About the Author

I’m now an octogenarian. This is the story of my journey, starting as a small child living with my grandparents at the Pencarrow lighthouse in NZ during the war years. I became a freezing worker, a hill country shepherd, a land development field officer, and a high country farmer.

In 1979 I took my family to Fiji, where I’d been engaged to manage a large scale cattle ranch development project.

The next two years were absorbing as we immersed ourselves in the local culture and the challenges of converting scrub covered hills into cattle country.

We returned to the farm in NZ to be faced by a tsunami of problems. Our marriage was struggling, and my business partner had forced a sale of our shares in a move to gain total control of the property. The dice was rolled, we lost, and I found myself for the first time in my life with a substantial amount of money, but I was now in a broken marriage, and the farm was gone. I was 42 years old.

In 1983 I “crossed the ditch” to start a new life in Melbourne Australia. How does a hill country pastoralist from the hills of NZ and Fiji, settle into a big city? It was very hard.

Across the Ditch

Phase two of my story covers the next 40 years. I fell in love, remarried, and learned to sell computers during the PC revolution. A few years later, I formed an IT company in partnership with a friend. Our small company merged with a competitor and in time we found ourselves doing deals on the world stage.

I stepped down as CEO at the age of 75 and completed my transition to retirement by walking 800 km across Spain on the Camino de Santiago.

In March 2024 our company was purchased by a large Canadian aggregator, and I finally retired.

These days I’m surrounded by family and friends, eternally grateful to the guardian angel responsible for looking after me during my long and fortunate life.

Ken Fife – 2024

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