Contents of A Life Between the Layers
50 chapters across 5 book blocks.
A Life Between the Layers is being published in stages. The first three published blocks now contain Chapters 1–30.
The book remains a work in progress and may be clarified or expanded as additional memories, correspondence, documents, earlier writings and other records are recovered and examined.
Published through Chapter 30 — 15 September 2026
Block One
Chapter 1 The Record
Memory, records, evidence and the layers between lived experience and institutional history.
Chapter 2 Forty-Five Geologists
A young coach driver, a busload of geologists and an education in the Australian landscape.
Chapter 3 Behind the Chronicle
Teenage years at The Yea Chronicle: printing, machinery, sectarian loyalties and the events that brought my apprenticeship to an abrupt end.
Chapter 4 Thursday
Why Thursday? A childhood accident, repeated anaesthesia, fear of not waking, and the nurse whose reassurance stayed with me.
Chapter 5 Robert
My older brother, years of bullying, the shooting, and the complicated history that shaped what happened before and long after it.
Chapter 6 Janette
My younger sister, an event in Yea in 1962, the consequences that followed, and the way her childhood story returned decades later.
Chapter 7 The Melbourne Process
Decades after childhood, I tried to place what had happened into a formal process. What returned to me was another layer of records, uncertainty and questions about whose account would be believed.
Chapter 8 Patrick Smith
My engagement with the Royal Commission, the first male professional to whom I spoke substantially about abuse by women, and what happened when even that process became difficult to fit.
Chapter 9 Canada
A country I had imagined before I saw it, a journey that began with a relationship, years of driving and travel, and one of the patchiest periods in my memory.
Chapter 10 When the Patient Meets the Record
Decades of experience enter the modern health system, where observations, diagnoses, records and the patient's own account do not always describe the same reality.
Block Two
Adult life, memory, evidence and the work of reclaiming a life from incomplete and disputed institutional records.
Chapter 11 The Life That Followed
The adult life that took shape after the events of childhood and youth, and the experience of living forward without yet understanding everything that had been carried with it.
Chapter 12 Work, Roads and Country
Work, travel, coach driving, landscapes and the education that came through movement, observation and encounters with people and country.
Chapter 13 Building a Life
Work, business, relationships and the long process of constructing an adult life around experiences that had never been fully resolved.
Chapter 14 What Memory Did With It
The changing experience of memory, gaps in recall, separated periods of experience and the gradual recognition that forgetting was not always ordinary forgetting.
Chapter 15 When the Past Began Returning
The return of events, names, physical memories and connections, and the difficult process of discovering how apparently separate parts of a life belonged together.
Chapter 16 Making Connections
The connections that began to emerge between returned memories, physical experiences, people, places and events that had previously appeared separate.
Chapter 17 Following the Records
Seeking the documentary trail and confronting the silences, errors and contradictions within institutional accounts.
Chapter 18 The Cost of Being Disbelieved
The lasting cost of disbelief when inaccurate institutional accounts are repeatedly preferred to lived experience and testimony.
Chapter 19 Building the Evidence
Gathering documents, recordings, correspondence and recollections, preserving their provenance and revealing the relationships between them.
Chapter 20 Reclaiming the Record
Bringing the separated layers together and reclaiming the authority to describe a life in terms that remain answerable to evidence.
Block Three
Returning to particular people and experiences, their later effects on memory, health and identity, and the methods that gradually made those layers possible to examine.
Chapter 21 Germaine
The music nun, the repeated piano lessons of my early childhood, the ritual of getting out silently, and the effect those experiences may have had on my relationship with music for decades.
Chapter 22 Herbie
Herbert Kemp, the safe place he gave me as a child, the protection and future he tried to provide, and the events that ended with his death in 1962.
Chapter 23 Through the Glass
The hospital doors, Bill Allison, the injuries that followed, and the way the meaning of that event changed as later questions were asked.
Chapter 24 What Happened to Herbie's Story
The conflicting memories, accounts and later explanations surrounding Herbert Kemp's final days and death.
Chapter 25 The Adults Around Yea
The adults whose loyalties, conflicts, protection, prejudice and ordinary trust helped shape my life in and around Yea.
Chapter 26 2007
A psychiatric crisis, changing diagnoses, involuntary treatment and the evidence that later raised serious questions about the diagnosis which survived it.
Chapter 27 A Diagnosis That Travelled
How a disputed psychiatric diagnosis travelled through later records and clinical relationships long after the circumstances in which it arose.
Chapter 28 Finding Julian Lim
Dissociative Amnesia, the permission to leave gaps unresolved, external memory and learning to proceed one step at a time.
