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.
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.
NEW EXTRACTS from Novels, Short Stories and Memoirs: go to WRITER then to whatever category you want to look at (try the lot!).
SEVEN NEW ILLUSTRATED TRAVELOGUES!
Four take you to various CHINESE destinations, first up the Yangtze in Closing the Gates on China's Three Gorges; to Nanjing where I find I have something in common with The Birds of Nanjing; to Beijing where I am offered The Generosity of Dr. Fung; and finally a magical bus trip In the Depths of Rural Yunnan.
Then we go to NORTH AMERICA for a hair-raising account: On Guns, God and Testosterone in Arizona. More violence, but this time in the past not the present, when Crossing USA , and peace and tranquility in lovely Vancouver Island On Motorcycles but not on Whales.