I am a fifth generation Tasmanian, but fled my home state as soon as I graduated from university. I started my academic career in England and have held academic posts in Australia, Canada and Hong Kong.
Like the autumn leaf in the Chinese proverb, I too fell to my roots. After leaving academe, I retired to Tasmania, where I live with my wife and partner, Catherine Tang. We are both now exercising our right hemispheres, Catherine with several genres of craftwork, me with writing fiction. My most recent novel, Tin Dragons, is about Chinese tin miners in Tasmania. It has had good reviews and has been reprinted. My current project is Return to Van Diemen's Land, a socio-political history of Tasmania as seen through the eyes of my great-great-grandfather Abraham Biggs and his seed. It will be published by Forty Degrees South later in 2010.
Hong Kong and Tasmania have much in common. Both are islands; the inhabitants of both have a love-hate relationship with that looming presence, The Mainland; both are extraordinarily beautiful and mountainous; both have governments that refuse to recognize their charge of stewardship over that beauty, a beauty I have tried to capture in photographic images while it still lasts. My academic and other rovings are told in my memoirs and in travelogues.
Regular NEW EXTRACTS from Novels, Short Stories and Memoirs: go to WRITER then to whatever category you want to look at.
NEW ILLUSTRATED TRAVELOGUES! The latest takes us across Eastern Canada to Old Quebec
One System, Two Countries?then down the West of America From Beggars to Beauty and Back. Other recent ones include Ireland in the Sun, A Week in Provence.