About me

Hi there, I'm Joel Rheinberger, author and broadcaster.

I have seven books you might want to check out:

ZeitHeist - after the ecological apocalypse, the banks and corporations that ruined the planet build an island paradise for themselves. And a group of Aussie thieves are hired to crack the place open.

The Poppy Lu Series - a young pilot learns to fly without a plane and joins the world of super heroes. Three books so far: (1) Suddenly Super, (2) Surprisingly Super and (3) Seriously Super.

The Hopping Ghost - a wee Scottish vampire finds herself in deep trouble in 1920's Shanghai.

Chick Magnet - a crime caper with a number-crunching assassin tracking down stolen drugs.

Discipline - a modern fantasy about an apprentice to a black magician.

When I'm not writing, I talk for a living on ABC Radio. (But for the record, this blog is purely personal.)

Some of my interviews get played right around the network, so if you live in Australia you've probably heard my voice. Often doing silly things, like getting naked on the radio or brushing a dead whale's teeth.

I also created and presented a long-running ABC podcast called Nerdzilla, which was about comics, computers, sci-fi, super heroes, games, gadgets, and geeks.

Before my time at the ABC, I was a copywriter. I won some awards for it, including a couple of New York Medals.

When I'm not typing or talking, I play games with my friends and teach Loong Choo Kung Fu.

I live in Hobart, truly the most beautiful city in the world, with my equally beautiful wife Iris and my son Louis.

I have an author page on Facebook.

I post on Mastadon now and then.

You can also find me on Blue Sky, Threads and Instagram.

And I would love to email you! Please join my list. 

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Fun parks and recreation

We have spent the last fortnight in Celle, Germany, visiting with my wife's family.

It's a town of around 80,000 people in Lower Saxony, in the north of the country.

When we're not visiting with family, we're looking for "family entertainment", which in this part of the country means zoos.

First up was the Tier Park, which is where they train animals for media performance. If you see a lion on German TV, it probably came from here.

They say this wolf is the world's best at playing dead. A totally chilled animal.

The keeper spent three years visiting the cage daily - even on weekends and sick days - in order to be accepted as a member of the pack.

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German observations

Thoughts on Germany and Germans, from an Australian bloke with a German name and a German wife.

The Roads

The Germans are much smarter than us about speed limits, which are slower in town and faster on the freeways.

Australians, myself included, get frustrated and angry in suburban 50km/h zones. But here everyone is totally cool about doing 30, and I have found that it encourages me to be relaxed about it as well.

Often in the middle of town the roads are made of old fashioned flagstones, which are indestructible but a wee bit bumpy and slippery. So you go very slowly indeed.

At this low speed, people just have more patience with local conditions.  We rode around Celle in a horse and cart today, causing about forty cars to slow down and wait for 5 minutes on a particular one-way road. There was nary a beep. They all just waited until we were out of the way.

Everyone double-parks if they need to pick up a passenger or drop off a package, and no-one else cares. You just go around them.

Here's a neato idea.

When you park in a time-limit zone, you put this little cardboard thing on your dash with the current time on it - how many minutes past the hour it was when you arrived. Then the inspectors know when you got there. (And if you don't have one of these things displayed, they book you.)

There are lots of people on bikes. The kids are legally required to wear helmets but virtually nobody else bothers.

There are dedicated bike lanes everywhere, sometimes on the road and sometimes marked out on the footpath.

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Roaming across Europe

Well, a little bit of it, anyway.

Five of us - three adults and two children - have stuffed our gear into a VW wagon and made our way from France to Germany, via Italy and Austria.

The highway system that links these countries is consistently excellent, though expensive in places.

At one of the toll stops, where we had pulled over to assemble the correct change for the booth, another car pulled up behind us and the driver got out to tap on our window.

He told our driver (who shall remain anonymous) that they had been wandering too close to the middle of the road, and perhaps we would all die in a fireball if this continued.

He politely made his point and went back to his vehicle. A far cry from the extended middle finger and cry of "get off the road ya fuckwit!" that I'd expect from Australians in similar circumstances.

Along the coast, Italy is mountainous and beautiful. There are endless villages strung out along the mountain ridges, with farms perched precariously on the slopes and huge greenhouses on every flat surface.

Then we turned inland, where it becomes rather monotonous. Flat and full of corn.

Our overnight stop was at the Garda Lake, which happens to be next to Italy's answer to Disneyland - Gardaland.

We didn't go there, but our hotel was clearly set up to cater for families that do. It had a massive buffet and some language-free entertainment for kids (magic and mime) after dinner.

The next day we continued towards Germany. The landscape became gorgeously mountainous again as we drifted through Austria.

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The old master

Today we walked up the hill, rising from our seedy city neighbourhood through several social strata to the Musee Matisse.

Between the museum building itself and the little cafe outside, there's an absolute rarity - empty space.

