Aurealis Awards - or there and back again

February, 2026

​The month ends with another war in the Middle East. No surprise. Regimes of dictators and autocrats posture and bluster as they revel in their power and greed and commit crimes against humanity simply because they can with impunity. While the scope and degree of killing and destruction is on a different scale, fundamentally the nature and actions of human ‘leadership’ has remained unchanged over millennia – rich, entitled, selfish, egotistical, hateful, vengeful, unenlightened – and nearly always male, although significant individuals here in Australia with those detestable traits are in the limelight in recent times. Sometimes I feel that real life is far more horrific than anything I can create.

However, February was an amazing month for me because of the Aurealis Awards. The Awards were established in 1995 and have become the premier Australian awards for recognising creativity in the speculative fiction fields – science fiction, fantasy, horror. In the inaugural year of the Awards, The Last Wizard was shortlisted for Best Fantasy Novel of 1995. Blood (the first book in the Ashuak Chronicles) was shortlisted for Best Fantasy Novel of 2002. As you might imagine, I was excited to be nominated on both occasions, although The Last Wizard lost out to Garth Nix’s Sabriel and Blood was pipped by Sean William’s The Storm Weaver and the Sand.

​In 2025, I entered a speculative novel, All We Have, in the Best Science Fiction Novel category and was overwhelmed with joy to learn that it was shortlisted for the award because I was honestly beginning to feel like my writing was second-rate and maybe it was time to let it go for good. The nomination rekindled self-belief.
 
As for All We Have, I first started drafting the work back in 2016 as a series of novellas based on a young person’s recorded diaries as they survived an apocalypse brought on by a combination of a pandemic and terrorist movements.
 
The spread of post-colonial terrorism across the globe and the rise of jihadist and similar groups throughout South-East Asia became a focal point for how and why Australia might be invaded by an army of some kind. Existing geopolitical relationships to some degree negate the likelihood of a war with a sovereign nation, but the possibility of radicalised groups combining and seizing an opportunity to take over nations if a pandemic or similar event weakened national defences seems more plausible to me. There are already significant radicalised groups in Africa, the Middle East, South-East Asia and within nations everywhere. I began to create a story with that threat in place, but I needed an event that would leave the existing global defence agreements and systems in disarray.
 
For the pandemic component of the story, I spent a lot of time researching and learning about how viruses like the influenza variations adapt and mutate – and learn – prompted by the bird flu epidemics in the 2000s and by my own near death from the Hong Kong flu in 1971. I then investigated the history of Ebola from its emergence in 1976 until recently and how, like many other viruses, it is adapting and mutating. I explored means of transmission, why Ebola has been contained so far, why recent ‘cures’ are now failing, and what the Ebola virus could do if it continues to adapt and mutate.
 
I shared the project with potential publishers but failed to garner interest. I wasn’t surprised – the novellas were in many ways unfinished and, let’s face it, the pandemic concept has been done many times in fiction and film.
 
In 2019, I combined the three novella pieces into a single novel, but I was considering it had significant flaws, especially around how the world would respond to a genuine pandemic, one larger and deadlier than anything we’ve seen in recent history.
 
And then came COVID.
 
Suddenly, I had research material right before my eyes as the world went into a state of fear, panic and lockdown. I mean toilet paper hoarding – seriously?  People died. The virus spread rapidly. Borders closed. Vaccines. Magic cures. Millions died officially. Many more millions died unofficially. Systems broke down or were disrupted. Misinformation went wild. The very chaos I was envisaging in fiction was fact.
 
I went to work on my draft. And I speculated. What if the virus was Ebola-like and far more deadly than COVID? What if survival rate/resistance was infinitesimally small – like one in a million? What if terrorist groups seized the collapse of systems and the lockdowns and chaos and fear as an opportunity to attack? What if the virus adapted and mutated rapidly? What if the virus was determined to survive this time and not just kill its host? What if it learned to control its host?
 
I brought into the setting the places I know well – Adelaide, the Tailem Bend/Meningie region, the Coorong, Robe, Waikerie, the Brisbane region, Brunei, Singapore, Huon Valley – and one that I can only speculate on through studying images and reading articles describing Chinese military bases on the islands in the South China Sea.
 
By the end of 2024, I had what I believed to be a gripping story so I shared it with beta readers and asked them to be vicious in feedback. They were vicious. But the feedback convinced me to polish and submit the draft to publishers. I did to three publishers. All said no.
 
In 2025, I established a tiny niche publishing company called Millswood Books to publish books for myself and for people who had a good book but can’t get an agent or a publisher to accept their work. I decided All We Have would be published by Millswood Books.
 
Formal editing was shared between two friends and myself. I designed the layout. I also did the cover design which is a conglomeration of multiple images and text reworked in Photoshop. The paperback is printed through Amazon. I submitted the book to the 2025 Aurealis Awards.
 
Meg and I flew to Brisbane to attend the Aurealis Awards and it was a rewarding feeling to sit in the audience of nominated writers. It was especially awesome to see Millswood Books up on the big screen. In the end, All We Have lost out to deserving winner Samira Lloyd’s debut novel Wastelands, but I was just happy to be on the shortlist and to enjoy being in the audience with so many peers. It’s nice to be recognised again.

​The image below is linked to the Australian Amazon site from where you can purchase an ebook or paperback copy.