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I sailed a bit as a child, but it wasn't until I was around 40, when I was halfway through Patrick O'Brian's 'Master and Commander' novels, that I had the sudden epiphany that I had to go sail on a square-rig ship.

One afternoon when I was 9, my dad told me I'd be skipping school the next day. Then we drove 12 hours from Melbourne to Sydney for the Centenary Test, a once-in-a-lifetime commemorative cricket match. It was great fun - especially for a kid who was a massive sports fan.

I left school at 17 and was a star by the time I was 18 - in certain parts of the world anyway.

I was the most Australian child ever in the world, even though my home was in Africa.

I was excited to come to Australia to shoot for Seafolly because I've been wanting to visit since I was young. There wasn't much time to explore because we were so busy, which happens often during shoots. We had to take a boat to the Whitsunday Islands every day to get to the locations, which was a great way to start the day.

In the late '60s, I was seven, eight, nine years old, and what was going on in the news at that time that really excited a seven, eight, nine year old boy was the Space Race.

Since I was 10 years old, I knew I wanted to sail around the world.

I went to Australia from England when I was right at that age when you learn to read. It's a very confronting thing, traveling halfway around the world and having a mother who was deeply unhappy at ending up in Australia, so you look for some way to find comfort, I guess, and I found it in books.

When I was about 14, my family emigrated from England to Australia, and we decided to stop in Bali on the way through.