Chapter 29 When Meditation Opened the Wrong Door
Meditation, body scanning, unexpected traumatic re-experiencing and the later research which helped make sense of an experience once treated as unusual.
Chapter 30 The Tests
Childhood experiences described as tests and exorcisms, the return of memories involving alcohol and water, and learning to preserve what can be known without forcing the gaps closed.
Block Four
In development
From childhood religious threat to the larger questions of belief, coercion, children's freedom of thought and personal sovereignty.
Chapter 31 When Hell Becomes a Threat
Hell, damnation and Satan as ideas encountered by a child not as abstract theology, but as threats carrying the authority of adults.
Chapter 32 The Child of Satan
What happens when religious language transforms a harmed child into the supposed source of evil, danger or wrongdoing.
Chapter 33 What Adults Called an Exorcism
Genevieve, the experiences described as exorcisms, and the beliefs that may have allowed adults to treat a frightened child as though something evil had to be driven out.
Chapter 34 The God I Was Told About
The punitive and interventionist God of my childhood: obedience, sacrifice, punishment, fear and the religious meanings imposed upon suffering.
Chapter 35 Another Idea of God
Deism and the profound difference between the possibility of a creator and the personal, interventionist deity I was taught to fear.
Chapter 36 Teaching Fear to Children
The religious teaching of my school years: Hell, mortal sin, Satan, confession, punishment and obedience, examined through the materials and assumptions of the period.
Chapter 37 What Children Are Taught Now
A comparison between the religious teaching of my childhood and present-day Australian religious education, asking what changed and what remains.
Chapter 38 When Religion Becomes Abuse
How governments, researchers and safeguarding systems have begun to recognise religious coercion, threats of damnation and related practices as potential forms of harm to children.
Chapter 39 Australia and the Child's Freedom of Thought
Religious freedom, safeguarding and the less frequently examined question of a child's freedom of thought and protection from coercive belief.
Chapter 40 Personal Sovereignty
After a lifetime of adults and institutions defining belief, memory and identity, the question of who ultimately has authority over a person's inner life.
Block Five — Authority, Systems and the Right to Question
In development
From inherited authority to institutional power: how religious, legal, medical and civic systems acquire authority, how error can become embedded in records and procedures, how institutions respond when challenged, and what accountability requires when evidence contradicts the system.
Chapter 41 What the Creator Forgot to Tell Us
A question about supposedly timeless moral authority: where are the clear protections concerning trauma, child development, coercion, grooming, consent, dissociation, memory, safeguarding and the vulnerabilities of developing human beings?
Chapter 42 When Mythology Comes Before Measurement
What happens when inherited writings, doctrine and supernatural explanation are given greater authority than observation, data, research and the scientific investigation of human behaviour, development and harm?
Chapter 43 Who Gets to Speak for Authority?
How people enter religious authority, how hierarchy shapes responsibility, and what encounters with clergy, survivors, advocates and communities can reveal about power, empathy, institutional loyalty and the difficulty of confronting abuse from within a system.
Chapter 44 When the Observer Becomes Part of the Event
How courts, clinicians, investigators and institutions can influence the behaviour they later interpret, and why observation is not always neutral when authority, fear, questioning and survival responses are already present.
Chapter 45 The Iatrogenic Loop
When treatment changes memory, cognition, behaviour or emotion and the treatment-altered presentation is then interpreted as evidence of underlying illness, allowing intervention itself to become part of a self-reinforcing diagnostic loop.
Chapter 46 When the Record Becomes More Powerful Than the Person
How diagnoses, reports and institutional interpretations can travel beyond the circumstances that produced them, acquiring authority through repetition even when later evidence calls the original account into question.
Chapter 47 Secular in Name
A closer examination of what secular service provision means when publicly supported care may be delivered through religiously affiliated organisations, and what disclosure, choice and freedom from religious intrusion should require.
Chapter 48 Democracy, Representation and Who Holds Power
A systems examination of representation, participation, concentrated authority and accountability, asking how citizens retain meaningful agency between elections and how different democratic mechanisms can be examined against evidence, participation and rights.
Chapter 49 Systems That Cannot Admit Error
What happens when an institution defines the problem, controls the interpretation, preserves the record and then uses that record to confirm itself, with particular attention to inquiry findings and institutional responses to sexual abuse, secrecy, reputation and accountability.
Chapter 50 Authority Must Remain Answerable
Bringing together inquiry findings, survivor accounts, published estimates and the author's earlier Estimating the Numbers research to examine accountability, why survivors continue to write, and what protections future generations still need. A consolidation of Block Five, not an end to the wider inquiry.
