Mark T McShane

I was born to the best of British--both my parents hail from Northern Ireland. 'Norn Iron' to the locals.

My childhood was filled with boyish adventures and idyllic days set against the backdrop of Sydney's northern beaches. I was the type of kid who yearned to be outside and you could always find me with a smile on my face and either a tennis racquet or cricket bat in hand. It isn't a hard stretch to imagine what I wanted to be when I grew up. My mother worked nights as a nurse and my father worked ten hours a day, six days a week, so Sundays were by far the best day of the week. In the summertime dad would load us into the jalopy and take us to one of the beaches, Manly, Freshwater or Curl Curl--zinc cream, paddle pops, surf and sand. In the wintertime if it coincided with the schedule, and the Manly Rugby League team had a home game, dad would take me to watch them play at Brookvale. We still get together to watch every televised match that Manly plays.

High school for me wasn't about the pursuit of academic excellence. That was merely an annoying distraction to the joys of the social environment I found myself in. I was there to forge friendships and hone social skills, a fact that was sadly reflected in most of my report cards. This phenomenon was greatly exaggerated by the event of my parents purchasing twenty five acres at Lake Cathie, just south of Port Macquarie on the Mid North Coast of NSW. I transferred from an all-boys school to a public co-ed. The new school distinguished itself by overlooking the intersection of two beautiful surf beaches--arguably the best view in Port Macquarie! It is also surrounded by ovals, tennis courts and, oh, did I mention girls?

The decade of greed had arrived and I entered university with Gordon Gekko's much vaunted, "Greed, for the lack of a better word, is good". So of course I studied business, a double major in Accounting-Marketing. Accounting--why I didn't look past 'A' in the university course guide still haunts me to this very day. How I graduated is one of life's mysteries. As with high school, my social exuberance was boundless, but in 1993 I graduated from the University of New England Northern Rivers with a Bachelor's degree.

By the mid 90s I was less than content with the tedious drone of accounting, and decided that my newly acquired passport needed its pages filled with stamps. That's when I discovered the wonderment of travel, the ephemeral relationship between time, space, and being, and of course the strength of the British pound. A six month contract in London would net the equivalent of a year's work in Australia. These were the heady days before Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs IR-35 tax reforms and when a British pound would buy three Australian dollars. Two passports later and the collapse of all things financial I returned to Australia. The year was 2008.

My first novel, Dusty Trails was completed early 2012 and is the first in the series. I am currently working on my next novel, titled The Accountant, and hope to get back to the Dusty Trails series by 2013.

Mark T McShane.