Hi all, I was asked by OCD to resubmit a more thorough introduction post. So here is goes.
Born in 1980 in a remote town in the Northern Territory of Australia. Nhulunbuy (Gove) was set up as a mining town to extract and process bauxite (Aluminium) and as such provided everything a community could want, from sporting facilities including a golf course (complete with water buffalos and crocs), a movie theatre, hotel with public bar to housing, shops, basically an entire town sprung up. Back then there were no transient workers so people and families moved up there for the work opportunities and to start a new life, My father was the manager of the local hotel and my mother worked there also (that's how they met), it was called the Walkabout Hotel, as far as I know it was the original one, life for a kid was pretty great, heaps of fishing and camping and outdoor stuff, I remember have a giant green tree frog as a pet that lived outside my window and having to check the toilet for goannas (thick leathery skinned lizards) that would get into the bowl looking for water, even though it was on the coast you couldn't really go to the beach as the water was full of sharks, saltwater crocs and box jelly fish. I can remember being to run away in zig-zags if a croc ever came out of the water and our parents running down to the beach if we got to close to the water. It is about as remote a place as you will find in Australia and is leased from the traditional owners of Arnhem Land.
As you can see it has one road in and out. It is of course a dirt road and for 4-6 months of the year is in-accessible due to the seasonal flooding (summer time up that way is called the wet season, and is generally very hot and sticky and absolutely pisses down). Supplies are shipped / flown in during this period. My family moved from there in 85 and I have not been back since but I plan on getting back there one day.
From there we moved to Port Headland in Western Australia. This is another mining town and the main iron ore export port. My father was once again in charge of another pub, once again called the Walkabout (this is the second one and I think was owned by the same guy). This time we lived at the hotel but it had a pool so wasn't too bad but we weren't there for long anyway as my parents split up. My mum took me and my younger sister to the city of Perth, which way further south then i'd ever been. It blew my mind to see how busy it was and how many people there were. We entered Perth via airplane at night and seeing all the street lights for the first time is still stuck in my memory today. The city was a big change for me but kids are resilient to change and I don't recall any negative emotions from starting again in such a wildly different place. Although that said seeing colour TV for the first time with actual advertising drove my mum crazy lol (Up north there was only black/white Tv with one channel, the ABC - which is the national broadcaster here so doesn't show ads).
I spent the next 7 yrs living there with my mum and sister doing normal growing up stuff, going on trips during school holidays, getting into fights at school, making friends, playing sports etc. Then I hit puberty and went off the rails. I ended up leaving home at 13 and finding my dad and living with him.
He was living in Bunbury a couple hours south of Perth, I'd visited him once or twice a year while living with my mum so sort of new him but not really. A whole new world opened up to me because as it turned out him and his brothers and a sister (my uncles and aunt) were all from Bunbury and so I walked into a situation where my family consisted of pretty much my mum and sister to 4 uncles and an aunt who all had 3-4 kids of there own. My newly found cousins were all older than me by about 10 -15 years but it was great having so much family around.
Starting high school in a new place was daunting as anything I'd previously had to face and didn't really adjust well but I made a few friends and played for a few sports teams so I got by. I never found my direction (and tbh still haven't) and never really had any goals and kinda just went through the motions. Tried being sporty but never really had any support from my father (which is weird because he loves sports), eventually did the classic teenager mistake, left school, got some shitty jobs and fell in with the wrong crowd and started getting into trouble. This eventually led to being arrested but luckily only received a suspended sentence and a fine. This was a kick in the arse that I probably needed and I moved back to Perth to my mum's and attended collage doing some I.T courses but again never really applied my self. I soon got bored of Perth and once again headed back to Bunbury where I started a job at a tyre change place and kicked about there for about 4 yrs.
Now in my early 20's I was stuck in a rut working a min pay job and spending all my money on drugs and alcohol, partying, still with no real direction. Then I met a girl, who'd I'd known through family for a few years out and about in town one night and we hit it off. Soon we were two peas in a pod and times were good. From the very start she had told me, herself and some friends were planning on travelling overseas, so we only had about 18months before she was leaving. I never really had any desire to travel overseas, so we agreed to just have some fun and see how it goes. Then with about 4 months left I realised I'd fallen in love with her and decided to go travelling too! So I picked some extra work up in bars and clubs and started saving. The big day came when herself and her friends were off but I was still short of the min cash needed for the visa to the UK. It would be about 2 months before I could join them. That time felt like an eternity but the day finally arrived for me to jet off. They had made their way through the UK and finally decided to live in Glasgow, Scotland and set themselves up in an apartment. After about 6 months we had 6 of us from Australia living together, running amok and seeing all we could see. Kristy, the girl I followed over was a qualified furniture designer / maker and picked up work as a cabinet joiner (putting in kitchens and the like) and I worked where I could in bars and assembly factories. We travelled and saw as much as we could, Travelled all over the UK and Ireland, Spain, Netherlands, France, Czech Rep, Germany, Austria, Turkey and Egypt.
