Hi.  I live in Whanganui and am retired.  I am of Irish, English and Maori forebears.  Ngati Mutungs, Ngati Maru and Ngati Raukawa.  I had a busy work life, see below.  I am married with two adult children and grandchildren.  I live a very quiet life nowadays, something I thoroughly enjoy after a work life involving people in crisis.

I came to writing later in life.  However my first published work was in 1984, a vignette published by Massey University as part of my Human Development paper.  I thought that was pretty cool.  The vignette was selected from many others to go into a book of vignettes.  It was about an old rugby injury.

I have always enjoyed writing but when I retired from full time work in 2016 I decided to finish a police memoir I had been working on for some years.  It became "So You Want To Be a Cop", published by Rangitawa Publishing in 2018. 

It went pretty well so I had another crack in 2020 with "A Battered Proud Badge" a potted collection of historic tales from the development of New Zealand's various police services back to 1840.  A hugely interesting part of our colonial history.  

I was a police officer for 23 years, retiring in 1992 as a senior sergeant.  I then eventually re-trained and qualified in Injury Rehabilitation, working for ACC for another 21 years as a rehabilitation case manager.  

I have for five years now written a weekly column for NZME through the Whanganui Chronicle.  The columns go around the NZME network and elsewhere.  I was a Voyageur Award nominated columnist in 2020.  

I did write sporadically for Stuff while still working but stopped when NZME contracted me.

My first fiction work is awaiting publication, it needs more tidying up.  It was an interesting experience as I have not written any fiction since leaving school in 1969.  But fiction has become a bit of a creative itch for me.  About what I know, crime and cops.

It is a police procedural set in 1970s Lower Hutt about the murder of two police officers by a gang of jewellery thieves.

For the past two years I have been writing a collaborative book with two other retired police officers and our editor, a retired editor from the Otago Daily Times and the wife of another retired police officer, on the history and development of the New Zealand Police Dog Section.  It will be on bookshelves by Christmas 2024 I hope.

The other two retired police did the research and interviews of old handlers and I made the taped interviews from a transcript into a story.  Then our editor applied her redoubtable skills to it all.

I am keen to network with other writers.  I consider myself a novice in the writing world still but my writing has moved from a hobby to an income of sorts.  It helps to pay for the nice things in life like books and my wife’s quilting resources.

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