Pebbles in a Pond

My first memory of Davin goes back to Narrabundah High School, and a conversation about how manifesting things in your life is a bit like throwing pebbles into a still pond and watching the ripples come back to shore. Those were the Hartleys' cubby house days. I'll always remember the painting he did of the Ringwraiths circling Barad-dûr on the cubby house wall, and him playing his beloved Hypnotic Specter, "Hypno", in Magic: The Gathering, with Led Zeppelin's The Battle of Evermore on, a Mary Jane roach clip, a beer and a chuckle in hand. And that little zebra-painted jeep he'd borrow and fang all over town.

Found it - Battle for Evermore - Ringwraiths circling Barad-dûr on the cubby house wall

Davin loved insects, the six-legged kind anyway. Bees and ants, the ones that look out for each other and build things together. Spiders, never.

He went on to Princeton, where he and some other students wrote a paper on what it would cost New York, short and long term, to build either a second Staten Island rubbish dump or a world-class recycling plant, and how many years it would take the plant to come out ahead for the city. A few years later the verdict came in. Yep, the government of the day went with the second rubbish dump, sadly.

He came home to Canberra and worked at the Department of Environment, helping build a spatial database of emissions and pollutants. It changed shape and name a few times, but the department was still keeping it long after he'd left. Twenty-five years on, I ended up working on a dataset from it myself.

Then Canada. He settled in Squamish, near Whistler, where he loved his snowboarding, and built a home and a business there: Base Technologies, the town's internet provider.

The best story he ever told me, possibly slightly embellished, starts at a party. A guy there had worked for a telco that went broke without paying him, so he'd climbed the abandoned cell sites on Whistler, pulled down the repeaters and network gear, and stashed the lot in his garage until some telco came to buy it back. Davin's thought was: why not put it all back up and switch it on? So they did. Generators at the base of the towers, repeaters back on the masts, cards for sale in town, and skiers on a mountain with no coverage buying pirate internet from him. For a few years that's how part of Whistler got online.

Eventually a big telco bought the towers, sent crews up, and found the sites humming away with someone else's gear on them. They could have sued. Davin offered them a deal instead. Take us to court and we'll owe you everything and go broke. Or, seeing as the company you bought never paid its workers, and those workers now work for me, hire us to look after the sites properly. They hired him. Base went on to build and maintain cell sites right through that region, getting mobile coverage to towns around Whistler before the cables could get there, and a lot of special network setups besides.

Later, when the Canadian government was offering grants to growing tech companies to take on apprentices, Davin got one, took on local people and taught them IT and networking, and the business grew with them. Being a citizen of three countries came in handy too: he was pitching the Australian government to fund the other half. Whatever he earned, he put back into his art, his community and the people who worked for him.

When the news came of a terminal illness, Davin's response was pretty much: bugger this. He was going to beat it with science and spirituality, and keep living life to the full, dark days included. I've had a rough couple of years myself and been in some dark places, and more than once Davin was a light for me in them. Only a few weeks ago we were on Zoom, chatting about his plan to spend half the year here in Queensland and half in Squamish.

He was a peaceful sort, or he tried to be, and he loved showing the people around him the ropes, at work and in his community. And he loved telling a good story with a grin.

Thanks Davin, for your creativity, your love of nature, your adventurous spirit, your warmth, and the way you kept living life to the full. You threw a lot of pebbles, mate. I'll miss you.

I'll end with Tolkien, because it takes me back to that painting on the cubby house wall, to The Battle of Evermore over a game of cards, and to travel, and old friends.

The Road Goes Ever On

J. R. R. Tolkien