I was born in Colombo, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1941, and spent the first seven years of my life there and in India, Malaya (Malaysia), and China. In October 1948, shortly before Mao’s forces entered the city, my parents and I departed Shanghai, aboard a passenger ship bound for the United Kingdom.

Between 1949 and 1960, I attended a couple of Scottish boarding schools, where the routine included cold baths before breakfast, discipline by caning, instruction in Latin and Greek, and afternoon sports to instil team spirit. Meanwhile, my parents had returned to the Far East, where my father resumed his banking career. They were granted six months' leave to return to the United Kingdom once every three years.

In 1956, at the age of fifteen, I was rushed to a hospital ward, where I lay for six months encased neck to ankle in a plaster cast following a complex spinal fusion. I endured the ordeal thanks to the support of the patient in the adjacent bed – a Canadian in his early forties who had come to Scotland to direct a play but had contracted polio shortly after arriving. He now lay in an iron lung, destined to spend the remainder of his existence imprisoned in a metal coffin. Despite his fate, he maintained unremitting optimism, which proved infectious. Upon discharging me from the hospital, the surgeon who had operated on me wrote to my father:

“I took the opportunity to warn him not to do anything foolish or to get himself into any dangerous predicament. I think he is the type of person who is liable to try and go one better than anyone else in order to prove that he can do it.”

Shortly before I finished school in 1960, my parents wrote to Ralph Barlow, my headmaster, exasperated that I had thus far exhibited no interest in pursuing any kind of conventional career. His response, which I discovered decades later among the memorabilia my mother had kept on me, concluded:

“I know he is difficult (but he) has a great desire to do things. He has this curious restless spirit. I don’t think he will become a rolling stone; indeed, I rather think he may do something good one day. I have a feeling that, if you give him your genuine support, you won’t regret it.”

As it turned out, it was not the expensive schooling that determined the future trajectory of my life, but rather a fortuitous acquaintance with a true gentleman – in every sense of the word – named Brigadier Gordon Osmaston. He had spent his working life exploring, surveying, and photographing many of the great peaks in the Himalayas, and closed his career as the distinguished Director of the Survey of India. He and his wife subsequently retired to the English Lake District, where they opened their sprawling home to a dozen or so boys and girls whose parents were “out East” and needed a place to spend their school holidays. Following my hospitalisation, my parents arranged for me to stay there while I regained strength in my wasted muscles.

Uncle Gordon, as I came to know the Brigadier, instilled in me an enthusiasm for rock climbing by taking the more adventurous of us to various crags on neighbouring mountainsides and leading us up challenging routes clad only in gym shoes (sneakers) and connected to one another by suspect jute ropes. I am forever grateful for his tutelage and his patience in dealing with my rebellious nature. He continued rock climbing until the age of sixty-five, when his wife forbade him to risk his life any further.

So great was his modesty that he rarely spoke of his exploits in India until one day I discovered a cache of his photographs and begged him to recount the circumstances under which he had taken them. I was enthralled by his adventures and by the discovery that he had once accompanied Shipton and Tilman, the legendary climbing duo of the interwar years, whose 1935 reconnaissance of Everest revealed the eventual route to its summit. His most loyal porter had been a Sherpa named Tenzing Norgay, who –  together with Edmund Hillary – went on to make the first ascent of Everest in 1953. Thanks to his ongoing friendship with Tenzing, he acquired for me the autographs of both Tenzing and Hillary, which I still treasure.

Keen to assuage my parents’ anxiety, Ralph Barlow arranged for me to interview with the Goldsmiths’ Company in London for a grant to attend university in Christchurch, New Zealand. Approval came shortly after I left school in 1960, whereupon I secured a berth as the sole passenger aboard a cargo ship running from Liverpool to Auckland via the Panama Canal. The trip took six weeks, during which time I established new climbing routes up and around the vessel’s superstructure during the daytime, took my dinners at the captain’s table, and on balmy nights slept out on deck beneath the stars. Thanks to both Barlow and the Brigadier, I now knew what I truly wanted to do: to travel and climb and mingle with fellow restless souls who had tales to recount and adventures to share. Only one minor problem remained – how to achieve such a lifestyle.

