About Me

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Erik is a public policy professional and owner of the online training course in democracy and civic action: www.3ptraining.com.au The Blog …explores ways to create a sustainable and just community. Explores how that community can be best protected at all levels including social policy/economics/ military. The Book Erik’s autobiography is a humorous read about serious things. It concerns living in the bush, wilderness, home education, spirituality, and activism. Finding Home is available from Amazon, Barnes&Noble and all good e-book sellers.

Saturday 18 August 2012

The Spice Islands - Indonesia


Jen was wildly popular with the village children
Why did a province held up as an example of religious and racial tolerance in the worlds most populous Muslim country explode into sectarian violence?  I spent two months in Ambon on a DFAT funded exchange program in the village of Tawiri and in the regional centre - Kota Ambon.  It was a wonderful experience where I met many wonderful people.  Afterwards I travelled solo across Java staying with people I met in the villages.  These pictures record that experience.  More than 10 years later I began to look for answers to what happened in Ambon.  I would welcome insight from anyone else with knowledge of those events.  What can we learn from them?

Brother Herson at church in Indonesia.  I do not know if he survived the violence
Some Muslim friends I made along the way took me to a local volcano


Happier Days

Saturday 11 August 2012

A Little More About The Book


This recently released autobiography deals extensively with matters of faith, activism, and creation care. 

This story relates the experience of emigrating from Britain to rural Australia as a young child.  It chronicles my family’s faith journey after leaving the church and their adventures in home education and natural learning.  It tells a story of discovery in the Australian wilderness; of finding faith, and subsequent journeys through environmental activism, evangelism, and relationships. 

Follow the author’s journey as he takes you into the wilderness, helps found a political reform party, trains in non-violent direct action, and stands in the dock in the Supreme Court as a litigant against the State.  Travel with him back to the British Isles, to Indonesia under dictatorship, to the Cronulla race riots in Australia, and then back to his mountain cabin in Tasmania.

This is both a very personal story and an insider’s view of public life.  It chronicles and critiques religious and other fundamentalisms as they encounter the real world of human passions, greed, and real politic.

Often humorous, sometimes tragic, this is a very personal story of engaging with public life, about finding the divine in odd places, about social conflict, and about finding in the end those things that hold us together. It is about the strange ways that love finds us. It is a story of finding home.

Finding Home is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and all good e-book sellers.

It can also be puchased from the publisher Authorhouse UK.

Alternatively, your local book store can order it by quoting the following ISBN: 978-1-4670-0136-6