I come from a musical family and started playing trumpet at the age of nine, but really wanted to play trombone or tuba. But I was too small to start that. At eleven, I was allowed to switch to trombone and joined a brass band in the town where we lived at the time. Later we moved to the Australian capital, Canberra, and there I got in touch with an orchestra. First in the Canberra Youth Orchestra and from the age of fifteen in the local Canberra Symphony (a very good amateur orchestra with a core of professional musicians in the "key positions"). By the time I left home at seventeen and traveled to Melbourne to study music, I had already accumulated a wealth of orchestral experience. I played the infamous Bolerosolo (Ravel) for the first time on tour with the Canberra Youth Orchestra in Bonn and Rome at fifteen. A career as an orchestral musician was my dream even then, and I have now been playing trombone for fifty years.

1988

Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne with Roger Davies and Michael Mulcahy.

Don't have any, but love Schumann, Sibelius, Brahms, Bruckner and Elgar immensely.