Books

When Rebecca died on August 17, 2017 I promised the extended family who attended her wake I would write her biography because most of them had no idea where she had been and what had happened to her from the time she had stopped being Robert Michael Norton. Her transformation from Robert to Rebecca had been a secret, never talked about at family gatherings.

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She had returned to Ballarat about the same time as I had, penniless and in poor health, addicted to cigarettes and champagne. We spent afternoons in her little apartment yarning about world events and the politicians she admired like Angela Merkel and Vladimer Putin until she became too ill to care for herself. It was the nursing home staff who restricted the champagne to one bottle a day delivered to her room promptly at three every afternoon.

 

As I set about tracing her life from one mining site to another within Australia and beyond, and discovering the issues she faced before and after she made the decision to undergo gender reassignment surgery, I decided that Champagne at Three was a fitting title for the biography I had written. It was published by Rainshadow an imprint of Clouds of Magellan in 2025.