I know this is indulgent, but I couldn’t resist sharing this welcome LinkedIn posting from my elder daughter, Julie, Director, Healthy Ageing and End of Life Care, CCQ Country to Coast, QLD:
“Yesterday I watched my dad launch his new book, and I couldn’t stop smiling.
Done Working: Finding Contentment in Retirement draws on the real experiences of 101 retirees and global research to explore what actually makes retirement good — not the finances or logistics, but genuine contentment: connection, purpose, identity.
It struck a chord professionally too. I work in healthy ageing, where so much focus goes on keeping people well physically and clinically, and far less on whether they’re genuinely content. This book is a good reminder that contentment deserves as much deliberate thought as any financial plan.
Mostly though, I just felt proud — of a dad who’s always been curious, generous, and a real listener. Fittingly, he hasn’t quite stopped working either. Congratulations, Dad. This one’s a beauty.“
We had a very successful launch of my latest book, DONE WORKING: Finding Contentment in Retirement at Avid Reader, West End, Brisbane, in a great conversation with my friend Dr Mark Tyler. Lots of good audience questions too. Many thanks to Eleanor from Avid Reader for organising the event and to Fiona Stager, Co-owner, and Sarah Deasy, the store’s bookbuyer, for their support.
I’m looking forward to another launch across town at Riverbend Books, Bulimba on Sunday 30 August 2026 at 4pm, this time in conversation with another good friend, Dr Ann Kelly.
If you’re in town, you’d be very welcome, whether you’re retired or just thinking about it. And if you can’t make it, you can still buy a book via either bookshop’s website. Or ask your local library to order a copy.
And, after reading DONE WORKING, you can share your ‘Afterthoughts’ if you’d like to, in the Comments section below.
Until next time
Darryl Dymock
Wellbeing Workbook: In DONE WORKING, I refer to Dr John Barletta’s stimulating publication, Wellbeing Workbook. You can download a pdf copy of the book right here.
I’m excited to announce my latest non-fiction book DONE WORKING: Finding Contentment in Retirement will be published on 15 August 2026.
To celebrate this publication of my seventh book, there will be two launches in Brisbane: at Avid Reader Bookshop, West End on that day and then across town at Riverbend Books, Bulimba on 30 August.
In DONE WORKING, I’ve woven together the real-life advice of 101 retirees, world-wide research and my own experience with humour and insight to tease out seven ways of finding contentment in retirement.
The theme was triggered by a comment from a student in a University of the Third Age (U3A) class, who said, ‘I’m retired and busy, but I’m not contented.’
The book will appeal to anyone heading towards retirement as well as those already retired, and help them negotiate their own best way to a contented life.
Clinical Psychologist and Wellbeing Specialist Dr John Barletta said: ‘Dymock speaks a language we can all understand. This book puts you in the driver’s seat to develop a good life, simple as that.’
INVITATION
If you’re in or around Brisbane, you’d be very welcome at one of the launches. Check the bookshops’ websites for details:
Avid Reader, 193 Boundary Street, West End at 2.30pm Saturday 15 August 2026
There is no charge for entry to either event – tickets are free, but please book online to register. No obligation to order a book when you register for the launch.
If you can’t get to one of the launches, you can still order the book through either bookshop if you’d like a copy.
Outside of Brisbane, you or your local bookshop can order a copy through Avid Reader. It will also shortly be available as an e-book.
With best wishes for a contented retirement, wherever you are on life’s journey,
I recently completed my one-month assignment in Nepal as a Visiting Scholar at Kathmandu University (KU) under the Australian Volunteers program. A billboard at Tribhuvan International Airport welcomed me to the land of Mount Everest.
Unfortunately, I was too busy with my Visiting Scholar tasks to have time to slip away to climb the famous mountain or even do some trekking in the foothills. In any case, it was the climbing season and the queue of climbers waiting to tick off their bucket list was too long for me to hang around waiting my turn :).
As part of my assignment, I undertook a review of the Master of Technical and Vocational Education and Training (MTVET) program, at the request of Professor Mahesh Nath Parajuli and Dr Suresh Gautam, School of Education (KUSOE), and with the support of Dr Prakash Paudel.
