When I was 9 years old, my family travelled from SYDNEY to SOUTHAMPTON aboard a passenger ship, and much of what came later — the gravitational pull of the world beyond my hometown, leading to the wanderlust of my early adulthood — can be traced back to this voyage and…

On the final day of a quick visit to Tuscany I noticed that I’d inadvertently pre-booked a smoking seat on that evening’s night train from Florence to Munich. Having just spent the past few days surrounded by chain smoking Italians, I foresaw an uncomfortable 8 hours wheezing in a cloud…

In my early 20s, I slept on the couch in a house full of university students. My childhood friend Peter shared the place with some of his uni pals, who were kind enough to let me stay while finding a new flat. The location wasn’t ideal, because it was far…

Exactly 9 years ago TODAY, a blood vessel burst in my thalamus, and I had a stroke. It took a while for my mind to knit itself back together, untangle what had happened to me, and grasp what was next.. I needed to learn to talk again, walk again, and…

For the first 10 years of my career I toiled exclusively on shoddy Saturday Morning cartoons and yearned to work on something, anything, well made. Thankfully, the second decade was spent on better quality work, though it largely went unseen. Either it was a TV commercial that was beautifully crafted…

My dog had about him the air of a ruffian with a shady past. Apparently, he’d been seen tossed from a moving car, and when rescued he had no tags and thus no name. A real mystery man.. The people who cleaned him up at the dog pound thought he…

In my final year of high school, Hanna-Barbera‘s Australian studio finally responded to my (frequent) query letters from the year before, and sent me drawing tests. After eagerly completing them and getting an in-person interview (necessitating a long train trip to Sydney accompanied my dad) I was ecstatic to be…

Whether for a TV show or feature film, the title sequence sets the tone for what is to come. Like an ear/eyeball appetizer. In the age of streaming video, it’s easy to SKIP them altogether, and thus the test of a great title sequence is one that you never skip…

I’m the oldest of 7 children, but before the rest of the brood hatched, I was an only child, and had an imaginary friend to keep me company. His name was Jerry Narkovitch. While Mum was in hospital, my paternal grandmother came to Tasmania from the mainland to look after…