About Me

It’s now almost fifty years since I was first introduced to small boat sailing. In 1967, I competed for Australia against New Zealand in the Inter-dominion Cherub Championships. Although I still occasionally take to the water in a Laser dingy, I now spend more time aboard my Halvorsen.  

This thirty-eight foot bridge deck cruiser, launched in 1934, is a perfect place for editing.

I’ll find a quiet mooring adjacent to the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, north of Sydney. After perching on the stern, I enjoy a quiet cuppa and then begin tapping away on my laptop.

Apart from a gentle breeze and water lapping against the hull, the only discernible sounds to punctuate the silence are the cries of sea eagles as they dive, soar and circle over the water and bush nearby. At the Bobbin Head marina, I am known among the shipwrights, mechanics and cover makers as ‘the typist’.

For me, editing is an exacting process, designed to prune out verbiage and let the story flow. No one has put what I try to do better than Will Strunk in his 1919 classic, The Elements of Style:

"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."

Other than that, I enjoy talking about my books and if you would like to contact me about them or have me address a literary function, service club or historical society, please contact me here.

Listen here to my ABC Radio interview with Margaret Throsby on 8th May 2012.

History Week 2012: Andrew Tink on 'The Lost Clothes Behind Australia's First Court Case'
from History Council of NSW.