Arriving in Christchurch, I elected to major in zoology, believing it might lead to a career in the great outdoors. However, I soon began neglecting my studies, consumed by the urge to climb among the Southern Alps. A couple of years later, daunted by the more realistic prospect of employment within the confines of some office or laboratory, I quit university and caught a boat to Australia. After briefly roaming around Tasmania, I made my way north to Sydney, where I made the acquaintance of a locally based photographer who, to my amazement, was not only travelling the world but actually being paid to do so. This, I suddenly realised, was the missing element in my life. Following his advice to study photography at a particular London institution, I duly boarded a Greek passenger ship bound for Athens, then made my way overland to the United Kingdom, where my parents were now based. Unspoken between us was their belief that Barlow had been profoundly mistaken about me. I was indeed a rolling stone, albeit a rather adventurous one.

The comprehensive photography course in which I enrolled was scheduled to take four years to complete. At the close of the second year, I made an appointment to show my portfolio to the photo editor of a respected magazine and was ushered into his office, anticipating a lengthy appraisal of my images accompanied by some requisite polite praise. Instead, he thumbed quickly through my book before snapping shut the covers and remarking, ‘You must be from the Regent Street Polytechnic.’

‘How do you know?’ I asked in astonishment.

‘All the work I see from there looks the same,’ he replied.

It was time to leave London again.

It was late December 1964 when I arrived in New York, mecca for every established and aspiring photographer, with its myriad advertising agencies and magazine publishers. I planned to linger there a brief while before continuing back to Australia. However, while making the rounds of various photographic studios looking for temporary work, I was fortunate enough to be hired as an assistant to Irving Penn, the renowned fashion and portrait photographer. Despite the privilege of working for Penn, it soon became clear that I could barely cover my living expenses on a salary of just fifty dollars a week. So, when a successful advertising photographer later offered me a more rewarding position in his studio, I gratefully accepted.

During my free weekends, I became casually acquainted with several of the better-known figures in New York’s art world – individuals such as Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, George Segal, Jim Dine, Saul Steinberg, and Tom Wesselmann – who graciously invited me, despite my inexperience, to photograph them in their studios.

Warhol subsequently appropriated my photograph of him to create a series of silkscreened ‘Self-Portraits,’ which have since commanded seven- or eight-figure sums at auction houses and now grace the walls of museums around the world. Unlike today, when copyright protection is automatic, the law then required formal registration with the Library of Congress and payment of a fee – a necessary step I neglected, as I could ill afford the cost. It was a vexing experience. Such flagrant appropriation has since been ruled unlawful in the United States.

Impatient to embark on a freelance career, I self-financed a trip down the Amazon River in 1966 – from its source in Peru to its mouth in Brazil. At that time, the river attracted few outsiders, and the mere mention of its name conjured visions of piranha-infested waters winding through vast expanses of unexplored jungles inhabited by warlike tribes and menacing wildlife. My gamble paid off, for upon my return to New York, one of America’s premier travel publications – Holiday magazine – immediately purchased my photographs. It seemed an auspicious beginning.

Before I departed on my Amazon adventure, I had approached the National Geographic Society in the hope that its magazine might sponsor my trip. However, when I was asked to provide examples of my previously published work – of which there were none – I was understandably turned down. Now, following Holiday’s acquisition of my images, I felt emboldened to contact National Geographic again with a proposal to lead a small expedition on foot across the interior of New Guinea, the world’s second largest island. This time, I was invited to fly to Washington, DC, to elaborate on my plan and was elated to receive the editor’s approval.

My initial 1967 expedition to Papua New Guinea lasted five months. Along with two companions, I traversed the island on foot from south to north, following the Fly River to its origins in the island’s mountainous spine, before descending the rugged northern flanks to the Sepik River and thence to the opposite coast.

In those days, a handful of young Australian patrol officers – while conducting government census surveys – were still discovering isolated pockets of uncontacted tribes, most notably in the region around the Nomad River, a distant tributary of the Fly. Despite ongoing intertribal conflict and reports of cannibalism, the three of us spent a memorable month among them, trekking through the jungle that separated their fortified communal longhouses. It was undoubtedly the highlight of that first expedition, and despite their feuding and fear of ambush, the people accepted our presence with wary curiosity.

One particular event I observed there had a profound influence on my future work. It was a healing ritual (hobora), conducted after dark within a cavernous ceremonial house. Flames from a fire on the earthen floor illuminated the magnificently decorated healer, a Samo tribesman named Igaiyo. He carried a drum and wore a fibrous brown kilt beneath a wide belt of tree bark. His body was intricately painted in yellow, ochre, and black, and his head was framed by a halo of white cockatoo feathers. A band of marsupial fur covered his forehead, and a twin row of dogs’ teeth adorned his brow. A hollow bone nose plug protruded through his septum, and a slender crescent of gold-lip pearl shell traced the line of his jaw and chin. Upon his chest rested a cowrie-shell necklace, flanked by loops of grey grass seed attached to his ears. The burnt umber plumage of four birds of paradise sprouted from the back of his headdress. Inserted in his armbands were whisks of palm fronds, while a more copious bundle of green fronds, tucked beneath the rear of his belt, cascaded down to his feet. Behind this ensemble arched a cane tail terminating in a rattle of dried crayfish shells.

