MARK LEEHY – PRODUCT DEVELOPER and PUBLISHER

Writing Credits

Developmental Classroom Music Program

  • Music Room (books 1-7)

Integrated Arts Program

  • Cool Cats Cross Arts Adventures (levels 1-4)

Singing Resources

  • Start Singing (with the Cool cats Kids)
  • Start Singing Aussie Kids Songs
  • Advance Australia Fair (adapted for younger singers)

Guitar tutor

  • Upbeat Guitar 2

Dance collections

  • Cool Cats Big Bush Dance with Paradidle Band
  • Cool Cats Big Dance Party with Paradidle Dance Band
  • Start Singing Action Songs with Paradiddle Band
  • Start Singing and Dancing with Paradiddle Band

Mini-musicals

  • What We Did on Our Holidays
  • Our Cake Eating Hippo Plays (musical adaptation of the Hazel Edwards stories)
  • The Gingerbread Man
  • Holidays

Junior Musicals

  • A Christmas Pageant
  • HMS Pinafore (adapted for younger performers)
  • The Mikado (adapted for younger performers)
  • The Pirates of Penzance (adapted for younger performers)
  • Kids in Camelot
  • The Little Mermaid
  • Masquerade!
  • A Kidsummer Night’s Dream
  • Danger Kids
  • Kids at Sea
  • Once Upon a Time
  • Kids in Paradise
  • Dragon Girl
  • Currawong Creek
  • Kids in Space
  • Superkids

Senior Musicals

  • Open Season

Music picture book

  • Moondrops – a First Book of Lullabies

Paradiddle Band

  • Wait Till the Word Gets Around
  • Sorry To Keep You Waiting
  • Eureka! Live at the Stockade

Miscellaneous

  • Cool Cats Graduation Kit

Being the publisher for the company, Mark gets to hang out with writers, artists and musos (his favourite pastime). He is always on the lookout for people with interesting and exciting ideas in music education and will either generate the project or find it in the submissions that arrive on his desk. It’s Mark’s job to put together the team and guide the project home. Sometimes his role is editorial and sometimes it’s hands-on researching, writing, composing and recording – and, these days, filming.

Mark is a Marrickville boy whose family never stood still. He grew up in Sydney, Melbourne and Darwin – giving him an early taste of state similarities and differences in education. These days he has a home, office and studio in Upwey, in Victoria’s beautiful Dandenong Ranges, where he lives with his wife, cat, free-range chooks – and several tree frogs, geckoes and bearded dragons (it’s a Darwin thing).

Mark has been a classroom teacher, music teacher and Music Advisor, as well as a professional musician, writer and performer. He holds a Dip Prim Tch and a Grad Dip Mus as well as a Grad Dip in Editing and Publishing..

Mark was a founder member of Paraddiddle Band, an Australian-Irish group that has been doing bush dances and primary school programs since 1978 and still won’t go away.

In the late eighties, he began writing school musicals with Lynne Bartlett, Rob Fairbairn and Kevin O’Mara. By the end of the decade, he, Lynne and Kev began Bushfire Press and those early shows were the first titles published by the company.

Get in contact with Mark via email