About
Vandalism
At RMIT I co-founded Vandal Press with Sharon Shelley. We couldn’t get published so we decided to be punkrock and publish ourselves. We roped in Jon Southurst, Patrick Witton and Adam Carey and between 1998 and 2002 put out our little books: Mean Gin (named as an up-yours to Meanjin, the uppity Australian literary journal), The Hard Word, Daytripper, A Small Good Thing and our swansong Adventures in Pop Culture which included fiction from twenty-plus, under-published peoples.
All Vandal Press books are now out of print, but occasionally turn up in second hand bookstores. People tend to frown on self-publishing but for me it was a good thing. At the very least it meant I was doing something. I had a book I could hold in my hand; I could send it off to snooty literary editors to say, Who am I? I can WRITE! After Vandal I started sending stories off willy-nilly. I wrote my way around the world.
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