Gary Forrester - Life

Life

Gary Forrester was born in Decatur, Illinois, "the soy-bean capital of the world." He grew up in Effingham, Quincy, and Tuscola in central Illinois, but spent most of his adult life overseas.

His father Harry Forrester (1922–2008), an Irish-American basketball and baseball coach, was inducted into the Quincy University Hall of Fame and the Illinois Basketball Coaches Hall of Fame for his ground-breaking work on behalf of African-American athletes in the racially-segregated 1950s. His mother Alma Rose Grundy (1922–2009), a primary school teacher and piano player of European, American Indian, and Melungeon descent, came from a line of musicians on her mother's side that included the German-American fiddler Otto Funk, who gained an entry as "the Walking Fiddler" in the Guinness Book of World Records for playing his Hopf violin every step of the way from New York to San Francisco in 1929, a marathon of 4,165 miles. (The "Walking Fiddler's" journey was chronicled in Forrester's second novel, Begotten, Not Made.) On her father's side, Alma Rose Grundy's ancestors included the abolitionist crusader Miner Steele Gowin, a Melungeon who operated an Underground Railroad safe house in Jersey County, Illinois, for escaping slaves; his wife Nancy Beeman, descended from Cherokee Indians from Georgia, also helped to operate the Jersey County safe house.

After graduating from Tuscola High School in 1964, Forrester worked his way through university by farming, life-guarding, and stacking bottles at a Kraft Food plant. He became a conscientious objector and anti-war activist during the Vietnam War, and performed alternative service in the Peace Corps teaching mathematics in Guyana, South America.

Following a B.Sc. degree in Mathematics, Forrester was awarded a Master of Arts degree in English Literature with a thesis on Applications of the Halle-Keyser Theories of Metrical Stress to Beowulf and Chaucer. He then obtained a Juris Doctorate from the University of Illinois College of Law, where he served as an editor on the law review. He worked for Judge Henry Seiler Wise as a law clerk in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Illinois, before emigrating to Australia where he taught at the University of Melbourne and befriended Aboriginal leader Brian Kamara Willis in Alice Springs. Through Kamara Willis, Forrester became interested in the rights of indigenous peoples, and left Australia in 1980 to work on Indian reservations in the states of South Dakota and Oregon in the USA. (The album Kamara is dedicated to the memory of Kamara Willis.) In 1984 he joined Oregon native Mindy Leek in supporting the final presidential campaign of South Dakota's Senator George McGovern.

Upon the successful restoration of Oregon's Grand Ronde and Klamath tribes, Forrester wrote his book on Indian law and returned to Australia to form the Rank Strangers and represent Aboriginal clients and others. He was also politically active, advising Australian Democrats leaders Senator Don Chipp and Senator Janine Haines in regard to the Aboriginal Affairs portfolio and the Democrats' successful campaign to save the Franklin River in Tasmania.

Throughout the 1990s, with the assistance of international WWOOFERS ("Willing Workers on Organic Farms"), Forrester (a vegetarian) and his family (including six children) operated a communal 80-acre (320,000 m2) organic farm in an Australian eucalypt forest in the Shire of Hepburn, Victoria, based on principles developed by permaculture designer and fellow Shire of Hepburn resident David Holmgren. During this time, he also worked with Father Bob Maguire on behalf of homeless children in Melbourne, studied theology under Veronica Lawson RSM at the Australian Catholic University, and wrote weekly newspaper columns in Central Victoria.

In 2000, Forrester accepted a professorship at the Law School of the University of Illinois. In 2006, following the completion of his first two novels and several years of anti-war protests against the USA's invasion of Iraq, he and his family left America to live on Tinakori Hill in Wellington, New Zealand, where he wrote the poems collected in The Beautiful Daughters of Men, his memoir Blaw, Hunter, Blaw Thy Horn, and his Wellington novel, The Connoisseur of Love.

From 2007 to 2013, he worked as a lawyer for Te Komihana O Ngā Tari Kāwanatanga, and as a Teaching Fellow at Victoria University of Wellington, lecturing in ethics, contract law, and writing.