The person
An Australian writer and analyst with deep roots in Asia-Pacific politics, business, and the machinery of power, and someone who has spent a long time working out how all of it connects.
The career has moved across politics, communications, intelligence, media, and strategy, in Australia, Japan, and across the Asia-Pacific. Author and analyst. Managing editor. Bid manager on major infrastructure. Press conference facilitator. Correspondent in Tokyo during one of the most consequential decades in Japan's modern history. The through line in all of it: a forensic interest in how power actually operates, how narratives survive or collapse, and what it takes to see clearly when the conditions are designed to prevent it.
Japan and Asia-Pacific are an intellectual home, offering different insights into how different societies work, what they're for, and what the long view of history actually tells us about right now.
A yoga practice arrived later, and stayed because it worked — as a set of tools for helping clarity of thought and action when the conditions make that hard.
This site
A public intellectual project
This is where a specific body of thinking about power, clarity, and how to act well inside conditions of genuine difficulty gets worked through in public, over time, and in conversation.
The site is organised around six areas of thinking: how power and information operate, what AI means for the people using it, how to think and act clearly under pressure, what Asia-Pacific history tells us about the present moment, how political power actually works, and the conversation those questions generate. They are connected. The thinking moves between them.
The site is designed for people who want to think rather than just read. The Conversation facet is the formal space for that. But the spirit runs through the whole site. The invitation is to engage, push back, and bring your own version of the question.
The thinking here is genuinely in progress. Some of it is settled. Some of it is being worked out in public. AI is used in the production of this site, as instrument not author, and that use is declared. Two pieces already published: Finding Dr Claire Clark, an AI-assisted recovery of a nearly lost career, and a journalism archive from Tokyo in the 1990s.