In this memoir, John Mathews outlines the twists and turns of a career that spans six decades, culminating in his earning a Professorship at Macquarie University in Sydney. He discusses his career as an intellectual Odyssey, full of challenges and controversies and unexpected developments. He outlines how he built on his PhD in London to act as advisor to unions in expanding the scope of their negotiations to encompass health and safety concerns; and how this led to interventions in debates over industrial and economic democracy. These real world concerns provided a platform for an academic career, documenting workplace reforms in Australia and national industrialisation initiatives in East Asia. He describes how his engagement with developmental business strategies led to a decade and more of interventions in greening of industry as the ultimate challenge. Mathews takes the reader on his Odyssey to relive the drama of the controversies and arguments that made his a fulfilling intellectual life.