[2] In 1963 he graduated from Auckland Secondary Teachers College and began practicing pottery, taught by potters Shoji Hamada, Takeichi Kawai and Michael Cardew.
[citation needed] Nealie began working with salt-glaze ceramics: he built his first anagama kiln in 1978, after visiting Japan.
[4]: 124, 308 He has gone on to research and work with wood firing in Japan, Korea, China, the United States, Norway, Burma, Bangladesh and South Africa.
Nealie has said Digging up old bottles, collecting scraps of weathered driftwood from the mangrove swamps or absorbing visual delights in fossils and artefacts in musky museums are often stimuli behind my work.
[5]: 20 In 1992, he was a member of the Artists in the Sub-Antarctic expedition to the Auckland Islands and was featured in the Treasures of the Underworld exhibition at the Seville World Expo.