ArsalanBilkis and Other Stories of the Middle East Ancient and Modern
Born a few years after WWI, the youngest of four boys, to a public auditor father and a highly intelligent former bank clerk mother. I grew up with three modern languages to start with. My father having died a mere five years into my life and my mother not allowed to work, we had to be versatile and resilient, earning even while at school. Almost as soon as I finished school, I left Europe, not to return till the mid-Seventies, after several years of work in postwar Bangladesh and India. Several children later, we had to leave the Gambia/ West Africa, a country only now emerging from decades of military or authoritarian rule, settling in Tasmania, home to my then-wife. I worked as lecturer, research assistant, gardener and gravedigger till I went to PNG without my family. I then returned to Bangladesh before changeing focus to Indonesia, Borneo, East Timor and, later. Malaysia and Indochina. My residence in the tiny town of Charters Towers started thirty years ago with field work involving neem as my phD project till my supervisor lost his academic position in Brisbane. I spent the next few decades in Asia, the Middle East and several African countries, such as Uganda and South Sudan, as a nonprofit consultant, academic visitor and teacher. In South Australia, I supported the Chin people of Burma and helped start a school for their children in Malaysia where I worked till the outbreak of COVID, interspersed with teaching in China, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Burma. An Iranian student whose academic work I edited, along with that of several of her friends, ' named ' me after a Iranian character actor - Rod Flash - famous for the role of Arsalan, a third- century Sassanian Iranian ruler. This young Shirazi woman features in my memoirs called Breakfast at Gunpoint. I wrote Bilqis-Mideast Ancient and Modern ( featuring the Ethiopian Foundation Myth and also the Sufi detective's tribulations ), Tajik Lady Detective ( a tale of people- smuggling against the background of minority suppression in Xinjiang ), Halima ( a fantastic account of a young Somali- Australian woman's political career ), Chorus of the Almost Damned ( a rendering of a teenage choir's experiences in Turkey ahead of the Gallipoli centenary ) and Gender Alignments- Her Mum used to be her Dad, her Boyfriend used to be a Girl ( the procession of two South Australian teenagers and their families from Adelaide to Micronesia ). Over the last fifteen years, I taught Asian History, Material History and Connectedness of Religions at different U3As- Universities of the Third Age.
