About

John Macgregor grew up in the Melbourne suburb of Brighton… 

“As a child I thought it must be a kind of spiritual exercise – probably a preparation for death. So I pumped out a long line of poems on that subject…”

I saw a bird on a ferny track,
Colours, green, red, on its back.
But when she flew my bird was black.

With black adolescence behind him, John took up fiction and got his break in 1986 when his manuscript, Propinquity, won the Adelaide Festival Award. By then he’d become interested in health, psychology, Australian politics, and…

“…the dictatorships to our north – so I let Propinquity open the door to journalism.”

This enabled John to not only review fiction and to educate himself in the science of health and the psyche; but to go to Florida and confront the FBI, to observe oppression in East Timor, and the slave trade in Burma – and to get into the New York Times.

“The education was worth a dozen degrees, and allowed me to retain the intellectual independence a degree can rob you of.”

Along the way he interviewed many interesting people, “… few of the big names held a candle to the activists, who’d usually put everything on the line to make a better world.”