Hi from my working place and home, a 101-year-old 45 ft yacht of teak and oak, one of the first yachts to have an engine, now moored on the West coast of Britain and linked to the web. She is the home of this website where I hang out my writing to dry;
It is also a place where I share my films and my story telling...a place to keep up our spirits while enjoying life and doing our bit to look after this amazing world of ours.
What else? Well, I should tell you a bit about me.
I have been around for ages and am now proud to be an adventurous elder. In 2002 I celebrated a birth week of parties, as I had managed to reach the mind boggling age of 60! I thought I would never get there - and still am not quite sure I have! I have had an incredibly very rich time; looking back, it feels as if I have lived several lives.
If you know your films, my life is most like that of Orlando.
For more about my work, see the box below on the left.
In recent years it has centred on investigative journalism and film making - as well as such books as those I wrote about the Aboriginal struggle for justice: the Mapoon Books, From Massacres to Mining and Jack of Cape Grim.
For the past 30 years I have continued to work on environmental and human rights issues; as an activist, journalist, author and film-maker - with my films on the BBC, the ABC in Australia and on PBS in the USA.
While doing this, I have never let go of my commitment to the spiritual and mediative life that I gained when I was once in a religious order - but I am today a trenchant critic of religions that build power and wealth on the human need for the sacred. As a child, my parents shared with me their beliefs about St Francis, his radicalness, lack of pretense and love of nature - and this helped shape me.
I have come to hold to a spirituality without a label, that can be shared at the deepest level between all, the one we inherit as humans. For me, our primary task is to look after the earth to which we are born, to create and love with our minds and bodies, and to keep the balance in which health of person and planet lies.
My feature-length film on diamonds, first shown as a Frontline Special on PBS in North America, later on the BBC, is also available here - as is also an award winning film I made with Aboriginal Elder Robert Bropho. It tells the story of the last great Australian gold rush as seen by the invaded Aborigines. It is a metaphor for the colonization of Australia. It won a unanimous Nomination as one of the 4 best Australian documentaries of its year.
My work helped generate the conflict diamond campaign - - and led to my being invited to testify at a US Congressional Hearing - and to showing the film at Congress. My subsequent book Glitter and Greed documented the role of diamonds in wars and oppression around the world.
My latest book on gender, religion and spirit is “The Seven Days of My Creation”. (to some book reviews)
In 2006 my work took me twice to South Africa to work on a new film on diamonds and human rights, and to New York to talk to scientists about immune systems and AIDS - for my next investigative book.
In April 2007 an updated paperback edition of my book Glitter and Greed appeared. (Review) This tells what I learnt on a six-continent investigation of the diamond mining empire run by De Beers, the people that make diamonds far rarer than they should be, thus gaining their fantastic profits. The Independent reviewed the hardback version as ‘truly brilliant’, “enthralling”, calling it the product of “hair-raising research” - as I had to be smuggled into some of the world’s largest diamond mines after De Beers and RTZ banned me - the former for my works on mining and apartheid, the later for my works on Australian racism.
I am currently finishing off a book about viruses. I have discovered to my surprise, from research by recent Nobel Laureates and other eminent scientists, that many of these tiny particles have been presumed to be bad for us far too long. Many of them in fact serve to help our cells communicate and to repair DNA - some scientists say they may even help protect us from cancer. Cellular biology teaches that all cells naturally make them. We live in a soup of life made up by them. They helped build our cells. Not their fault they are small. I will be posting research about them here. For my progress on this, se another of my websites www.sparks-of-light.org
Unfortunately, getting us scared is a great to raise research funds. Thus some scientists talk of viruses as if they are all nano-terrorists plotting our mass-destruction, hijacking cells (as a single ant hijacking a giant elephant) and deserving only extermination. I will show in my forthcoming work that diseases are often wrongly blamed on them rather than on toxins and malnutrition.
And on an entirely different front, I am working to get a feature film off the ground - but more on this later...
more links soon to be posted here
