Other writings

I have written through virtually my whole adult life. My first pieces were some rather amateurish freelance journalism while I was still a teenager, when I was living in Darwin in 1978. They were for a magazine called Nation Review, published under pen names. I did a few more bits and pieces through the 1980s, but that was essentially my decade of living in the Kimberley, working full-time for the mob, and raising young children.

The bug really bit  me during the writing of Noonkanbah: Whose Land, Whose Law, that came out in 1989, and I was able to follow that up with the Polly Farmer biography in 1993. In between I managed to get a couple of short stories – my first pieces of fiction – published under the name of Jim Delaney in The West Australian.

Then in the mid 1990s I was invited by the Bunuba mob to work with them on a dream they had been chasing for almost a decade, to make a feature film about their great hero Jandamarra. I knew the story. I was good friends with some of the key people involved, including Howard Pedersen, who with Bunuba elder Banjo Woorunmurra had written the definitive history, Jandamarra and the Bunuba Resistance. I leapt at the chance. It was the start of a thirty year involvement with Bunuba Cultural Enterprises.

Although we got very close a couple of times, we never got the film made, but we were able to find other ways to take the Jandamarra story to the world.