Childhood

I was born in October 1971 in Bristol, Great Britain, of very young parents of Anglo-Irish origins. At the age of two, I was taken to Australia to live with my adoptive parents, who already had two sons.

The latter are what we generally call “globetrotters” who would blindfold their eyes, throw a dart at a world map and wherever it stuck, would drop everything and move there.

We spent several years between Melbourne, Sidney and living in a wooden and corrugated iron house in the bush north of Brisbane, Queensland (check Bauple in Google Earth™ and you’ll get an idea of what it was like). A great life for a child, though life with no running water and no electricity, among the cane toads and snakes, was probably not the ideal life for my parents.

My mother, who was a potter, sold her wares and my father set up a fruit and vegetable stall at the side of the main road along the Great Barrier Reef.

We finally hopped back to the United Kingdom via Malaysia and the Arab Emirates and spent another few years in Cornwall where my Father ran the large garden centre (Plymouth).

European culture was new to me. I had to wear shoes (very painful at first) and found that in the summer, you could expect 17°C and rain, what you get in winter Down Under. I also found that there was another national anthem than Waltzing Mathilda.