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Matt Mason

Matthew R. C. Mason
Some authors make it quick, others take their time. I guess I'm one of those who hasn't been in too much of a hurry!

    Look and Listen

    Biography

    My father is a New Zealander, descended from French Huguenots, the Irish middle class and English craftsmen who had associations with secret craft organisations. My mother, now deceased, was descended from Buchanan clan early settlers of New Zealand on her mother’s side and (we believe through some sort of shenanigans) from Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington,on her father’s. I was born during January 1960 in Sydney, Australia lived in the leafy old harbour side suburb of Hunter’s Hill, then in Bangkok and Khon Kaen for two years while my father assisted the Thai government to set up radio stations and programming in the north east. It was a mind blowing time for our family, during which time we met the King and Queen of Thailand, lived for much of the time in what was little more than a remote village at the time, and frequented such exotic places as Ankor Watt, Vientiane and Chiang Mai. Returning to live in quiet respectable Hunter’s Hill was not an easy transition. After another three years there, we moved to a small acreage with a lovely old garden fronting the national park at Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains, near Sydney. I spent three years at Blue Mountains Grammar School, during which time one of my friends was the now very illustrious Andrew Denton, who, at that age (9 -11) was already a companion of considerable wit and sensitivity. I did not continue there after year 6. My father thought I would be better served by being thrown into the melee of the rather overcrowded and somewhat dubious Katoomba High School, but the decision hinged, as a matter of fate, on whether I won the Dux scholarship or not. It seemed a good chance since I had got first place two years running already, but as fate would have it, it was not to be so. I do think the experience of the local public high school shaped my destiny well on the whole, though not always for the best. Excessive interest in girls and cars and all things fast led me away from academic excellence, though I was lucky to have one very positive and effective English teacher for several years. My education was also interrupted, or facilitated, (I am not sure which) by spending a year travelling in Europe and England with my parents. Despite relatively poor results in my studies I was able to get a position as a copy boy at Rupert Murdoch's News Limited, in Sydney, at the same time as my father started his first term as a Democrat Senator. The year after that I was accepted as a cadet reporter with the Sun, a competition paper. I grew up fast there with exposure to some pretty grim things, but on the bright side I was pursued relentlessly by the dazzling adopted daughter of one of my father’s friends, with whom I eventually became engaged. Career wise I had opportunities that many would die for, doing the midnight to dawn shift on police rounds and getting more than my fair share of front page stories, but the atmosphere was unduly competitive and the stress aggravated serious health problems which began to affect my work. As matters became worse I accepted the offer to work for a colleague who was setting up a small weekly newspaper in the Blue Mountains, hoping for a more relaxed life style. As the only graded journalist on the paper I would gain some great experience, and spent a lot of time talking to some really interesting and creative people, including the artist Reinis Zusters, and even an aged but extremely amiable James Mason during a shoot there. In spite of some great positives I was at a crisis point with respect to my health. I gave up work in despair when I could not even keep awake at my desk during the day, and began to dabble in drugs, especially acid, in a pretty counter culture sort of way. As Jim Morrison and Aldous Huxley had done, I hoped to open doors. LSD is a risky tool, but it gave me far more than I had imagined would be possible. It opened my eyes to many things that I had been shutting out, including the finer detail of the world around me, my emotional hangups, and the long term solutions to my health problems. That was a year full of extremes, though, and eventually a series of catastrophes drove me and my fiancee apart. I was a train wreck when that happened, but following that, I began to work in earnest on my health. At the beginning of 1983 I got off my butt and enrolled at a variety of universities to study literature. Accepted in all of them, including Sydney, I opted to study at the University of New England in rural New Soth Wales, for reasons that were largely intuitive. Already having learned basic TM, I was interested to discover a course in South Asian History at UNE, and decided to take it. The course teacher was not an Indian, nor did he seem to be religious in any external way, yet while studying that course I experienced a series of mystic insights that appeared to be linked in some way to this man. I studied some remarkable texts, particularly concerning Tantricism, that, along with my teacher's influence, shaped my understanding of eastern religion and philosophy in a unique and highly individualistic way. Over the next few years, in and out of university, part time and full time on different occasions, friends and family must have felt that I had become well and truly side tracked, but looking back on it all in retrospect, every step I took was the right one for my own healing and personal development. I completed the degree in 1988, but the qualification itself meant little to me. I had tried one teaching diploma during that time and tried others after graduating, but by that time I had developed a view of education that was well outside the conventional approach, and I could not see a way to express it within the confines of the system. Over the years at university I had been reading a lot and set about writing a variety of things. I chose in the early nineties to retreat with my new girlfriend and baby to the wilds of central Tasmania, where I wrote, grew food, and welcomed another remarkable child into the family. My partner tired of the wilderness however, so we sold up and returned to the Blue Mountains, where we finally split up. I was then obliged to take full time care of my two years old son, who was so full of energy and enthusiasm for life that he needed ceaseless attention. Faced with the almost complete loss of a social life in any case, I decided to sell up and try the rural thing again at a tiny town called Tumbarumba in southern NSW. After a couple of years there was a crisis with my daughter and she came to live with us as well. Life was good there in many ways. The house was an old earth wall cottage that had needed almost completely rebuilding, apart from the 15 inch thick walls, and there was something about living in it that was conducive both to amazingly clear dreams, and to creativity. It was there in late 1999 that I began to write the Dream Master, which later became the Dream Nemesis, then both under the overall title of The Dream Saga. My mother died in 2000 from advanced Parkinson’s aged 70, which she had battled from her early forties, and my 12 year old German Shepherd cross labrador canine friend, who had been with me from the age of three months, died at around the same time. An offer came for my rural retreat, which I decided to accept, in order to be closer to my father. After some difficult years my children and I decided to rent a place in Jindabyne, NSW in 2004 to do a season’s uninterrupted skiing, and while we were there found a charming house for sale overlooking Eucumbene Cove, where we are now living for the time being. I am at this stage a single parent, full time father of two teenagers, fond of sailing, skiing, fine food, antiques, classical music and playing the piano.

    Inspiration

    I've given a fairly lengthy description of myself and my background, but if I can say one thing here, it is that I have always wondered why there was so much of bad and evil things going on in this world. I know there are some great things too, but that's surely what you'd expect. What you don't expect is the rotten terrible, murdering careless mindlessness that seems to pervade so much of the established business and political world. That's what I've called into question, and it was certainly the principal purpose of writing in The Dream Saga.

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