Introducing Troppo Bloggers

This post is just an exercise in housekeeping, intended to provide short biographical details (and in some cases photos) of the Troppo Armadillo blogging semi-co-operative. The biographies are mercifully short, although they may still tell you more than you really want to know about us. You might be better to maintain some residual illusions by not clicking through to the rest of the story.

I intend creating sidebar hyperlinks to each of the bio sketches.

PS – Geoff Honnor is yet to provide a photo, claiming that the only ones he has show him in outrageous outfits at the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. I told him that sounded fine to me, but I don’t think he’s convinced. Stephen’s photo is also still in transit.

PPS – Geoff has now cunningly responded to my Botox gibe by providing a photo so out-of-focus as to make him unrecognisable in a crowd (well, a Mardi Gras crowd anyway). I can see I’ll have to come to Sydney in November equipped with a digital camera.

Stephen Hill

Stephen Hill is an Honours student at Macquarie University in his mid-to-late twenties. Previously he has worked as a journalist at several web-sites until their inevitable demise. After some futile job-hunting and encountering dot.com companies’ propensity for not paying wages Stephen decided to embark on postgraduate studies. Stephen’s major achievements are hopefully all in front of him when those bastards in Stockholm finally recognise his literary genius

Stephen has a B. Arts (Communications) and a B. Commerce. He has worked in a strange assortment of jobs on his quixotic quest to collect more letters after his name than Barry Jones.

Stephen would be a proactive employee who thinks outside the square and would be a strategic fit with core competencies contributing to the bottom line of any media organisation. His vast knowledge base with its clientele focus, would allow for him to fast-track the building of synergies in any newsroom. His ability to think-outside-the-square and to accommodate paradigm shifts is unprecedented since that German guy with the fuzzy hair (tragically played by Yahoo Serious) came up with the theory of relativity.

Fortunately, the previous paragraph shares little resemblance with Stephen’s resume except references to ‘dynamic workplaces’ and a couple of other inane platitudes.

Geoff Honnor

Geoff lives in Undercliffe, in Sydney’s inner west. His career highlights include eleven years as a Naval Officer, followed by 6 years in human resources management with Shell International in locations from Brunei to Aberdeen. Latterly he’s been involved in health management and policy development and currently works as a freelance writer and consultant in that general area. He has a partner named Lance, a cat named Missy,  a moderately optimistic outlook on life and is not currently on any anti-depressant medication.

Ken Parish

Ken is a law lecturer at Northern Territory University Charles Darwin University in Darwin, and a former Labor member of the NT Legislative Assembly (1991-94), holding numerous economic development shadow portfolios. He began to suspect that he’d chosen the wrong profession when CLP government Ministers took to labelling him an extreme economic rationalist (which was true, at least by comparison with their peculiar brand of corrupt agrarian socialism). This suspicion cystallised into certainty when, in a blinding flash of self-awareness, he realised that he was an anti-social introvert and quite uncomfortable in large crowds or meeting new people. For anyone wondering why he didn’t work this out much earlier, it’s a good question.

Leaving aside his stint in politics, Ken ran a private Darwin law firm for most of the last 20 years until 2000, when he decided on a mid-life career change and became a legal academic so he could study dysfunctional bureaucracy at close quarters. He currently has no party political affiliations and treats both major parties with deep suspicion born of intimate experience. The minor parties are best not mentioned at all. Ken’s academic areas of interest lie in administrative, constitutional, immigration and cyberspace law.

He has a long-standing interest in the citizenship and educational potential of the Internet, and is currently responsible for developing and co-ordinating Charles Darwin University Law School’s new external law degree program, which is the first in Australia and one of the first in the world to be delivered wholly online.  As well as being webmaster of Troppo Armadillo, Ken also maintains the Law School website and the related Australian Public Law site.

Ken is fairly recently separated after almost 20 years of marriage and has a teenage compulsive consumerist daughter Rebecca aged 15 16 going on 27 and an even more undisciplined poodle named Munchie.

Christopher Sheil

Chris is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of History at the University of New South Wales. Awarded a PhD in history by the University of Wollongong in 1989, he has served as a senior policy official under many Labor and Coalition governments, serving on numerous cabinet and national policy committees, including the 1990-91 Special Premiers’ Conferences.

A columnist for the Australian Financial Review, he also holds adjunct appointments with the University of Sydney and Boston University, and is the author, contributing author or editor of over 130 publications, including: Globalisation: Australian Impacts (ed) (UNSW Press, 2001), Water’s Fall: Running the Risks with Economic Rationalism (Pluto Press, 2000), War on the Wharves: A Cartoon History (Pluto Press, 1998), and Turning Point: The State of Australia (ed) (Allen & Unwin, 1997).

In his spare time, Chris edits and maintains (pro bono) the Evatt Foundation website, which is why he reckons he has no spare time.”

Wayne Wood

Wayne moved to Darwin from Adelaide in 1981 and had a career in financial management until 1994.  For some years he conducted a regular weekly session on finance and investment on Darwin ABC radio. Wayne has travelled a lot, to Europe and North Africa for 3 years in the ’70’s then Eastern Europe for five months in 2001; been to Indonesia and Indochina many times, to North America twice and South Africa once. He’s off to South America at the end of this year.

Wayne worked on contract for the Federal and Territory Governments from 1995 until 2000 and then ceased took early retirement and ceased full time work.  He plays (slowly) veterans rugby, manages his investment portfolio and teaches children to swim. He’s been married to Rosemary for 35 years and has a married son living in Queensland.

Wayne is currently engaged in an experiment in the Internet serial publication of a novel he’s recently written called Southern Pearl, using a weblog format.

Jen

Jen (jen.mccullochATozemailDOTcomDOTau) is Darwin-based, in her early forties with a 9 year old daughter. She’s a dance and drama teacher at a Catholic high school, and aspires to age graciously without selling out to the complacent middle class. So far she’s succeeding brilliantly in this endeavour, not least because of her compulsively mischievous, vaguely “hippie chick” demeanour. Jen and fellow Troppo blogger Ken Parish enjoy a loving but frequently volatile “loosely partnered” relationship that might end up more tightly partnered one day soon if they don’t piss each other off too often.