A Defining Moment Returns
In August 2026, we mark a quarter-century since the MV Tampa became a defining moment in Australian history.
What Happened in August 2001
On 26 August 2001, Captain Arne Rinnan and his Norwegian crew answered a distress call and pulled 433 mainly Hazara asylum seekers from the foundering Indonesian fishing boat Palapa 1. What followed—a deadly ultimatum, refusal of entry, a dramatic boarding, the rapid introduction of emergency legislation, and a political storm that helped shape the 2001 election—still echoes. The event crystallised questions of sovereignty, humanitarian obligation, media narrative, and the distance between government machinery and the people caught inside it.
A Creative Parallel
But how does one create a fictional story out of such events? Anyone familiar with George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman papers will recognise the lineage. Fraser dropped his incorrigible, randy, self-preserving anti-hero into the great crises of the nineteenth century—the First Afghan War, the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Indian Mutiny—and let the meticulously researched history speak through the eyes of a thoroughly compromised man. The history remains exact; the fiction supplies the sweat, the lust, the moral shortcuts, and the accidental survival.
My male protagonist, Christian Holland, is no Flashman. He is neither coward nor rogue. But the method of story telling is related. Put a flawed, essentially private character into a real and still-contested international drama, and the official narrative is forced to share the stage with hunger, calculation, and human messiness. The Tampa Affair is recent enough that many Australian’s still feel its aftershocks. As I read the press (or not) the refugee issue has reared its head again in the Western world in 2026. Embedding a character like Christian inside this dynamic lets the novel examine how political forces grind against individual appetite and loyalty without needing to deliver a tidy verdict.
An Uneasy Mix of Heat and Politics
The novel is deliberately uneasy. It is erotic, yes—front and centre—but the heat is colder and more transactional than in some of the earlier books. Power, memory, deflection, and the gap between official story and history matter as much as the physical encounters. I wanted the reader to feel the disorientation of being inside the fog while larger forces move. Politics in Tampa Gold is not window dressing for an erotic tale; it is the weather the characters must sail through.
Looking Back Twenty-Five Years Later
The Tampa Affair remains one of those rare events in Australian history that still polarises. Some remember it as a necessary assertion of border control. Others see the beginning of a harder, more permanent regime. Fiction does not have to resolve that argument. It can simply put a human body—sweating, calculating, wanting, compromised—on the deck while the arguments rage around us.
I remain grateful that Tampa Gold found readers who were willing to sit with its ambiguities, and that it received the 2025 Reader Views award for erotica. The recognition meant a great deal because the book is not pure romance or pure political thriller. It is both, and the friction between those modes is the point.
Explore the Story
If you have not yet stepped aboard, the novel is still available. If you have, perhaps this anniversary is a moment to look back at the real events and the invented ones side by side. History does not stay on the page, and neither, it turns out, does gold—literal or otherwise.
In a sea of troubles, love will save the day.
Other Authors of Interest this Week
For rookie American pilot Ian Faraday, the transition from training fields to the chaotic dogfights of World War II is brutal and unrelenting. Freshly assigned to C Flight at RAF Hornchurch, he’s thrown into the fray with little more than the fundamentals of flying and a handful of hard-learned lessons. Under the command of the sharp-tongued, no-nonsense Flight Lieutenant McKenzie, Faraday and his fellow newcomer, Michael King, quickly realize that survival means mastering more than just their aircraft—it means navigating the harsh realities of aerial warfare.
The French want to kill him. First in the Paiute Indian wars, but now he is white-knuckle exhausted in wrestling the tiny pitching mini-sub off stormy Civil War Cape Hatteras. The French ironclad appeared in the middle of the Atlantic storm, six-inch guns blazing and intent on obliterating the vulnerable submarines in tow to attack the unsuspecting rebel ironclads at Charlestown.m.
Drowning her sorrows at the local bar after being laid off, Eris Matthews has reached the end of her rope. What else could go wrong now in her shitty life? Things take a turn for the worst when, after last call, she is chased by mysterious men in black.
Spending time on the beach with Scott and Jim, Julie begins to sense that they might both be into her, too. But which of the brothers will Julie pick? Jim has a great sense of humor and is a fountain of random information, which she loves hearing. Scott is a great listener and has a way of prompting her to pour her heart out to him.
It’s a tough choice to make.
Joe the Magic Man has returned in this spin-off novella to “Get Out of My Dreams.” Going beyond the crime-solving Joe that “Get Out of My Dreams” portrayed, where the reader only caught a glimpse of his steamy adventures, “Tale of the Inn Keeper’s Niece” shows his more passionate, erotic side. Set in 17th century France, get ready to be swept away on a sex-filled—with a touch of kink—whirlwind adventure.
Lord of the Succubi is an erotic fantasy adventure that follows our hero Zeke as he explores the long-lost succubus homeland.
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