Martel the Hammer?  Yes, it is a pen name — proudly borrowed from Charles Martel, someone who unified much of Europe over a thousand years ago and defeated a large and determined Moslem invasion.
 
Today, we have new threats. They may be subtle and less well defined but they are in fact even more dangerous — for almost everyone. I may not take up a sword against these threats but didn’t some clever guy back a little assert that the pen was mightier than the sword? Thanks Ed, well said!
 
I am only a very small part of the rising movement against communist globalisation and the persistent erosion of individual rights but I do firmly believe that writing, both fiction and non-fiction, play a huge part in the mobilization of human effort towards any worthy goal.
 
My writing reflects the need for that and to that end seeks to reveal innovative new philosophies central to creating a better life like blending passion with effort, engineering freedom from predestiny, creating a workable balance between good and evil, consciousness in decision-making, exploring divine will to fulfil destiny, negotiating a creative path through the conforming and inspiring influences of those around us, the spiritual relevance of dreams and much, much more.
 
Like everyone, I have my passions but perhaps unlike many I’ve had to learn the hard way how to reveal and express them.
 
On my mother’s side, my influences were relatively normal and unrepressed, although she had lost her father, who had served at Gallipoli and The Somme, at the age of ten and her mother went through a long period of mourning.
 
On my father’s side, perhaps because of his family’s deep involvement in the Masonic Lodge with two successive Grand Masters in two generations, there was a lot more repression and he was reared to operate under the misguided principle that emotions were better off avoided.
 
I’m talking about this because I have come to believe that emotions are far more important than most of us realize. I believe my more recent writing reflects this and has lit up over the time that this realization progressed from idea to integrated emotion-intellect reality.
 
As a young man, I was emotionally repressed but I was appreciative and that led me into the life of logic and intellectual exploration that could, perhaps surprisingly, end up generating profound emotional revelations.
 
I grew up and have lived mostly in Australia. It’s a big country in more ways than one. It offers a lot in terms of sensual engagement with nature. Temperate weather perhaps allows more in the way of outdoors activity but it’s more than that. Despite a lot of clearing and degradation, there are still vast tracts of untouched country begging to be explored and while much of it is flat, nondescript and dreary, it hides many small places of sometimes incredible beauty.
 
Perhaps because I was emotionally repressed, I felt a powerful draw from the land. If the wind was up on a cold night, I’d be out for a walk to stimulate the senses rather than hugging the fire. Wind, sky, waves moon, stars, waterfalls, cliffs. All of these things had me enthralled . Maybe that’s why many men have taken to exploration.
 
One of the ways that I engaged with nature as I became older and more experienced was to volunteer with the ocean rescue service in New South Wales. Over a seven year period, I took part in ocean rescue missions both day and night in all sorts of conditions. Whales, dolphins, vast schools of tuna, seals and birds. Storms and calms. Happy people and dead people all came my way.
 
It was challenging at times but gave me a sense of belonging that I had somehow missed before. Then a dispute with the woeful MRNSW hierarchy left me on the rocks and I was forced to face the gaping hole in my emotions that my stoic upbringing and other circumstances had left me with.
 
It was a lengthy process of anger and suffering but in the end I found healing through learning the significance of facing emotions instead of repressing them and through understanding their true importance life.
 
Logic and discipline ultimately led me back to emotions, albeit by strange paths. The challenge of dealing with the corrupt and blindingly inefficient Australian bureaucracy, now such a big part of what is holding this country back, the death of my famous and influential father and how poorly he was treated by a number of aspects of society in his very old age and the mad strategies of our politicians to deal with the spurious pandemic all shed light on what was missing in me until eventually much became clear.
 
In the wake of that period of awakening in my life, when I read over my existing work, I became certain about one thing. Emotional expression was almost completely missing and it felt sterile — almost meaningless at least on that level. It became clearer and clearer to me that both intellect and emotion have a place and that they have to work together cooperatively to light up more and more of the bulbs of our consciousness. They can and should work together, in essence to become a turbocharger for consciousness.
 
I had been hostage to the very common misconception that these two vital aspects of our consciousness compete with each other — that they are in a sense at war with each other. The more there was of one, the less there would be of the other. And of course, intellect had to win out because if you were too emotional, you were irrational, directionless and perhaps even dangerous.
 
The fact is, the less you can express yourself emotionally, the less depth of understanding you can generate with your intellect. And the less discipline you use with your intellect, the less you will feel and understand your emotions. They’re not in competition at all — at least not in a healthy mind.
 
For me at this point, music — piano in this case — played a large part in my release, amongst a number of other things. I learned piano as a boy and perhaps reflecting where I was emotionally, only ever played from musical scores. I couldn’t remember music to play it without a score in front of me and I couldn’t improvise.  Over the years, especially after I bought myself a nice new grand piano I began to improvise a little but it tended to be repetitive and not very melodic. My technical ability increased a lot but I still couldn’t improvise or in essence I suppose, compose. 
 
After the crisis I had with Marine Rescue, my father’s prolonged, difficult death and the difficult resolution of his estate, I felt I was on the edge of a precipice but I had also come to know the proper relationship between intellect and emotions and with every choice I was making, despite the pressure of all that was happening around me, I was slowly but surely digging myself free. Every challenge dealt with properly brought a sense of freedom and everything I felt and expressed became clearer. I was also beginning to improvise more and better on the piano.
 
I had inherited my father’s beloved old Bechstein grand, built in the 1840’s when Liszt or Chopin might have played it. Sometimes as a teenager I had under the influence of strong emotion improvised on it and now that it was mine, it inspired me to do the same again. It sits back to back now with my William Knabe grand, and between them they take up most of the space in my living room.
 
One piano is a round 170 years old and the other is nine and they have very different characters but this somehow seems to suit improvisation and I often move from one to the other spontaneously. As my emotions become more free and open, what I improvise on the pianos improves. When I write and edit, the right words seem to fall into place and the hidden meaning becomes clearer.
 
I know now that when people read books, they are at least as interested in what the characters feel as in what they think or do. Why? Because they wish to be inspired emotionally — because they want to be free to feel as much as they can of the astonishing array of human emotions that are possible.
 
Many people also need release and healing. This a good instinct — a positive drive but unfortunately, modern culture panders to it without the proper consideration by placing too much emphasis on emotions without any revealing intellectual understanding. It’s all out of balance.
 
Sure, we need to tune into our emotions more effectively and properly understand them but that’s not going to happen except on the most temporary basis when we watch shallow movies, listen to the low level pop-music of today and read the tawdry crap that the international corporate publishing industry produces.
 
The fact is, many elements of industry trade on our emotional repression and injuries. They feed on them like vampires and we have learned to go and watch a movie designed to pluck on our heartstrings for an hour or two at best when we’re feeling down.
 
There’s a lot more to the state of social control as I’ve discovered but no doubt you get the idea.
 
So, yes, I really do have something to say and I hope that it will serve you when or if you read some of my published work, whether it’s the fiction or the non-fiction. Preferably all of it, of course, LOL,  but what else can you expect me to say?