A PERIPATETIC childhood in the United States prepared Professor Jim Morgan for his biggest move to date: to a house in Bathurst on the other side of the world with views of the mountains.
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Professor Morgan has been busy helping set up an innovative new engineering course at Charles Sturt University Bathurst, but has had time to soak up some Australianisms.
"My whole family think I've become Australian, because phrases like 'no worries' come naturally now," he says.
"One thing I have not got over is seeing kangaroos as often as I have."
The professor of engineering and inaugural course director has long been interested in how things work and how students learn, but has found himself thinking about language since he arrived in Australia.
"When I moved to Australia, I would have said we [the United States and Australia] share a common language," he says.
"The realisation that that's not really true has been a bit more of a surprise than I thought it would be."
Professor Morgan was born in Tacoma, Washington, on the US west coast, to a father who was in the Air Force.
"I lived in 12 different places when I was growing up and had been to nine schools by the time I finished year 12," he says.
And the moves were big: the family lived in Florida in the south-east, Montana in the north, Illinois in the midwest and Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean, among other states.
Professor Morgan studied civil engineering at the University of Illinois.
"I'm from a generation where you picked engineering because you wondered how things work," he says.
"I would take things apart, and could sometimes put them back together again."
Completing a post-grad, Professor Morgan picked up a part-time job in the mid-1970s with an engineering firm that was owned by one of the faculty members.
As part-time jobs go, it was a big one: working on the more than 800-mile long Trans-Alaska oil pipeline, a project worth billions of dollars.
Professor Morgan's part in the project was helping to protect the permafrost - the permanently frozen ground - from thawing as the hot oil was transported across it.
"The project that I was given was to work on the vertical support members that held the pipeline in a long stretch where it was elevated above the permafrost," he says.
"Which is when some of the theoretical classes finally started to sink in."
Having attained a PHD, Professor Morgan says he had a "fairly traditional academic career for a faculty member" of teaching classes and doing research.
And then, in 1991, when his eldest daughter was born, he had an epiphany.
"Quite shockingly, my first thought when I saw her was 'I hope she does not come to uni and decide to do engineering'," he says.
I would have said we share a common language
Puzzling over his reaction, Professor Morgan realised he would not want to see his daughter subjected to the same "fairly brutal process" that is the traditional model for engineering education in the US as he had experienced.
"Although I had seen the effects of students losing self-esteem, and their sense of failure, it was not really a personal thing to me until I saw my daughter and then remembered I struggled in first year," he says.
An example of that "fairly brutal process", he says, was having a dean of engineering tell a lecture hall full of first-year students (including Professor Morgan) to look to their left, look to their right and then look in the mirror when they got home and reflect on the fact that only one of those three students would be graduating.
So Professor Morgan's research took a new tack: a different style of engineering education that supports students and encourages under-represented groups - including women and those from a lower socio-economic background - to be successful.
So when a phone call came from an Australian friend, Euan Lindsay (now the foundation professor of engineering at CSU Bathurst), asking if Professor Morgan knew someone who would want to help set up a new engineering school at CSU, the answer was obvious.
Professor Morgan says CSU was the right size for a university wanting to try something different.
"A feature of large institutions is they do not change very rapidly. I liken it to boats. If you want to turn around one of the cruise ships that come into Sydney Harbour, it takes a lot of time, and a lot of planning."
Professor Morgan left Texas for CSU in April last year, his first students arrived on the campus in February and he has quickly settled into Bathurst life.
"The uni is starting the process of helping me become a permanent resident," he says.
His wife, who has her own company, remains in Texas for the moment, but Professor Morgan says there is a competition between them: "Whoever retires first has to move."
And in the meantime, there are kangaroos to see and Australianisms to unravel.