I was born in a picturesque coastal village in The Netherlands.

At the age of seven, with my immediate family, I boarded the ship ‘The Waterman’ and as Dutch migrants, we sailed off to Australia to start a new life.

It was an impressionable journey at that young age to endure.  There were moments of great sadness as the distance between myself and my wonderful extended family grew further and further apart. Many hours were spent alone at the back of the ship watching the wake dissolve into the vast open sea, staring back to the horizon wondering if I would ever see my Dutch family again. It was hard to lose my loving grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins all at once on the same day.

The one and a half months onboard also left me with many impressionable moments as we sailed past the Rock of Gibraltar and through the Suez Canal where bare-bottomed boys dived for pennies thrown overboard by passengers and small vessels would come alongside and sell their wares as ropes were hoisted up and down the side of the ship exchanging goods for money.

As we sailed through the Indian Ocean I was captivated by the vastness of the ocean, the enormity of the ship, the maze of corridors, the constant churning of it’s powerful engines, the friendly staff and the excited chatter of passengers full of anticipation for their new life in Australia.

Our family settled in an industrial town in Victoria, a southern state of Australia, where there was plenty of work for new migrants. I missed Holland and my extended family terribly and found it difficult to adjust to life in Australia. We were not privileged with a happy family life and seven years later, at the tender age of fifteen, I left home and moved north to Sydney.

I worked for a couple of years and saved enough money to buy my passage on a ship headed to Singapore and thereafter continued my travels through many countries, living and working for a while in London and Amsterdam.

Returning to Australia, I worked and travelled throughout the country and held a great variety of positions in all kinds of employment.  I liked a challenge and once I got to as high as I could go in any given position of employment, or I was no longer challenged, I would have to find something else to do in order to stretch myself all over again.

Where most people around me settled down into a steady life as their comfort zone, I became uncomfortable when I was ‘too comfortable’ and hence being ‘uncomfortable’ became to some extent, my own personal comfort zone. I was, forever wanting to try out new things and discover new places. Life for me, was like a tantalising smorgasbord of treats just waiting to be tasted.

My main hobbies throughout my life have been renovating properties, art, photography and dancing.  My other joys have been Snow Skiing, Ice skating, rollerblading, swimming and bushwalking.  My greatest joy of all?… to be surrounded by the beauty and peace of nature… I am continually impressed by all of it’s glory.

Throughout my life I experienced extraordinary events that just didn’t fit in with normal everyday life and these events forced me to question everything that I had ever been taught about ‘how life is’ as there was no correlation between these experiences and what we are generally taught to believe about our human existence.

As aesthetics and a warm climate are important to me, I chose to settle in Far North Queensland, Australia, where at the age of 62 years, I wrote my book; “My Extraordinary Experiences” .. a truly fascinating book full of documented events accompanied by my thinking processes as I try to piece together how these events could possibly ‘fit in’ to the world around us.

Just as I have been ‘stretched’ many times throughout my own life, my book will stretch most of it’s readers and it will most definitely challenge everything that you think is real. You can read more about my book on the ‘Books’ page.

I have certainly come to understand that every single person is equally unique and plays an equal and important role in creating the world that we are experiencing. We are truly amazing beings and are far greater than we can even possibly imagine.

My life has shown me that just like white light can be split into seven colours, the human experience can be split into many facets’.

I believe that we all have inside of us a special gift that we bring to the world.

May we all discover it within ourselves and offer it out for all to enjoy and thereby assist in the positive evolution of mankind.