My new book, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat, is now out! Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat: Writing on Governing, is both memoir and essay collection. I think it breaks new ground because bureaucrats don't publish memoirs. It will change how you see government, politics, working life, and bureaucrats.
For several years in my early thirties, I attended a dream group with the Jungian psychotherapist, Peter O'Connor. Peter, who is now retired, was a gifted therapist who for many years from the late 1970s held the torch in Melbourne for a humanistic and mythopoeic psychology against the rat-observers and statistical behaviouralists who were dominant… Continue reading Dream. Life. Recovery.
Since I was very young I have been drawn, like a moth to light, to the world of politics. It has not done me much good. True, I have made a career of sorts in the margins of government; always on the periphery, even when I was truly close to the fabled centre of power,… Continue reading On the renunciation of the political world
"We all know poetry isn’t a craft that you can just turn on and off. It has to strike fire somewhere, and truth, maybe unpleasant truth about yourself, may be the thing that does that." Robert Lowell, from a letter quoted in Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character (2017) by… Continue reading Craft, voice and the fire
