Pretty much from the crib, my obsession has been words, words and more words – in prose, in verse, in puzzle grids, on Scrabble boards, billboards and blackboards. When not playing frisbee or flunking calculus, I gobbled syllables. In a fit of inspiration I decided to become a writer.

Cassowary Crossing (alias Offbeat in its new rendition) is my fourth book – and first in the travel field. The first two – Marzipan Plan and The Book of Miles – were both novels, written ten years apart. During the interim I vanished to Europe on a cargo ship, played rugby in Madrid, bummed around South America and scratched the surface of Australia.

Such decadence was funded by a puzzle income from the Sydney Morning Herald and Brisbane’s Courier-Mail. For both papers I compose a daily word-puzzle named Wordwit – similar to Bird Brain on this site – as well as the weekly cryptic crossword for Sydney and Melbourne solvers.

Back in Oz, living in Melbourne, I wrote my third book in 2002. One Down, One Missing is an inside pass into a homicide taskforce. I worked in tandem with Senior Constable Joe D’Alo, a member of the Lorimer team that hunted down the killers of policemen, Gary Silk and Rodney Miller, back in 1998.

Maybe due to such a torrid story I needed a little sunshine in my life, and a tablespoon of levity. Enter Offbeat – an eccentric blend of travel and trivia. As travelers, we’ll always need to pinpoint bus depots and laundromats, but so often we crave a story as much as a place to lay our heads.

Offbeat is that guide you need when you have the other guide, an alternative view on almost anywhere you visit in Australia. Mermaid statues. Pebble churches. Tram hotels. Secrets and scandals. Ghosts and graffiti. The guide is distilled into 400 pages, over 1000 entries form Airborne to Zany.

If you haven’t already, grab a copy of the book and sample the welter of weird and wonderful places. As a tease, check out this website to see what other suggestions have been posted by fellow offbeat travelers: a growing archive of absurd Australian spots off the popular radar.

Surfing the site, you’ll also come across such stuff as a monthly travel column (Offbeat Beat), a weekly word puzzle (Bird Brain) plus an array of other Astle scribblings.

Anyhow, enough rambling. Welcome to the nest.