For seventeen years, Peter McKinnon held senior roles in the frenzied world of high finance, the last five sitting at the top executive table of Australia's then largest financial organisation, NAB, reporting directly to the CEO. As a psychologist working inside large organisations, he had spent a lifetime studying human behaviour and the way big companies work. Life was fast, privileged, exhilarating.Then, in one twenty-four-hour period, everything would change. The largest trading scandal in Australian financial services history would break and leave people, profits and reputations shattered in its wake.Disillusioned by what he had experienced, Peter stayed a year then cast himself adrift of corporate life. Then, a surprise phone call from a friend since childhood, World Vision Australia CEO Tim Costello, literally turned his world upside down once more, and he and his wife found themselves living and working on the other side of the world in Los Angeles and putting their hands to changing the lives of others around the world. Responsibility for forty thousand employees in over one hundred countries in the largest humanitarian NGO in the world, World Vision International, shifted his view of the world and underlined for Peter, once again, the importance living a life that made a difference to others.When he returned to Australia in late 2009, he determined to pursue a more creative and purposeful life and began to write.Decades earlier, with the help of his wife Julie (who had appeared for several years on the ABC television series Bellbird) he had written and produced an amateur musical on a similar theme to The Songs of Jesse Adams. Many thousands attended and celebrated what became an acclaimed local hit. Thirty years later, Peter, now a full-time writer, has re-imagined this musical in book form, The Songs of Jesse Adams which gives readers an engaging fantasy on what can happen when the unexpected lands on your doorstep ...
"The Age" - Spectrum - In Short Fiction - Reviews by Cameron Woodhead - 6 September 2014 (also in "The Sydney Morning Herald" and "The Canberra Times"): 'Adapting the story of Christ to 1960s Australia? "The Songs of Jesse Adams" is about as ambitious as it could be, and it's a testament to Peter McKinnon's storytelling that it doesn't fall on its face. The author captures the spirit of the age of protest, the bridling at an unjust war and the revolution in popular music with zest, and there's an understated Australian flavour in his adaptation, which brings to life King's Cross and the inner suburbs of Melbourne (the garden of Gethsemane is reimagined, naturally enough, as a Carlton beer garden). There is, however, passages when the writing isn't up to the emotional freight of the story, and a more complex act of creative transfiguration is needed to save it from seeming overwrought. Still, for the most part it's an unusual and weirdly compelling read.'
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