Killing Brumbies is a strange and moving book that weaves fact and fiction with art into a story that roams from love and art to politics and moral outrage. This is an intriguing setup to a novel that is high in social commentary. What was your moral goal when writing this novel, and do you feel you’ve achieved it?

My novel ‘killing brumbies’ could just as easily be named ‘accidental book’.  In 2009 After my last major art shows in Melbourne and in Cairns at the James Cook University about global warming species extinction, I was offered an undergrad position in fine art to ‘catch up. The library staff (God bless them) taught me how to turn the computer on and what an email is. Up to that point I wrote letters and shopping lists by hand or used a quaint old Remington typewriter. The kind where your fingers get stuck between the keys. After a semester of ‘art techniques up to impressionism’, there were no other art subjects on offer, incredible to think art as being cancelled at university level. I changed to Literature, did a semester of ‘writing a play’.

When starting a new body of art, it’s like being taken over by an external force, not a sinister poltergeist, an unstoppable force that until that body of work is all out and finished there is nothing else you can do. The writing happened the same way. It was raw and powerful and in many ways better dialogue than in the book. At first the university was thrilled to have writing talent in the class, even put me on a writer’s program with the local theatre company.

At the first reading of the play the supervising person proclaimed the work banned as too controversial, I refused to stop writing it and was kicked out of university.

It’s not a book I wanted to write; you’d be crazy to want to write a book like this.

I rewrote it as a play, that was banned. I went into a creative coma hiatus for a few years and played with my dog and my horse and did a series of work about Barbie caught in a cave unable to get out. Then I saw a Utube video of someone claiming to have painted my side of the tram, sent him a solicitor’s letter which he laughed at, his response, ‘You don’t exist’.

I got angry, bought my first laptop and began the five-year anguish of writing my book.

‘killing brumbies’ is the statement of my existence. I hope through all the dirt and grime of the storm shines a hopeful message, ‘Horses are sacred and Dogs are Angels’.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

I could say something lofty, hopefully witty or tell you the truth. After laying out the plan of the book from the play. I engaged a dramaturg to help me learn to tell a story. It was worse than marriage, I bled on the pages, he criticised everything stabbing into my soft underbelly. Finally, he said I would be jailed when the Aboriginal arts council (which he worked for) got hold of this. It is a fictionalised true story to overcome over 300 hundred pages of censorship imposed by the Australian government on non – indigenous writers.

I started again on my own, realized, I had not gone deep enough into my memory, I needed to see the characters from all angles to understand them. I bought a very large bag of marijuana (illegal in Australia) and spent six months getting in as deep as I could to memories lost or deliberately forgotten.

I ran out of the nice drugs and on the third day of being clean, I experienced symptoms of a heart attack, the ambulance rushed me to emergency, hooked up to life saving equipment, tested for everything… well almost everything. After four hours the doctor came in and asked if I had ‘smoked’, I nodded, THC withdrawals he said. He unhooked me and quietly sent me home, don’t come back he said.

What was one scene in the novel that you felt captured the morals and message you were trying to deliver to readers?

Now that I live the clean saintly life, I can say the chapter I like most is No. 9 City Dingo.

I’d like to think it is that satisfying moment when another wild creature recognizes, accepts and invites you into the pack. The deep primal need to see the stripes of another zebra or hear the call of another wolf. For me as an artist I found a home, another artist, a gentle pure place for a little while. I still howl at the moon calling for him.

What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?

Next underway now, is the Catalogue book of all exhibitions over a 35-year time span. Including short stories, photographs and new work. ‘killing brumbies’ includes a selection of work. The Catalogue book is the complete sequence of paintings so far.

Also, next. I’m mapping out a children’s book with new illustrations.

Freddie the horse and two dogs, something dogs and horses and trails, roads, pathways leading somewhere. People and situations that are not what they seem. I like the original Star Trek episodes of a situation, problem and unlikely resolution.  

Having learnt how to write it’s irresistible to keep going, im looking forward to getting into the studio and see what happens, where the story goes…next.