How Bradley Trevor Greive’s list of achievements has inspired his books

Tasmanian-born author Bradley Trevor Greive will give just about anything a red-hot go – and his crazy-brave lust for life fuels his books

To call Bradley Trevor Greive “surprising” is an understatement almost as big as the man himself. The bestselling Tasmanian-born author – who has sold more than 30 million copies of his books – is best known for his whimsical gift books such as The Blue Day Book, Dear Mum and Thank You For Being You. But there is so much more to his career trajectory, which includes military service as a paratrooper and a short-lived stint as a model, as well as outings as a cartoonist, TV personality, wildlife photographer and wildlife philanthropist. He also trained as a cosmonaut in Moscow, became French Polynesian rock-lifting champion in 2005 and voiced an albatross in Finding Nemo.

Given Greive’s offbeat sense of humour, it would be easy to dismiss such inclusions on his website as tall tales tossed into the mix just for a laugh. But his response to my incredulity is simple: “As strange as my bio may seem in places, I assure you it is all true.”

By way of supporting evidence he sends photos: a victory pose on a Polynesian beach after claiming the rock-lifting title, and another of him standing proudly next to his cosmonaut spacesuit in 2004, having lost a significant amount of weight to fit his 193cm frame into it and be light enough for the Soyuz space capsule.

“You gotta try these things,” he tells TasWeekend via Skype from California ahead of his visit to Hobart next month for the Tasmanian Writers and Readers Festival. “I’m a firm believer in experiential-driven creativity: the belief that every idea you’ll ever have comes from what you do with your life, and that in order to write interesting books you first need to live an interesting life.

“My one truly famous friend, John Cleese, describes my life as one long suicide attempt. However, he’s completely wrong. I’ve lived a wonderful life adventure and I have the X-rays to prove it. We learn from our mistakes – and I’m a slow learner.”

After a punishing military career and other physical endeavours, Greive says his body is held together by scar tissue and titanium screws. But despite the action-man persona, he seems more like a poet at heart. His best-known books combine quirky animal photography with words of wisdom. His first, The Blue Day Book, has sold more than 10 million copies in 115 countries, and was not only a New York Times bestseller but a global bestseller. As well as his gift books in the Blue Day Book series, he has published his own illustrated edition of philosopher Bertrand Russell’s essay In Praise of Idleness and authored the non-fiction Penguin Bloom, which is set to become a feature film starring Naomi Watts.

Greive, 47, was born in Hobart in 1970, when his family was living at Battery Point and his father was working as a doctor at the University of Tasmania’s School of Medicine. He was still a baby when his dad got a scholarship to continue his medical studies at the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh and the family moved to Scotland.

Greive spent his childhood in Scotland, Wales, England, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore, and he eventually returned to Australia in the ’80s when his family moved to NSW. After finishing high school in 1988, he and a cousin headed to Tasmania for a week so Greive could reconnect with the island state. They rented a car and “screamed around the mountains like two chimps in a billycart”.

“I was utterly in awe of Tasmania’s unparalleled natural beauty, and intrigued by her dark history,” he says. “I felt a connection that has never left me – I determined there and then that as soon as I was able I would return to Tasmania to buy a rural property near the ocean.”

Greive would eventually make good on that promise, but the intervening years were busy. He enrolled in the Royal Military College at Duntroon and graduated in 1990, going on to be paratroop platoon commander with the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment (Para), based at Townsville. After a few years he left the military and worked in “underpaid but creatively enlightening positions”, including as a model and waiter.

He launched his career as a cartoonist in the ’90s, working for the Sydney Morning Herald. At the same time, he worked as a creative consultant for MTV, a creative consultant and writer for Godfrey Bigot’s comedy sketches on Today Tonight, released a line of greeting cards and wrapping paper, and made a threeminute animated short for Nickelodeon.

He finished The Blue Day Book in 1998 but struggled to find a publisher. “No publisher in Australia or the UK wanted The Blue Day Book, or the seven other books I wrote before that,” he says. “I was first published in the US and then later brought my work home. Bottom line, if I’d only focused on the local market, I might not have enjoyed any kind of career at all.

I’VE ALWAYS FELT RATHER SPECIAL BECAUSE OF WHERE I COME FROM

“Of the 30 million books I’ve sold, two million were sold in Australia and New Zealand – fewer than 7 per cent.