This part of the world has been civilised for so long that parklands just don't seem to exist any more, long ago built over with apartment blocks.

So naturally some people were in this little park playing the French national sport, pétanque.

I think it's a sport in much the same way that Thumb War is a sport.

A game, yes. A thing to keep children amused at a picnic, definitely. But not a sport.

I suspect that the drugs in cycling (the other French national sport) actually drifted over from pétanque, as it would take some serious mind alteration to make me buy a special shirt for tossing metal balls in random outdoor venues.

But the people playing were taking it very seriously indeed, putting on that grim face known amongst aficionados as the "total pétanquer".

I digress.

So the Matisse Museum is full of the old master's work, mainly donated by his family, as they were clearing wall space for plasma TVs.

(Below is the sculpture series: The Many Faces of Margaret Thatcher.)

If the museum was your only exposure to Matisse, you might think he was a bit crap, because it's full of his practice works - the stuff he created on the way to being sublime.

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Viva la di'France

A French road and a French footpath are more or less the same thing.

One has mainly cars and the other mainly pedestrians, but that's mostly a matter of convenience and relative sizes.

After less than a week here, it's no longer a surprise when a Vespa jumps the curb beside me to overtake some jammed cars. And cars will also use the footpaths with aplomb, should the driver need to pick up some dry cleaning, or just stop for a chat about the cigar stink that clings to his jackets.

(This is true: today I watched the local dry cleaner enjoying a stogie in his doorway, smoke drifting back to hang around inside his shop.)

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Commercial demos

I spent the first decade of my career in commercial radio, doing just about everything that a radio station has to offer.

But I spent most of it being a copywriter - writing ads as a part of each station's sales team.

I did this in Canberra at FM104.7 / 2CA and then at Canberra FM.

After that I moved to Sydney, becoming Creative Director at 2WS and then later at Triple-M.

It's a fun job! You talk to local businesses, get a feel for what they want to communicate, and try to write something memorable about them to go on the radio in 90 words or less.

If you're lucky (as I mostly was) you work with clever audio production bods and voice-over people, who help you bring the ideas to life.

I thought I'd share my copywriting demo with you. These ads aren't necessarily all award-winners or the most perfect sales tools, but they're probably the ones I had the most fun making.

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Dark Mofo beaming up

Let me lay this out for you...

MONA is the Museum of Old and New Art, a wacky new museum here in Hobart.

MONA FOMA is the MONA Festival of Old and New Art, an annual arts fest which happens here each January.  This is usually shortened to Mofo.

And Dark Mofo is the brand new mid-winter arts festival they've just launched last week.

Got that?

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Queensland reporting

So the ABC has sent me to Queensland as a recovery reporter, talking to the people around the Wide Bay area about how they're getting on since the January floods.

It's an important part of Local Radio's work, so I've done plenty of radio and online stories about it for the ABC.

This post is about all the weird incidental stuff that's happened since I arrived in the sunshine state.

First up, as you can see, I had to buy a hat.  I've wanted an Akubra for donkey's years and now I've found one that I like. The man in the shop says it will be good in the rain too - let's hope so, as I go back to Hobart in a week.

On my first day, the local boss-man Ross gave us a tour and it was quite an eye-opener.

Look at this place in North Bundaberg. During the floods the water in this area was several metres deep and flowing at over 70 km/h, so it would just swirl around some houses and dig out the foundations, leaving them in a sink-hole.

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In defence of old fashioned shoe polish

Will you please polish your goddamned shoes? I am sick to death of looking at them.

Those devil-may-care scuff marks are like patches of ignorance spreading across the leather.

And don't use that pretend polish liquid shit that comes in a bottle with a sponge on the end. You may as well colour them in with a black pen. Or dip your boots in Vegemite.

It adds colour, but it doesn't nourish the leather like an old fashioned waxy polish does.

Pictured are my 6 year old Blundstone boots, which have mowed lawns, shifted rocks, trekked across the wilderness, hooked flathead, and kept me standing at many a music festival.

They have been used and abused like any outdoor boots. But they are still whole, still supple, still waterproof, and shiny enough to wear to church.

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Review - "A Memory of Light" by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson

I loved the first few books in this series - they were well written, well imagined, and populated with very distinct characters.

Like most fantasy readers, I love getting lost in another world, so I even appreciated their vast size.

But then I came to a terrible and boring one. I think it was number five or six? It seemed that the plot required all of the characters to move to new locations, so there was a whole book of people travelling around the landscape. All they did was ride horses, camp, and feel great angst. For 800 pages.

At that point, I gave up on them.

But when I was on a beach holiday a few years later, I saw the next volume at the second hand store. I had time to kill, so I grabbed it, and it was pleased to find the plot had gained momentum again.

I read the next half dozen volumes in much the same way, just casually. Then I heard that Robert Jordan had died, and his wife had picked another author to take up the reins.

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