I was born in Dublin, Ireland, with an innate passion for the creatures sharing our planet. Encouraged by a father knowledgeable in Irish wildlife, and nurtured by a mother tolerant enough to accept my mud-covered returns from hedgerows and estuaries, I grew into a dedicated birdwatcher and eventually a professional zoologist.
At an early age I also strove to capture the details of familiar birds on paper. Along with three classmates, I first showed my paintings in a joint exhibition at our high school. While studying for my B.Sc. in Dublin, I exhibited with the Irish Federation of Wildlife Artists and contributed illustrations for the first issues of the annual Irish East Coast Bird Report. Following my move to Australia in 1983, art took a back seat to my postgraduate studies and later my teaching and research work in north Queensland.
Bubbling back to the surface in recent years, my painting skills have been stretched as I have experimented with different media and sought non-scientific expression for my growing appreciation of birds of this corner of the globe. Surrounded by the rainforests, wetlands and savannahs of north Queensland, and within easy reach of Papua New Guinea and the islands of the southwest Pacific, I am in awe of the extravagant diversity of the Australasian realm, and infatuated by its ornithological oddities and mysteries.
