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Mike Rimmer was born in 1947 and grew up in Sunbury on Thames. After qualifying as a teacher at Didsbury College, Manchester in 1970, he taught briefly at Abbotsford School in Ashford, Middlesex, then emigrated to Australia early in 1971. He spent the next 20 years teaching Geography and History at Brisbane State High School (1971), Ravenshoe State School (1972 - 3), Oakey State High School (1974 - 6) and Kepnock State High School in Bundaberg (1977 - 90).
At the beginning of 1991 Mike returned to the UK and took a job at Evelyns High School in West Drayton, but in August 1992 he began teaching at the British School of Lome in Togo (West Africa). Mike ended up spending 11 years in Togo. He got to know the country very well and thought that BSL was the best school he ever taught in. He particularly liked the cheerful, positive students and the almost total absence of the twin scourges of teachers in the UK and Australia - masses of totally useless paperwork, and the constant stream of ill-conceived initiatives dreamt up by half-witted 'experts'.
There aren’t many places in the world more exotic than Togo, but in 2003 Mike found one - the former Soviet Republic of Tajikistan - and he worked there (at Dushanbe International School) for a year. In August 2004 he accepted the position of Head of English at the Tashkent Ulugbek International School in Uzbekistan (even though he was a Humanities Teacher!). Unfortunately he was forced to return to the UK in 2005 to take care of his elderly, ailing parents and aunt.
During the course of his teaching career Mike took tens of thousands of photos of his students and on his travels. He also found time to write a three - volume history of the Cairns Hinterland. In 2005 he decided to create a website containing an archive of the best of his photos, its main purpose being to enable his former students to download images of themselves when they were in their prime.
In addition, while he was writing his North Queensland book, he took a large number of photos - many of people who are now dead and of buildings that are no longer there. He could only use about 1% of these photos in the book’s three volumes, so he decided to put the pick of the rest onto the website for the benefit of anybody who is interested in the history of this lovely area.
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