To be honest, I’m not sure how Mandy Nolan finds time to do everything she does. She’s had three books out in less than two years; she makes regular comedy appearances around the country; she writes for the Byron Shire Echo, and she keeps a clean and tidy house.

I know this last for a fact from visiting her to interview her about her last book, Boyfriends We’ve All Had (But Shouldn’t Have), but it’s handy information to have whilst reviewing her latest comedic memoir, Home Truths, because Nolan’s line from her childhood home to the light and airy Mullumbimby house where she lives with her husband and more than several children, has been anything but straight.

In fact it’s hard to imagine that the young woman in a squalid shared house in Brisbane where they didn’t train the cat to use the kitty litter because it was ‘too much trouble’, where people drank until dawn, and slept where they fell, is the same house-proud somewhat OCD Mumma Bear juggling multiple careers that Nolan has blossomed into over the years.

One wonderful recollection of the shared house was their attitude to locking it up – they didn’t. But coming home one night from a Nick Cave concert, they found a male intruder leaving the house…The stranger wasn’t remotely apologetic. Instead he looked at the bunch of mismatched punk, new romantic and swampy girls and snarled, “You don’t even have tea.’ He was right.’

Comedian, author and proud house-owner Mandy Nolan outside her Tallowood Ridge home, at Mullumbimby.

The book follows the trajectory of homes Nolan has known from childhood to now, shattering a few misty-eyed myths along the way. The idea, for instance, that we think fondly (mostly) of where we grew up, is given short shrift by Nolan, who lambasts the little Queensland town of Wondai, and in her frank and forthright fashion labels it simply a ‘shithole’, although, in the kindest sentence she has towards where she grew up she adds: Sure it’s a shithole. But it’s my shithole. (When Nolan wrote her first anti-Wondai piece she was bombarded with angry letters, emails and facebook comments. You should be ashammed of yourself, wrote one woman. Nolan, of course, couldn’t help herself, she wrote back correcting her critic’s spelling.)

But Wondai, in a sense, did lay the foundation for this book, because according to Nolan it was responsible for leaving her with a very specific syndrome – The Fear of Missing Out on Living Somewhere Better. It’s that sense of endless questing for ‘home’ whatever it means, which raises the book from simply a funny memoir to a philosophical look at what ‘home’ means to all of us, as the place that helps form our personalities and behaviours – for better or worse – and the kinds of homes we grow out of, and into, during our lives.

Not unnaturally a lot of the book is devoted to the house she lives in now, which was purpose-built, and took over three years to complete. The process allows Nolan to be at her rampant best as she writes about the endless frustrations of building – and the strange obsessions of a home-builder. Taps, for instance, cornices and decks all get a good workout.

There’s a great chapter on what Nolan calls ‘Feng Shite’ – and I’ll leave you to work out Nolan’s position on that particular philosophy yourself.  It’s almost impossible when reading this book, not to give a (wry) smile of acknowledgement at the familiar family topics she covers. Pet ownership and houses, for instance – the differences between cats and dogs, the sadness of losing pets, the happiness of getting new ones and whether pets should be ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ pets is familiar territory to many of us, as is much else in the book, including a long treatise on the Single Sock Syndrome – a subject which has mystified those in charge of the family washing for decades.

Sensibly perhaps, Nolan doesn’t take many digs at her adopted hometown of Mullumbimby. (After all this is the town that tried to fight off an invading Woolworths grocery store with a T-shirt that said ‘It’s Ground Zero all over again’, so I personally wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side of Mullumbytes, as they’re affectionately known.) And the most moving part – in the emotional rather than the locomotive sense – of the book is Nolan’s description of how she came to realise that this area of the Northern Rivers was ‘home’ to her, and that home is quite definitely where the heart is.

Nolan, as usual, strikes a delicate between outright rudeness, a light-comic touch and a broad humanitarian take on the domestic issues that affect us all. And as we know, there’s no place like emoh ruo.