An ailing girl crouched on the ground beside the hearth. Rhythmically beating his drum, the healer began to dance around her, feet together as he hopped, bowed, and ruffled the feathers and fronds attached to his back. The rattle bobbed in unison with his movements, emitting an eerie rustling sound. It soon became apparent that he was imitating the hypnotic courtship display of the male Raggiana bird of paradise – a reclusive denizen of the surrounding forest, hunted for its dazzling plumes used in ceremonial regalia. By attaching its feathers to his own body and reproducing its mesmerizing dance, the healer – and the onlookers – believed he had absorbed the bird’s power, which he now employed to cure the girl of her illness.

Until very recently, these people had had no contact with the outside world and relied upon resources from the surrounding forest, as well as occasional barter with neighbouring tribes, to sustain themselves. In that respect, they led a primal existence, but they were not “primitive” in the misunderstood context of that word. They might have appeared unwashed and “wild" to the Western eye – wielding stone axes, attacking one another with bows and arrows, practising cannibalism, and believing in witchcraft and spirits – yet I was witnessing a performance that would have impressed audiences anywhere in the world. Their use of costume and ornamentation, fused with dance and musical accompaniment, evoked a sense of euphoria common to all cultures.

It troubled me that only a handful of outsiders would ever witness such an event in its authentic setting, and that assimilation with the outside world would ultimately bring about its demise. This thought inspired me to begin documenting examples of self-decoration as practised by other tribes on the island. Thirteen years later, following six subsequent trips, my book on the subject, Man As Art: New Guinea (Studio Books, Viking Press, 1981), finally came to fruition.

Another memorable experience occurred late one night, as I lay asleep in a village hut. I was awakened by an unearthly whirring sound that varied in pitch and intensity – sometimes close by, then distant and barely audible. When I enquired about it in the morning, the villagers confided I had heard the voices of their ancestral spirits. Only later did I learn that a secret ceremony had taken place overnight, accompanied by the pulsing drone of a bull-roarer wielded by a shaman. I cursed myself for omitting to bring a tape recorder with me and resolved to do so when I next returned to the island.

In 1970, sponsored once again by National Geographic, I flew into the Asmat region on the south coast of West Papua – a flat expanse of sweltering jungle and mangrove swamp intersected by numerous rivers that originate in the central mountains and coil their way out to the Arafura Sea. Mud permeates the forest floor and extends thigh-deep for a considerable distance beyond the shoreline at low tide.

The Asmat people occupy small settlements strung out along the riverbanks, their huts elevated on wooden stilts to protect them from flooding and potential attack. Their headhunting tradition is linked to an affinity with the sago tree – their primary food source – and to its perceived resemblance to the human body. The legs correspond to the tree's roots, the torso to its trunk, and the arms to its branches, while the head is analogous to the germinating fruit, symbolising the continuity of life. Each village has its ceremonial bachelors’ house, or jeu, where seated boys periodically undergo initiation into manhood, clasping freshly severed heads between their thighs in their transition to sexual maturity. After undergoing a ritual death and rebirth by submersion in the ocean, they subsequently assume the names and physical attributes of the victims and are even recognized as reincarnations of those individuals by the victims’ own relatives.

The cycle continues unabated when the kin of those killed seek revenge upon the attackers. Tall wood bisj poles – carved with representations of relatives whose deaths must be avenged – are mounted outside the jeu prior to the departure of the raiding party. Following the boys’ initiation, the skulls are flayed and used as pillows to ward off the vengeful spirits of the dead when they emerge at night. Cannibalism constitutes a subsidiary aspect of the headhunting ritual, with body parts distributed among members and relatives of the successful raiding party. Lower jaws are detached from the heads and worn on the killers’ chests as symbols of prowess, while leg bones are fashioned into daggers incised with emblematic designs.

I spent over three months among the Asmat, together with two companions, travelling from village to village in a canoe outfitted with an outboard motor. In the remote headwaters of one river, we came across a headhunting party intent on attacking a settlement farther upstream. I stopped to photograph them until our local guide nervously pointed out that we were in imminent danger ourselves, so we made a hurried departure and continued farther upstream to warn the people there of an impending assault. On our return downstream, the raiders paddled toward us in their canoes in an attempt to cut us off, but we managed to speed past them to safety.

