I was born in Randwick, Sydney on 7 August 1950, the middle child of a large middle class Catholic family. Then raised on the North Shore and educated in turn by the Brigidine nuns and then Jesuit priests of St Aloysius College at Milsons Point, opposite to where they began building the Opera House as soon as I arrived.

Thence onto Sydney University where I didn't study Law or Medicine, nor did I begin a career in Advertising or other such business to establish my place in the metropolis. I studied Arts, I played in music groups, I didn't get conscripted to the Vietnam War, I travelled to the Aquarius Festival in Nimbin in '73...

I left the city. I lived with the hippies...there was music, street theatre, performance, radio and film. I worked the harvests of wheat and cotton and grapes; I hitched around the land...

I'd studied the poetry of Donne and Hopkins and Shakespeare at school, but when I heard the street poets at the Adelaide Festival in the '70's that was when I started to write my poetry. When I travelled back out to the harvests I wrote romantic poems, landscape poems, lonely poems, poems about the hard-bitten, hard-drinking Aussies, poems about the land wearing away...all the while I was playing music, which started with piano lessons as a young child; then percussion then keyboards...and then performance poetry.

The poems about love and landscape evolved into poetry about media, power, politics, environment, war & peace...the poems came off the page and onto the stage, the microphone, the classroom, the festival marquee, onto the road...