The Cacophony Ensemble

The Cacophony Ensemble is a writers' collective exploring the space and song within the noise. While we don't seek to be prescriptive in content, our glue is a desire to explore spaciousness, restoration, redemption, divinity...and levity across all the stuff that, together, is life.

We seek to grow in our ability to write well and, in doing so, communicate and decipher the culture of our day through the timeless lens of the gospel of Jesus.

We believe that there is one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live, yet we've noticed that discovering his melody in a broken world isn't usually realised through incidental or easy listening. While we don't seek to promote ourselves as answer-givers we do seek to wrestle well. To reveal or move towards truth through what we see, what we write and how we unpack what's going on with God's creation. We seek to explore love, grace, justice, humility and mercy in all the random and decisive moments of life.

We are not a mono-culture, but come from a diversity of faith traditions. We're united in our belief that Jesus' bride, the Church, is both beautiful and broken, yet it remains God's holy intent that the church be the means by which people come to a saving knowledge of Jesus. Crazy, but that's the deal.

9 regular contributors comprise the Ensemble with a burgeoning array of occasional contributors.








Simon Elliott
Simon liked the idea of being a journalist but discovered other ways to write. For 14 years he's been a copywriter and designer for The Globe and also, more lately, a pastor at Riverview Church and a MDiv student at Regent College. He lives with his wife, Fiona, his baby girl, Molly Grace Shakespeare, and Fella (an athletic kelpie). He loves Jesus, Fiona, running, rain, coffee, building the church, leading worship, growing stuff you can eat, leadership—heck, even a spot of writing. He has a weakness for song lyrics, meaningless statistics and rudimentary meteorology.
Coffee preference: short mac Favourite number: 12
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Brad Birt
Brad Birt has lived in 27 houses in 4 countries. These days juggles writing with a role in marketing and MBA studies. He likes to watch Ultimate Fighting with a good single malt scotch and finds an obtuse pleasure in their convergence. He’s 26 and lives in Perth with his wife and baby girl, Bijou Amri, and one day would like to learn to weld something. Anything.
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Sarah Green
Sarah is 26 and works as a copywriter at a marketing company during the day, which leaves her nights free to play online Boggle. Her appearance could be described as bookish, which means most times she visits a library someone asks for her help in checking out a book.
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Karyn Ash
Karyn is three fifths of an architect, one twelfth of a crazy cat lady and two ninths of a lawyer. The rest of her is pecan pie; about 10%.

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Amanda Powell
Loves: coffee, friends, creativity, candles, airplane food, Jamie Oliver, lip gloss & old suitcases.
Loathes: animals, bad smells, mismatched towels, spam, end times hysteria & gardening
Ambivalent about: waiting in queues, song writers, film reviews, purple, horoscopes & passport control
Intrigued by: shadows, comets, babies feet, blue bottomed monkeys, Thailand & history
Passionate about: God
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Garrick Field
As a consulting hydrogeologist Garrick spends far too much time in steel capped boots and a hard hat in un-pronouncable places looking at rocks, and then writing really scientific things about them and how wet they are.
Born in NZ, married to Simone from Perth, living in Lima, Peru. Loves the Lord, guitars (especially fenders), wife, wine, coffee, food, and dreams of crossing numerous foreign borders on a motorcycle.

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Clare O'Neil
Clare O'Neil is a twenty-one year old female. She is currently studying for her BA and planning to go on to study for a MA in the United States. She still retains a slight phobia of children under the age of two. Her accent only becomes obscenely 'Aussie' when she is tired. Last year she created a budget and one of her many boasts is that she is sticking to it. Clare will argue that her cassette walkman is better than an ipod. Any day. Clare has been described as geeky, weird, a terrible flirt, comical and as having a thousand faces. Of course, post-mortem she will be recognised as a genius, a revolutionary and a lover. But only if she gets offline, breathes the air outside and actually, truly lives.

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O T H E R C O N T R I B U T O R S

Gavin Eva International traveler and man of many mysteries. Now lives in Perth.
Michael Dunjey Climber of consequential mountains.
Douglas Smythe Exegeting the ski fields of Switzerland - one snowflake at a time.