DAVID TURNBULL continues his series of profiles on Canberrans with a story. This week he meets a familiar TV news face who’s gone from writing fact to fiction. 

When I asked Michael Brissenden for an interview he said: “Not sure I’ll be all that interesting, but I’m happy to give it a go”.

It was a throwaway line, one journo to another, but it underlines who he is.

There are no pretensions here; he’s comfortable in his own skin, but even with three novels published and a fourth due out in September, he just takes it in his stride.

He likes writing; that’s just what he does.

Put simply: Michael is a humble Canberra boy made good.

He grew up in Yarralumla “surrounded by books”. His father, Bob, was an English lecturer and poet; his mother, Rosemary, a political scientist who specialised in southeast Asia.

“Dad specialised in 18th century English literature, and modern American poetry, neither of which excited me. And mum specialised in southeast Asia. She was ahead of her time and actually wrote the first Asian cookbook in Australia.

“Dad always had a crime book on the go, so I guess that’s where I first got my love of that.”

Michael went to Narrabundah College, AME School and Deakin High.

“I wasn’t a very academic kid, I just loved footy,” he says. 

He played Australian Rules and both codes of rugby “until everyone else got huge and I didn’t”.

“It was a small place Canberra and ANU was a small, tight community.

“There were people at our place all the time. 

“I never really took any notice, but there were a lot of interesting people.”

At 14 Michael wrote for the school paper. And that convinced him he wanted to be a journalist.

“It just seemed to come naturally, ” he says.

When he told his dad, though, Bob dismissed the idea.

“They’re all drunks, he said, so I went to Sydney Arts College to do ceramics instead.”

By 1986, though, Michael returned to his first choice and started what became a 35-year career with the ABC. He cut his journalistic teeth covering federal politics for public affairs radio and in 1989 was posted to Moscow. 

Further postings to Brussels and Washington followed, punctuated by stints on ABC TV News, 7.30 Report, Four Corners and AM.

By any measure, Michael Brissenden is an extraordinarily experienced and well-rounded journalist.

So why did he make the transition to fiction, and how difficult was it to do so?

“I wrote a manuscript years ago, but no-one was interested. Some people can write in their twenties. But I couldn’t. Just too young, I guess,” he says.

Around 2015 he was working as the security and defence correspondent for ABC Television News and the complexity and challenges terrorism presented spawned his first novel, The List.

“The overall story was just too big for any one news story, so I tried to capture the wider story with all its nuances,” he says.

“Writing fiction is a different muscle.

“It’s harder than journalism, but you just have to put one word down after another.

“You can always change it.”

He’s gone on to write three more novels – Dead Letters and Smoke, and the latest, Dust, coming in September.

So how does he bring being a novelist into his family life?

“My wife works full-time, and our kids have grown.

“I just get up early, have a coffee and then sit down and try to write a thousand words a day.

“It’s a job. You have to approach it like a job”.

And the ideas? Where do they come from?

“I don’t plan out the plot in detail. I often start with just a single image.

“Along the way, I map things out on a white board. This goes there, that goes there.

“But as I write, things change and I think that’s good.

“If I didn’t know something was going to happen, I can be sure the reader will be surprised, too.”

Michael just focuses on the process.

Unlike many journalists and published authors, he retains his humility.

He’s still the boy from Canberra.

Journalist David Turnbull is writing a series of profiles about interesting Canberrans. Do you know someone we’ve never heard of? Share the name in an email to David via editor@citynews.com.au