Peter Maxwell

Poetry is like those little polished stones that you pocketed as a kid, it’s the scars you suffered along the way, the loves that strayed and those who stayed, and it’s the dust on your boots from a long long road. Here’s where my road has led me.

I grew up happily as the fourth generation of my family in The Fiji Islands. I was educated, as a boarder from the age of nine, at Kings School and Kings College in Auckland New Zealand before returning to finish my schooldays at The Suva Grammar School. I lived in London for a while, in a flirtation with the stage. In Australia, I met the girl I would marry but returned to Fiji and to Western Samoa where I also lived for a while. Back in Australia I married Pamela, after she had returned to me from South Africa. We have been married now for over half a century. We have three sons, two grandsons and now a granddaughter, in all of whom we take great pride.

After a long career in advertising as copywriter, creative director, principal of two advertising agencies carrying my name and a stint as lecturer on the creative process at Bond University, I have now retired from all that and live happily with Pamela right here on the beach on the shores of Queensland’s Moreton Bay. An Australian citizen since 1983, there is a milestone facing north-east in front of our home, down by the water. It reads “Fiji. 2727kms.”