The Lord moves in mysterious ways

This is the story of how I came to live in Australia. It’s a story I’ve told many times over the years. However, it never fails to surprise people. The person I was then is not the same person I am today. Back then, so much was hidden and so much was in flux.

I landed at Sydney Airport on Sunday, 4 February 1990. This was my second time in Australia, having previously visited for a week in November 1988. You can learn more about my first time here. Below is the passport stamp recording my arrival. Little did I know this stamp would signal the beginning of 35 years as an Australian resident, and eventually, a dual citizen.

At the time, I’d just completed a season working on a friend’s dairy farm near Raglan, a coastal town on the North Island of New Zealand. For 11 months, I’d worked as a farmhand, milking more than 200 cows twice a day. The farm itself was located at Okete, on a peninsula overlooking the harbour. You learn more about the farm here.

My time on the farm was an intentional act on my part. In November 1988, I completed my four-year university degree, graduating with a Bachelor of Management Studies with Honours. After focusing on academic achievement for four years, I wanted to rebalance my life experience by working with my hands rather than my mind.

The farm was owned by the Wallis family. Two of the family’s ancestors, James and Mary, had arrived in Raglan as Christian missionaries in 1835. They were the first European settlers in the area. In my first year at university, I shared a dormitory room in the student residence with Don, the family's eldest son. 

Don and I connected immediately. We shared a common bond as former high school exchange students. He'd recently returned from Japan, while I'd been in the USA.  As luck would have it, I was also studying Japanese language at the University, so it was handy to have a fluent Japanese speaker right next door.

Our room was a unique set-up in the student halls. Don and I had our own bedroom, which opened into a central study room. This three-room floor plan was situated at the end of the building, with views looking over the university’s sports fields and farmland beyond. Only three rooms in the entire building boasted a separate study room.

It didn’t take long for our study room to become party central, while its ground-floor location meant we could climb out of the window unseen for late-night adventures. Don and I became good friends. His brother Shaun, who was a year younger, became one of my closest friends during my university years. For three years, I spent most of my summer vacation living and working on the family farm.

The photos opening this post were taken on my 20th Birthday in a holiday bach (cabin) on the farm. From left to right, me, Don, Rachael (a mutual friend) and Don's mother. Yes, I had a perm then, and yes, Don is wearing a dressing gown because he'd decided it was a little cold in the bach that day. Don and I had driven out to his farm for an afternoon visit on my birthday. His Mum decided to have a spontaneous afternoon tea to celebrate the occasion at a bach on the harbour foreshore.

Don was a bit of a free spirit. He often saw rules and regulations as guidelines rather than strict boundaries. As a result, he’d sometimes adhere to them in an arbitrary manner, or at least that's how it often seemed to me. Don’t get me wrong, Don was a law-abiding citizen; he just occasionally bent the rules with a cheeky grin.

Don was also a fundamental Christian. He informally introduced me to the scriptures, and a more liberal interpretation of the bible than I’d experienced as a child growing up in the Anglican faith. In fact, if I’m totally honest, the local vicar expelled me from Sunday School about the age of 11, much to my mother’s embarrassment.

By simply living his life of faith as a free spirit, Don’s example encouraged me to explore his faith. I decided that I’d rejected Christianity based on my experience with a religious institution, the Anglican Church, rather than on the message it was attempting to share. To cut a long story short, much to everyone’s surprise (including Don), I became a fundamental Christian in my first year at university.

Fast forward five years. My brief stint as a full-time farmhand finished in late 1989. Shaun completed his final year of university and returned to the family farm. It was always clear that he’d be the son who’d ultimately take on the family business. As a result, I needed to decide what was next. In the final two years at university, I took a couple of Political Science courses and thoroughly enjoyed them. I decided to return to university for two more years and complete a Master's degree in Political Science.

However, fate (or perhaps, faith) intervened. In early 1990, shortly before university enrolment commenced, I decided to do an entry-level Christian Missionary course with Youth With A Mission (YWAM). The Discipleship Training School, or DTS, that I chose was based in Goulburn, an inland city in New South Wales. Several Okete friends had completed the course and spoke highly of the experience.

Hence, I arrived on Australia’s shores in February 1990, ready to study as a Christian missionary. The DTS course was a six-month program, split between three months of practical study and three months of in-the-field outreach, preaching the gospel in the community.

YWAM Goulburn operated out of a former Catholic orphanage. This was a large double-storey, red brick and white weatherboard building situated on a hill overlooking the town. The dormitories and bathrooms were located on the first floor, while the classrooms, dining hall and communal spaces were on the ground floor. In the photo above, I slept in the bottom bunk visible in the middle of the image. Sadly, the building was demolished in 2023, after being ravaged by fire several years earlier.

