Paul Voermans

Returning to Australia in the 1990s, Voermans helped launch VICNET, a proto-Internet service provider and community web publisher at the State Library of Victoria, leading the technical team that produced early versions of the genealogy database, social media (My Connected Community), and intranet, installing free public internet in libraries based on a direct US satellite service, and advocating for information equality for regional and other disadvantaged groups. He has since worked for the Victorian Government in Information Technology innovation, cloud computing and remote working.

"Manipulating Reality, Puppetry and Mask in Australia" at the National Gallery of Victoria (1981)

Voermans exhibited masks and puppets at the National Gallery of Victoria and the Arts Centre Melbourne and taught mime at the Victorian College of the Arts. He played the silent character Max Box in Trapp, Winkle & Box for ABC TV, appearing with Wendy Harmer, Robert Forza, and Lynda Gibson, before moving to the United Kingdom for a number of years, where he wrote his first novel while working as a butler and in the kitchen of a psychiatric institution in the late 1980s.

Theatre, colonialism, natural history, insanity, the dynamics of friendship groups, along with off-the-wall and often scatological humour, are all preoccupations for Paul Voermans. Chantal Zabus has described And Disregards the Rest, a novel involving The Tempest and alien invasion, as being about "ecocide", saying "Voermans is aware of the intertext that emerged, in the 1980s, strata from sci-fi texts and 'high art' postmodernist fiction", asserting that "And Disregards the Rest indubitably draws on the cyberpunk repertoire".

After studying drama at Melbourne State College, Voermans helped found B'Spell Performance Troupe, a community puppet and Commedia dell'arte theatre company, associated with Handspan Theatre, Suitcase Theatre, and the Magic Mushroom Mime Troupe, performing at festivals around Australia, in schools, on streets, and at number of alternative Melbourne venues such as the Why Not Theatre and The Universal Theatre in the 1970s and 1980s.

Paul Voermans (born 4 June 1960) is an Australian performer, community IT advocate, and writer of prose and poetry, whose work includes a number of novels. Published as science fiction, the novels contain elements of surrealism, horror, and humour. They have been compared to RA Lafferty and Douglas Adams.

Paul Voermans was born in Traralgon, Victoria, in 1960. The son of Indo refugees, Voermans was brought up in suburban Melbourne under the White Australia Policy and during a wave of European immigration. In the 1970s, while still a teenager, he studied writing with Vonda McIntyre, Christopher Priest, and George Turner at a Clarion-style workshop held at Monash University.