‘You’ve been sitting there all morning!’
‘I’m trying to write the About page for the website.’
‘It’s easy, it’s a bio. Just keep it brief.’
‘What about this…’ Linzi Murrie writes. He has degrees in languages and literature, a PhD in sociology, and has taught in several universities. He writes, grows food in Widjabul country, has a passion for writing, for languages and architecture, and speaks passable Italian.
‘It’s a bit short.’
‘You did say brief…’
‘Yeah, but…’
‘Okay.’ His history includes theatre work, cooking in restaurants, building and renovating. Linzi Murrie writes.
‘Shouldn’t it be, “Linzi Murrie is a writer”?’
‘I write, it’s what I do. I think we overuse the verb to be in English’
‘Alright, but I think the whole thing needs more of a narrative quality. What about…’ Wrenched from an idyllic Australian suburban boyhood through a hideous family dispute, he watches as his parents go broke. His adolescence is spent in poverty in a small flat with an empty larder, he goes to school with the children of Jewish refugees.
‘Go on…’
Surrounded by a culture that values the scholarly above the sporting, there begins his European enculturation – music, theatre, architecture, history, literature. All that follows has its beginnings there – writing for the stage, an academic career based on studies in languages and literature, and a life centred on growing food, cooking, writing and travelling, with a penchant for talking to himself and counting things. Otherwise, he was destined to be an electrician.
‘I reckon I would’ve made an okay sparky.’
linzi murrie 