Frank Smith

Frank Smith is a retired agricultural scientist based in Perth. He runs his blog, www.seniorwellbeingnet.ipage.com/ and enjoys freelance journalist work. He was born in the UK and still has a ‘bloody plummy pommy accent’. He arrived in WA to run a pig farm near Margaret River in 1974. After a spell teaching soil science and agronomy at Muresk Institute of Agriculture he moved to the WA Department of Agriculture and handled media relations and publications for the Agriculture Protection Board (APB) for 17 years. He also spent 12 months as visiting professor of agricultural information at the University of Missouri-Columbia (USA). After that experience he now claims to be bilingual, speaking both English and American. He left the APB to run a publishing business, Hopscotch Publications P/L publisher of What’s On in Perth and Fremantle and the Western Liquor Guide with his wife, Mary-Helen. On retirement in 2002 Frank began a new career as a freelance writer and editor. He has contributed paid articles to more than 40 magazines and newspapers in four continents. He regularly writes for Have a Go News, Town and Country Farmer, Australian Dairy Farmer, Australian Forests and Timber and the Countryman. Frank has five children, all of whom have had the good sense to grow up and leave home, and eight grandchildren. He and Mary-Helen recently built a solar-passive home in the hills at Boya. They are busy trying to turn a clay-pan-cum-building-site into a native garden and veggie patch. They have no pets, but regular visits from quendas, blue wrens, sacred kingfishers and a kookaburra that arrives on cue as soon as the BBQ is lit to steal sausages. Frank’s ambition is to retire from paid work before he reaches 80.