“While enjoying success at home is easily the most rewarding from a personal point of view, in the current market climate it’s very important to think internationally to ensure your work reaches the largest possible audience. This is not about dumb luck or dark magic, it’s a natural result of thinking big, proper planning and bloody-minded persistence.”

The Blue Day Book – with its sweetly philosophical and inspirational musings combined with poignant animal photos, designed to lift the spirits of those having a bad day – was finally published in 2000 and was a huge hit, its international success allowing him to keep his promise to his island home.

He moved back to Tasmania in 2001 and describes the next decade of living and writing on the East Coast – between other travelling adventures – as some of the happiest years of his life. But this period of bliss ended when he forgot to latch the gate to his property and his three great danes escaped while he was in town.

“The dogs got out and killed my neighbour’s sheep,” he says. “I’d lived on my own for a long time, and my dogs were my family. After they were put down I hit rock bottom and felt unable to write.

“The day I buried my dogs, half of St Helens turned up at my house that evening bearing food and wine, unplanned and unannounced, to try to lift my spirits. I will never ever forget this simple but profound gesture of love and support. To be honest, I still haven’t forgiven myself for what happened, and I don’t think I ever will.

“The sight of the dogs’ graves left me ruined with grief. I couldn’t enjoy my private slice of paradise anymore – I needed a change of scenery. Luckily, I had a long-standing invitation to be a creative consultant for Walt Disney Imagineering, a prestigious appointment I had rejected for several years due to not wanting to be apart from my dogs. So I bought a plane ticket.”

Imagineering is the research and development arm of Walt Disney responsible for the creation, design and construction of theme parks, restaurants, hotels and various attractions worldwide. In 2010, by the time he moved to California to take up a role as executive creative consultant in residence for Imagineering, Greive had completed 17 books in the Blue Day

Book series and worldwide sales had topped 20 million. “I didn’t know anybody in California when I arrived, but that didn’t bother me,” he says. “Like most writers, I’m quite content in my own company. I honestly didn’t expect to enjoy working for Disney as much as I did. Disney’s core value is sharing joy with those you love, and it’s hard not be positive when you spend your hours focused on delivering this promise. I found the whole process quite inspiring.”

His job at Imagineering also brought his future wife Amy Melin into his life. An architect with the company, her job involves the design and construction of the attractions created by the group. Meeting towards the end of Greive’s final three-month term with Imagineering, the couple maintained a long-distance relationship when Greive took on a writing project in Costa Rica and Melin remained in the US. After a year, he moved back to California fulltime – but he maintains he doesn’t “live” in California.

“My wife lives in Los Angeles and I live with my wife,” he says. “I didn’t want to live in Los Angeles, but from the moment Amy followed me down a 1000ft [305m] descent for her very first abseil I knew she was the one – giving up my home for the love of my life was both a very easy and a very painful decision.

“I’d be a complete bastard if I put my foot down and said, ‘That’s it, we’re going to Tasmania’. She has an amazing job and career opportunity and it’s my turn to be supportive. It’s a great time to be her. I’m happy to go along for the ride.

“Thankfully, Amy also understands that I go a little spare in an urban environment and gives me her blessing to run off into the wild from time to time to pursue my other projects.”

Greive says he spends 70 per cent of his time working on his next book projects, 20 per cent on opportunities such as TV and film projects and the remaining 10 per cent on outlandish ideas he comes up with. “They’re the ones nobody expects or even wants and most of them go nowhere but occasionally you pull one off,” he says.

Opportunities since he started living in the US include being a regular guest on talk show Chelsea Lately as the resident wildlife expert. He has also spent time in the Alaskan wilderness tracking and photographing what is possibly a new subspecies of brown bear for an Animal Planet documentary expected to air next year.

“Once I’d had a half-dozen television appearances, more offers started coming in. And so I made a more concerted effort to generate appropriate content,” he says. “Years later, when I brought back evidence of a new brown bear subspecies, Animal Planet were keen to talk.

“Funnily enough, I wasn’t even chosen to host my own show – an edict went out from the network chief saying he didn’t want to see any more ‘big, bearded men’ onscreen, so I was passed over for a far sleeker, fresh-faced host. But at the last minute that candidate dropped out and then his replacement wasn’t available at short notice, and I was suddenly promoted from off-camera expert to host at Seattle airport, while en route to Alaska.”

