This is my biography. I have included details of my larger life, family and friends, as people around me have shaped my life and I am as much a part of them as they are a part of me. The photos are not in sequence with the text, so I have put a small descriptive comment on each photo.

Dimi Tishler, born in London, UK, my father was studying architecture, mother was looking after me, I hope. They had a top floor flat backing onto Hampstead Heath.

My parents had decided to travel through Europe in a VW van. My nappies and everyone's clothes were washed in a bucket, with no ill effect, six months on the road through Northern and Eastern Europe, lastly in Greece where my grandfather was born, in a small village in the Peloponnese mountains called Akrata. We ended up finally on a small island off Corfu called Paxos where we stayed for a year while my father tried in vain to finish his architectural thesis. Because living intervened in Greece, we went to Cornwall to live in a thatched cottage just out of Bude for six months and he finally finished his thesis.

Moving back to Australia, we lived firstly living in a terrace house in Malvern, Melbourne. Moving longer term to a house in the Dandenong ranges just outside Melbourne, our house in the forest. My love of nature comes from this time and especially my parents love of gardening. Early influences were my fathers playing piano and a friend of the family Max Thomas, who peaked my interest in art, he gave me colouring in pictures he had designed. My first composition on guitar, only two chords Amin, Emaj but it sounded amazing to me at the time. My brother and sisters are born in this period.

The family moved to North Australia, Cairns. This is a time of walking in tropical rain-forests, swimming and sailing on the Great Barrier Reef. I used to fish a lot, catching butterfly fish for the local aquarium. Myself, brother and sisters had an underground cubby house and used to make tree-houses in the large mango trees in the local park.

My parents divorce and my father, brother and I move to New Zealand for three years. This is a both fulfilling but difficult time. My visual arts world broadens here, I had my first solo exhibition at this time, and I discover I have a rare form of eye cancer. Questions of life and death arise and I look for answers, in the process, I discover the Baha'i Faith. This feeds into my exhibition as the main theme is 'life after death' and the eternal nature of the human soul as it progresses in stages, see novel 'A Shade Near White'.

Back in Australia, my eye is removed in a bid to free myself of cancer. Again more difficult times here struggling to stay well but my composition starts as I recover. Go back to New Zealand on a photographic and musical journey. Come back to Melbourne and start Bachelor Fine Arts.

Studying sculpture and painting. Meet my future wife - see left, isn't she beautiful. Complete the degree and go onto do a teaching degree. Find teaching is not for me. Stop painting and sculpture, making the decision that I want to pursue composition exclusively. Start writing several solo classical guitar works, nothing of consequence. Get Married in 1995, the beginning of a significant journey in my life. Start doing design work to pay the bills. Feeling a bit limited in Australia, need a change of scene and more opportunities to study music. We decide to move to London.

Arrive in London, credit card has a heart attack. Settle down, start writing some serious compositions for solo guitar, this takes the next few years. Begin travelling around England and Europe. Start taking more photos as a visual outlet.

Start studying composition with Paul Rhys. Complete my guitar works and move onto other instruments. Visits New York again a year before the world trade centre collapses. It was sad actually, to think many of the people I have passed on my way to and in the restaurant at the top of the Trade centre towers may have passed away a year later. I took a photo of the towers a year before on my first visit to New York and discovered only after Sept 11 that a jet is passing over the towers way above.

Visit Paris for the third time, but on this trip I visit the grave of Thomas Breakwell an early Baha'i who lived in Paris around the early 1900's and died tragically early. See photo left; a typically French avenue of trees at the cemetery where he is buried. I start getting severe headaches in these years and have to stop design work as the stress of contract work didn't help, but this gives me a chance to compose more or less full time. Get a cat, Jaffa, great little fur ball, but unfortunately he dies after only 6 months, we are not sure why, very sad.

Started composing for piano and cello, and other small chamber works. Study composition with Alwynne Pritchard. Got some goldfish in this year, I hope I have better luck with them than Jaffa, anyway they are still alive. My wife goes back to study graphic design at Camberwell College of Art in London. Also started writing a novel, A Shade Near White.

We move back to Australia, our London adventure comes to an end after 5 years. Wife continues her study of design in Brisbane. I continue writing my novel and work on having compositions played at various locations around the world. We both start learning how to surf, badly I might add.

Writing ongoing. I am concentrating on writing the novel "A Shade Near White" these last few years. I'm close to a first draft in 2008.


Copyright ©  Dimitri Tishler                                                                       top