Tasmanian Connection
Ian grew up in the NorthWest Tasmanian town of Ulverstone. Dad owned a building company and Mum had an art gallery... " so my home was filled with hardworking carpenters and bricklayers AND wacky painters and potters.." His childhood was spent giving heart failure to his mother, regularly disappearing to wander the richly forested hills of the Dial Ranges, behind the town.
This deep, personal grasp of nature is a powerful tool and influence in his work. : a living connection with nature, beyond the rhetoric and statistics of environmental debate . He has been an activist for the environment for many years, his song, "Face of Things to Come" playing a pivotal role in the movement to save Tasmania last wild river, the Franklin.
His love of music was stimulated by his parents' eclectic tastes - Wagner to Miles Davis, The Seekers to Slim Dusty. After winning a school talent contest he was drafted (for two gigs) into his brother's pop/rock band at the age of 9. Here he met musicians who shaped his life.
But it was with the advent of Folk Concerts in aid of the Vietnam Moratorium at the age 14 that Ian discovered his true love, Songwriting. "I discovered that people ( me too) had deep feelings about the world and ways we could live if we made different choices. That there were so many stories to tell, that aren't in history books... I discovered life could be songs."
That same year Ian became the youngest person ever to be accepted into the Melbourne Theatre Company's Acting Summer School - held in Launceston. The course of his life has been shaped by Nature, Art and music ever since. For the last few years, ian has kept a more modest participation at festivals outside Tasmania, preferring to concentrate on Community Arts and the long haul of a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Education. His thesis topic "Teaching Wisdom: Ways of Transformation."
Web site design by free o'toole