Mandy Nolan’s Home Truths is published by Finch Publishing.  RRP $24.99, e-book $9.99 available from bookstores and online: finch.com.au/books/home-truths

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Let’s face it Lisa Messenger, Australia’s favourite entrepreneur and creator of the fabulous international magazine, The Renegade Collective, did start out with one amazing advantage for someone starting a communications company. Her name. Messenger, the internet tells me, comes from Middle English and Old French, it dates back to William the Conqueror, and literally means ‘a carrier of messages.’

In a sense, this is what the redoubtable Messenger has been doing for many years, first as a marketing and sponsorship manager, raising funds and support for both her products and for other people, and more recently as a publisher, not just of Renegade Collective but also of several books, including her most recent one, Life and Love, to be launched on February 14 in Byron Bay, at those wonderful purveyors of fine food, the 100 Mile Table.

The message, as you can imagine from the title alone, is of course a positive one. Messenger comes bearing us the ultimate gift – the secret of life – that we have it in us to create our own destinies, that we can live fulfilled, abundant, happy lives, and be cool, calm and centered in the midst of all our challenges.

The book came to her, as many of her ideas do, as a complete entity, but even she was surprised at the speed with which it followed her earlier book, Daring and Disruptive: Unleashing the Entrepreneur – a kind of over-turn everything you know business manual for creative entrepreneurs. “We’d only just completed Daring and Disruptive,” Messenger says, “and, as you are at the end of a project I was pretty much depleted. I’d even thought to myself that the book would come out, and I would go back to concentrating on business, but my imagination had other ideas. It was quite late on a Friday night, I remember, and I just suddenly had this visualization. I saw Life and Love – even its table of contents, almost exactly how it is now, and I knew I had to do it.”

It’s that kind of counter-intuitive, commando-style, boots and all thinking that has got Messenger where she is today. She did, she says, “veggie English at school. It was basically the lowest of the low for people who couldn’t write or spell. Now I’m proud to say that I’ve made a life out of writing books – I’ve written 13 myself and co-authored, contributed or custom published numerous others.”

But it was her first book which was the most important for her on her journey towards finding her purpose in life. She is open about the dark days that preceded her breakthrough. “I was stuck in an unhappy marriage,” she says. “I was alienated from my family, drinking too much and I’d spent ten years of my life largely isolating myself. Even though I was married I’d never felt more alone. It was hard to see how I was going to get out of the hole I’d dug for myself.”

In her blog on Life and Love Messenger writes: I had made the conscious decision to cut all ties with my mother – a decision I thought would empower me but only served as a domino effect to alienate myself from the rest of my family. Our struggles began when my parents divorced and over time the tension grew to toxic levels. I remember when I married my first husband – my ex-husband – instead of coming to my wedding, my mum and sister walked the Inca Trail. I can’t blame them. A mountain goat would have been better company than me at that point.

But something was brewing. She decided she wanted to know what happiness was – what made people happy, and how they find happiness, so in 2004 she set off around Australia interviewing people what made them happy, culminating in the book, Happiness Is…The book sold 36,000 copies in its first 12 months, which is phenomenal for an Australian author. People asked her to publish their books, and there it was – an industry was born. The Messenger Group has become a brand engagement agency specializing in custom publishing, and utilizing books and magazines as an extension of brand awareness. Eleven years and countless books later, Messenger is here to tell us that we can do create the life we love, and without compromising ourselves.

If there is a journey between Daring and Disruptive and Life and Love, it seems to me to be a journey from the head to the heart. If the earlier book was a kind of kick-ass book, this is the reverse – a gentle, reflective, beautiful book. A feminine book, if you will. “I think that’s right,” Messenger says. “I think Daring and Disruptive and another previous book, Cubicle Commando, which was all about being an ‘intrapreneur’, that is someone working from within a corporation, were both ‘yang’ energy, and with Life and Love, I was seeking my own balanceto that. I think I had a need to do something more ‘yin’, something softer and more organic.”

Ryan Gosling was the first male to make it on to the cover of Renegade Collective.

Despite the stunning success of Renegade Collective which is now sold in 37 countries, and her Collective hub, which runs the spin-offs from the magazine, plus her other 13-odd companies, Messenger remains a hippy at heart, which is what brings her back to the Byron Shire for her rest and recreation. Having reconciled with her family some years ago, Messenger’s mother and her sister live respectively in and near Bangalow, and Messenger owns a house in Bangalow herself. “I love it up there,” she says. “It’s my feel-good place. I get away up there as often as I can.”

