Hi, I’m Adam Martin. Much of my life has been spent balancing two opposing instincts: order and drift, measure and memory. One part of me is trained to hold things together. I’m a registered architect and project manager, accustomed to plans, contracts, budgets, and the careful discipline required to stop buildings, timelines, and budgets from coming undone. It’s a life shaped by structure and precision.

But there is another part of me that belongs elsewhere.

It lives in Bicheno, on Tasmania’s east coast, at our family shack overlooking Peggy’s Point. It’s there, watching the granite rise from the sea in slow, lichen-softened forms, that the limits of order become clear. Those monoliths hold weather, years, and stories without ever needing to explain themselves. They remind me that not everything of value can be managed or measured, especially memory.

For a long time, I’ve found myself searching for stories about Bicheno that are framed by nostalgia, memory and connection to place. Stories that simply didn’t reduce small coastal towns to either hardship or holiday. Those realities exist, of course, but they are not the whole truth. I wanted to read something that reflected the quiet luck of living close to the sea, the weight of history carried in ordinary lives, and the creative, thoughtful communities that persist beyond the city’s gaze.

I wanted a publication that assumed people here, and people who care about here, are perceptive, curious, and deeply connected to place. That they value culture and craft, memory and environment, as much as productivity or progress. And I wanted something that could act as a bridge: between those who stayed and those who left, between locals and visitors, between past and present.

So I made The Bicheno Stories.

But my most important role is at home. I’m the partner to the most extraordinary, beautiful woman and my best friend, Gabrielle, whose astonishing patience keeps my world from spinning off its axis. Together we’re raising four children. They are my daily reminder that attention is an act of care, and that stories, like places, are inherited whether we speak about them or not.

Much of what I write circles around vulnerability, especially the unspoken kind. I care deeply about men’s mental health and the damage done by silence, by the belief that strength requires concealment. I’m drawn to imperfect stories. Fractured ones. Human ones. I don’t believe in polish for its own sake. I believe beauty lives in cracks, in scars, in landscapes that have been weathered and remain.

The Bicheno Stories exist because places hold memory. Because not all stories are loud. Because some towns don’t ask to be explained, only listened to. This journal is an invitation to slow down, to sit with a place, and to let it speak in its own time.

And to you, the reader: thank you. Time is the only thing we never get back, and you’ve chosen to spend some of yours here. That matters more than you know. May the landscapes that shape your life steady you, challenge you, and occasionally remind you to let go. From this quiet edge of the coast, and from a heart still learning how to listen, thank you.