I worked on that review in the weeks after my return to Australia, and am pleased to say that I’ve now submitted a report to KUSOE for their consideration. I appreciated the invitation to undertake this task and received excellent cooperation from KU staff and students alike.
Since I was based in Nepal for a relatively short time in April/May 2024, opportunities to gather data were limited. Nevertheless, with the assistance of KU staff I was able to organise focus groups with past and present MTVET students and interviews with KUSOE academic staff members. I also had informal chats with staff and students about their experience with the MTVET.
KUSOE Conference, Pokhara, April 2024
During my time in Nepal, I was also fortunate to be part of a MTVET staff/student conference in the regional city of Pokhara, and to join field visits organised by KUSOE, to be a guest lecturer in two online MTVET courses, and to visit several TVET organisations, including the Council of Technical Education and Vocational Training (CTEVT), Pokhara Technical School, GATE Vocational Training, and Shankharapur Poytechnic Institute.
All of these interactions helped me develop some idea of the realities of learning and teaching in the MTVET program and of the broader context in which TVET operates in Nepal.
A presentation from the Dean of KU School of Education, Professor Bal Chandra Luitel, at the end of my in-country assignment in Nepal
I’ll be continuing to work online with KUSOE as a ‘remote’ volunteer throughout 2024. It’s good to be able to bring to bear my long experience as a teacher, researcher and published author in adult and vocational education, including almost 20 years with the School of Education and Professional Studies at Griffith University, Brisbane.
However, I’ll have to wait until the climbing season next year to see if the Mt Everest queue gets any shorter.
Australian Eastern Standard time is four-and-a-quarter hours ahead of Nepalese time. I know that because I recently taught an online class at Kathmandu University that started at 5.30pm their time, which was 9.45pm Brisbane time. I finally signed off at midnight AEST.
Thankfully, coffee and the enthusiasm of the students and the course coordinator, my Nepalese colleague Dr Prakash Paudel, kept me going.
That teaching session was part of a 12-month ‘hybrid’ assignment I’ve accepted in 2024 as a Visiting Scholar with the Australian Volunteers Program, which is funded by the Australian Government. This involves 11 months working online with staff and students of the School of Education at Kathmandu University and four weeks in country.
I’ll be supporting teaching and research in the School’s Master of Technical and Vocational Education (MTVET) program, as well as helping with its Journal of Education and Research.
During my late-night session, it was encouraging to see how interactive and responsive the students were and how well they were able to contextualise theory and ideas from elsewhere to their local context. (Intriguingly, there are also a couple of Namibian students enrolled.)
And, of course, I learnt a lot about those local situations in a very short time, with lots more to come! In case you’re wondering, classes are conducted in English.
I’m looking forward to learning more about the local culture during my one-month stay, which starts mid-April this year. I won’t be doing any trekking in the Himalayas, but I know I have some learning mountains to climb. Good for my brain, and my humility.
I took on this volunteer assignment because I saw it as an opportunity to give back some of the learning and experience I’ve accumulated over the years through teaching, researching and writing about adult and workplace learning and vocational education and training.
Kathmandu University’s MTVET has much in common with Masters programs I’ve been involved in at the University of New England, Armidale, and in the past 18 years at Griffith University, Brisbane.
My wife Cheryl and I recently had a meal at a Nepalese restaurant in Brisbane, Jhigu Bhoye Chhen. Delicious food, and friendly and efficient service. I’m looking forward to trying out more of the extensive Nepalese cuisine when I arrive in the country in a couple of weeks.
Writers Group Convenor Darryl Dymock introduces writer John Brown, the founding Shed president
We had a great launch of the Oxley Men’s Shed anthology, Offcuts: Stories from the Shed, on Saturday 27 November in Brisbane. Nine men from the Shed contributed to the collection, and the first (modest) print run sold out! 70 to 80 people turned up to hear a brilliant launch by local Councillor Nicole Johnston, listen to music from the band Crossed Fingers, and enjoy a scrumptious morning tea.
