My name's John, and I live in Australia. I tinker around with building and painting models of various subjects, but I particularly enjoy building models of sailing ships from plastic kits. I am fascinated by all the history associated with sailing ships, and the romantic in me appreciates the fact that these were surely among the most beautiful and charismatic artefacts ever designed, constructed and operated by human hands. As a modeller, I enjoy the challenge of sailing ship kits, which probably represent among the most complex and demanding plastic kits ever engineered. I also like the fact that sailing ship kits as a genre offer the modeller a wide variety of choices for non-military subjects.
My avatar and screen name honours one of history's great navigators and his ship, both of which perhaps deserve to be better-known than they are. From 1802 to 1803, the English navigator Captain Matthew Flinders commanded the ship HMS Investigator in the first circumnavigation of the Australian continent. His resultant map was the first to give the name "Australia" to the landmass previously known as "New Holland" by the Dutch in the West and "New South Wales" by Captain Cook in the East. The voyage of the Investigator was thus not only a stunning achievement of exploration and seamanship, but also the beginning of Australia as an "idea" in the modern world, and the resolution of one of the last great blanks in the outlines of the globe.
The image of the investigator in my Avatar is a detail from a panting by Ian Hansen.