Hi, My name is Martin Peters, although my friends and family call me Fred. No, I don’t know why!

I was born on October 23^rd 1971 in Plymouth, England, and spent the first 18 years of my life growing up on my parents’ dairy farm on the outskirts of Kingsbridge in Devon.

Whilst at school much of my spare time was taken up by outdoor persuits under the supervision of Roger King and the “Outdoor activities club”. Caving, climbing canoeing and hill walking were all regular activities, the latter being my favourite.  Events such as the “Ten Tors” expedition on Dartmoor led on to numerous trips to Snowdonia and the Lake District.

Between school and University my gap-year was partly spent walking the GR5 – a long distance footpath (1293 miles) running from the Hook of Holland to Nice on the Mediteranean. It to me and Ben Scott, my partner-in-crime, 79 days to complete and raised about £3,000 for charity in the process.

More recently I graduated from Cranfield University’s School of Agriculture, Food and Environment at Silsoe with a BSc (Hons) in Agricultural Technology and Management.  Following this I started on a research degree program sponsored by Massey Ferguson and the Ministry of Agriculture, investigating “Nitrogen Management Strategies for Precision Farming” It soon became apparent to me that I was not cut out to be a proffesional academic, and my interest in the non-practical side started to fade.

It was at this stage that I was invited by Justin Smith to join his company, ASE Solutech Ltd, as his Technical Development Manager.  I just one year with this company I was directly involved with projects ranging from developing and manufacturing radio-telemetry tensiometers for irrigation scheduling to developing the TurfTrax sytem for spatially assessing the going conditions on race courses.  More recently, much of my time was spent constuctiong and operating the MagnaScan system – a DGPS located real time soil mapping scanner based on electromagnetic induction technology.

Going back a few steps, my placement year from Silsoe was spent working for Aussie-Drain, a Subsurface drainage contractor based in Victoria, Australia.  My boss, Bill Boersma and his wife Thea are probably most resposible for my love of Australia.  The 14 months I spent working with them never ceased to turn up surprises!  I worked on agricultural land ranging from dairy country near Melbourne, to vineyards at Griffith.  Even a pistachio nut farm near Robinvale.  The Aussie-Drain specialist sports field drainage system took us to sites as well known as the AFL’s Waverley Park, as well as numerous golf and race courses.

Since then I have returned four times to Australia, inluding for Christmas ’98 which was for our honeymoon.

On returning from our honeymoon we submitted our application for Australian residency, and in August we finally heard that our application had been successful.

So that is where this expedition starts!  We sold our house.  Packed all our belongings into a Landrover (well, all those that didn’t go with the shipping company!) and started heading south east.

This Website is covering our overland migration form England to a new life in Australia.