16 years ago Currawong and I began our journey together. We’d seen each other around before that, and casually wondered about each other from a safe distance, but 16 years ago is when I was back visiting the Blue Mountains - after having emigrated to South Australia a year earlier in search of change and adventure – and we clapped eyes on each other for the first eternal moment…….

And it was a serious event. The full stereotypical catching of eyes from across a crowded pub, and neither of us could look away. I’ve never, by the way, done such a thing with anyone else. A moment of recognition, and spark, and melting into deep blue oceans, and time…..just…..stopped. Only with my bird man have I felt like there was a body sized magnet within me that dragged me towards him whether I wanted to or not.

It was the beginning of a long and winding path towards each other, through trust, and hurts, and pain, and fear, and all the other feelings a human often feels when taking up the challenge of merging into another human. Into and around and under and behind and through. After this initial meeting it took us over a year to actually start living together, and about 5 years before we really started to see each other for who we truly were.

But after that first meeting, I went back to the Adelaide Hills and decided I needed to write what had happened, and remember it. Because truth be known, I’ve been a bit of a wild thang in my youth, and decided the best way to get over the sexual repression of my fundamentalist upbringing was to fuck my way out of it. So I did, with massively happy abandon for quite a large percentage of my 20’s, which resulted in me realising quite clearly that there is a dearth of women role models in our culture apart from the Madonna or the Whore.

Towards the end of my sexual exploration of the world, I’d reclaimed the title of whore in the old matrifocal sense of the world, and had proclaimed myself a ‘Holy Whore’. And with this came a certain expectation of stereotype from the people around me. I was fun, but not the sort of girl who got brought home to meet the parents. Never taken seriously as I was ‘too easy’. Or strong, whichever definition you prefer. Anyway. Currawong was the first man I’d ever come across who treated me with complete and total respect, and without ever alluding in a sideways manner to my sexual past. And I wanted to remember it.

So I started to write.

I was living in a blue slate mansion surrounded by cliffs with my mother and daughter, and studying Behavioural Science at Flinders University, but somehow I sank into a complete parallel reality, and for 3 months I disappeared into my room, and stayed up till 4 every morning writing, and slept in till 2 in the afternoon. And went out on mad dashes into the city to have a few drinks and remember I was part of a bigger world. And received visitors at the strangest times. And through a kaleidoscope of other men, experienced a complete trip as I was writing, where I didn’t know if I was writing the book or the book was writing me. Misty otherworldly snippets and people and stories coursed through my body, and I felt like I was channelling a whole other reality, and what came out in the early grey light of dawn, through my fingers tapping on my computer………was quite amazing. I’d read it and think ‘who wrote that?!’ and get just as surprised at the outcomes, as I would if I was reading someone else’s book. It went from being an account of our meeting, to becoming an autobiography, self help manual, science fiction fantasy, and visualisation of what I wanted to manifest. And after a few chapters, these ancestors turned up……….

And when it was written, I bundled it up, with a bunch of crystals and velvet and candles and sacred objects and clothes and a tent and jumped in my little Holden Gemini of 1984…….and drove off into the sunset of the Australian desert in the peak of summer, playing and driving through temperatures of over 50 degrees, and decided I was going to face all my fears, and run into the arms of my Saturn Return, burning my book at the beginning to release it all to the universe, let it go, and call in my future.

Which is a whole other story.

But on the way home, I stopped in at the Blue Mountains again, after not having seen him after our movie stare and first meeting for a year, and just as I was about to leave and drive back to the Adelaide Hills, he walked into the pub I was sitting in, and where we’d first met, and our eyes caught each other again.

I’d written a book about him, and he’d written a song about me, and everything that I’d written about in my book had happened. And when eventually we got together and continued our journey leading us to where we are now, we started off by completing most of the other things I wrote about in the book, and fulfilling the manifest destiny that was written on the wall the moment we met.

Now that book has been largely buried for the last 21 years, and I think it’s time it came out. Just after I wrote it, I showed it to lots of people, and read it to folk all the way through my desert journey, and I had incredible reactions to it. One amazing man, who was a very hard man with a very soft centre, and who I met in Alice Springs, had tears in his eyes after I read him the second chapter about Balthazar. He couldn’t believe that I was a woman, and I’d written so clearly what happened in his head. How did I know how to write like a man? Some people said it was one of the best books they’d read. And only last year, a woman I hadn’t seen in 10 years and I bumped into each other, and the first thing she said to me was ‘have you got that book published yet?’ No I hadn’t. But it keeps jumping around at the back of my head and reminding me of it’s existence, and I believe that it's time has come.

Here's a review from a reader…..


Stars Review

“Balthazar and Nimue sits in me, a sperly pause just after a vibrant exhalation, the knocking of ovaries after orgasm… I dared for days not to breath back in… as the black hole of my mind expanded into your story… unintentionally It brought up my dark hidden stuff and I have enjoyed greater clarity ever since.

At the Feast this story stands naked and raw and sometimes bleeding a real person or two; who in the opening and clearing and adventures of their life evolve into themselves. The truth of this human experience, clearly concludes on the heart however hammered… This BIG heart is something sadly most people haven’t found within themselves these days. You liberate yourself with your honesty and therefore help us all to truly see clearly.

This miracle book has forever changed me and that is true- It is a story that has some strange magic formula the dancing mosaic of myth, insight, innuendo, hard straight up reality, so much love… a poignant evocation of a mind I would unhesitatingly call genius."