Gavin Clarke

Content Creation / Writer

Before joining the team at GemSelect, Gavin Clarke enjoyed a diverse life that has included teaching, running a successful business, a period in a monastery, worldwide travel, two children, two wives and a durian plantation!

Born in London, England, Gavin soon swapped the gray and rainy skies of his home country for the sunny blue skies of South Africa, growing up around the diamond mines of Kimberley and the gold fields of Johannesburg.

Back to high school in London before embarking on a series of travels that led him to hitchhike through Europe, ride a bike across America and backpack through South East Asia to Australia and finally to New Zealand where he settled down for a decade as the owner of a prosperous print, design and marketing company.

Ever the wandering spirit, Gavin, left New Zealand at the beginning of the new millennium. Returning to a country he fell in love with many years before, Gavin found himself in Thailand and, although he cannot give a good reason why, entered a Buddhist monastery as an ordained monk!

During this spiritual retreat, Gavin discovered a love for teaching as part of his daily duties was to look after the small group of orphans who lived at the temple. Tutoring the young boys in English and creating fun ways to keep them interested was a highlight of his life as a monk and led to another career as a teacher in a rural high school.

The local town happened to be Chanthaburi, which turned out to be the centre of the world-wide gems trade and many of his students had family who worked with gemstones in one way or another. This rekindled old memories of his life back in Africa where gemstone mining was an important industry as well as his time in Coober Pedy, Australia's ‘opal capital of the world'.

It was only a matter of time before his love of creative English writing, knowledge of the geological origins of gemstones and curiosity about the spiritual strength of crystals would lead him to our doors at GemSelect.