His parents met at the Streets Ice Cream factory, near, they say, the Heart machine. His mother is of Sydney Irish-English and Scots-Jewish extraction and his father was born in Germany during WW2 to Polish domestic servants. Meika was born in Sydney in 1965. He spent his childhood in the Blue Mountains near Sydney and adolescence in Launceston, Tasmania.
After dropping out of a science degree at the Australian National University in Canberra, Meika began writing poetry and helped squat the Cambodian Ambassadorial Residence while fronting the South African Picket. Poetry was published as A Sonnet of Unsonnet, 1987, by Pete Spence's Post Neo press. He spent most of his twenties traveling in Australia and overseas while occasionally working for a living. This included a stay in the early nineties on Mizen Head in West Cork, Ireland, until he began talking to himself as none of the locals would, and so he returned to Tasmania where much the same thing happened.
In the mid-nineties he helped set up the Resource Work Co-operative which managed two landfill salvage and resale Tips Shops in the Greater Hobart Area. At the end of this involvement he invented a new form of multiple voiced poetry composed like a musical score. (For some PDF downloads see Compositional Poetry.)
Then Meika helped Mona Loofs Samorzewski with her Doctorate on Heathland Ecology, driving and cooking and getting un-bogged and stuff. Later they went through IVF and succesfully homebirthed Ulrike, while a couple of years later Adelynde was homebirthed without the need for test tubes or frozen nitrogen.
Meika holds in his left hand a Master of Applied Science in Social Ecology from the University of Western Sydney Hawkesbury and has worked a lot in vineyards, but not at the moment.
He no longer writes for humans, as he is a
But the sculpture thing is here to stay, he reckons, as he sold the first one he made as a wedding present. Since 2008 he has been working in bronze.