Beaches, baby, book

Just sharing a quick life update for my wonderful Patreon supporters.

A couple of months ago, my wife and I became parents for the second time. The labour happened very suddenly one night, and we were back home for breakfast the next morning, which is a sign for how uncomplicated the birth was for my wife and baby.

Everything is going great for little Sean, and Luke is doing a good job of being a big brother – though in the scatterbrained style of 2 year-olds! And we are enjoying the journey of parenting together, and making it all work in as positive a way as we can manage.

Beaches

Since it is a time of life that we will never be able to repeat, we recently took a 9-night trip to the south coast of New South Wales, staying in three different beach towns along the way: Mallacoota (in Victoria), Pambula, and Bermagui. We are one month from the Australian winter, but the weather was perfect, with the ocean still a surprisingly swimmable temperature. Postcard holiday conditions all round, really.

The highlight of the trip was beautiful Bermagui. It has a fishing wharf close to the heart of town. Huge short-tail stingrays (Bathytoshia brevicaudata) are constantly cruising around in the water between the boats. They are each roughly the size of my outstretched arms. The stingrays circle, waiting for the fishing boats to drop some food in the water for them. A short video that I captured below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3bGlFNhVT8

Other wildlife that we spotted included Australian fur seals sunning on the rocks, bottlenose dolphins tearing through the surf, as well as numerous Eastern grey kangaroos in the caravan parks that we stayed. These caravan park kangaroos are very used to the presence of people, and let you get far closer than wild roos typically do.

Parenting and creating

So my home life is a big reason why I’ve been quiet with my Patreon updates in recent times! In most ways baby Sean is actually the ‘easy one’, and it is 2 year old Luke who occupies our attention, as he explores the boundaries and goes through mood swings. He is thriving, but definitely takes a lot of work to manage. Very often I am in the darkness of his bedroom until after 9:00 pm, waiting for him to settle down and get to sleep. At which point I emerge and feel as though my entire evening has been consumed. Just the phase we’re in, I suppose.

All I can say is I am grateful for Australia’s childcare system, which has been slowly but steadily ramped-up by successive government in recent years. Luke is attending 3 days per week, and the cost is 87% subsidised by the government. Universal childcare is apparently a goal of the re-elected federal Labor government, which would be a game-changer to have fully-funded early childhood education available to everyone.

We’re also lucky to have made friends with parents in our neighbourhood who have similar-aged children. There is a great sense of solidarity knowing that others are going through the same demanding life stage. The other parents have similar broader values and worldviews to us, which is a great basis for friendships based on more than just our children.

The book

We had a little period of nesting as a family of four, but I am increasingly getting back into the swing of comics creation.

The book-length Town Without Television adaptation remains the somewhat daunting mountain that I need to climb.

Any times that I pause work on the book— whether for Christmas holidays or any other reason—tends to leave me feeling flat-footed when I resume work.

At this point, the scope sometimes feels more than I can hold in my mind at once. However, that is a feeling that I’ve experienced with other projects before, such as Energy Slaves, Peak Oil, and Rat Park. The closer I get to completion, the more locked-down the elements of the project will feel.

A major way that I am keeping myself on track with my work on the book is having weekly 'accountability catch-ups' with a fellow resident from Gorman Arts Centre, where we both discuss the ongoing progress of our arts practices.

I’m really happy with the work that I’ve done on it so far, but the big challenge is ‘seeing the forest for the trees’, and simply making sure that the project is as good as it deserves to be.

My upcoming Patreon weekly updates

I’m still at the stage where I don’t have work-in-progress panels or pages that are ready to show to you. But I aim to begin a new weekly habit of sharing other interesting things with you. These will generally be things that are related to my Town Without Television project in some way, such as some of the 1970s magazine articles, archival videos, or photos that I’ve been using in my research process.

Edit 30/5/2025: I should have mentioned this earlier, but I'll reserve future updates of this kind for my Patreon supporters who are on the Behind the Scenes with Stuart membership tier (US$10 per month) and above. I'll, of course, continue to keep my lower-tier supporters informed about important aspects of my Town Without Television project and other work, but will keep the regular weekly updates as a perk for those who are opting-into that benefit.

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Thanks as always for your support, and please message me at any stage to let me know how things are with you.

I’ve spent the last 45 minutes drafting this letter listening Manuel Göttsching’s seminal 1981 album E2-E4. The Guardian describes him as having "invented techno by accident" with the album. It has been one of my go-to albums to work to in the last couple of years. Give it a go, the next time you are working on personal project that needs a perky pulse.