There’s a sweet synchronicity to launching Life and Love on Valentine’s Day. It took Messenger some years to find love again after the end of her first marriage, but in November she got engaged to her partner Jack Delosa, an entrepreneurial educator she met on stage during a speaking gig. “We were on a five-gig tour together,” she says. “On the third gig he asked me out to dinner, and the rest is history.” They share their lives with Bennie, a Cavoodle, who doesn’t leave Lisa’s side – and of course, if you run your own creative entrepreneur business you can take your dog to work!

The idea that print is dead or dying, has been around for some years since the internet began its inevitable encroachment on sales, but a bit like the ‘death of the author’, or the supposed demise of film to dvd, reprorts of the death of print, to paraphrase Mark Twain, have been greatly exaggerated. What has been proved by Messenger, and other brave do-it-differently publishers is that what was wanted was something fresh and different. “When I launched the Collective the idea behind it was being a business magazine for entrepreneurs,” she says, “but I didn’t want it to look like a business magazine. I wanted it to look like a fashion magazine, I wanted it to be gorgeous and and have a feeling for who I am, to morph between traditional business, fashion and design.” For those of us who soaked up her first issue, full of admiration for the tactile feel of a magazine full of handwriting across photos, collage and beautiful artwork intermingled with entrepreneurial derring do, it was irresistible – and cross-generational I might add in our house where it is compulsive reading for both me and my 23-year-old son. (Our two must reads? Renegade Collective and Horse Deals…)

Ignoring the dire prophecies of print death has stood Messenger in good stead. Richard Branson now puts a copy in every room on his exclusive Necker Island resort, and the U.S sales are booming. Messenger recently spend four days with Branson on the island, and was on the alert for insights. “I really noticed that of course Richard, as with other high-profile achievers is, of course, just an ordinary person, but entrepreneurs have this propensity for risk, and an ability to trust their own decision-making process.”

Branson has often said in interviews that when it comes to business decisions his final decision is based on intuition rather than logic, and Messenger concurs. “I’ve very counter-intuitive,” she says. “As well as being a hippy at heart, I’m really tuned into the idea that there is flow of energy – something higher than us, and that is where gut knowledge and intuition come from. It’s totally different to how most businesses are run, but I think we are seeing more of it in action – it’s conscious capitalism I guess.” That said, though, she is also a believer in what she has referred to as ‘fast failure’. “Not everything is going to succeed if you’re an entrepreneur,” she says. “I’ve honed it down to a fine art – put it all together, if it doesn’t fly, walk away.”

Even further back than Medieval French or Old English, messenger in archaic Hebrew was the name ‘Malakhiy’ – meaning ‘My Messenger’ or ‘My Angel’, definitions which seem only fitting for someone who is truly delivering a message of self-fulfilment.

Paper Runway are hosting a cocktail party for Lisa Messenger  on  February14 (Valentine’s Day) to launch the serial entrepreneur’s book Life and Love, sequel to her best selling book Daring & Disruptive.  There will be wines from  Burch Family Wines and the style-makers from The Canavan will be there to shake + stir cocktails from their 1960’s retro-styled caravan. The cocktail party will be held at Byron Bay’s hippest eatery – 100 Mile Table. With five years experience as Neil Perry’s right hand person, Sarah Swan relocated north to open 100 Mile Table and will be indulging guests with paddock-to-plate canapés.

What’s included –
Canapés
Wine
Cocktails
A signed copy of Life and Love
Treats from Paper Runway

Cost $150

Where – 100 Mile Table 4/8 Banksia Drive Byron Bay

Bookings – paperrunway.com

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A ghostly moment by Byron Bay’s tea tree lake – from the book Time Out of Place. Photography Rosie Sherwood

Indie publisher and book artist Rosie Sherwood knows what it’s like to live in two worlds – even though she is based in the UK, her love for Australia began at the tender age of two.

