Patrick Ford has had an interesting and varied life. At eighteen, his ambition was to be a regular army officer, but his family circumstances prevented this. There was his widowed mother, two farms to run, and he was an only son. So, he studied agriculture.

He was disappointed but later he said in his unique Australian way, ‘With my luck, I'd probably have been the first poor bastard shot in Vietnam’. He assuaged his ambition by becoming a part-time soldier in his University Regiment.

In his youth Patrick experienced a life-changing event, an event he kept to himself for nearly fifty years before he wrote about it. Since then he has written another fifteen novels. ‘It was like a dam had broken,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t stop.’ Fortunately some family members have had more than interesting lives, and he used their experiences to create a series of nine novels about one family of extraordinary people, the Jack Riordan series.

He has been a farmer, a farm consultant, a teacher and an accountant, but most of all, he is a son of the soil, with a deep spiritual attachment to the land where he grew up. Patrick loves history, particularly military history, and he has travelled extensively in North America, Europe. Malaysia, and the Pacific. His experiences have left him with a deep well of knowledge from which to draw as he writes his stories.

He credits his mother for his love of reading and writing. His current ambition is to share his stories with many people, hoping that they will enjoy reading them as much as he has enjoyed writing them.