WAYNE FURLONG taught English in Melbourne for twenty-seven years and in Hong Kong for eight. He writes song lyrics, poetry, letters and emails. He has written a travel book for friends, an anthology of short stories, and is working on two novels. Wayne is a contributing editor of GoVeg Asia magazine. He has recently been engaged to write a book of interviews and brief biographies for “Small Island Big Song”, a multimedia project with indigenous islander musicians. A father and grandfather, Wayne enjoys keeping fit and is an avid hiker. He loves dancing, socialising, discussion and reading. Wayne reads informative and opinionative texts on social issues, on politics, on history and on science. He likes page-turners but mainly enjoys reading writers who use language playfully and truthfully. His favourite writers are P.G. Wodehouse, Graham Greene and Raymond Chandler. He also enjoys Chinese literature for the way it challenges the reader’s preconceptions. Wayne believes that we all want to be happy and that happiness comes from connection. He is a vegan because “We need to be kind to each other, to animals, and to our environment. Our happiness depends on it.”

Buddha is  a Punk Skater  is a book for educators and student teachers, for anyone who ever went to school, and for anyone who enjoys an entertaining read.

A detailed account by an Australian teacher of his experiences in Inner Mongolia, Melbourne, Southern China (Shenzhen) and Hong Kong.

                In 1977 Wayne, fresh out of university, finds himself in a job for which he is not equipped – English teacher in a tough all-boys secondary school in Melbourne, Australia. He has no learning theory, no confidence and no understanding of the people he is about to teach. He faces a world of binge-drinkers and dope-smokers, of old-school thugs and hippies, of loud music and violence. And that’s just the staffroom.

                For the next forty years, in Melbourne and in Hong Kong, Wayne is slowly dragged to competence by a range of characters, minority and majority, indigenous and foreign, gay and straight, violent and kind, criminal and law-abiding. They are variously abled. They are funny and sad, spiritual and materialistic.

                They are all as different from him as he is from them and they are all the same.

COMMENTS ABOUT Buddha is a Punk Skater (available from Chinese University Press, Hong Kong; Alternate editions from Kindle (pbk and ebk).

“This collection pays homage to the surprising and the frustrating; the amusing and confusing; the enlightening and liberating elements of the essentially human endeavour of teaching. … The poignant and profound is balanced with genuine laugh-outloud moments... The time is ripe for such an anthology. The educational landscape and our collective lives will be better for it.”—Cindy Sullivan (BA; BSc; Grad Dip Student Welfare, University of Melbourne; Master of School Leadership, Monash University)

“Sincere. Humorous. Thought-provoking. Wayne has ingeniously used a multitude of story-telling methods to make us think about the true purposes of education, the roles of schooling and what teachers can and should do.”

Cora Lingling Xu (PhD Cambridge), Lecturer in Education, Keele University, UK

“Wayne asks his readers, and he shows us, how to really observe ourselves. In so doing, he demonstrates how we can appreciate and make a virtue of the necessary and wonderful difference in the people around us, be they strangers, students, colleagues, neighbours, or superordinates.” —Jason S Polley (PhD McGill), Associate Professor, Department of English, Hong Kong Baptist University; Co-editor, Cultural Conflict in Hong Kong: Angles on a Coherent Imaginary (Palgrave, 2018).