I've always lived in Melbourne. I took my Arts Honours degree at Monash University, where I picked up a University Prize in English and helped found and run the university's Film Group. Later, while working full-time in the above Department, I began work on a Master's thesis about Hitchcock but didn't complete it. Frankly, writing the thesis while teaching several Hitchcock (or Hitchcock-related) courses to undergraduates, felt like trying to cram an ocean into a wine glass!
Also, I had begun to notice how certain academic ways and mindsets are theory-bound or worse.1 Like the good yoga student I aspired to be, I wanted to see things whole and 'as they really are'.
But afterwards I resumed study for another degree and a diploma. Subsequently I taught Film and English at university, secondary-school, and adult-education levels. Nearly always the emphasis was on Hitchcock! My main teaching-interests have been Hitchcock movies, world cinema, the 19th-century English novel, and just ideas generally (though not for their own sake - more for keeping aware of the limits of perception) ...
My yoga teacher of many years, Shri Vijayedev Yogendra (his father founded the 'modern' yoga movement in Bombay in the 1920s), was a big influence. So, too, has been a very good friend, Freda Freiberg (an authority on Japanese cinema, women's issues, and the Holocaust). Today I practise yoga with the Brahma Kumaris.
Alfred Hitchcock once sent me a copy of Truffaut's book about him. In 1975, on a short visit to Hollywood, I watched Hitchcock direct the airport scene in Family Plot. I also got to meet and interview Edith Head, Albert Whitlock, and John Michael Hayes, and visited such interesting places as the Mission San Juan Bautista, San Francisco (my informal version of the 'Vertigo tour'), Santa Rosa, and Bodega Bay ...
At the end of 1990, I had time to start a Film/Alfred Hitchcock Special Interest Group (SIG) for Australian Mensa, and to begin editing the SIG's quarterly 'newsletter', called 'The MacGuffin'. I drew on my experience as both a teacher and a freelance writer.
In 1995, my brother-in-law, Malcolm Parks, instructed me in using a home PC and accessing the World Wide Web. Until then, 'The MacGuffin' had been produced on a small Smith-Corona word-processor. Soon afterwards I started on this website a daily 'blog' about Hitchcock called "Editor's Day" (sometimes "Guest Editor's Day") which still continues, though lately as "Editor's Week".
In 1998, I was invited by David Barraclough of Titan Books in London to write 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story'. That book - the uncut, beautifully illustrated UK edition - received excellent reviews, perhaps the nicest being Dan Auiler's. ('Ken Mogg may know more about Hitchcock and his milieu than any other film critic.') Nonetheless, the book distilled only a tiny amount of my thoughts and understanding of Hitch and his films!
In 2005 my long profile of Hitchcock for 'Senses of Cinema' (http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/05/hitchcock.html) was well received.
I continue to be a full-time Hitchcock scholar who prefers to work outside the institutional academic scene. In 2007, critic Adrian Martin (writing on the 'Film-Philosophy' website) called me 'the world's greatest expert on Hitchcock's sources and influences'.
Also, I continue to enjoy, and value, ideas (but not for their own sake) ..._____
1. In 'MacGuffin' 8, we noted the following. It concerns the 'father of modern philosophy', René Descartes (1596-1650) and a group of his 17th-century followers; it describes a case of where a proper trust in the evidence of one's senses was called for but wasn't used. Descartes, a Catholic, not wishing to be heretical, i.e., for reasons of expediency, taught that humans are unique in having immortal souls - which he identified with consciousness. To him and his adherents, then, it appeared only logical that animals could not have consciousness. Animals were to be seen as mere machines, automata. So Descartes himself, in order to advance his knowledge of anatomy, proceeded to dissect living animals; and at the Jansenist seminary at Port-Royal the work of experimenters was noted by an eye-witness:
