I was born in the south midlands English town of Luton, and lived until I was in my early teens on the town's post-war Farley Hill council estate. My love of history was inspired by James Dyer FSA (1934-2013), archaeologist and historian, who in the 1960s taught at my primary school.

My immediate family came as assisted migrants to Brisbane in 1966. Other uncles and aunts had come to Queensland as 'Ten Pound Poms', the first in the mid-1950s.  Coal miners became Holden car builders. 

We lived in what was then the outer southern Brisbane suburb of Acacia Ridge.  I attended Salisbury High School, leaving at grade 12 with mediocre grades.  While working for Queensland Comptroller General of Prisons as a junior clerk,   I attended evening classes, achieving adult matriculation to James Cook University of North Queensland.

I began my studies at James Cook University in 1974, after The Whitlam Government passed the Student Assistance Act the previous year to provide means-tested financial assistance for tertiary students.

My intention was to become a clinical psychologist, a choice determined y my experiences in Queensland's prison system    However, I was soon drawn to study literature and intellectual history, not least because I came to think that many common psychological problems that resulted in the sufferers committing  offences for which they were imprisoned were social problems with historical origins.

In the late 1970s, the History Department at James Cook was pioneering the study of the history Indigenous-settler relations in Australia.    But rather than pursue doctoral studies on some aspect of frontier relations,      I chose to research the religious, philosophical and historical thought of Edward Gibbon, the great Enlightenment historian of Rome, for I had the opportunity to study under Paul Lawrence Rose, a brilliant scholar who happened to join the department in 1975.                    

The doctorate won high praise from my examiners, Roy Porter and J.G.A. Pocock. However, without the support necessary to do further research in British and American archives, the thesis was not transformed into a book, but chapters appeared as journal articles.    Also, by the late 1980s,  my interests had shifted towards exploring the fate of Enlightenment  thought in early colonial Australia.  While at the same time I was actively in North Queensland politics, actively supporting Indigenous land rights.    This led to my being asked by several Elders to help them locate the bodily remains of several of  their Ancestors who they had discovered might be in British scientific collections.   And, as an intellectual historian, I was curious to know why there should be scientific in the bodily remains of Australia's First peoples. 

For near thirty years now, I have been engaged in archive-based historical research and analysis, informed by ithe historiography of science and the history of settler colonialism.   I have also drawn on my research to assist First Nations, state and national museums in Australia and overseas, and Australia’s federal government, to locate, identify and repatriate First Nations Ancestors from overseas scientific institutions to their communities of origin for reburial.

I am also knownas a pioneer in creating research-based digital resources for Pacific and Australian history, and I have been instrumental in the creation of the Return, Reconcile, Renew Archive, an innovative, indispensable online knowledge base for assisting Australian and other First Peoples in locating and repatriating their Ancestors in Western medico-sceintific archives.

Over the years, I have held positions teaching history and digital humanities at several Australian universities – with guest appointments and fellowships in European and US academia.

I took early retirement from the University of Tasmania in 2017 to focus on research writing .