Her mother’s voice on the phone was smaller than usual.
“I’m sorting through some boxes,” the older woman said. “Found these old photographs from the 1960s. Your grandfather in uniform. Me at some event I can’t quite remember. There’s a man here I don’t recognize at all.”
She held one up to the light, as if better lighting might return the memory. It didn’t.
“Who is he, do you think?”
Her daughter took the phone back to her ear. She could ask, right now. The story was still there, still retrievable. Her mother was still here. But the daughter had laundry to fold. Emails to answer. A meeting in twenty minutes. Asking would take time, real time, the kind you can’t get back once you’ve spent it elsewhere.
“Maybe we can look through them together sometime,” the daughter said.
They both knew what that meant. Sometime never arrives. It just waits quietly in the future until one day it’s too late, and the question you thought you had years to ask becomes the one you’ll spend decades wishing you’d asked when you had the chance.
The photograph went back in the box. The story stayed locked inside her mother’s memory, where it would die the day her mother did.
Meet Christine Matheson-Green
She’s the founder of Remember Press, a publishing platform built specifically for entrepreneurs and families who want to write their stories before time runs out. But Christine isn’t a typical publisher. She’s lived at least five different lives, actress, chef, restaurateur, newspaper editor, television producer, and each one taught her something about people that prepared her for this moment. She understands regret the way people understand air. She breathes it in every day through the stories her clients bring her, and she’s determined to make sure the next generation doesn’t carry the weight of the questions they never asked.
Five Lives, One Purpose
The first surprising thing to know about Christine is that she was never supposed to end up here.
She began as a performer. A ballerina. An actress. A founding member of Theatre in Education, moving through the world with the kind of presence that made people watch. But something shifted when she started teaching. First in Australian classrooms, then at Melbourne University and Victoria University. She taught literacy, which meant teaching people how to find their voice. She taught in Japan at one of only two English immersion schools in the entire country, where she learned that story is the universal language underneath all language.
Teaching led to journalism. She became an editor, a writer for publications like Weekend Australian and Travel Week, the kind of writer who understood that every person had something worth saying if you asked the right questions. Then came the newspaper. She was editor-in-chief of Tasmania’s biggest circulation paper, the role that placed her directly inside the stories that mattered most to her community.
But in 1977, at twenty-five years old, she did something that made no sense on a resume. She opened a restaurant.
Then another. Then another. Ten successful restaurants and food businesses over twenty-five years. She was running empires during the Fitzgerald enquiry in Queensland, a period when Brisbane’s underworld and legitimate business blurred dangerously. She watched her staff navigate complex personalities. She learned which people thrived under pressure and which ones crumbled. She discovered that the most talented people often didn’t fit neatly into predictable boxes. She nearly got killed once—a staff member crossed a line that could have ended everything.
After that, she opened Tasmania’s first Fashion Factory Outlet. Then she founded a company called Off the Hotplate, a toolbox of courses designed to teach emotional intelligence and build high-functioning teams. When COVID hit, she pivoted. She created a forum where chefs, restaurateurs, and industry people could share their stories and wisdom.
Every single chapter of her life was preparation for what came next.
The Book That Unlocks Everything
In 2021, Christine founded Remember Press. The origin story matters because it explains everything that followed.
Years earlier, her father died. He was remarkable—Head of ASIO for Queensland, fluent in six languages, an interpreter in courts, the first policeman in Queensland to earn a university degree. He had stories that could have shaped generations. She never recorded them. She was too busy. Too caught up in the urgency of her own life. By the time she understood what she’d lost, it was gone.
This grief became fuel.
“What I realised,” she says, “is that people massively underestimate the meaning of their own lives. They don’t see how powerful it is to preserve a voice, a laugh, a truth, before it slips away.”
Remember Press isn’t another AI-powered publishing platform. The market is flooded with those. Instead, Christine built a system based on twenty-five years of running businesses, teaching, editing, and understanding how people actually work. She created a subscription service with workbooks, video guidance, and a framework that helps authors move from idea to published book without the paralysis that stops most people from starting.
The framework is simple, but the philosophy behind it is radical. Every book Christine helps publish serves a reader, not the author’s ego. She asks her clients the same question every time: Who did you wish you’d had five years ago? Write that book. Not the book you think you should write. The book someone needs you to write.
“I adapt the process to the person,” she explains. “Every author is different. Every voice is different. Every book must be different. That’s how you create books people actually remember.”
Her clients have gone from corporate executives to families preserving memoirs to war correspondents finally telling the stories they survived. One client came to her with forty years of ideas bubbling in his head, stuck, paralysed. She gave him the canvas. Another realised halfway through that she wasn’t writing for herself, she was writing the book she wished she’d had five years earlier. The moment she understood that shift, everything clicked. This is the core of Christine’s philosophy: the book isn’t the destination. It’s the tool that changes who the reader becomes.
She believes in something most publishers have abandoned. She believes the reader comes first. Always.
The Matheson-Green Playbook: Five Lessons
Lesson One: Stay in your lane. Authority comes from depth, not breadth. The people who build real credibility go deep into one thing, not shallow into everything.
Lesson Two: Your book is your new business card. Publishing establishes authority faster than any other tool available. The executives who write books become the ones leading conferences and commanding rooms.
Lesson Three: Get out of your own way. When you’re too close to your own problem, you can’t see the solution. Step back. Pretend you’re looking at someone else’s challenge. Ask another brain for the long view you need.
Lesson Four: Find the talents latent in everyone. People are complex. Too often, someone gets promoted into a role that doesn’t fit them, and no one—least of all the person doing the job—understands why they’re struggling. Great leadership means seeing what people are actually built to do.
Lesson Five: Use humour to connect. When people laugh together, they connect. There’s nothing like it. This is true in restaurants. It’s true in families. It’s true in books.
The Question That Changed Everything
Christine still hasn’t written her own book.
She has stories that would reshape how people think about resilience, about reinvention, about the price of success and the value of failing publicly. She has photographs from Egypt in 1982. She has memories from Brisbane’s restaurant underworld during one of the most dangerous periods in the city’s history. She has the untold story of watching her father’s life slip away before she thought to preserve it.
But here’s what she knows now that she didn’t know then. The best time to tell your story was yesterday. The second-best time is today. She’s stopped waiting for someday.
And somewhere, a daughter is still holding a photograph she doesn’t understand. But if she reads Christine’s work, she’ll know exactly what to do. She’ll put down what she’s doing. She’ll call her mother. She’ll ask.
The box can wait. The story cannot.
Christine Matheson-Green is the founder of Remember Press, a subscription-based publishing platform for entrepreneurs and families in Hobart, Tasmania. She helps business leaders establish authority through books and guides families in preserving their legacies for generations.
