My family came to Australia in 2010 and I have been in the Wheatbelt since mid-2017. I am currently the principal of Bolgart Primary School and live in Coondle in the Shire of Toodyay. Before that I was in Borden which is about 125km north of Albany, through the Stirling Range. I was the principal at the school there for nearly three years.
I was part of the Toodyay and Districts Bendigo Bank and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I am also the president and coach of the Toodyay soccer club.
My parents were both British and I was originally born in New Zealand and adopted. I went to school and university in the UK. England although familiar is not classified as home in my head. When I go and visit England I don't think, "Oh, I am home." I am just in England. Home is always here, where I am now.
I studied mathematics and statistics at university initially. I then worked in casinos looking at table placement. For example, if you had two roulette tables you would carry out statistical analysis of why one table was pulling in more money than another table. It could have been table placement, how many times a ball was spun etc. It was pretty amazing to learn all the strategies that casinos employ to get people to spend their money.
I then worked for a large insurance company looking at servers and how many times their servers broke down. I remember reaching 30 years old - looking out of a London window with grey skies and an amazing view thinking what did I really want to do with life. Was this going to be it until I retired. I felt I needed to go and see the world.
The idea of being overseas was not new - as a child I had lived in around Asia moving every two to three years. My dad worked for the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank (HSBC). I have lived in Japan, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India and Dubai. I decided to go to Taiwan for one year and teach English just to have a break. Originally, I was going to go to Japan then a friend suggested Taiwan. Taiwan was paying the same as Japan but the cost of living was lower, so it gave me the opportunity to repay university debts. I went there never having taught before with an educational organization called HESS. I had to teach American English and phonics and ended up staying in Taiwan for seven years.
I met my wife, when I was running through the jungle in Taiwan. She was teaching kindergarten. We used to carpool to the running tracks. She is amazing. We have been together 13 years, married for 10 years and have two kids called Max and Zoe who are eight and five years old.
One of the other things I did coming up to my 30th birthday is applying for my pre-adoptive birth certificate. I looked up my birth surname and there was only one in the New Zealand white pages. So I sent them a letter that stepped out who I was, why I was sending the letter and I understood that if they didn't want to contact me that's fine as well. It just so happened that the person I sent the letter to was my birth mother's brother.
They contacted me straight away within days of it arriving, they all knew that she had had a baby but she now lived on the Gold Coast in Australia. And she made contact with me. I don't know how but she tracked my father through HSBC and had known where I was living up until we moved to Dubai. My parents knew nothing about her. I met up with her and have a half-brother and half-sister. They are about five or six years younger than me. My half-sister and I really hit it off together, it was like we really knew each other. It was really weird how similar we were in our actions, and our thoughts. But more generally my uncle in NZ was a school principal, my mother was working in TAFE, my half-sister was a school teacher up in Queensland and here I am in education.
You've got all of these people genetically related who are all in the same job. Which to me is fascinating considering I had had a completely different upbringing.
I am also a sailor. I started sailing when I was six years old. We have a small boat in Nedlands and so we are involved in the sailing club. In the summer we do two weekends a month. In the winter not so much. We would love to sail around the world one day.
The best experiences of my life has been the birth of my children and getting married. We could have got married in Taiwan but I was concerned about Taiwan's status as a country at some point in the future. At the time Taiwan was not recognized by so many international institutions, I really wanted a piece of paper from a country that might be a bit more reliable. At that time, we decided we would get married in Hong Kong, because the other thing was that the marriage certificate would come in English and Chinese. Therefore, not only would it be fine for Taiwan but if we ever then decided to move somewhere else, we'd have something in English as well, which would probably be useful.
Since we were going to get married in Hong Kong we also decided to compete in the 100km Oxfam Trailwalker with friends. We could fly to Hong Kong on the Wednesday, get married on the Thursday, and then have dinner with a select group of friends that were also doing the Trailwalker with us which started on the Saturday morning. And so we got married, small wedding ceremony, beautiful dinner in Hong Kong overlooking the harbour. Then we did this Trailwalker with friends. We were in teams of four and we did it with a lovely couple who we had known for a while. We started walking at about 2pm in the afternoon. The Ghurkas who half run it, do it in about 13 hours up and down all the mountains out the back of Hong Kong. It is tough and we had been training, so we set ourselves a goal of doing it in 24 hours. You start walking in the daylight and walk through the nighttime and through the next day. So this was our honeymoon!
The weather is normally quite nice, but it just so happened that particular Trailwalker, a cold front came in and the temperature dropped to about five degrees celcius at about 3am and of course we are all in shorts and t-shirts and we are going up on top of these hills and its bitterly cold. We ended up doing it in 27 hours. We had been awake for over 24 hours and freezing but the sense of achievement amongst the four of us.
Of course you spent 24 hours with three other people, you've gotten into a lot of conversations and talked about a lot of life stuff. The beautiful thing was that Kevin and Kerry who are from the USA were high school sweethearts, had been married at 21 years old, had kids at 23 and were coming out of the other end of that process. We got to spend 24 hours as newlyweds with this amazing couple who were still truly deeply in love and were a fantastic couple together and had brought up these beautiful kids that we knew and so some of the conversations were all around that and how they made it successful. Our honeymoon was this amazing challenge thrown in with these amazing two people. It was a fantastic all-round experience.
Worst experience - it's weird, I don't classify things as bad experiences, I classify them as learning experiences. But I have experiences that other people would say "Woah". One of those was when I was backpacking through Africa. I was coming out of Malawi and going into the north end of Mozambique. The civil war had died down however there were still military elements floating around, and I was travelling in an open backed truck.
I was on this truck with 20 other people travelling, I am the only westerner on there. I had been on several of these trucks before, but anyway this one was going through the night and it pulls up at a stop and there is armed militia pulling us all out the truck. You get out and you think this is not good, but I started chatting to this one guy next to me. They weren't particularly aggressive. I said look mate this is literally all the money I have, it was about $150 that was in my wallet. I gave them some smokes as they rifled through my bag, and took my camera. It could have turned out a lot worse, but I think they were possibly looking at the other travelers along tribal lines.
Some advice - Take the risk, go for the challenge, mess it up, learn. If you keep saying no to opportunities, you don't live. Say yes to stuff, sometimes it will work out, sometimes it won't, doesn't matter but at least you have that experience and you end up growing. My favorite quote is by George Bernard Shaw: "A life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."
Human - David Thewlis
Interviewer - Anna Cornish
Photographer - Tristan Snooke
