I was born in Sydney, Australia in December of 1976, granting me a few precious months of youth over my peers, a fact I would come to appreciate in time. In 2000 I completed an Honours degree in Art History and Curatorship at the Australian National University, Canberra. Being, obviously, completely unemployable I decided to become a journalist and, while doing my cadetship, was offered a rock music column by the Sunday Telegraph.

A series of bizarre circumstances ensued and I was approached by, small but artistically impeccable Sydney publishing house, Duffy and Snellgrove to write a biography of much-loved Perth-based Filipina socialite, eccentric and practitioner of the dark arts Rose Hancock-Porteous. Tragically, after being granted unprecedented access to the mysterious Rose (I stayed in the “Ceaucsescu Suite” and she rubbed my back in KY Jelly), my book, Poodles on Prozac or The Incredibly Strange True Story of Rose Hancock-Porteous, was pulled at the last minute for legal reasons. It did, however, create some “buzz” in the Sydney literary world - later identified as a hive of European wasps in the air conditioning at Random House. Nevertheless, I did manage to get an agent and a new project, The Secret Life of the Gold Coast, which was published in late 2004 by Penguin Australia.

Since then I have started a weekly opinion column with the Daily Telegraph, Sydney’s largest-selling newspaper, and in between episodes of Dr Phil and beer have managed to travel extensively in southern Africa, South East Asia, India, China, Turkey, North America, New Zealand and western Europe.

© Brendan Shanahan 2008