Dumbo Feather
Conversations with extraordinary people
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Previously, I was the editor of the quarterly Australian magazine Dumbo Feather, a magazine about extraordinary ideas and the people behind them. It’s a magazine that’s beautiful and radical in form and content, largely based around long (really long) interviews, beautiful photography, and diversions inspired by the featured conversations. In collaboration with Stuart Geddes, Jessica Friedmann and the team at Small Giants, I reinvented everything about this magazine, building something that was entirely new but retained the soul of what came before. In my time at the helm, the magazine grew rapidly, both within Australia and overseas. To this day it’s a deeply loved and unique creature, which continued to 2023 under a new editorial team. It still exists online, and you can get a nice list of all my features in one place.
Though this was by no means a solo operation, and some of my best relationships with fellow magazine makers (fellow edit staff, writers, photographers, art directors) began here, I did get to speak to some pretty incredible people for Dumbo. These are some of my faves that are still online:
- Max Richter, one of my favourite composers (pictured here, by Traianos Pakioufakis)
- Vandana Shiva, seed warrior
- Alex Gibney, documentary maker, to put it simply?
- Sir Ken Robinson, education reformer
- Alain de Botton, you know who he is, he’s made sure of it
- Richard Skelton, composer of the saddest music in the world
- Joel Salatin, lunatic farmer
- Carol Rittner, activist nun, Sister of Mercy
- Chris Anderson, curator of TED
- Fouad Hady, refugee and war correspondent