About Gavin
Gavin Wigginton was born in Nottingham. He is a sometime graduate of the Universities of Wales (in Swansea) and Hull where he studied economics, maths and operations research. In the late 1960s he commenced a rich and varied career in the private sector of industry, with positions at the Aero Engines Division of Rolls Royce and at Imperial Group, which led him to living in Glasgow, Grimsby, Bristol, Guildford and London.
From university days, Gavin was active in politics. In the 1970s, he was twice elected as a member of Grimsby Borough Council. Later he was chairperson of the Liberal Party’s Employment & Industrial Relations Panel, and in 1983 he stood as the Liberal Democrat candidate for the seat of Brigg & Cleethorpes in the UK General Election.
Since 1986, Gavin has lived in Australia. After a period with the National Companies and Securities Commission (now ASIC), he was for 15 years a senior manager of the Australian Red Cross Society’s blood service (now Lifeblood) and, in 2004, he was awarded the organisation’s Distinguished Staff Medal. More recently, he has been a management consultant specialising in governance and risk management and has served on the board of a number of not-for-profit organisations.
For most of his life, Gavin has been an active environmentalist. A long-time member of Friends of the Earth and the Wilderness Society, for a number of years he served as Honorary Secretary and a board member of the Australian Conservation Foundation, receiving Honorary Life Membership of that organisation in 2013. For the last ten years, Gavin and his son have owned a nature reserve in the Strzelecki Hills of Victoria with a conservation covenant and an off-grid sustainable house that is his base for writing. Following a major bush fire in 2009, which he and his son narrowly survived, he has also been active in community-based emergency management.