On another occasion, I witnessed an elaborate adoption ceremony intended to forge a bond between two rival villages. During the ritual, six adults – three men and three women – from one village underwent a symbolic birth before being adopted by members of the other. Each was decorated with strips of palm leaves and the three women were presented with bamboo food tongs, signifying their future obligation to feed their new parents once they came of age. They also wore symbolic umbilical cords fastened to stone axe heads around their waists.

All the men in the adopting village lay side by side, face down, on the floor of a hut, while the women stood astride them to form a tunnel representing the birth canal. Each infant then crawled through the canal over the men’s backs, and upon emerging at the other end was hidden beneath a pile of fronds – the placenta – by two elderly women acting as midwives. The midwives then parted the bundle to reveal the newborn infants within and, after opening their eyes, proceeded to sever the umbilical cords with slivers of sharp shell.

The six infants, now transformed into children, were then escorted outdoors, where the men were given toy bows and arrows to practice with. Later, they were paddled out to sea in the canoes of their adoptive parents, and on the return journey were taught the names of the trees and animals they passed along the route. By the time they arrived back in their new home, they had matured into adult members of the community.

I also investigated the fate of Michael Rockefeller, who disappeared here in 1961 during an expedition to collect Asmat woodcarvings. His father, Nelson Rockefeller, then Governor of New York State, organized a major search party, but no trace of him was ever found. I spoke with a Canadian missionary who was there at the time. Reluctant to talk openly, he requested that I turn off my tape recorder before confiding that the locals had told him Michael was killed by men from Otsjanep village, in payback for the shooting of five of their members by a Dutch patrol officer three years earlier. Two other Dutch missionaries – one of whom had organized the Rockefeller search party – confirmed what he had said. I twice visited Otsjanep myself hoping to uncover additional evidence, only to meet with a hostile reception on both occasions.

In addition to photographing their rituals and daily lives, I made numerous tape recordings of Asmat songs and oral histories. Some years later, I was contacted by the renowned ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, who asked if he might copy my material, saying that he was collaborating with the astronomer Carl Sagan to compile a record of music representative of all mankind, to be beamed into outer space from the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft. As Sagan himself so eloquently described the mission:

“Billions of years from now our sun, then a distended red giant star, will have reduced Earth to a charred cinder. But the Voyager record will still be largely intact, in some other remote region of the Milky Way galaxy, preserving a murmur of an ancient civilization that once flourished ... on the distant planet Earth.”

I never learned whether an Asmat song was included on either Voyager craft, but copies of the recordings I made in New Guinea now reside with the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, as part of the extensive Alan Lomax Sound Archive, and in the Rockefeller Wing of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

My eighth and final visit to New Guinea occurred in 1985. Over the preceding two decades, I had been fortunate to receive numerous magazine and occasional advertising assignments that took me to far-flung locales in almost every corner of the globe. But after being on the move for as many as nine consecutive months, my wife encouraged me to settle down and travel together at a more leisurely pace.

On July 4, 1985 – Independence Day in the USA – a real-estate agent brought us to admire the expansive view from a hilltop property in Columbia County, one hundred miles up the Hudson Valley from New York City. It took but a few minutes to confirm that we wanted it. The land had recently been farmed, and the twenty-six-acre parcel consisted of an abandoned hayfield bordered by woods. The prospect of erecting a house where none had previously existed posed an appealing challenge. If homes and gardens indeed reflect the personalities and preferences of those who created them, then we looked forward to leaving an imprint of our own presence here.

Old barns have an unfathomable allure, and since every traditional farmhouse in the surrounding area had at least one adjacent barn, such architecture seemed appropriate for our site. In 1987, after inspecting numerous examples, we came across one that had been constructed in the late eighteenth century by a prosperous landowner named Deertz, whose forebears were Lutheran immigrants from southwest Germany. Unlike barns more common to the region, this one was aisled like a church, with a central nave that had served as the threshing floor. It was a type favoured by the early Dutch settlers, in contrast to the later monospan structures erected by the British. Relatively few still survive in North America.

We purchased the barn in 1987 and began dismantling its timber framework in order to clean and make necessary repairs to the two-centuries-old posts and rafters. The following year we reassembled the frame on our property in Columbia County, some sixty miles – almost a hundred kilometres – away. Since the barn is an historically significant exemplar of its type, we felt a responsibility – as temporary guardians – to retain evidence of its original function and layout, so we proceeded cautiously with the assistance of a talented craftsman. Transforming it into a living space preoccupied us for the ensuing six years.

