This blog is about stuff, but as this page is about me allow me to indulge: 

I’m pretty normal actually. I’m married and have two dogs. Well, actually three if you count my Golden Retriever who has been adopted by Mum. I used to be somewhat of a rebel. I’ve tempered my spirit somewhat in recent times. I’m more chilled now and no longer feel the need to go do silly things like join the Army – I thank my lovely wife for that. I love good food and travel. I can speak some Chinese, Mandarin. I dislike cruelty to animals and ignorant people. Bozo’s annoy me too. I have the perfect novel inside of me; I’ve ben trying to get it out for about a year and a bit now.

Job-wise its been a bit of a journey. My first real job lasted a week – I was not cut out to be a waiter (I’m too impatient). I decided I wanted to embrace my manly manlinessness and thus joined the Army at 19. I learnt a lot about myself, and others, and curiously delighted in jumping out of perfectly functioning aircraft. Hemingway once said, “An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools,” and so eventually the drinking and the fools began to make me realise that a career in the Army was not for me. And so I did an about-turn and marched back to the dreaded classroom.

My education is interesting. As a kid I hated school. No really, I HATED it. I was a bright kid but was ultimately let down by my junior education. I was moderately good at maths. I loved reading history. I was the second fasted kid in my year and not bad at handball I might add. Still, I was repressed by the same narrow – and ubiquitous – view on education that has sadly repressed so many bright young people over the years who don’t find quadratic equations particular interesting. Highschool remains a hormone-fueled blur.

Undergraduate life changed the way I looked at education. The frustration I experienced in earlier years lifted off me as I experienced unbridled interest in just about everything; I was even awarded  a scholarship to study in China for a year. Moving to China was just great, great, great. I began reading Owen Lattimore’s journey’s through China and thus became very interested in the North-West province of Xinjiang, home of the Muslim Uighur. I ended up writing an honours thesis, titled Civil Rights within the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region: Prospects and Challenges. My then head of school told me I received the highest single honours mark by an examiner since she had been with the University – the other examiner was not so generous, but I was pretty chuffed by that.

In choosing to continue onto PhD or earn some coin, my financial state pushed me into the latter category – although I would have been quite comfortable being the perpetual student. So, I enrolled into a post-grad law course majoring in Migration Law.  However, the more I studied and learnt about migration, the more jaded and pessimistic I became about the whole process – from the dodgy migration agents and applicants, to, especially, the inconsistent and whimsical decisions by case-officers within the Immigration department. I graduated, but chose to work in Education over migration because I thought why not combine my knowledge of Education and Migration law with my aquired understanding of Asian cultures and language. Since then I have studied Project Management within the International Education space and am currently completing my MBA (Executive).

I currently work in the mining sector , but I’m not a miner nor do I have a minerals qualification. I represent the minerals industry at tertiary level, focussing on the promotion of mining engineering, geosciences and metallurgy. It’s a great deal – I get to travel to Universities all over Australia, I meet some amazingly interesting people, I get to hang-out with students and work in a position where my work can contribute significantly to the future of Australia’s minerals industry. 

Anyhoo, enuff of my ramblings. This blog is, in the bastardised words of Rupert Brooke, some corner of the world-wide web that is for ever mine. It’s about stuff.