There were 23 students in my DTS course, from across the globe. The group included a couple from Switzerland, two Canadians, an American and a couple from Indonesia. We were an odd bunch, from all walks of life. Some were solo parents, some farmers, and others, including me, were university graduates.

 

For three fun-filled months, from 5 February to 13 May, we studied the scriptures, learned effective outreach techniques and prepared to go out into the wider community to preach the gospel. This included learning a non-verbal street drama, set to music, that presented the story of salvation. Without a hint of irony, I played the part of Satan.

The time in Goulburn wasn’t all study. I became good friends with Dean, a Victorian sheep farmer, and Michele, a woman from Sydney. The three of us frequently ventured out for a bit of fun. This included a night at the pub, day trips to watch One Day Cricket at the Sydney Cricket Ground (SCG) or to go swimming in the Shoalhaven River near Braidwood, and a day trip to Canberra to watch the AFL. I also spent Easter weekend on Dean’s farm near Portland.

In late February, YWAM held its annual national conference in Canberra. Our class attended the event each day. An inspirational guest speaker spoke about Eastern Europe opening up after more than forty years of Communist, and by extension, atheist rule. He highlighted an emerging opportunity to share the gospel with millions who’d been denied its message for decades.

A month or so later, YWAM decided to send its first outreach missionary team into Eastern Europe. I was chosen to join the team. On 14 May 1990, about a dozen of us flew to Vienna to embark on an extraordinary three-month journey through Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania and Bulgaria, preaching the gossip on the streets of Eastern Europe. That’s a story for another time.

I’m often asked if I’m “still religious”. The honest answer is no. I’ve chosen to embrace my sexuality as another expression of a fundamental truth in my life. However, it would be another three years after my return from Europe before this stage of my life unfolded. That’s also a story for another time.

I have so many happy memories from this period in my life. I loved my time on the Wallis farm, the friends I made in Okete and my time at YWAM. I learned a great deal about myself and the world around me. As a closeted gay man, full of fear and self-doubt, I experienced love and acceptance in abundance. For a time, Christianity gave me a purpose and a focus that I'd have otherwise lacked in my early twenties.

This was also a time when the AIDS epidemic was sweeping the globe. The first antiretroviral drug used to treat HIV arrived on the scene in 1987, followed by highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) in 1996, a protocol that boosted the life expectancy of someone with HIV by 15 years. In other words, HIV was doing its worst during my university years, and its treatment was relatively ineffective until six years after I arrived in Australia.

This high-risk era for young gay men coincided with my fundamental Christian years. I would have come out at a younger age without them. Likewise, I spent most of my university vacations on a farm with a Christian family, free from the vices and temptations of city life. Without these moral and physical constraints, I’m certain I would have seroconverted.  In other words, I believe without a shadow of a doubt that Christianity saved my life.

Laggard or Luddite?

Artificial Intelligence, or AI for short, is all the rage these days. Silicon Valley is all over it. AI-related start-ups are everywhere. AI-related posts and stories are flooding social media, LinkedIn and business news stories. Market valuations for AI-related companies are soaring just as dotcom companies did at the turn of the millennium.

Take Nvidia, for example. This relatively modest chip‑maker once focused on graphical user interface chips (the technology that renders images and video on device screens). In recent years, it’s become a poster child for the AI boom. Nvidia’s chips are ideal for AI because they can handle thousands of calculations simultaneously, making them perfect for the massive data processing AI requires.

Its valuation recently climbed to over $4 trillion, making it one of the most valuable companies on the planet. In essence, investors believe that as demand for AI hardware (like the specialised chips Nvidia produces) grows, so too will its profits. However, when valuations shoot up so fast, there’s always a question of whether expectations are running ahead of what’s actually possible.

Sadly, I’m old enough to remember more than one tech boom in decades past. When I began my career at IBM in 1991, the desktop computing phenomenon was taking off. Desktop computing was hot, and local area networking, the technology linking desktops together, was emerging rapidly. Likewise, new desktop applications were on the rise, including tools we take for granted these days, such as spreadsheets, word processors and email.

When I joined IDC, a technology industry analyst firm, later the same year, I quickly learned that in the previous decade, minicomputers had been the proverbial golden child. They'd progressively transferred the capabilities of room-sized, and horrendously expensive, mainframe computers onto smaller and cheaper machines. I was writing about the industry's evolution as research manager for The Computing 100, the local technology industry's annual bible. At the time, the minicomputer boom was drawing to a close, and the industry was in recession for the first time in more than a decade.

