Deeply grateful to editors of The Australian Fabian Review # 6, 2024 for featuring my four 2010 paintings & extract from my blog post last year about the provenance of wars in Gaza. Their cover art is very clear: “Stop Killing Children”.

I have new artwork in the most recent Issue 5 of The Australian Fabians Review 2023. Their editor invited me to share my painting ‘Australia a Prophecy’ under their topic of AUKUS in a large issue with many writers expressing themes shared by the Australian wing of the Fabian Society, an international labour movement think tank which has its origins in the UK in 1884.

I was reminded with all the stories around the Indo-Pacific and naval activities of some artworks from my 1992 solo exhibition Dualities. I was 24 and they have that graphic style from the era as I was doing graphic design back then before I discovered paint and canvas. It is the same theme, starting with dry pastel on paper in very vivid colours (1). All titled the same, Ship of Fools. This first image was actually the last incarnation. I started off with some pen and ink cross hatch drawings (3), the theme then evolved into an etching/aquatint on cotton rag (2).

In this article of Volume 9, #2, 2023 of Routledge London journal Critical Military Studies, I share my experience of using William Blake’s 1793 poem America a Prophecy as a lens to explore the mythic, subconscious and literary constructions of military interventions in the Indo-Pacific with my 2021 painting ‘Australia a Prophecy’ & a 2000 word essay.

An amazing night with a repeat walking performance of The Lion Never Sleeps by Noamie Huttner-Koros at The Blue Roome theatre (well, we started walking from there) for which I was interviewed in 2019 for her 2019/20 season. It tells stories of Perth's LGBTIQ community during the AIDs crisis in the early to mid 1980s, part of the largely undocumented and overlooked history of Western Australia that wasn't considered 'acceptable' history for decades.

“William Blake’s character Orc and I did a metaphorical bar hop and imagined our way into a bar in Richmond on a typically cold, wet winter Melbourne evening. The windows were steamed up from the kitchen and after many whisky shots we were both worse for wear. Back in my real-time studio of course, it was gin & tonics…So, in my imaginary studio conversations, Orc was in verbal stream-of-consciousness about how men saw their violence as crucial to their hero’s journey…