Over the past couple of years, he also found time to pen the acclaimed Penguin Bloom, putting words to the photographs taken by Sydney photographer Cameron Bloom of an adopted magpie named Penguin. The Australian family adopted the abandoned magpie chick after she fell from her nest, not long after Bloom’s wife Sam suffered a near-fatal fall that left her paralysed and depressed.

Bloom’s gorgeous black-and-white photos capture the way Penguin changed the family’s life, the magpie becoming a loved member as well as inspiring Sam to overcome her demons. The book is slated to become a feature film, shot in Sydney.

“I knew from the outset this deeply moving book had tremendous cinematic potential, and I was prepared to take my time to make sure the adaptation deal was perfect,” Greive says.

“The Bloom family and I had our hearts set on Naomi Watts playing the lead role. The only question was how to get the book to her. Naomi loved the book and not only wanted to play Sam Bloom, she also wanted to produce the movie. Suddenly, with Naomi in place, Reese Witherspoon jumped on board, along with her powerhouse Aussie producing partner Bruna Papandrea. All of this took just over a year to put together, and frankly I still can’t believe we pulled it off.” And there is good news for Tasmania as well, with Friend of

the Devil, a TV series Greive has been developing, to be shot in Tasmania next year, featuring Lowdown and Wilfred star Adam Zwar. “I plan to come back to Tasmania to shoot the pilot,” Greive says. “It will be an adventure-travel comedy series and it will be largely unscripted in the way Curb Your Enthusiasm or This Is

Spinal Tap were unscripted. “I want Adam’s reactions to what he experiences to be genuine, in the moment, when he’s gone too far to turn back. The idea of dragging him behind me into the Tasmanian wilderness fills my cruel heart with delight. I’m hoping it will be something not only our fellow Tasmanians will enjoy but also mainlanders and people overseas.”

Greive’s use of the possessive pronoun here and the slightly pejorative term “mainlanders” does not go unnoticed by

TasWeekend and he laughs raucously when it is pointed out. “Oh yeah, don’t you try to palm me off as some expat wannabe American,” he says. “I’ll have none of that.

“Let me step naked from the tepid bath of false modesty and be perfectly clear: I’ve always felt rather special because of where I come from. Thankfully, my wife loves Tasmania and one day we plan to move back for good.”

It has been three years since his last visit, but Greive will get his fix of Tasmania when he visits for the biennial Tasmanian Writers and Readers Festival next month. He will be giving a masterclass in landing that elusive publishing contract, a workshop on children’s writing and a talk with friend Andrew Hopwood about their experiences in the book trade.

“I’ll be kept fairly busy while I’m down there, but there are about half a dozen restaurants around Hobart that, as a man of impressive dimensions, I am obliged to go to and eat my fill,” he says. “Sadly, I won’t have a chance to head up the East Coast, as much as I’d love to.”

The next big challenge on Greive’s horizon will be parenthood, with he and Amy planning to start a family soon – a plan that has already curtailed some of his creative endeavours.

“I had been developing a documentary about the wildlife living in the 20-mile [32km] exclusion zone around Chernobyl, but the thought of me returning home with irradiated testes just as we start planning for a family did not rate highly on the domestic scorecard,” he says. “So I won’t be doing the field work on that one.

“I’m definitely looking forward to having kids. My own experiences with small primates to date have not been particularly successful, though: I’ve had five treatments for rabies so far. But I’m a bit appeased by the fact human babies don’t have teeth, so there will be less biting – to begin with, anyway.”

If Greive’s life has proven anything, it is that he really is up for anything. He takes every opportunity, not just because the experiences feed into his writing but because they enrich him as a person. And, as his phenomenal publishing success demonstrates, persistence pays off.

“I was a paratrooper, but I was afraid of heights,” he says. “As a young platoon commander, I took up recreational skydiving to help overcome that. I wasn’t very good at that, either. On one occasion I missed the drop zone entirely and crash-landed onto an enormous barbecue grill at the local aero club. The pilots and their families were quite surprised when I wiped away a hotplate covered in sizzling onions using only my tender buttocks.”

“Whatever success I’ve enjoyed as an author, indeed my entire approach to creative discipline, reflects the values such as persistence; drilled into me as a soldier. Anything I’ve achieved that sounds impressive has far less to do with fragrant genius and more to do with the paratrooper ethos of ‘die first, quit later’.”

For more details on next month’s Tasmanian Writers and Readers Festival, which will run from Thursday, September 14, to Sunday, September 17, visit taswriters.org