Those who have followed Bob's songwriting career, will be glad he picked up the guitar again in 1998 because gems like Little Deeds, The Old Musician, Mending Fences, Courting the Net and Underneath the Story Bridge emerged, just the tip of a very large back catalogue of unpublished songs.
He has continued to write strongly into 2002, finally completing the much-anticipated 13-song epic "Big Country Town"

"I guess if you like Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell, Loudon Wainwright, Kristina Olsen, John Prine, Warren Zevon, Tom Lehrer, Dory Previn and intelligent, sensitive writers like that, you'd probably like my stuff."

Bob has been pursuing his dream of earning a living as a writer since 1975. He dropped out of society that year and lived in the remote wilderness of northern New Zealand while trying to find his writing ''voice'' and was, he confesses, distracted by women, wine, poetry, fishing and music. He learned guitar as he learned to write, using open tunings because with his natural ear for music it made more sense to create songs this way and he still does.

Bob made his first stage appearance in 1977. Always an anxious individual, he found performing a hard task, trying to break through intense stage nerves. But the sheer volume of his work kept thrusting him into the spotlight and as he became more experienced, the nerves became less of a problem. By 1978 he had written more than 100 songs and his guitar playing had become rather good, mainly because in those years he travelled and worked at odd jobs which allowed much time to practice. In Auckland New Zealand he entered his first songwriting competition with a ballad Hokianga and won. Six months later after moving to Australia he won a national songwriting award for the anti-war song The Almost Armageddon Waltz.
"People still bellow out for that song," Bob said, "And I'm so far past that now, but I still do it, if I can remember the words. The references are a bit dated now, but I've been threatening to write a new verse and update it, maybe arrange it for brass band."

Bob wrote prolifically in the 1980s and played in bush bands and a trio which performed his own songs. In his days with The Ordinary Mortals, Bob hit a purple patch and produced some great songs including Ah Cette Vie, Postman I'm Waiting, Five Minute Love Affair and Table for One. In the late 1980s he moved to Brisbane and became involved in big city journalism. The songwriting stopped and for a few years there so did the music.

"I guess I just got discouraged with playing my own stuff in noisy smokey bars where people who weren't listening made it tough for those who wanted to listen. Besides, I was making tracks in my career and had a family to raise. You know how it is."

But in 1998 all of that changed and someone turned the songwriting tap on again.
"I don't have any sense of having missed anything in those years. Geez, I raised a son - how much more creative does it get? I wrote a dozen or so songs in that time but I didn't get a sense of them being much chop although my son particularly likes a song from that period If you Smoke in my Kitchen I'll Fart in your Bedroom.

"But the 1998-2002 collection is much stronger, more universal, more positive. I tend to think I wrote way too many poor me songs in the 1970s and I've ditched a lot of them.

Still, there are all these suitcases full of question marks (as a line in one of Bob's songs goes) in Bob's writing room. Three of Bob's stronger songs featured on "Courting the Net", his debut studio EP recorded with long-term musical and marital partner Laurel Wilson in 2000.

"I was skeptical about putting the album out there, but almost straight away we got played on all sorts of radio stations and got some nice reviews. Then Macca started playing Courting the Net and Underneath the Story Bridge on Australia all Over and suddenly we became accepted by a segment of the market we hadn't even thought about."

Encouraged by this exposure, and the inclusion of the title track on Macca's compilation CD, Bob began planning a full-length album of his own songs in 2001 but postponed it for a year due to ill health.

"I'm much better now, thank you,'' he said, while completing a circuit at the local gym.
"I'm really happy with the way the album turned out.
"My biggest problem was deciding which ones to leave out - and because I'm prolific, as each month passes by I usually add another one to the list.
"Little Deeds re-established me as a songwriter with ideas and sharp lyrics - hopefully Courting the Net and Big Country Town will bring my songs to the attention of good singers who are short of good songs.''

"The first two CD projects at least convinced me that I can do it myself and quickly sell enough copies to cover my costs and from that point on, anything at all could happen.''