What I’m Working on Now

What am I working on now? Too many things - I’m pretty creatively promiscuous if you can’t tell by this website.

I’m doing a lot of research into writing about food and motherhood for my nxt novel. I’ve just finished working on a couple of projects with Powerhouse Musuem on the Parramatta river and I’m currently working on another project for them about shopping malls.

I’ve been doing a lot of research on housing, suburbia and urbanisation. This led to a wonderful project I did with photographer Garry Trinh, who helped me photograph the houses on my street for an article I wrote for The Conversation, where I tried to record the stories of the houses that are disappearing and the people who live there. And I’ve been talking on The ABC a lot about what happens when we lose our suburbs.

And lastly but not at all leastly, I recently finished a novel for adults called Peaches, which I’m now editing because it’s being published in early 2027. Peaches is a generous, loving book about Camille, who has turned her family home into a boarding house so that she can care for her community in the face of rampant urabanisation and gentrification: She’s also probably a serial killer and when the book opens she’s perturbed at the police for ruining her garden by pulling all the bodies out of the ground. Peaches explores the lives of people in turmoil and those trying to help, and everyone who wants to post about it on social media.  It travels from country Australia to the liberation of East Timor, to the punk night clubs of Western Sydney and out to where migrant workers pick oranges in Southern Italy. And it always returns to the boarding house in Parramatta where Camille and a cast of characters help run a restaurant out the back called The Last House, which quickly becomes famous for its food and then everything else that happens there. This book is for readers who loved all the food and social commentary in Asako Yuzuki’s cult best seller Butter. It’s for people who love the dark humour and charm Peter Carey brings to his descriptions of Australia and the engrossing absurdities of suburban life explored in the work of novelists like Meg Mason and Sigrid Nunez. In Netflix terms it’s The Bear meets Beef.

All Images on this page by Garry Trinh