Last Part – Tony in his own words – a broad overview with selfies

I was born in Melbourne to a family of fruit & vegetable wholesalers. At twenty, I took off for UK to follow my dream of motorsport photography, which I did for these three years with some success. While in the UK I married a pommie nurse, and brought her & her mum out to Oz by sea as 10-pound migrants. (The marriage lasted 31 years which was a fair innings).

Back home, I started a boring career in banking, with a little boost from being sent to Noumea by BNP for three months to optimise my French language skills. While there I realised that people living in capital cities are wasting their lives.

After Noumea, I was sent to Adelaide for four years. I used equity from the sale of my Melbourne house to commission a new 25-foot sailboat, which I raced in the beautiful SA waters, culminating in a fantastic Adelaide-Port Lincoln race, which took my little yacht out into the Great Australian Bight. After a week competing in the local regatta, we had a lovely cruise back to Adelaide, which included sailing amongst a 150 strong school of dolphins for an hour or more. We took turns lying on the foredeck, and stroking the heads of dolphins alongside us as the bow buried into the swells. All us blokey blokes were crying like babies!

When I got transferred to run a branch in North Sydney, I reluctantly had to sell the yacht, and moved as far away from the coast I could to drown out the call of the Lorelei. But (surprise surprise!) I took to chartering yachts on Pittwater, drawing crewmates from a big e-newsletter mailing list to help pay for 40-foot monohulls or 33-foot catamarans. I was staggered to realise that I actually totted up no less than 33 weekend charters, and actually outlasted two owners of Pittwater Yacht Charter, and teaching about 100 people how to sail.

When my marriage fizzled out in 2000, I moved to Dundas in Sydney, and met another pommie nurse via RSVP. We started as a couple but in due course she decided that she would be returning to UK to look after her parents and dote on her young grandson, so our relationship changed into great “best-friends”.

Katie went back to UK in about 2011, and we kept in touch by constantly playing Words with Friends. Anyway, I sold my Sydney unit and cleared the decks and debts, and moved up to Forster in February 2009.

In mid-2012, I made quite a big change in my life, by selling my sporty Subaru WRX STi and buying my sailing trimaran, a Hobie Adventure Island. I started to sail around the Wallis lakes and out to sea. I was involved with a Hobie Facebook page and made more friends.

Schoolhood friends and others friends I had made in the WRX Club and sailing would visit. We would go sailing on the Lakes and I even did an Outback trip. [Part 1 here and Part 2 here.]

I returned to my photography finally, and use to run a part-time business via my website www.scenefromabove.com.au sending a camera up a 40-foot mast or up to 400 feet under a giant kite, for interesting elevated images.