On writing Senior Sergeant Diane Foss

When Diane Foss sent Col Drummond his dead wife's recovered case file, she included a message.

It said: She was extraordinary. I thought you should know that from someone who didn't know her.

I wrote that line and then sat with it for a while. It felt important enough that I didn't want to rush past it.

Foss is a Senior Sergeant in Brisbane Internal Affairs. She's Col's contact inside the system — the person he calls when he needs something done that the system would rather not do. She's precise, methodical, and carries the particular authority of someone doing a difficult job carefully for a long time.

She's not a glamorous character. She doesn't have a dramatic arc in the conventional sense. What she has is integrity applied consistently over a long period of time, which is rarer and more valuable than most fiction gives it credit for.

Helen Macklin's case file had been buried — deliberately scattered across AFP archives, misfiled, its index entries altered. Foss spent months reconstructing it. Patient, unglamorous archival work, done correctly. Then she sent it to Col with that single line.

She was extraordinary. I thought you should know that from someone who didn't know her.

I wrote Diane Foss because I believe in the people who do the right thing without an audience. They're everywhere. They're what institutions actually run on, quietly and without recognition. They are wabi-sabi to their bones — imperfect, unfinished, essential.

In every organisation I've worked in or around, there has been a Diane Foss. The one who keeps the files. Who remembers what actually happened. Who does the thing that needs doing and doesn't put it on her LinkedIn.

I wanted to write her down somewhere. So she exists now. In five books.

Try this: Think of a piece of work you did that nobody noticed but you know mattered. Write it down. Not for anyone else. Just so it exists somewhere in words.

You could buy me a cup of green tea

Turns out that’s roughly where the inch comes from. Some king, back when people were considerably shorter than we are now, stuck his thumb out and said “that’ll do,” and centuries later I’m still meant to take it seriously enough to measure a spine width with it. Feet were feet, more or less — an actual foot, presumably a fairly average one, though whose foot exactly depends who’s telling the story. And they swell in the heat, feet do, so even the original wasn’t especially reliable to begin with.

(Its why most of the world has switched over to using metric measurements that have all been defined.)

I found that oddly comforting, actually. Most of what we’ve spent our lives measuring precisely was, underneath, someone’s rough guess that got official-looking over time. Even GMT — Greenwich Mean Time, the time-keeping gold standard, the one everyone else set their watches by — was always an average. The actual sun turns up early or late by as much as sixteen minutes depending on the time of year, because the earth doesn’t orbit in the tidy circle we’d prefer. So our days can start and finish up to thirty-two minutes away from the GMT average. Handy if we were coming back from the moon. They had to invent UTC eventually, handed over to atomic clocks, because the sky itself couldn’t be trusted to keep proper time.

Mind you, none of that precision helps much when the internet drops out for even a day and suddenly the kids are forced to talk to each other like it’s 1985, while the rest of us can’t get near our own bank accounts. Turns out you can measure a second to eleven decimal places and still be beaten by a dodgy modem or a glitch in the power supply.

Anyway, I’m mentioning all this because retirement has a way of making you notice how much of your old life ran on somebody else’s measurements. Clock-in time. Financial years. Deadlines set by people who’d never so much as met you. For over sixty years I measured my days the way everyone measures an inch — agreed upon, official-looking, not actually mine. Using an appointment book that suited others but not always me.

Nobody Told Me that once that clock stops, you’re back to a king’s thumb. You get to decide what counts as a proper day’s work now, what a “long walk” means, when the day officially kicks off. It might mean a kilometer, six, or ten. There’s no Greenwich Mean Time for retirement. There’s just you, having a go at your own average.

I quite like that, honestly. Wobbly as it is.

Try this: pick one measurement you’ve been running your day by out of pure habit — a mealtime, a bedtime, a “should be dressed by now” — and chuck it out the window tomorrow. See what your own thumb reckons instead.

You could buy me a green tea

On writing Sergeant Maureen Pryce

Maureen Pryce makes Col Drummond a coffee without being asked. She starts doing this at the end of Book 1 and she never stops.

That’s the whole character in one gesture. Read it however you like. We all know someone like that.

There was a former Australian Prime Minister’s wife who alwaya presided over the teapot at some s…

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I read a Substack post this week by Judy Allen about wisdom. Judy writes with an honesty and care that I’ve come to appreciate. This one made me put my green tea down and think for a moment.

