His maternal grandmother, née Florence Laflin, had a family tree linking her through an unbroken line of agricultural labourers to the end of the sixteenth century.

In Liverpool, thanks to a friendship with the London teenage pop poet Royston Ellis, he met George Harrison and Stuart Sutcliffe, the Beatle who was a promising young artist but died of a brain haemorrhage in Hamburg in 1962.

He worked as a writer and researcher for Pathé Films from 1965 to 1969 and made journeys to shoot Pathe Pictorial in Morocco, Bermuda, Florida, New York and Hong Kong.

Norris started the design shop Ace Notions in Camden Town, London, which was later shared with the new wave fashion house Swanky Modes.

Following the excesses of the Three-Day Week and the IRA bombing campaign of 1974 (and the birth of their daughter Klio), Barrell and Norris moved to Sydney, where they lived together in the same house in Balmain.

In 1988, the last year of Ronald Reagan's presidency, Barrell toured the US to make a five-part radio series Choice of America which visited Los Angeles, Houston, New Orleans, Boston, Washington and New York City.

In 1989, Barrell won the Australian Writers' Guild award (known as an AWGIE)[3] for radio for his play about the American poet Hart Crane, Lost at Sea.

Both Danzo and Crane committed suicide by jumping off ferry boats—and it explored ideas of synchronicity and the concept of 'dying at the right time' in the context of western and Japanese culture.

[1] In 1994, in the immediate aftermath of the genocidal massacres, Barrell travelled as field producer for ABC's Foreign Correspondent on assignment to Rwanda (with reporter Peter George).

The result was broadcast in a feature by Radio Eye, but what made it different and special, was that it was accompanied by a dedicated website titled Trammit!, the wider story of light rail trams and street cars throughout the world.

The ABC website carries Must You See the Joins?, an illustrated article about the great collagists including the veteran Japanese artist Kimura Tsuneihisa who celebrated his 80th birthday in 2008.

[6] In 2000, Barrell was commissioned to produce a one-off report for the ABC TV's leading currents affairs program Four Corners, a study of how the service industries have grown and changed Australia's working life.

Also in 2003, BBC World Service and ABC sent Tony to Singapore, Vietnam and Okinawa for a series about the effect of Chinese and Confucian values in the Asian region.