Notes from the field: In full feather
The colourful Walkley Award-winning journalist and author has spent more than a decade living in Broken Hill, trading city life for the outback mining town more than a decade ago.
“I’m from Sydney, my playground for all my adult life. I loved the metropolis, stalking its streets and lanes and gutters like a gentrified hooligan, a cosmopolitan girl on my arm, the lights of the city like flames to the moth,” Jack says.
“In 2012, I came to Broken Hill to write an important story. I was only meant to be here for a few months. I never left.
“It’s a typical tale – nobody comes to live in Broken Hill on purpose. They pass through and get stuck.”
Broken Hill has certainly left its mark on Jack: “I used to wear suits and fedoras – Bogart, Ben Chifley, et al – but that doesn’t fly in the Outback, so I traded them in for cowboy hats and jeans. You’ve got to move with the times.
“The Broken Heel Festival presented me with a bit of a challenge: Do I swap my hat for a wig, my moustache for some lashes, my boots for pumps? No way. They say to come as you are, come as you love. I can dig that.
“A drag queen saw me and said: ‘God, you’re really challenging the stereotypes!’ That was funny. But it was also true. At the Broken Heel Festival, I was, in fact, ‘the weirdo’.”
