I live in Sydney, Australia. Originally from New Zealand, I grew up in a small town of 900 or so people. It was essentially a rural – certainly rustic – upbringing that was no preparation for a move to Melbourne Australia in 1976 and about as far from the bustle of Sydney as you can get.
I have most recently been working in the NGO space for thirteen years in the private sector. Prior to that, I was employed by the Department of Defence. The Air Force to be precise. In that time I was fortunate enough to enjoy a four year period with the Department of Foreign Affairs.
Somehow I found myself doing a lot of travel in the last twenty years, a trip to China in September 2006 sparking the idea of a blog, nicely mixing as it does my interest in writing and other arts. Like many others this is a second blog, coming after the more experimental Blogspot on which I cut my teeth.
This blog will give me more flexibility to write about broader things than just travel although I am hoping there will still be plenty of that. Pickledeel conveniently provided the fuel for a book published by Harper Collins and based on my travels to Iraq in 2007. You can find ‘Flowers of Baghdad” here.
