Thanks for reading. This blog is an opportunity for me to capture some of the diversity of my writing interests. My muse tend to appear on my shoulder as I board an international flight although not all of my writing is inspired by travel and foreign places. These blogs have been the basis of a novel (Flowers of Baghdad) but there are a few other writing projects in progress besides. Please feel free to leave a comment. Or two.
Intelligence and Australian national security / edited by Anthony Bergin and Robert Hall. ContributedAppendix 3. Military intelligence: sources Canberra, A.C.T. : Australian Defence Studies Centre, 1994 | ISBN: 0731703022
In the aftermath of the 1991 First Gulf War, and in militaries all around the globe, a bright light was shone on the relationship between the commander and their intelligence staff. The RAAF Commander and the Intelligence Resource Published: 1994 | ISBN: 064221297X
This paper was the subject of my Master’s thesis and argued that the emergence of the modern RAAF had more to do with the relationships built between the US and RAAF aircrew in Korea than in the flying operations of World War 2. The Significance of Air Operations in Korea Published: 1992 | ISBN: 0942173664
The first anthology of writing came out of a writers group that ran for a couple of years on the Northern Beaches of Sydney. It was called the Fast Twitch Writers Group – the author who sparked it researched fast-twitch muscles but it also had an ironic tone. We were less than fast-twitch when it…
In 2007 I travelled to Baghdad and spent a month there attempting to secure business for Argus Solutions. While there the US government embarked on its so-called ‘Surge” strategy in its attempt to disengage from the country and the city was ‘on the boil’. People I met there became the central characters of this novel,…
Monday 2 March 2020 The carpenters below us started hammering away at 0600, clearly making the most of the day. They were still at it last night, right up to last light. This morning Kavitha watched the sun edge down from Nagthali and over Thuman. Those villages on the other side of the valley were…
I woke this morning to news that Kabul had been captured by the Taliban. I nearly wrote ‘fallen’ but so far there has been a reasonably peaceful transition though video sent to me privately from the middle of the night show scenes of desperate despair at the airport. I spot one man wandering among the…
March 1 Sunday. Psalm 121:1 We have had a deep and still sleep. No barking dogs. Just the calm dark of the mountains. The wind had dropped by 1800. We played cards until 2030, drawn to the radiating heat of the stove but once it had died down the chill crept back and we repaired…