For many people, their interest in astronomy goes back to a childhood experience. For me, it was when I was seven years old. My father took me outside our home in Wellington, New Zealand, to see the Great Southern Comet of 1947. I remember it as low over the western hills, with a classical large coma and short tail.
After that, my interest was nurtured by visits to the weekly public nights at Carter Observatory, not far away. Looking through its seemingly enormous 9-inch Cooke refractor at Saturn, the Moon, and much else, plus the lectures, helped me to learn and to wonder.
I was lucky enough to take my secondary schooling at Wellington College, which has a fine and venerable observatory with a Zeiss 5-inch apochromat refractor. There I also developed a passion for maths and physics.
In my college years I built a solidly mounted telescope around a 6-inch Cave mirror, and used it extensively in my backyard. This and the Zeiss gave me great experience in practical astronomical work, and in 1959 at age 19 I was awarded the Murray Geddes Prize of the Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand, for my work on the Sun and planets.

My university years were spent first at Victoria University of Wellington, where I gained a Master of Arts with first class honours in philosophy, specialising in formal logic - because my initial interest in maths and physics was overtaken by a fascination with the foundations of mathematics. Then on to University College, Oxford, armed with a couple of scholarships. While there I won the George Paul Scholarship, and graduated with a D.Phil in philosophy (logic).
After a year or so at Auckland University, I took a Senior Lectureship in philosophy at La Trobe University, in Melbourne, Australia, in 1969. Here I fell in love with an exciting sociologist, Lyn Richards, and we married in 1971 and produced two wonderful children, Naomi and Marshall.
In 1980 I spent a fascinating year at the Institute for Mathematical Studies in Social Sciences at Stanford University, which accelerated a career switch to computer science - common with logicians. Shortly afterwards I was transferred to the Department of Computer Science at La Trobe University and became Reader and Associate Professor. While there I started to develop something unheard of - qualitative analysis software for social sciences. This was to assist Lyn in a very large longitudinal research project on families and new housing estates. The result was a product called Non-numerical Unstructured Data Indexing Searching and Theorizing. (Its acronym you don't use on the Web!) The world wanted this, so by 1995 Lyn and I resigned our positions at La Trobe University, and set up a company, QSR International, to develop the software further. The software evolved to a new product, NVivo, used in universities and institutions in over 100 countries, and the company to an operation with about 40 staff and offices in UK and USA as well as Melbourne. Lyn and I have now left QSR for happy retirement.

Astronomy took a back seat during those years of building a family and a career - a not uncommon pattern with amateur astronomers. I resumed an active interest around 1990 and rejoined the Astronomical Society of Victoria. At first I worked on planets with a 250 mm Meade SCT telescope then an Astro-Physics 180 mm apochromatic refractor - back to my childhood love of refractors.
But I became strongly attracted to variable star work, perhaps because it seemed to me that I could contribute to astrophysics better that way. So over time I built the new observatory on our 5-acre property in Eltham, and set up the present equipment. I've now been working since about 2000 almost exclusively on the photometry of variable stars and asteroids. I have been teaching third-year Monash University astrophysics students observational astronomy at my observatory, and giving numerous presentations and workshops on my interests in many places.
In 2006 I was awarded the Berenice Page Medal of the Astronomical Society of Australia for my work in photometry, including teaching and advising others. I am now Chair of the Programme Committee of the National Australian Convention of Amateur Astronomers, with the responsibility of organizing the content of their two-yearly conferences.