Scotland - Me participating in a highland games
Barcelona - Kristy in front of the Sagrada Familia
Turkey - ANZAC Cove in Gallipolli
Czech Rep. - Astronomical Clock in Prague
Germany - Oktoberfest in Munich
Netherlands - Amsterdam
France - In side the Louve, Paris
Egypt - The Sphinx
When In Austria I finally decided to pop the question and ask Kristy to marry me. We were at the Neuschwanstein Castle (the one Disneyland was based off) and it was winter with about 4ft of snow. She knew something was up because it was freezing cold yet I was slick with sweat, lol. I eventually found a secluded spot on a hill with leafless trees and dropped to one knee and asked her the question, as I knelt down I sank up to my waste in snow. Straight away she was on her phone calling her mum, meanwhile I'm still kneeling there waiting for an answer, I asked her 'I'll take that as a yes?' she said of course and I was finally allowed to get up out of the freezing snow :)
Germany (Close to Austrian border) - Neuschwanstein Castle
About 6 months after that we returned home back to Australia and started making plans to get married and start our new life together. We got jobs, Kristy started at a local hardware store and I got a job doing soil and ground compression testing at a road-base company. We saved up for a deposit and bought our house. An old run down thing that needed a lot of work but Kristy was confident she could do it up.
I changed jobs to a underground cable laying company (phone / power / data cables) while Kristy advanced up in the hardware store to the tools division.
Eventually I stuffed up at work while on an away job, drank far to much got into fights and was eventually arrested and fined by the police for drunken disorderly. Suffice to say I was fired. The HR lady tried to give me some stern words about how I'd disgraced the companies name, I looked her fairly in the eyes and said ' Iv'e been arrested, fined $1k and fired from my job and I still have to go home and tell my wife all this, you think I care what you say?'. Anyway she was pissed and I was in the dog house for a few weeks but then I got a job in construction, building a power station which payed twice as much and really set us up. From there I skilled up further getting my riggers tickets and I could finally start to see where life could be heading career wise.
Kristy changed jobs and become a Rep for an industrial wood making company and she really thrived at it. The construction job had finished and it was time to start my construction FIFO (Fly-in Fly-out) career, this is where the jobs are remote and you fly in to work for a month then fly out and have a week off. During this 10yr period the house got renovated, holidays were had and life generally ticked along, Kristy once again changed jobs and become a building supervisor at a housing company and I was always moving onto the next project. Then in 2014 Kristy fell pregnant with our first child, a baby girl named Skye and our whole worlds changed, definitely one of the scariest times in our lives :). After the first 18months of her life I calculated I'd only seen her for 14weeks due to working away and decided to make a change.
I came back home and started a collage course in LAB Technicians as there was plenty of work in that field close to home. After the first certification was achieved I started a summer job while waiting for the next course to start. It was at a mineral processing company, close by, via a contracting company. It was only short term but flexible. My next course was delayed 6 months and continued at the mineral processing plant. After a few months the company offered me a full time position with them and I accepted. I have now been there for over 5 years and have advanced through all the sections to now be an advanced operator and get to run the control room and 'drive' this massive plant.
In 2017 we had our second child, another girl we named Mae. Our life just got a whole lot busier but for the better :) Since then it's been all about doing family stuff as our world rotates around the kids schooling and sporting schedules and the next chapter of our lives began.
Skye & Mae
Fast forward to 2020 and we all know how that year started, the Corona virus put the world on hold but being in the Sth West of Western Australia we were extremely lucky as we had a very minimal outbreak that was contained quickly. We never experienced the effects that most of the world has suffered, with minor lock downs from time to time being the worst of it.
Start of 2021 and I decided to stop drinking. I felt it had taken control of my life and decision making and really was affecting my mental outlook on life, with swings of depression becoming more regular and my anger issues becoming more apparent. Since then while I don't feel any better I feel depressed a hell of a lot less and when I do it passes fairly quickly to really be a non-issue. The money saved, which is substantial now that I think about it, is now used to invest in crypto.
This new found interest has in a round about way lead me here as I never would have heard of hive without exploring the new frontiers that the blockchain has opened and am I am excited to see where it leads and what the future holds with this new technology. Not only as an investment but what new and exciting technologies are developed from it. One that I am interested in is a company called Power Ledger. That are a smart energy contracting organisation that runs on the Ethereum blockchain. They have a few international projects underway and a handful of local trials based in Australia and New Zealand. Basically a community battery is set up and those with solar can feed the battery to buy and sell excess power among themselves with the blockchain as the central hub. Very exciting if it can take of and be accepted through state legislation.
I spose I should share a little bit what the sth west is like. It boasts some amazing coastlines and beaches with hills and forests inland. It's famous for it's wine regions and surf spots and really has it all for those that like the outdoors with camping, fishing, 4x4, mounting biking, sailing, canoeing, bush walking designated and maintained areas. Bunbury itself had a population of about 80-90k and is the second largest city in WA, with Perth at about 3mil. So heaps of room with not a lot of people but plenty of facilities.
Collie River
Sunset in the west
Well if you made it this far thanks for reading, that was actually quite cathodic. I'm quite taken aback by all the support the hive community has shown me so far and will be thinking of new topics to post (that's definitely enough about me) and more subjects to read up on. Feel free to point out any improvements in my formatting or writing style as this is all very new to me. Im active on Hive Australia discord if you want to hit me up or ask any questions.
Have a good one!