I restacked it. And added a note.

Because the post got me thinking about something I’ve been turning over for a while now. We talk about gaining wisdom as if it’s som…

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On writing Annabelle Driscoll

There's a particular kind of woman who often gets written as the love interest in crime fiction and I didn't want to write her. You know the one I mean. They meet the hero and are in bed with him or her a few pages later. I'm more interested in finding out who the woman is. How she thinks and acts. What her real role is in t…

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The first thing I wrote about Col Drummond was this: he sat in the hire car outside the police station for four minutes before he went in.

It’s a bit like how we retirees act to start our days. Like wabi sabi. Not quite perfect any more, but we can still contribute.

I didn’t plan that detail. It arrived. A…

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Red Dirt

I’ve been keeping a secret. Now it’s time to share it.

Mike, a Substack friend asked me whether I’d ever thought about writing thriller set in the Australian Outback. Mike said that he’s flown over the Outback once, but standing in the middle of it is something else.

Mike’s casual …

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On my morning walk recently I noticed something I’d missed before.

An old tree stump. Substantial one. Whatever the original tree was, it had been cut down some time ago and all that remained was this wide, weathered base sitting quietly at the edge of the path. Starting to rot away.

Except it wasn’t just sitting there.

Out of the top of that stum…

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The Pebble

I enjoyed my walk. he pebble, not so much.

I was not having a transcendent moment.

I was having a pebble. Lodged somewhere in the sole of my left shoe, just off-centre, doing what pebbles do best — making every step a small ne…

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There’s a whole cottage industry of hand-wringing right now about writers who use AI to help with their books. Its cheating, apparently, according to these twerps.. Not “real” writing. I’ve read enough of these pieces to know my opinion, and here it is: the purists can stick it in their ear.

Here’s my actual situation. During Covid, I typed a series of n…

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I’ve been thinking about my retirement so far.

Here’s the thing Nobody Told Me.

I spent my working life doing things for other people, and then one day I was supposed to just... switch off. Do things for myself. Because I want to.

Sounds simple. It just isn’t. Switching off a mindset I’ve used for 63 years is bloody hard.

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If you’re hiding under your rock thinking that its scary having to go and talk to other people, listen to my story and maybe you’ll think again.

I was under the bonnet of my old car at my mate’s place one day when I was a know -it-all 1 year old. Pretending to know wh…

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First time I went to a Men’s Shed, I didn’t actually go in. I drove into the car park, saw the building, saw the cars, saw my own reflection in the Shed window, and buzzed off. Told myself I’d “come back when it was less busy.” That was bullshit, and…

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I said this to a mate over coffee one morning and he just nodded like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
I’d gone from being the guy people rang for answers to the bloke nobody thought to call at all.
The shock wasn’t instant, it crept in slowly, …

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You weren’t born scared of people. Someone quietly trained that into you before you were old enough to argue.

How so, you ask.

Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist that worked out that until a child is about 6 or 7, they have no reasoning powers. If they are told that the moon is made of green cheese they believe that it is.

I said this to a young bloke wh…

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Retirement wasn’t gonna mean lazy river cruises and long lunches for me. It felt more like being dumped in a low security prison with no identity, no job, and no purpose.

Three years ago, at 79, I stepped out of public practice and straight into a ... void. Overnight, the identity I’d worn as employee and practice owner for 63 years – the steady, dependa…

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You don’t have “social anxiety,” you’ve trained yourself to run away every time life asks you to open your mouth.

I know that pattern better than I’d like to admit.

When I purchased my first accountancy practice I moved to a new town. Where I knew no one and had to start tell strang…

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When work stops, you don’t just lose tasks, you lose structure, status and built‑in mates in one hit.

One week you’re “the bloke from X”, the next you’re pushing a trolley at Coles feeling like a ghost while everyone else looks busy and important.

That shock is normal, not a personal failure.

Forward this to a mate who’s just retired and…

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Then the phone went quiet, the calendar emptied and I caught myself wondering when exactly I stopped being needed. No one tells you that losing your job can feel like losing your identity as well. You’re not weak, you’re just rattled by a hit no one warned you about. That punch in the guts is proof you cared about what y…

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