I have a Ph.D. in History and a postgraduate qualification in English-language teaching. That said, I would describe myself best as an independent scholar. I spend most of my time working on a book which will show that the history of the 20th century - in the sense that most people know it - has been falsified virtually in its entirety and should be thought of rather as propaganda. Yes, as Henry Ford said, history is bunk.
Back in the early 70s, when I was growing up in Brisbane, I attended Acacia Ridge State High School, spent most of my time listening to the fashionable hard rock and prog rock bands of the day and learned to play basic rock guitar. Amazingly, some of the bands I worshipped actually came to Brisbane. The most famous of those I saw in concert would be Led Zeppelin, who I saw a few weeks after their classic fourth album had been released, but by far the best was Jethro Tull, whose 1975 show promoting their latest album War Child was astonishing. I also collected a few autographs along the way, meeting people like Black Sabbath (including Ozzy), Marc Bolan, Cat Stevens, Queen (including Freddie Mercury), Jon Lord, Ritchie Blackmore and David Coverdale. I also started a band with a few of my old school buddies, including John Kennedy. Called Mantelpiece - an allusion to a Monty Python sketch - we never performed live but concentrated on recording tracks in John's garage live to cassette. We recorded a mixture of originals written either by John or myself and covers of songs we liked a lot such as Ronnie Lane's beautiful Debris.
By the late 70s, I had had enough of my day job working for the Queenland Government Tourist Bureau and hurriedly put together enough money to go travelling in Europe for a year from 1979-80. After I returned from my travels, I played guitar in and wrote songs for a Brisbane band called JFK and the Cuban Crisis. Our best-produced track, The Texan Thing - thank you, Colin Bloxsom - achieved high rotation on Sydney's JJJ radio in about 1983, but we broke up about a year later. Incidentally, JFK's lead singer, John Kennedy, has re-recorded two of my songs (Gotham City, White Civilisation) from that period for his latest CD Someone's Dad. Around the time JFK began breaking up, I dabbled in co-writing songs with David McComb of the Triffids; of the dozen-odd songs we worked on together my favourite is Blinder By The Hour, which is on the Triffids' Calenture album. We also did an 'unplugged' affair, a mini-album called Lawson Square Infirmary, which was recorded covertly one night at the Sydney Opera House.
Anyone interested in reading (in some considerable detail) about my association with David McComb and the Triffids can visit this still-developing thread on the Triffids website: http://thetriffids.com/forum/index.php/topic,1605.0.html
By the late 80s, after I had failed to get a new band, Champagne Love Garden, up and running, I lost interest in contemporary music and concentrated on my studies in ancient and modern history at the University of Sydney. Amazingly, considering I spent most of my time reading prodigious amounts of books about subjects that had little if anything to do with what I was supposed to be working on, I managed to complete a Ph.D. dissertation on British travellers to Italy in the Tudor and early Stuart period and was awarded a doctorate in 2001. A chapter from this thesis is available as a short book here:
http://www.lulu.com/content/121258
I spent the happiest year of my life, 1995, living in Vienna, Austria, and Vignoni Alta, Italy. In Vignoni Alta, I became friendly with an expatriate English painter, Sue Kennington, a wonderful human being and a very good artist indeed. You can see some of her work at these locations:
http://www.re-title.com/artists/Sue-Kennington.asp
http://www.showcomplex.com/images/Sue%5FKennington/
Sue also introduced me to English author Erin Pizzey and American author Ferenc Mate. Mate subsequently published a book about this period of his life, The Hills of Tuscany, although I couldn't find any references to her (or myself!) in it.
In the late 1990s, I dabbled in music again, helping to produce demos for a close friend, a Sydney keyboardist and songwriter named Leng Boonwaat. Of the bunch of tracks we did together between 1998 and 2000, my favourite, Close Your Eyes, can be downloaded using the link posted immediately to your left (in the Music section). Around the same time I contributed around ten essays - more than any other single contributor - to the Routledge encyclopedia Literature of Travel and Exploration (3 vols.) URL: http://www.routledge-ny.com/ref/travellit/index.html I also contributed a biography of the mid-18th century female traveller Elizabeth Justice - the first female traveller ever to have published an account of her travels - to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. URL: http://www.oxforddnb.com/index/101059243/
Since 2001, I've created a couple of websites on aspects of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a subject that utterly absorbed me for about two years. Under a number of pseudonyms, I've also published articles on political assassinations and other conspiracy-related topics. I'm not going to tell you what they are, though, because I've been reliably informed that thanks to these articles 'they' are out to get me.
Music-wise, I am nuts these days about two early '70s bands that I didn't pay nearly enough attention to at the time, Badfinger and Bloodrock. But my favourite album is still, and has probably always been, The Who's Next.