The story so far...
Simon lives in the northern suburbs of the Illawarra on the south coast of NSW, Australia. Although his ambition is to be artistically fulfilled, he still hopes to earn some kind of living one day, although it’s rumoured he also wants to play professional croquet.
Despite his upbringing in the western suburbs of Sydney, he managed to resist the unrelenting tug of peer group pressure which was compelling him to abandon school at 13 and steal cars, and he subsequently managed to obtain a Master’s Degree in Writing instead. (What was he thinking?) He also studied highly career-oriented BA subjects such as Drama, Australian Drama (and just to be wild) Philosophy, Ethnomusicology and Astronomy.
Since the halcyon days of tertiary education he has written in a number of genres including theatre. He is particularly fond of inventing unlikely characters and structurally juxtaposing them within an iconically-derived subtext while simultaneously driving the action with amusingly syncopated dialogue, a combination of attributes not seen in Australian writing since the height of "Hey Dad!" His work has a higher irony content than Kathy Lette pureed with her own body weight of raw liver (which come to think of it, is not such a bad idea…)
He has also moonlighted as a journalist, may God have mercy on his soul. He has done this despite claimng that he still fights for the rights of the people in these bleak days of the post-Millennium, pre-Genetic Age New Apathy.
Please see the Gallery for some examples of my work...
Journalism
1998-1999
Journalist/Senior Writer for "Pulse of the Illawarra". Numerous articles published which covered politics, sport and the arts, including interveiws, reviews and op ed.
1999-Present
Freelance Writer
Articles
The Australian- 'Gallery gets case of the Costellos' (March 2009)
The Sydney Morning Herald- 'Old acquaintances should be forgot, frending is the way to go' (February 2009)
The Koori Mail- 'Let Down at Every Turn' (June 2006)
The Koori Mail- 'Waiting for Answers' (June 2006)
The Koori Mail- 'Doubt Cast Over Investigations' (April 2005)
The Koori Mail- 'Too Much Wrong' (January 2005)
The Sydney Morning Herald-'Yo dudette': Interview with Jessy Moss (January 2004)
The Illawarra Mercury- 'Artists of the Sea' (September 2003)
Good Weekend Magazine- 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' (July 2003)
The Australian- 'Not the average Brady Bunch' (July 2002)
Miscellaneous
My claim to have coined the longest word in the English speaking language is now official. At least in Column 8 of The Sydney Morning Heraldquestioned whether antidisestablishmentarianism was still the longest word, and I responded with my term pseudoautobiographicalisations (stories that are similar to works that are like autobiographies). For example, George Johnston's My Brother Jack or Helen Garner's Monkey Grip are autobiographicalisations, in that they are autobiographically-based, but are not pure autobiographies, however books like Me, Cheetah and Lemony Snickett: The Unauthorized Autobiography are pseudoautobiographicalisations. They can't be pseudoautobiographies because this is a contradiction in terms. It's like saying fictional non-fiction, when what you're really trying to say is fiction in the style of non-fiction... I'm expecting to hear from the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary any day now...