PHILIP LUKER THE BLOGGER

Philip Luker has travelled through, interviewed and photographed people in 59 countries in North, Central and South America, Asia, Africa, Europe and his home country, Australia.

He walked through some of the countries as a backpacker (before the word was invented) and was the first Australian journalist to get into Communist China.

He interviewed world leaders as a journalist but the other people he met and photographed on that and later world trips were ordinary people on the street. 

These are the people whose lives he describes after a great deal of research in Thirty People of the World in Thirty Countries.   

Philip has been a reporter or sub-editor on the now-defunct Sydney Daily Mirror and The Sun and also on the Sydney Daily Telegraph and The Australian Financial Review and in London on The Daily Mail. 

He launched, published and edited four management newsletters, Foodweek, Inside Retailing, Greenweek and Mediaweek, all of which except Foodweek are still being published. 

He wrote the only biography of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation personality Phillip Adams.

On one of his three trips through Africa, he interviewed Australian doctors and nurses working for Medecins Sans Frontieres and back in Australia continued interviewing MSF volunteers and had a hundred articles published about them in Australian newspapers. 

“I dream of a world where all people of all races work together in harmony” 

– Nelson Mandela

Philip Luker aims in Thirty People of the World in Thirty Countries to describe, in words and photos, the lives of ordinary people in the 30 countries so readers will understand them and be less likely to fear, ignore or resent them.

Like the famous French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, he has in his photographs tried to capture “the decisive moment.”

Why I wrote this blog

1. I want to share the knowledge and understanding I have gained about the ordinary people of the world.
2. Most of what we see, read and hear about foreign countries reports politics, wars, climate crises and other headline events.
3. I want to tell you about the lives of ordinary people I met, talked with and photographed in the streets.
4. These are the people I had feelings for in my extensive travels through 50 countries.
5. Many of them looked poor and struggled to stay alive.
6. The children had no toys but made-up games like playing marbles with pebbles. 
7. The people I photographed and whose lives I researched want to live their lives in peace and as best they can; many have hopes of a better life; many of their rulers aim mostly to feather their own nests.
8. Sir Francis Bacon said in 1597: “Knowledge is power.” 
9. Martin Luther King said: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.”  
10. Buddha said: “There is no wealth like knowledge and no poverty like ignorance.”