The Curious Pilgrim

Gordon Hammond

A Search for the Authentic Jesus

Beginning life in a small Australian country town, then thrust into postwar Malaya, a three-year-old boy grows up on the edge of the jungle amidst the turmoil of The Emergency. The son of a missionary doctor, his childhood is characterised by extremes—adventure and danger, faith and confusion.

At the centre is his father: a brilliant surgeon and big-game hunter, volatile yet charismatic, whose influence blurs the line between earthly and divine authority. Raised in a deeply religious home yet spiritually unfulfilled, he enters the Seventh-day Adventist ministry, serving for sixteen years before walking away to establish the Chaplaincy services of Mission Australia.

His journey leads him to work among Sydney's homeless, before an unexpected reinvention in food and travel journalism, transforming regional food tourism across Australia.

This powerful memoir traces a life of upheaval, belief, loss, and rediscovery—a modern pilgrimage and search for authenticity that challenges inherited belief and reveals a simpler, more human understanding of meaning that was always there.

 

About the author

Gordon Hammond is a polymath who avoids labels. For the record, he has a background in pastoral care and psychology. Among other things, he describes himself as a problem-solver, facilitator, photographer, and composer. Much of what he has learned is selftaught and gained through experience, mainly out of necessity or curiosity. Gordon and Sally, his wife of fifty-seven years, live in Sydney, Australia.