I advise Commonwealth leaders on complex change at Parbery Consulting, and I turn out with the Braidwood bushfire brigade when the pager goes. My poems have started to travel too: ‘Bogong’ won the 2026 Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Prize, and ‘Hecuba’ came second in the Winchester Poetry Prize.
My work sits at the intersection of strategy and delivery: helping senior leaders clarify direction, engage stakeholders, manage risk and translate policy intent into practical outcomes. Twenty years across government consulting, higher education leadership and financial services, and a fireground that taught me leadership is tested under pressure, not in planning sessions.
Translating intent into practical, sustainable outcomes.
Government consulting, higher education leadership, and financial services: the common thread has always been the same. Advice on complex reform, project management and benefits realisation for clients across the Commonwealth.
The land, the people on it, and what fire and weather do to both.
Poems from Braidwood, in the southern tablelands of New South Wales. ‘Bogong’ won the 2026 Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Prize, ‘Hecuba’ came second in the Winchester Poetry Prize, and others were shortlisted for the Bridport, Robert Gray and ACU prizes.
·Defence
Fuel is the only commodity the inquiry’s terms of reference name, and it comes with days of cover and a department reporting them. Whether Australians would fight to defend the country was measured once, in 2025, and not since.
·Change & Transformation
Scrum was abstracted from manufacturers who could not patch a product after it shipped. Software inherited the practices in a medium where correction is nearly free. Programs building hardware are now taking on the ceremony without the condition that made it safe.
·AI in Government
Direction 002-2026 counts only what meets both gates of the PSPF legacy test, so a supported internet-facing service sits outside the stocktake because the definition puts it there. Agencies setting scope this month can still ask who reaches a service without authenticating.
Announced at the prize-giving on Winchester Poetry Day, 10 October, where I read the poem. The judge, Julia Copus, chose the winners from a longlist of 26 poems, all of them published in the prize anthology launched the same day.
All four poems I entered made the shortlist: ‘Antigone’, ‘Cenotaph’, ‘Statement’ and ‘Veronica’. The prize, run by Australian Catholic University since 2013, is one of the country’s richest for a single poem. This year’s theme was ‘Witness’, drawn from Elie Wiesel’s words: ‘For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.’ The poems will appear in the prize anthology. The winners are named at a presentation in Sydney on 5 November.
‘Allocation’ will appear in the Winter 2026 edition of EcoTheo Review, an American quarterly of ecology, spirituality and art. It is my first acceptance from a journal outside Australia.
‘Miles’ made the shortlist. The judge, Clare Shaw, names the winners at the festival’s prize-giving in Cedars Hall on 19 October.