Shed President Martin Rankine makes the welcome
This is no ordinary collection of stories. It draws on the varied experiences of nine men who have led very different lives, but whose paths have eventually crossed at Oxley Men’s Shed. In this book these mostly first-time writers have taken the opportunity to share some of their fascinating stories from the past with their families and with the wider community. Many of these are never-before-told tales, entertaining anecdotes that not only illuminate the writers’ earlier lives, but often trigger our own memories too.
In these stories we meet a former fitter and turner who as a boy decided to see what would happen when he packed gunpowder from leftover fireworks into a fruit tin and lit the fuse; a retired meat inspector who had to escape hand over hand down a rope off a high church roof when his ladder collapsed; an ex-plumber who starred in a Bollywood movie and dodged bombs and bullets while driving a tour bus in the Middle East; a former photographer who once had the ultimate hand in a boarding house poker game; and a retired insurance underwriter who relives his late-night dash home to dive under the bedclothes before the resident ghost appeared.
Crossed Fingers Band
Then there’s a Vietnamese veteran driving an Army forklift who literally backed himself into an embarrassing corner with his commanding officer; an ex-teacher who was driving his prized first car through South Brisbane when the back seat caught fire; a former electrician who turned jackaroo to help out his mate on a cattle drive in northern NSW; and a retired agronomist who as a young man led a hiking group down a mountain during a cyclone, with intriguing romantic results.
This is a heady mix of yarns from a group of writers keen to tell their often remarkable stories – sometimes humorous, occasionally hair-raising, but always from the heart.
Offcuts: Stories from the Shed, Armour Books, Brisbane.
Do you know that children’s song: The wheels on the bus go round and round? Well so do stories on the bus. Read on …
As Covid-19 seems to be retreating in Queensland, I’ve started to go back on campus a couple of days a week at the university where I’m an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow.
This means travelling by bus – rear door entry, touch card on and off, wave to the driver somewhere down the front. Masks optional.
It also means sharing the bus with an assortment of fellow passengers and watching the world go by. The 40-minute journey also gives me time to catch up on a bit of reading.
So over time I thought I’d share with you some of my experiences and interactions on those journeys. The theme is: The stories on the bus go round and round! This is Story No. 1.
The other day, a man with a walking stick joined the bus. The reason for the stick was that one leg was stiff at the knee.
In particular, the right leg. So in an uncrowded bus he searched for a seat on the left-hand side, so he could rest his unbending right leg in the aisle.
I was thinking he would always need to do that on buses and trains so he could stretch out his right leg. Which led me to jot down this little poem in the notebook in my phone:
If, like me, your senses respond to the feel and smell of books in a bookshop, you’ll like Avid Reader.
This award-winning independent bookstore has been in the high street at West End in Brisbane for 22 years and has firmly established itself in the local community. In recent years they’ve spun off a successful children’s bookshop next door: ‘Where the Wild Things Are’.
But the past few months of 2020 have been tough for storefront bookshops, and I recently talked to co-owner Fiona Stager about how Avid Reader has coped. This is an edited version of that telephone conversation. It first appeared on the guest blogger page at Margaret River Press in August 2020.
First I asked Fiona about changes she’d seen in publishing in the past two decades. You can listen to her response in this audio clip.
The developments Fiona mentions in that audio clip were of course all before a certain pandemic swept across the world and turned many businesses upside down, including bookshops.
I asked Fiona how Avid Reader had responded to the constraints of Covid-19 measures. You can hear her reply in this audio clip.
Despite the limitations of Zoom-based events, Fiona says they will continue with them after the current restrictions have gone:
Using Zoom has really allowed us to engage with a much wider audience. Each time we’ve done a Zoom there’s been an interesting story that’s come out of it. After our first Zoom event we did a survey: ‘I’ve always wanted to come to your events but I live in Western Australia’; ‘I used to come to all your events but now I’ve moved out of Brisbane and with Zoom I can come to all your events.’
Fiona has also moved all her book clubs to Zoom. But despite the geographically expanded audience, she says that sales are down compared to walk-in events. With an in-store book launch, for example, people often not only buy that book, but they also browse the shelves, and pick up other books that appeal to them on the spur of the moment. Nevertheless, Fiona says they will continue with Zoom even when face-to-face events restart because they know it does reach people beyond the immediately reachable community:
For any number of reasons people can’t come to the shop, but we’ve built such a strong reputation that people jumped at the chance of coming to Zoom events. It’s really opened up the world for us. It also means we can curate our program to even finer detail. So we’ve been able to match the best interviewer for the author, and they don’t have to be in the same city. For example one author was in Melbourne and the interviewer was in Sydney.
