Welcome Aboard

Hello all! This is a blog created to reflect on and respond to topics raised in Land Administration One. There will be a reflective post every two weeks and responsive posts sporadically as well. These are just my thoughts about the subjects raised and I would love to hear what you think about them also.

Today I am going to give a little bit of background about myself and where I am coming from to form my world view. My hometown is Courtenay, about half way up the east coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia. Most of my life in Canada I have lived on the west coast. During my childhood, my family and I did a lot of road trips and camping around BC and Alberta, and once took the train all the way across the country to Toronto, driving back west over the course of several months. Before moving here last August, that trip when I was eight years old was the furthest east in Canada I had been.

As a family we also traveled extensively in Mexico during my high school years, avoiding anything one would normally call a tourist destination. These trips, along with a solo trip late in high school  were my first real view into a vastly different living and social situation than what I had thus far seen. They helped prepare me for just how different the world can be.

My first degree is a BSc in Geography from the University of Victoria. UVic has a very large geography program which encompasses many disciplines and puts them all under one roof. From GIS to sociology to conservation and economics, all can be found under the geography banner. It also allows considerable exploration of other departments which I used to its limits, studying astronomy, history, languages, and even photography. During that degree I went on an international exchange to James Cook University in Cairns, Queensland, Australia. If anyone reading this can work an exchange into your program, I highly recommend it. It may increase the program length, but the experience is well worth it in my experience.

My tour truck heading up into Bunuba
country from Yawuru country passing
through Nyul Nyul territory and the Country 
Downs cattle station

After graduation I did not have any particular drive to find employment in the geography field, so I ended up moving to Australia again for several years on a work visa. The primary work I found let me get quite involved in land administration questions even if I did not recognize them as such at the time. I worked as a tour guide for extended off-road camping tours through the Kimberley region of far north Western Australia.

The tours I guided routinely passed through aboriginal communities and lands, cattle stations, national parks, natural gas exploration areas, mining regions and small areas of freehold land. In many cases all of these land use areas overlapped, often with several categories at once. It is a very complex situation and far from a satisfactory resolution. It was very interesting and eye opening to become involved in these communities and lands in different ways myself, and see change slowly happening.

For many years I have known that land surveying is where I would like to end up. Last spring I finally was in a position to work in the field with a surveyor for several months, and found it just as fascinating as I had hoped, leading me to thoughts of studying formally. Eight months later and here I am.

I write this just to give a bit of a look into who I am and where I am coming from with what I say in the future on this blog. Cheers, and have a great day!