A short Bio
Thank you for taking the time to come here to what is a collection of my thoughts and viewpoints. I hope you find something to take away with you.
In life, I have done some things I am proud of, some that I not so proud of and some I would do again if the chance arose.
I grew up in rural Australia in an era when we didn’t have to be concerned about making our houses like fortresses or constantly worry about our kids being at risk from elements in the society. The conflict in Korea had finished and Vietnam had yet to start.
In the five plus decades since I have produced four lovely kids, earned a degree at university and won a Pride of Australia medal and in some respect made a commitment towards living life as an adventure. Too often I have watched friends fail to achieve their life expectations before illness or accident took them from us.
I have been rich and I have been poor and at both ends of my financial extremes I have worried just the same about not having the cash in hand to pay the bills on time.
In 1999 I found great satisfaction in doing something that has since transformed my life and is the driving force behind much of what I now do. I was broke again but found that there was a whole world filled with people worse off than me. There was this peak of several lines in my life all crossing at the same time when I followed up on an opportunity to go to Kosovo just after the war where I would work for an American organisation providing shelter for thousands of homeless people. After a year and a half of doing that I bought a small boat and sailed through the canals of Holland, Belgium and France for ten months stealing the dreams of a dozen people I know, having a baguette and a slab of cheese and a lump of sausage washed down with a bottle of rose for lunch on the back deck while moored in some little cul-de-sac along the French waterways.
Then Afghanistan erupted. I went there for the next two and half years, managing programs that employed thousands of people initially so they wouldn’t grow opium. It was a drop in the bucket but it had some positive results and many negative ones. I finished up working with UNDP as the Senior Adviser to the Minister for Rural Rehabilitation and Development.
I left Afghanistan and arrived back in Australia the day before the tsunami razed Aceh. It was only a matter of two weeks before I and found myself there working for a few months again managing the initial cleanup of the coastline with the UN.
After that I needed some time out and for a while I lived on a small island in Thailand. I needed a rest and started writing as I looked out into the coconut grove that was my garden. It was almost idyllic save the occasional interruption due to noisy or inebriated people. After a while it started to lack any real depth so this last year we moved to Penang in Malaysia. We have since bought a small house in the UNESCO World Heritage zone. I am planning on spending some time at the end of this year to renovate it.
To support that I returned work in Afghanistan for all of 2009. I am not particularly satisfied with the impact that our projects have on development and the peace process. They are directed more toward show much we can spend with seemingly little interest in the impact of what it is we do.
These days I am convinced that we can make a difference however it is not going to happen the way we are going about it now. The poor need support but too often we simply provide a short term relief and offer nothing in the way of sustainability, going from one crisis to the next.
No matter how many miles of road we construct, no matter how many government buildings we rehabilitate, no matter how many schools we build, if regional industry is not healthy, if people are not being employed and have security existing in their domestic lives then the process of crisis will reoccur time and time again at the least provocation.
If I can, I want to change that.
