About Matthew

While you can find more about my career on my LinkedIn profile, I can say here that words and images have always fascinated me.

A linocut with the words to Alfred Tennyson’s 1830 sonnet ‘The Kraken’ (“Below the thunders of the upper deep; Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea …”) dates from 1982, which is when I made it. By then I had matriculated from secondary school and, though in my heart of hearts I wanted to be an artist, I enrolled instead at university. In those early years I sat on the margin between the visual and the written worlds. So, this is an artefact from a time when I was looking for ways to express myself.

With this type of work you have to carve the image in reverse so that it comes out the right way when you ink an impression on paper. You use a rubber roller to apply ink to the block and then with the back of a tablespoon you rub the reverse side of the paper so that the ink is evenly distributed over its surface.

I did graduate with a Bachelor of Arts back in the day and then worked in several organisations before I started in PR with a manufacturer of high technology. Eventually, I went back to uni (the same place I had earlier graduated from) and did a Master of Media Practice and then freelanced for a number of years during which time I wrote stories for different magazines.

I wrote stories on commission for Good Fruit & Vegetables, Australian Farm Journal (now defunct), Australian Horticulture (now defunct), Australian Geographic, Australian Anthill, Ethical Investor (now owned by an investment company), G Magazine (now Green Lifestyle), Process and Control Engineering, Crikey, National Times (now defunct), New Matilda, and Global Mail.

While it is often rewarding because you learn a lot of things and you get to work with good people, this type of work is hard and time-consuming and the pay is not all that great. I also wrote stories for magazines published by private organisations and did other types of PR work on occasion. Nowadays, most of my writing goes on the blog, which you can see here.

With Twitter, I don’t always follow people back because I find that people sometimes unfollow even if I do. On Facebook, I won’t put up with rudeness or extreme language and will unfriend people who resort to such tactics. My personal opinions on issues of public importance are easy to uncover if you pay attention so I won’t go into them here. Suffice it to say that I am interested in practical solutions and will not obediently follow the policy platform of either of the major political parties.