Curious Pilgrim

Beginning life in a small Australian country town, then thrust into postwar Malaya, a three-year-old boy grows up on the edge of the jungle amidst the turmoil of The Emergency. The son of a missionary doctor, his childhood is characterised by extremes-adventure and danger, faith and confusion. At the centre is his father: a brilliant surgeon and big-game hunter, volatile yet charismatic, whose influence blurs the line between earthly and divine authority. Raised in a deeply religious home yet spiritually unfulfilled, he enters the Seventh-day Adventist ministry, serving for sixteen years before walking away to establish the Chaplaincy services of Mission Australia. His journey leads him to work among Sydney's homeless, before an unexpected reinvention in food and travel journalism, transforming regional food tourism across Australia. This powerful memoir traces a life of upheaval, belief, loss, and rediscovery a modern pilgrimage and search for authenticity that challenges inherited belief and reveals a simpler, more human understanding of meaning that was always there.