WELCOME!

About Me

At sixteen I ran away to sea from the small New Zealand town where I spent my childhood.

In 1969, after ten nomadic years in the Merchant Marine, I gained a professional pilot’s licence and for the next thirty years I flew throughout Australasia, Africa and the Middle East. 

I returned to New Zealand to a society I barely remembered … and life as a deer farmer. 

Disenchanted by politicians then-fashionable privatisation agendas and their adverse effects on our once egalitarian society, I turned to writing in the belief the pen is mightier than political rhetoric.

I commenced a BA in Visual Arts and began writing short stories, some of which found a home in local anthologies and writing competitions - then came the debut novel. 

​Now, residing in the hills behind Tasman Bay on New Zealand's South Island, I indulge my urges to write and talk to animals for which I have an abiding affection. 

---

​Listen to an interview with me on radio Fresh FM.

About My Writing

The raw material for my writing comes from fifty years of fossicking in the globe's four corners and an overactive imagination.

I write stories that entertain, and which readers can empathise and engage with. ​Exploring human interaction in a 'factional' context I draw on life-experience to provide immediacy, atmosphere and life-believable outcomes. 

Though my novels and stories can be classified as action/adventure, they are infused with a deeper human, and sometimes philosophical context.    

​​My writing philosophy is perhaps best expressed by New Zealand author, Janet Frame in her autobiography.

In The Envoy from Mirror City, Frame resolves "never to forget that a writer must stand on the rock of her self and her judgement , or be swept away by the tide or sink in the quaking earth; there must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect must be the writers own."