Tom Dullemond - Going dutch in Brisbane
lines, Tom had to map out a story with 15 locations and eight different branching storylines. Each story has commissioned art, soundtrack and voiceovers to match.
Tom’s G-rated story had to appeal to a broad audience. He had to cater for old and young and consider that a reader could be in a wheelchair or blind. The adventure story is written in the second person, making the reader the main character in the story. While writing, he had to be mindful the story was an immersion experience and he says, “I wanted to make sure that there wasn’t anything that would kick you out of that.” He gives an example of a wheelchair bound reader and says, “I can’t say, you run across the road to save that person without breaking the immersion for them.”
The involved writing process found Tom taking a number of days to walk the locations to ensure that they fitted into his storyline. He says he had to “stand and look around where the reader would be to get an idea of what they would see so that I could incorporate that into the story." This science fiction tale turns the reader into a cyberspace traveller and the city into the Nexus Brisbane Virtual CitySimulator. The city buildings are the characters. Tom says, “The whole concept of my story was being in Brisbane literally."
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Walking the streets of Brisbane with his laptop for Street Reads, gave Tom a fresh look at his adopted hometown. He says, “It has given me a completely new appreciation for the complexity and diversity of architecture. Brisbane is really cool.”
Tom Dullemond Photo: Kaylene Lawson
Writer and long term Brisbane resident, Tom Dullemond admits, “I am one hundred percent congenital Dutch.” However, during our interview, he refers to Brisbane as his “home town”. He arrived in Queensland in the late eighties for Expo and has been there ever since.
As a child growing up in the Netherlands, Tom found enjoyment in writing, “plagiarising comics” that he had read. But it was not until he was living in Brisbane as a young adult, that a short story he had written was professionally published. Since receiving that first payment, Tom has written many short fiction stories and the occasional poem. His science fiction tales appear regularly in the CSIRO’s The Helix magazine.
When asked what makes him so “dutch”, Tom explains that he is a detail person who is overly efficient and disciplined. This is reflected in his thorough research and fact checking. His method is “dutch” but the backdrop to his tales is Australia.
He has co-authored the first in a series of philosophical fantasy adventures for middle-school students, The Machine Who Was Also a Boy which was published last year. He is currently finishing off the second book in the series, Pandora’s Paradoxes which are publicized as tales of puzzles, paradoxes and perplexing predicaments. The philosophy behind this series, is to avoid using violence as a “copout” to “defeat the bad guys”. He says, “Kids already know you can win with violence, I kind of owe it to the readers to show them that you can win without it.”
As part of this year’s Brisbane Writers’ Festival, Tom is a contributing author for the Street Reads choose your own adventure series sponsored by the Brisbane City Council. This location-based adventure takes the reader through Brisbane city and part of the Cultural Precinct. As the writer for one of three story-
For information on Tom Dullemond, visit his blog at: http://cacotopos.wordpress.com
