John was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1940, and lived there until 1995, after which he moved to the Gold Coast, Queensland. At one stage a keen underwater photographer John wrote the book Cinematography Underwater for Australian Sports Publications as well as contibuted articles to Neville Coleman's Underwater Geographic and Skindiving in Australia.
Also a percussionist who was fascinated by Afro-Cuban percussion, John played conga and timbales, bongo and other small percussion, and instructed at workshops sponsored by the Victorian Percussion Society. He took up the art of Aikido in 1990 and has studied this martial art since then, also writing an instruction book called Aikido-Basic and Intermediate Studies. He has written two volumes of memoirs, Fragments from A LIfe (translated into Greek, which won the Agelidis Foundation's 1st prize in 2007), and a follow up volume called Fragments that Remain, as well as a short volume of articles about writing called Attributes a Writer Needs. He has written articles and short stories for various magazines including articles for Aikido Today Magazine and Bujutsu INternational. And The Waters Prevailed is his first full length novel. He is a member of the Gold Coast Writers Association and the Queensland Writers Centre.