Greg J Keynes

GREG KEYNES — AUTHOR

Greg Keynes is a Western Australian author whose writing draws on an unusually broad range of lived experience — family, isolation, survival and recovery, business, community, relationships, the Australian landscape and the changing nature of regional life.

He has written and published three non-fiction books in The Flying Bushman series, including The Flying Bushman: An Australian Story of Life Above the Land, published in 2020 and distributed through Simon & Schuster, which became an Australian bestseller. His third book, Stories from the Heart, was published in 2023 following an international production process involving specialist publishing professionals engaged through Reedsy across four continents. His publishing experience has encompassed both self-publishing and professional publishing pathways, giving him practical experience across writing, editing, design, production, distribution and promotion.

Born in Geraldton, Western Australia, Greg spent his childhood on his family's remote pastoral property, Curbur Station, in the Murchison. With neighbouring properties approximately 50 kilometres apart, his early life provided first-hand experience of isolation, family and community dependence, Aboriginal and pastoral culture, the natural environment and the realities of living and working in remote Australia. At nine and a half, he left that environment to attend Hale School as a boarder in Perth — an abrupt transition that became another formative influence on his understanding of independence, belonging and adaptation.

After school, Greg worked with the Commonwealth Bank and played football with Claremont before returning to pastoral life. He subsequently became involved in community and regional organisations, including the formation of the Murchison Landcare Group, service as a local Shire Councillor and involvement with the Isolated Children's Parents' Association. His contribution to regional agriculture was recognised with a Rural Achiever of the Year award.

In the early 1980s, following prolonged drought across regional Western Australia, Greg established a helicopter aerial-mustering business operating across the Murchison, Gascoyne and Pilbara. In 1984, an engine failure while mustering resulted in a helicopter crash of approximately 50 metres into rocky country in the Hamersley Range. He sustained severe spinal injuries, underwent major spinal surgery and an extended rehabilitation, including learning to walk again.

Owned and managed Ballythunna Station, where Greg and his wife developed the annual Ballythunna Bush Bash, attracting hundreds of people and raising substantial funds for the Royal Flying Doctor Service. His subsequent working life included establishing and operating Greg Keynes Auctions as principal and auctioneer, FIFO employment and work in the livestock processing industry.

These experiences provide the material behind Greg's writing, but increasingly his work reaches beyond the traditional description of “bush stories”. His writing explores the human experiences within those settings: relationships between parents and children, love and loss, survival, ageing, resilience, humour, vulnerability, generational change and the consequences of lives shaped by both isolation and community.

Greg is now developing two new and distinctly different works. Wait A While Country draws on regional Western Australian experience through shorter, accessible non-fiction stories shaped for contemporary readers while retaining the humour, character and emotional substance of the original experiences. Uncharted Waters represents a major expansion into commercial fiction: a completed high-concept survival thriller examining human resilience, moral compromise and behaviour under extreme circumstances. His experience speaking with survivors in Thailand following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami contributed to the emotional foundations of the novel.

The potential of Uncharted Waters has also extended beyond the page, with the work progressing through professional feature-film development and currently under consideration with APH in Melbourne, where a detailed pitch deck and supporting development material have been submitted for industry assessment.

Greg also brings substantial practical project experience to his writing career. Across several decades he has established and operated businesses and managed significant projects involving budgets, logistics, people and commercial decision-making. That experience now informs the professional management of his publishing projects and his approach to working with editors, designers, publishing professionals, agents and other industry participants.

Based near Geraldton, Greg continues to write with the objective of taking Australian stories beyond their geographic origins to broader Australian and international readerships. His current work reflects a progression from documenting a particular way of Australian life toward exploring the universal human experiences contained within it — the landscape may provide the setting, but the people and their stories are at the heart of the work.