Born in Goulburn, New South Wales, 1951, I grew up on `Stillwater’, the farm where Miles Franklin wrote My Brilliant Career. Mine began in 1972 as a cadet journalist on The Goulburn Evening Post, in 1976 took me to The Canberra Times as a sub-editor and in 1996 to The Townsville Bulletin, in various roles until retirement in 2016. Rain God, my biography of meteorologist Clement Wragge, grew from studying environmental history at JCU with Dr Russell McGregor. My MA thesis, Conservationism and Farming in North Queensland, 1861 – 1970, was completed in 2003. I’ve written one other biography, God’s Maverick, published in Sydney, 1993, by Albatross Books. The subject of God’s Maverick, Edwin Tscharke, was a self-taught PNG medical missionary. Rain God — self-published in 2023 — took 12 years to research, write and publish. For the sake of my supportive family, I’m reining in my writing for a while.