As an aside, I ghostwrote most of the publication in 1993. It subsequently opened the door for my 20-year career in technology public relations. In March 1993, I responded to an ad in the computer section of the Sydney Morning Herald's employment pages. A company called Recognition Public Relations was seeking applicants who enjoy writing about computers.  During my job interview with Steve Townsend, the company's owner, I was asked about my relevant writing experience. I placed a copy of The Computing 100 on the desk and said, "I wrote this."  Needless to say, I got the job.

By the late 1990s, the rise of the internet had superseded the desktop revolution. At the time, Recognition Public Relations was actively promoting this burgeoning technology and its day-to-day use. I still recall the first time I wrote about the internet. It was a user story prepared on behalf of a client called Softway.

It had helped implement a Unix-based internet solution for the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney. I interviewed the Chief Botanist, asking him about his use of the Internet. He explained that he could instantly view images of leaf images in the archives of Kew Gardens in London. I remember thinking, "How on earth do I make this internet thing sound remotely interesting?"

Soon after, the dotcom boom was upon us - followed swiftly by the dotcom bust. A few years later, the mobile app and social media boom emerged, and a new wave of Silicon Valley unicorns was born. Scroll forward another decade or so, and now it’s the turn of AI.

I’ll be honest — I still don’t fully grasp the whole “AI” phenomenon. There's also a hint of deja vu. 

People talk about the dawn of a new age, just as they did about desktop computers, the internet and mobile phones. I’ve also attended numerous events where I've seen stunning demonstrations of AI writing, drawing, creating video content and holding conversations — even making decisions of its own. It’s impressive stuff.

It's mind-blowing that machines can now “learn” from experience. I understand the theory, but part of me still finds it unsettling — a tool thinking for itself somehow blurs the line between human and machine. Does it have a moral compass? Are machine learned ethics the same as those instilled the traditional way? In simple terms, artificial intelligence is just a fancy way of saying “teaching computers to think a bit like people.” It’s not magic — it’s maths and pattern recognition.

Machine learning, the part that gives AI its smarts, works by feeding the computer huge amounts of data — photos, text, sounds, you name it — and letting it find patterns on its own. The more examples it sees, the better it gets at guessing what comes next. It’s a bit like how we learn: by making mistakes, getting feedback, and slowly improving. Show it enough pictures of cats and dogs, and eventually it can tell them apart — though it doesn’t see them the way we do. It’s really just number crunching on a massive scale, but somehow, out of all that maths, it starts to look a lot like thinking.

As I look at my own business, I struggle to see the role that AI can play within it. However, we’ve been experimenting with it in small ways. For example, we’ve used AI to create lifestyle images for older products lacking this kind of marketing content (like the image above). We’ve also used it to quickly generate code for new product pages on our website. I’ve used it to create the first draft of advertorial promotions. I even used today to help me draft this blog post.

However, I realise that I’m finally showing my age. The thought of trying to learn AI and master its use does my head in. I’d rather leave this challenge for a younger generation. I vividly recall my father expressing similar sentiments about spreadsheets. He wasn’t keen on learning how to use and apply this desktop technology. As someone who’s used spreadsheets his entire working career, I couldn’t imagine life without them. No doubt some young person will say the same thing about AI in the years ahead.

While I’m not willing to be a digital pioneer, I'm certainly no technology luddite. I’ve learned over time that entrepreneurial organisations eventually find clever ways to integrate new technologies into the mainstream and help smaller businesses deploy them in meaningful ways. Therefore, I'm more than happy to adopt this new technology as practical applications emerge and their day-to-day installation and activation become seamless. I wonder what I’ll be saying about AI in a decade from now.

On the fringe

The Sydney Fringe Festival is a quirky event which has been running for more than a decade. It’s a 30-day arts festival filled with all manner of eclectic events, exhibitions and live performances. According to its website, The Sydney Fringe Festival is the largest independent arts festival in New South Wales, with over 450 events presented in over 70 venues across Greater Sydney each year.

On Saturday, Garry and I had tickets to Elixir Revived, a comedic acrobatic routine being performed in a temporary dome at the Sydney Entertainment Quarter. The performance delivered by three athletic young men lasted little more than an hour. Some of the acrobatics on display were impressive, while other aspects of the show were a little mundane. However, given the relatively modest ticket price, we couldn’t complain.

Earlier in the day, Garry and I met up with friends at The Paddington on Oxford Street for lunch. Jacqui and Mandy were in full force. Lunch kicked off at 1:00pm. We then went for a drink (or two) at the Paddo Inn, before Garry and I walked directly to the Entertainment Quarter to catch our festival event at 7:00pm.

Someone left their sunglasses at the pub. That would be me. As a result, after the show Garry and I walked back to Paddington, collected the lost sunglasses, and went for dinner at Thai Nesia. This restaurant is an institution. I recall dining here thirty years ago. I was surprised it was still going. According to my phone, we clocked up 13,763 steps. Not a bad day’s outing.