History and Biography
Champagne at Three
The Story of a trans mining engineer
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.
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From the Murray to the Sea
The history of Catholic Education in the Ballarat Diocese
Having immersed myself in Catholic Victoria for my PhD dissertation, I was invited by the Catholic Education Office to write the history of Catholic education in the Ballarat Diocese, which covers nearly half of the state of Victoria. From the Murray to the Sea, the History of Catholic Education in the Ballarat Diocese, was published by Indra Press and the Catholic Education Office in 2004.
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Little Red Books
In 2007 and 2008, Exisle Books commissioned a series of short histories on a variety of topics including the histories of the Eureka rebellion, Aviation and Gold.
Cuthberts: a Ballarat Institution
In 2014 I was engaged to write the history of the Ballarat legal firm Cuthberts which was completed and published in 2015 under the title Cuthberts: a Ballarat Institution. This monumental task involved tracing the biographies of all the lawyers who had been partners since the Irishman Henry Cuthbert had established his practice in Ballarat in 1855.
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