After 15 years in the Australian mining industry, we returned to New Zealand in 2019 and settled in Central Otago. Since then, I have completed two historical fiction manuscripts based on actual events.

'The Hawks Cry' unravels the fortunes of Hartley and Reilly, the original discoverers of gold in Central Otago in 1862. The story explores the cost of ambition and the spiritual linkages that bind families across generations.

The second manuscript, 'Aotea', begins in 1293AD in Southern Polynesia and follows the desperate Polynesian migration and settlement to New Zealand. The story weaves a multigenerational saga of resistance, adaptation and the quest to safeguard ancestral taonga against external forces seeking to rewrite history.

Both of these manuscripts remain unpublished.

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