About Jock

Jock grew up in the suburbs of Melbourne. Of this there is nothing to report. He only ever wanted to be a writer, enrolled in journalism but somehow wound up studying law, and the law had him in its mandibles for seventeen years. He practised crime, both as defence counsel and as a prosecutor. He lived and worked in the Western Desert among the Martu people, contributed to the Bringing Them Home Inquiry, represented asylum seekers in the Federal Court, and did a lot of strange and meaningful and meaningless work besides. He was probably never a lawyer.

Somewhere in the middle of his life he started writing for surfing magazines, then writing fiction. The work took place in the middle of the night, on weekends, moving the operation around the house into all its different nooks and crannies as children arrived and took up the available spaces. By the winter of 2013 he had finished a screenplay, signed a contract for a crime novel and taken up a post as founding editor of the mighty Great Ocean Quarterly. There was no annual leave left, not a minute of the weekends or the late evening. He quit the law.

Since then, Jock has published seven novels and a biography, written episodes of TV and countless feature articles in media ranging from Surfing World to Patagonia’s Roaring Journals, Rolling Stone, Meanjin, The Guardian, the Sydney Morning Herald, Literary Hub and The Monthly. If pushed, if pressed, if badgered and berated, he would say that he tries to write about alternative ideas of Australia - ones that don’t fit the obvious but conform to a wider preference for forgetting.
 

Jock is also a board member of Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas, and also of the Port Fairy Literary Festival. He works with the Victorian and federal Judicial Colleges, helping judges and magistrates with their writing. And he does a little copywriting and teaches writing. After twenty-two years and counting, he is nearly a Port Fairy local, and spends part of his year on Flinders Island in Bass Strait’s Furneaux Group.

P.S. Jock has a thing about social media, i.e. he detests it. Probably counter-productive, but bail him up some time and he’ll tell you all his reasons. You can find him on Bluesky at @jockserong.bsky.social