Mick O’Donnell grew up in Maitland N.S.W. He served in radio communications with the Royal Australian Navy for 20 years, including 2 years at the Naval Communications base on Manus Island, on RAN ships during the Borneo confrontation, and in supervisory roles during the Vietnam conflict. He worked with the Australian Federal Police (AFP) initially in the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence (BCI) from 1985 as the Head of Information Data Services (IDS). He traveled extensively with the AFP, and between 2004 and 2009 he was attached to the International Deployment (ID) group on numerous peacekeeping missions throughout the Pacific and South Asia. He was part of the AFP response to the bombing of the Australian Embassy in Jakarta in 2005 and the response to the Garuda aircraft crash at Jogjakarta in May 2007 in which 21 people were killed including 2 AFP officers and visited the International Counter Terrorist College in Samarang, Java, Indonesia. He was regularly deployed to the Solomon Islands as part of the Regional Australian Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI) and was involved with the AFP response to the Honiara riots in the Solomon Islands in April 2006. He visited East Timor many times and was part of the AFP response to the civil unrest in Dili in May 2006. Mick studied creative writing at the University of Canberra, Australia. He was awarded a Bachelor of Theology from the Sydney College of Divinity, and a Master of Arts in Theological Studies from the ACU. He lives i