People who were told as children, “You’ll never get anywhere in life”, where are you now?

So, how did I get to Senior Curator? Some things you need to know first I’m obsessive about English Morris dancing. I’m the first guy to take his hat off here. Many of my decisions about work and travel focus on improving my opportunities to get more Morris Dancing. It’s hard to know where the journey to Senior Curator started as so much feeds into getting there, but I’ll start in 1993. This is so simplified it’s almost bullet points, though! In 1993 I was working as a spare parts man in an Italian Motorcycle shop in Hobart, Tasmania and dancing with a team there. The shop burnt down and I was told that it would be six months before I could restart my job. My wife and I decided to sell up and move back to mainland Australia as Tassie was becoming very claustrophobic. I pushed for South Australia as that would give me the opportunity to dance with the, then, best men’s Morris team in Australia in Adelaide – the Adelaide Morris Men. I’d been working very hard in the time I was at the ‘bike shop and decided that I wanted to have a slack year and sign up for university (I already had a BSc. and knew I could leverage that to get in). I had hated university the first time and my intent was to use the government money that uni students then could get and basically only turn up now and then. And if I failed at the end of first year then I would have had a year’s holiday at the government’s expense. But … It turned out that not only did I love being at uni, I was very, very good at it. I won prizes, medals and money all three years of my undergraduate years. I had chosen subjects that were essentially useless but would engage me if I had to turn up more often that I thought I would. I ended up after four years with a BA (Hons) and an MA owing to circumstances that are far to complicated to explain here. And, importantly a scholarship for a Ph.D in one of my majors. I was still loving uni, but could see that there were a lot of changes coming so decided that whatever I did needed to interest me; needed to give me employment opportunities; and, importantly, could be leveraged to give me lots of overseas travel to go Morris Dancing in the UK and elsewhere. I’d always been a keen motorcyclist and loved going to museums and art galleries so I decided to research in a field where no research had previously been done – automotive museums, their visitors, and their collections. So for five years I travelled  the world on the academic purse, getting grants from the latest fields – gender studies/women’s material culture etc etc – from motor museums and technology museums; from automotive companies than actually ran their own museums; from motor insurers with a public facing ‘supporting education’ face. And on and on. I would go to overseas conferences and then take a month off and fly to the UK and go Morris Dancing. Sometimes the places I went to conferences had teams I could dance with – who knew that Helsinki had a team? At other times I could spin museum ‘research visits’ or bursaries in the UK and get someone else to pay for my obsession. It is an obsession – I have the word ‘Morris’ tattooed on my left forearm and ‘Dancer’ on my right; labelling me whenever I watch teams dancing with my judgemental arms folded stance. The downside was that I didn’t actually like motor museums very much – like going to a zoo full of dead elephants in my opinion – or, if done well, an art gallery for blue collar guys. Anyway, about two and a half years in I applied for a job as Senior Curator at the National Motor Museum in South Australia and got the job. Thus proving to myself that, when it comes to ‘dream jobs’, it’s always wise to remember that nightmares are dreams too. Postscript:- My wife was a teacher and could get a job almost anywhere at the drop of a hat. She loved teaching as well as regular changes of pace and place so I could not have lived the life I lived without her support.

Right now I’m about to drive for four hours, have an injection to manage my long term cancer (25+ years and counting), then drive home. But I’ll get back to you.