Rosie Sherwood always knew she wanted to be an artist – what she didn’t know was what kind of artist. It wasn’t until she was working on her MA in Book Arts at Camberwell College of the Arts in London, that she began to realise that outside of the mainstream art and book worlds, a whole Indie universe exists.

“Artists book fairs really opened a world of community and conversation around art for me,” says 28-year-old Sherwood. “There’s a vast community of people at book fairs who have all looked at the changing art world and the suffering industries and rather than seeing the disaster they’ve seen the potential for something new.”

Book artist Rosie Sherwood with one of her adapted comic books. Photograph Lauren Fried.

As a child, Sherwood straddled two worlds – England, where she grew up, and Australia, her father’s country – where many of her family and friends live. It’s this dichotomy of where we are and where we might want to be, that has informed much of her work, including the beautiful and wistful Time Out of Place, a limited first edition of 25 books, with half the photographs taken around England, and the other half from a trip to Australia during the course of 2010/2011 – including a ghostly image from one of Byron Bay’s local tea tree lakes. (See top)

“The books were made up of loose-leaf pages collected together in a folded box,” Sherwood says. “The idea is that readers can move the pages around – changing not only the order but what you see through each image because the paper is slightly see through. Most of the pages are single sheets, but some are folded so you open them as if you’re turning the pages of a book. The book is a visual exploration of belonging in two places, and of being between the two – it’s about as autobiographical as a series of pictures can be.”

Dyptich England, from Time out of Place

Dyptich Australia from Time out of Place

Having identified that ‘book art’ was her calling, Sherwood has set about combining her two passions for words and images – and space – in a major way. She’s already produced a number of books, including an on-going arts journal Elbow Room. Each of her books is self-produced, printed in her studio and hand-bound. Some are housed at Tate Library and Archive, Chelsea College of Art and Design, The National Gallery of Scotland Library and The Poetry Library or sold at Foyles and thebookartbookshop.

Her next project, The Ellentree, had its genesis many years ago – born from that very under-rated creative impulse – boredom.   “I was at my grandparents house one summer many years ago and I was really bored,” she recalls. “For some reason I decided to make white origami cranes and hang them in their apple tree. As the years passed an idea grew, the birds became coloured, the tree evolved into twisted copper – I wrote my story, and Evelyn began his search for the Ellentree.”

The Ellentree

‘Evelyn is pursuing a trail of fallen bird-leaves from the mystical Ellentree. He must find it or be lost forever.’

The Ellentree tells the story of Evelyn, a young man with an eye of red and purple who walks in two worlds. One is our own; the other, a world of brilliant yet terrible extremes, a place of blurred edges sharp to the touch. To find his way back to our reality, and to the one person who knows he is missing, Evelyn must pursue a trail of leaves – a technicolour flight of birds fallen from a mystical tree. His quest is to find the Ellentree, or be lost forever.

The idea for the story came to Sherwood in the summer of 2009 when she was reading a biography of Neil Gaiman. “I came across the 24-hour comic book challenge, originally created by Scott McCloud as a creative exercise and completed the first draft of The Ellentree in 24 continuous hours.

Sherwood worked on The Ellentree for a year, handing it in as her graduate project and imagining that it was complete, but Gaiman continued to be an inspiration. She sent him a copy of the original book, and his response inspired her to keep working. “I absolutely treasure the meetings and conversations I had with Gaiman,” she says, “they were a major stepping-stone in the path that has led here.”

An origami bird in flight…

The ‘here’ she refers to is to her latest quest – inspired by Amanda Palmer, Sherwood has set up a kickstarter crowdfunding appeal in order to complete her project. “To do it justice, to make this book the beautiful object I dream of, I need professional printers and binders this time around,” says Sherwood.

Sherwood says The Ellentree, named after a childhood friend, who would constantly chastise the teachers at their school for wasting paper, is many things. “It’s a short story, a comic book, a poem and a piece of book art,” she says. “However you look at it, at its heart, The Ellentree is a story told in words and pictures.”

You can support Rosie Sherwood here:  kickstarter.the-ellentree

You can see more about Rosie here: .ayupublishing

You can follow her blog here: rosiesherwood

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