ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The author is Dr Rod Blackhirst, long-time resident of the old goldmining town of Bendigo in southern Australia. He was a tutor and lecturer in Arts, Philosophy and Religious Studies at La Trobe University for over 25 years. His doctoral thesis was a study of the works of Plato and ancient Greek natural science and his subsequent academic interests focused on alchemical traditions, east and west. In Religious Studies he lectured on diverse traditions including the Bible, Sufism, Taoism and the I Ching. He regards himself as a Platonist with a particular interest in the alchimie primordiale and is happy to be labelled an "orientalist".

He is now semi-retired and devotes himself to cooking, travel, gardening and writing. The cooking side of things has included working in a (non-macrobiotic) commercial kitchen - hard work, great fun. The gardening side of things includes cultivating a half-acre urban farm ten minutes from the town centre - vegetables, herbs, fruit and nut trees and chickens. He is an advocate of and employs the Biodynamic/French Intensive methods of the great English master gardener Alan Chadwick. (No, it's not permaculture!)

He first encountered macrobiotics in the early 1980s when he accidentally purchased a copy of John Downes' seminal classic of Australian wholefood cooking Natural Tucker. This was followed by wide reading of the works of George Ohsawa, father of modern macrobiotics, and by his own kitchen experiments over the next few decades. Although he has not always subscribed to anything resembling macrobiotic orthodoxy - life often intervenes - he has always remained committed to traditional grain-based wholefood cuisine. (No it's not paleo!)

He is widely travelled in Asia, Pakistan, India and the Middle East. In 2011 he journeyed to the Nara/Kyoto region in Japan for first-hand acquaintance with traditional Japan and the roots of zen macrobiotics. More recently, he returned to Asia and spent a year backpacking around India, Malaysia, Thailand, China and Japan.

HEAVEN - MAN - EARTH

Sulphur - Mercur - Sal

Revolutionibus