Patrick Ford

Born: 21/09/1946 Education: Batchelor of Agricultural Economics Military Service: Sydney University Regiment 3 years Marital Status: Married 1970, three adult children I have lived in Goondiwindi, Queensland, for most of my life. I have been a farmer for most of this time, but also worked as a farm consultant and an accountant for many years. I have travelled extensively in North America, the UK, Ireland, Western Europe, Malaysia, Vanuatu, and New Zealand. I have always had a love of history, particularly military history. As a youth, I had an ambition to become a regular army officer, but commitments to the family farm precluded this. I have had a colourful and varied career. As a farmer, I learned about life and death, jubilation and sorrow, success and failure, from an early age as I experienced good seasons and crops, but also drought, flood, fire, and market crashes. As a soldier, I learned about duty, commitment, and honour, along with planning and man-management. As a student of history, and a traveller, I gained important information and learned to appreciate different cultures. I am a voracious reader of both fiction and non-fiction and that, along with my life experiences has delivered me a deep well of knowledge from which to draw my stories. I began writing in 2012 and my first book, ‘Drowning in Her Eyes’, reflects a part of my early life that has been imprinted in my memory for more than fifty years. It tells a story of young love and the joy and sorrow it can bring. That part of my life did not turn out well for me, but I was able to gift to my characters the happy conclusion I did not have. Sometimes I feel that I have learnt so much in my life and that is unfair people should die with so much unsaid or unrecorded. I am determined that will not happen with me, and I use history and even family history to produce novels sometimes based on actual events.