in the age of virtue signaling and social media. I’m now on about draft 10 and hopefully, I’ll be brave enough to send it to my agent soon.

All Images on this page by Garry Trinh