A short biography

I was born in Paisley, Scotland, the third child of Fred and Anne Lang. My father was a leather tanner, just as his father and his father before him had been (WJ & W Lang Tanneries Ltd, Seedhill). My mother was a Stevenson, from the West End of Glasgow, the eldest of four daughters, a Cordon Bleu chef and keen promoter of women’s issues. My parents married in1943, during the War, and by the time I came along in 1951 we were living in a house in Thornleigh Park, which, when I visited it decades later, proved to be semi-detached - that is, it was only half a house with other people living next door. Such is the child’s experience I had never noticed. Later we moved to Kilmacolm, up on the hills behind Port Glasgow and Greenock. Around the same time I was sent off to my first boarding school, Craigflower, on the north side of the Firth of Forth. I spent four years there before going on to Merchiston, in Edinburgh, for another four years. Boarding schools in Scotland in the nineteen-sixties were unpleasant places and I did not fare well in either of them. Eventually, in 1968, just turned 17, I ran away. A year later, having completed my A Levels (badly) at a college in Glasgow, I set off for America, intending to hitch-hike around the world.

Most of my contemporaries who did something similar took the Asian route but I was drawn to America for various reasons - the nascent hippy movement attracted me, but I had also developed something of a passion for the work of Jack Kerouac, not so much On The Road, although that was bound to have had an effect, as Desolation Angels and Dharma Bums. After my years in boarding school I had romantic notions about living alone in fire towers in the wilderness. I spent most of a year in North America, traversing the country several times, ending up in Hawaii. From there I travelled to Japan for Expo ’70, and then on to Hong Kong. My time in Japan was confronting. I had tried to hitch-hike to Kagoshima and back without any of the language, in a period when very few Japanese spoke English, when I was a six-foot-two blonde long-haired Caucasian. By the time I returned to Tokyo I was in a bit of a state. I went to Hong Kong, hoping to meet up with a friend and find work but he proved not to be there. I ended up booking a phone call at the central post office to call my parents, to tell them I was ready to come home, go to University, do whatever was required, even to join my father’s business, anything, if they’d just get me out of there. They, to their credit, said I should go to Australia, they’d arrange funds for me to do that.

From Sydney I hitched up to Mt Isa, looking for work and, while I didn’t get any in that mining town, I was offered a job in the outback, a couple of hundred kilometres west of Borraloola in the Northern Territory, looking after some equipment that had been dropped in the bush near a proposed airstrip. Left utterly alone there for a few weeks - which had been my earlier dream of course - I was suddenly faced with the harsh reality of my own self; very new to the country and haunted by all the possible beasts that might injure me; hardly daring to leave the bounds of the caravan. At the end of my contract I cadged a lift in a light plane (from the very roughly completed airstrip) to Alice Springs. From there I rode the Ghan down to Adelaide, having a birth in the single ancient First Class car attached to the end of a goods train.

I’d been pretty much by myself throughout all of this, in fact it would be fair to say a sense of isolation had been my sole companion for the previous ten years. In Sydney I walked in the door of a share house and, for the first time ever, found a group of people I recognised. This was what struck me about Australia, it seemed to be a country where it might be possible to be what you wanted to be, or at least to grow into that. The residents of the house were students at the University of Sydney, studying, of course, but also doing a lot of LSD and marijuana, playing music in live venues around the city. I stayed. Over the next year or so I developed a love of the Australian landscape, to the extent that I went in with some others to buy 550 acres of forest back of Eden. It was 1973. I lived there for ten years, building a dome, knocking it down and replacing it with timber and mud-brick. It was there, two years later, that I met my first wife, Frances. We had two children together, Kim and Rhia.

In 1983 we moved back to Sydney. A year later we separated. The hippy years were over. I gave up casually working in kitchens and took up metal roofing. If you live in inner-city Sydney there’s a fair chance I’ve been on your roof at one time or another. In the late 80s Frances moved to Maleny to join a permaculture community (and start her own business selling organic gardening supplies). I followed her there and eventually found what had been eluding me for a couple of decades: a way to write books. Although it was, still, another decade and a half before one got published. During that time I met Tyyni, and we got married in 2000. We raised her two children together, Hannah and Jackson and, during all that, managed to find the time to start Rosetta Books in Maleny.

These days writing is at the centre of my life. But Tyyni and I also run Outspoken, an extended writer’s festival held in Maleny which takes the form of conversations between myself and visiting writers. Among the many who have featured are Kevin Rudd, Anna Funder, Tim Winton, A C Grayling, Alexander McCall Smith, Richard Fidler, Richard Ford, Karen Joy Fowler, Henry Reynolds, Patrick Gale, Christos Tsiolkas, Kate Grenville, Ann Patchett, Ruth Ozeki, Thomas Keneally and John Birmingham. Please follow the link to the website for details of up-coming events, or to register to receive notifications. In 2007 we sold Rosetta Books. Tyyni and Fi Hunter went on to purchase and then run Maleny Bookshop for ten years, until July 2020.