During that period, I began researching the origins of aisled barns travelling on various occasions through England, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Belgium, and South Africa in search of early precedents. The most striking examples I encountered had been built by monastic orders – the Cistercians in particular – who owned extensive agricultural estates. They date from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, and their survival is testimony to their robust construction. My book on the subject, Silent Spaces: The Last of the Great Aisled Barns (Bulfinch Press, Boston, 1994), was published the same year we moved into the Deertz barn and made it our home.

Although our hilltop location afforded a magnificent vista over the valley below, we were equally aware that we lay open to the gaze of everyone underneath. To lessen our visibility, we planted more than two hundred oak trees around the perimeter of our property, but our desire for privacy called for an additional screen even closer to home.

The solution we decided upon was to create a small garden on the terrace immediately in front of the barn, to serve as an outdoor extension to the living-room behind it. We surrounded it with a waist-high boxwood hedge, which provides the requisite seclusion when we are seated yet affords a view of the landscape beyond while standing. We could have erected a stone wall or wooden fence instead, but live vegetation seemed the more fitting choice.

Curious to learn more about the function of boundaries, I embarked once again on a series of tours of public and private gardens across Europe and North America. During these travels, I came across a work by the English geographer Jay Appleton. In his book The Experience of Landscape (1975), he argued that the twin requirements of all animal species are food and security. The most sought-after habitats, he proposed, are those that offer opportunities for hunting or foraging, together with secure places in which to raise offspring or retreat to in moments of danger. Human appreciation of landscape, he suggested, is biologically related to such needs. The most desirable landscapes afford both prospect and refuge. His theory struck me as entirely plausible, since it precisely mirrored the motivation that led to the creation of our own enclosed garden.

A few years after Silent Spaces appeared, my wife and I received an invitation from the Dutch public-art group Observatorium to inspect a project it had completed in Germany’s Ruhr Valley. The area’s traditional coal mines had long-since closed, and grants had been awarded to reclaim and beautify the disfiguring slag-heaps left behind. As we drove along the A57 autobahn, a familiar profile appeared atop one of the tall heaps ahead of us: it was a full-scale replica in steel of our barn’s timber frame, which the Dutch team had seen and copied from my book.

In its new role, it is suggestive of a temple without walls, affording a contemplative sanctuary to passers-by. It also serves as a tribute to the thousands of impoverished migrants forced by circumstance to leave the region centuries ago in search of a more productive life in America. The sight of our barn transposed back to the Old World and redefined as a work of public art was a poignant and uplifting experience.

Looking back now, I’m gratified to have been able to lead the sort of adventurous life I had yearned for as a schoolboy. My youthful thirst for exploration was kindled by reading Heinrich Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet and Thor Heyerdahl’s account of his Pacific voyage aboard the Kon-Tiki.
Over the course of my lifetime, I have visited both Tibet and Easter Island; roamed the islands of the South Pacific; consorted with cannibals; participated unwittingly in a Papuan headhunters’ raid; and lived like a castaway on a remote Kiriwina beach. I have contemplated the ruins of Machu Picchu, Monte Albán, Tikal, Angkor Wat, Borobudur, Abu Simbel, and other lost cultures. I have stepped back in time within the monasteries of Mount Athos, and reposed amid Bali’s serene temples and rice terraces. I have safaried in Africa; caught giant catfish on an Amazon tributary; trekked around Nepal’s great Himalayan peaks; ballooned over the Swiss Alps, and climbed the Matterhorn. I have wrestled with an Indian money-changer in the heart of New Delhi to reclaim the money he stole from me – and gazed awestruck at the world’s most immense trees in California, Mexico, Tasmania, and New Zealand. Together with my wife, I continue to travel for up to four months a year.

It was curiosity and an adventurous disposition that led me to some of the world’s more remote regions, and my encounters with the remarkable cultures I chanced upon there gave me a renewed perspective on the Earth we share.

It is particularly rewarding to know that the projects I undertook independently – Man As Art and Silent Spaces, together with the songs and oral histories I recorded in New Guinea – have been deemed worthy of inclusion in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Columbia University’s Avery Library, and the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.

Ultimately I hope to have made some small contribution to humanity. With gratitude to my longtime partner and wife, Bryce Birdsall, for her companionship and support, this is my legacy.