About John Oxenham Goodman Books
John Oxenham Goodman was born in Australia. As a young man he studied Spanish and German and then travelled extensively in Western Europe. On returning to Australia he found employment in the Australian National University Library where he came in contact with many Asian people who worked in or frequented the university's Oriental Library. He developed an interest in Chinese and Japanese civilizations and in 1969 enrolled in the Asian Studies Faculty hoping to learn Asian languages and teach them in Australian schools. He first studied Indonesian and Japanese as Chinese was then rarely taught in Australian schools. Eventually, in early 1973 he undertook an intensive course in spoken Chinese at the University of Canberra and then studied Classical Chinese at the National University where he began to learn the Three Character Classic (San Zi Jing) and read parts of the Analects (Lun Yu) of Confucius. He finished his Indonesian major and studied Javanese and Arabic for one year. Later he completed graduate diplomas in Education and Librarianship and went on to major in Japanese language at the University of New South Wales. Much later he studied the Teaching of English as a Second Language at the Australian Catholic University in Sydney. He worked in the University of Sydney Library in the 1980s and later taught Japanese and Indonesian in Australian secondary schools, finally teaching English to foreign students who came mainly from China. He attended art classes at TAFE (Technical and Further Education) College in Sydney thus enhancing his lifelong interest in art and photography. After retiring in 2010 he lived in China visiting museums and temples (Buddhist, Daoist and Confucian) all over the country and this inspired him to complete this book which he had begun 30 years earlier.
