This is my first blog since returning to live in Australia.  It may take a while for these blogs to become as regular as my earlier blogs from Hong Kong and Houston, as we are not yet in our home and we do not yet have internet access organized.

Since returning to Sydney, Di and I have been staying with some very good friends of ours in the suburb of Leichhardt.  Our own house is not yet vacant, and even when it becomes vacant, we will still need to wait for a few weeks before our furniture and household goods arrive from Houston.  They seem to be on a particularly slow boat, even when the vast size of the Pacific Ocean is taken into account.

We have made some progress towards re-settling.  I transferred my driver’s licence to New South Wales yesterday morning, and we have arranged to buy a car, which we will collect this Tuesday.  We have bought a bed, and that will be delivered on Tuesday next week, enabling us to move into our own home, even though the bed may well be the only piece of furniture in it.

The novelty of moving internationally wore off several moves ago.  Hopefully this will be our last Big International Move.

Two days after arriving in Sydney, I paid a visit to Pronins, the distributors of the books I have written for the past decade or so.  As well as making contact with some folk who have become good friends over the years, it enabled me to see a copy of my latest book for the first time.

The new book is the 7th edition of “Planet Geography”, a book I have written to support the IB (International Baccalaureate) Geography course.  The first edition was released over a decade ago (in 2002), and the latest edition is almost unrecognizable from that 1st edition.  Indeed, it is even vastly different from the previous (6th) edition, so great are the changes, the updates, and the extent of new or expanded sections.

In some ways, writing a book is a bit like having a baby.  The gestation period for a book (for this book, anyway) is actually a little longer than nine months, and like giving birth, you don’t really know what the finished product will look like even though you provided the genetic input for it.

When I saw my first copy of the 7th edition of “Planet Geography”, I was immediately delighted, and I understood the enthusiastic comments of those who had seen it before me while I was travelling back to Australia.  The printers did a superb job.  The photos look great, the paper has a beautiful sheen to it, and the all-new layout looks just as modern and effective as I had hoped.

In some ways, “Planet Geography” is the documented culmination of many of my experiences as a geographer.  The 1400 photos in the book are, with just a tiny handful of exceptions, all ones that were taken by me when travelling or while undertaking fieldwork.  Much of the material was also gathered by me while in the field, travelling either with students or solo.

The IB, with its emphases on global understanding, academic excellence, genuine enquiry, open-mindedness, reflective learning and appreciating others’ perspectives, provides a brilliant framework for expounding geographical insights.  It has been a privilege to help support geography in the IB for over a decade now by doing what I love most – sharing insights and perspectives with young people who will without doubt be the leaders of the next generation.