I was born in 1952 and grew up on a dairy farm near Yarragon, Victoria. My parents were committed Christians and were very involved in the Yarragon Methodist Church. My father was a local preacher, the secretary of the church trust, and the Sunday school superintendent. When I was 11, I made a decision to be a Christian at an after-school children’s mission at our church and when I was 16, I confirmed my membership of the church.
I went to Yarragon State School (∼100 students), then I went to Trafalgar High School (∼300 students), where I was head prefect and dux, and then, for year 12, I went to Warragul High School (∼600 students), where I was again dux. In year 10 I was awarded a major bursary in the intermediate section of the Science Talent Search organised by the Science Teachers Association of Victoria for a project on the planets in which I observed the movement of Jupiter in relation to the star Regulus over a number of weeks. In year 11 I was one of six Victorian students selected to attend the International Science School for High School Students sponsored by the Foundation for Physics within the University of Sydney. The theme of the School for that year was nuclear energy and the lectures included lectures on cosmic radiation and particle physics.
For most of my secondary schooling I was going to be a scientist and I studied physics, chemistry, and mathematics in year 12. However, late in my secondary schooling I decided that I should be more directly involved in helping people in my future work and I was accepted to enrol in Arts/Social Studies at the University of Melbourne. My family moved to East Burwood, a suburb of Melbourne, so that I could go to university from home. University greatly expanded my intellectual and social horizons. In particular, I included philosophy in the Arts part of my course and I was introduced to linguistic analysis and the problem of knowledge. Also, enrolling in Social Studies meant that I had to do a subject called Social Biology, and this greatly increased my understanding of ecology and the problems of human over-population and pollution.
During the long vacation between first and second year I decided that I needed to join a Christian group on campus and I became involved in the Melbourne University Evangelical Union, soon to be renamed the Melbourne University Christian Union. The two most significant events of my life occurred in my second year at university. The first event occurred at a combined conference of the three university Christian unions. There I met two members of a Monash University group which called itself the Christian Radicals. What they said convinced me that if I believed in God I should look to the word of God, the Bible, for solutions to the radical social and epistemological questions I was asking. The second event was largely a result of the first event but it was also a result of my relationship with a number of Pentecostal students. This event was initiated by my reading of John’s gospel and involved me becoming profoundly aware of Jesus, the living God, and conversely, becoming profoundly aware of my own self-centredness. The sorrow with which I turned to Jesus and the joy I subsequently experienced were overwhelming. For some time afterwards I thought that I had never been a Christian, but later I came to think of this event as the climax of a process which began when I was born into a Christian home.
The rest of my story is the story of the outworking of those two events. At the beginning of my third year I moved into a Christian household in North Carlton where I stayed for three years, and then I moved into a Christian coffee-shop in Richmond where I lived for the year before I married Janine. I had failed Social Studies at the end of second year, but I completed an Arts degree with a double major in philosophy. Having concluded that philosophy teaches you how to think but not what to think, I pursued my questions about a Christian view of thinking and my academic ambitions by doing an MA Prelim in history and philosophy of science. During all this time I was greatly influenced both by the reformational movement and by the Christian counter-culture movement.
Janine and I lived at Bulleen to begin with and I enrolled as an MA student, but when we found midway through the first year of marriage that Janine was pregnant, my doubts about what I was doing quickly crystallised and I cancelled my enrolment. My father was now working as property officer with the Uniting Church homes for the aged, and he got me a job as gardener at one of these homes. However, I wasn’t happy doing this full-time so I asked to work part-time so that I could continue to develop a Christian way of thinking. Anita’s birth provoked another crisis and I enrolled to do theology full-time, but a few months later I stopped this, too. I then settled down to a combination of writing and a gradually increasing amount of part-time work for the homes for the aged, which changed from gardening to cleaning the administrative office and cleaning the floors at one on the nursing homes. Stephen was born sixteen months after Anita.
After living in Bulleen for four years, we bought a house in Nunawading where we lived for six years. During this time I also cared for our children for one day a week, for the first four years, and then for two days a week, for the last two years, while Janine studied theology part-time. During those last two years we shared in home-educating Anita and Stephen. When Janine finished her study and applied to be a secondary school chaplain, the application form allowed her to indicate a preference for a city or country appointment. We chose country because I had become convinced, through thinking about the laws for human life, that God intends that humans should receive their food and clothing from their own land in such a way that the existing conditions of life for all other species are maintained. Accordingly, when Janine was appointed as the chaplain at Warrnambool High School, we looked for a bush block near Warrnambool and bought a property consisting of 20 hectares of remnant native vegetation which is about 20 kilometres east of Warrnambool. We call this property “God’s Garden” and we describe ourselves as its caretakers.
During the nine years we lived in Warrnambool time I undertook all the home duties. During the first five years I also finished my work on the laws for human life and then during the next four years I built our house using materials from our bush block as far as possible. After moving to our house at the beginning of 1996, I worked full-time for six months finishing off the house and doing necessary outside work, and then I began alternating between working to revise, expand, and consolidate what I had already written and working to develop and maintain our property. In these ways I have continued to work out in writing and in practice what it means to think and to live in a radically Christian way.
