Bill StanfordAbout the AuthorBill Stanford was born in Orange, New South Wales and educated in Moss Vale and Sydney. He started work with a stock and station agency in Mudgee, before being a jackaroo at Wingadee, Coonamble, and Ebor, east of Armidale, NSW, and thn a driller in a mining camp in the Kimberley of Western Australia. The latter exposure to men from a great variety of lands encouraged him to buy a one-way ticket to Europe on a Russian ship. For two years he travelled, with stops in Italy, working on a Chianti vineyard; Germany, where he was a civilian assistant to a four-star General at an American Army base and England as a tour guide before accepting the position of a club manager. Along the way he was unfortunately stoned by a crowd of Muslims at the main mosque in Mashad, Persia, stopped by the police in Kandahar, Afghanistan, for speeding in a horse-drawn cart, chased on foot by four Afghans, two of whom were wielding their knives over an economic mis-understanding in Kabul, mugged twice in Brazil and detained for five days by the KGB in Russia.Next, he met and married Janice, settled down and they raised their family at Dubbo, NSW. Then, over 14 consecutive years he and Janice explored at ground level but first-hand the lands, cultures and histories of peoples around the globe, in total more than one hundred and twenty countries. They undertook camping trips from Alaska to Mexico, Buenos Aires to Rio de Janeiro, Istanbul to Cairo, overland journeys from St Petersburg to Shanghai, five visits to the African continent, to the Americas and Asia, to North Korea, Moldova, Cuba, Syria, Bhutan and others along with a horse-riding expedition across western Mongolia. The highlight has most likely been aboard a Dutch Tall Ship, a three-masted, square-rigged barquentine constructed in 1911, working as voyage crew on five adventures including from Argentina to Antarctica and onto South Africa and later sailing 5,163 nautical miles non-stop from northern Brazil to go around Cape Horn from east to west, the first such rounding in a barquentine since 1939, to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the first rounding of the Horn.Having seen something of the history of other lands Bill has now traversed those of his own country and wishes to pass on as best he can, some of the happenings and characteristics of our colonial era forebears that made Australians who they are today, wherever they originally came from. Read More Read Less