‘An ecosystem of small business’
Fiona actively fosters a sense of community, not only among the bookshop’s clients, but also among local businesses. She says that after such a long time in West End, she sees Avid Reader as an ‘anchor tenant’ which relies on other small businesses but has an obligation to them as well:
I made a commitment to our staff, our publishers and writers that we would be here after this [the Covid-19 shutdown]. But also I was really committed to being here for other businesses around us. It’s an important ecosystem of small business, that we all really need each other. That’s something I’m really passionate about.
And there’s been unexpected spin-off from the constraints:
I must say I’ve never been so pleased to be near a chemist. I’ve always thought it was important to be near good retailers, like a good shoe shop, good fashion, good food, a good bakery … . But now, I think it’s been really great to have been close to a chemist. People come out and go to the chemist for something, and then they come to us because the chemist is right next door.
West End business centre, Brisbane
Clearly Fiona is always on the lookout for ways her own business can survive alongside and with the other retailers in West End. But as a bookshop, Avid Reader faces particular challenges at this time.
I asked Fiona about her predictions for the future of publishing and book-selling in Australia in the coming months. You can hear her response here:
Fiona added that in the emerging sales climate, not all the books released later in the year will make it. And that’s got nothing to do with the quality of the books, she says, but to the fact that they’re ‘competing for everything from our shelf space to media and what will get coverage and traction.’
As for Avid Reader itself, I asked Fiona how she was feeling about the bookshop’s future in the midst of this uncertainty. You can listen to her prognosis here:
Fiona’s response is the experienced and pragmatic voice of someone who’s been in the book trade for more than 20 years. It’s clear she sees some hurdles and unknowns ahead. As with the spread of the pandemic itself, retail businesses are in uncharted territory, with a compass we’re all learning to use as we go along.
Nevertheless, in the midst of predictions of retail gloom and doom, and her struggles to maintain a solid client base, Fiona maintains a pro-active and optimistic outlook. Not that she hasn’t had her doubts. ‘At one stage I was just too stressed to read anything,’ she told me. ‘But now I’ve got myself out of that hole.’
So, with the stock of a whole bookshop to choose from, what does Fiona like to read?
I read mostly new fiction. I read a little bit of non-fiction. It will often depend if I’m being any kind of book judge – if I’m judging a literary award, I will read fiction, non-fiction, children’s books as well, and a little bit of young adult.
You’ve probably realised by now that Avid Reader is not only a bookshop but a dynamic part of its local community. We need all the publishing outlets our pockets can sustain, and power to them, but independent bookshops seem to have a special place in our communities, whether you visit them in person or online. And at the end of the year, you might think of Fiona’s prediction that for authors, publishers and booksellers alike, ‘it will depend how Christmas goes’.
Until next time
Darryl Dymock
In the next blog, I’ll bring you another perspective on writing and publishing: a video interview with a key figure in editing.
I’m chuffed that a Haiku I entered in an international Covid-19 Lockdown competition run by Fish Publishing in Ireland made the shortlist (although it didn’t win):
There were 1436 entries for the Haiku, Poetry and Pocket Prose categories and the competition raised the equivalent of around AU$7000 for OXFAM’s Coronavirus Emergency Appeal.
Haiku is a Japanese form of short poetry comprising exactly 17 syllables. It’s normally written in three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five, but the competition sponsors indicated that on this occasion they would be flexible about the structure.
Technically, in Japanese literature, Haiku tend to be about nature, while a similar short form, Senryū, is more about human foibles.
Morning mist, Tamar River, Tasmania
Here’s another Haiku I wrote, on a similar theme:
Before,
only druggies and astronauts
were spaced out
Now we
all are
Until next time
Darryl Dymock
What writers say:
The shadow deepens at the edges of the scene. I hope we come out of it all the wiser.
Darryl Dymock's Writesite 