. . . of Keith’s mother: “Mum was a bit of a home doctor. She had a cure for everything. If we had a belly ache, she would dose us with Epsom salts. With ear aches, it was a clean out with peroxide. When we got boils, she would examine them from time to time and be quite sympathetic, but when ready to burst she would grab hold of us and squeeze like hell. It didn’t matter how loud we yelled, she didn’t stop until all the puss was out. When we got hair lice, which we got almost every year from the other kids at school, Dad practically shaved our heads and then Mum would go to town on our scalps with kerosene and a stiff brush. We felt that our scalps were practically on fire.

Mum had a happy nature and loved to play tricks on her progeny. On one occasion she came up to us when we were very young holding her hand and telling us that she had cut off her middle finger. And there it was, the middle finger, displayed on blood-soaked cotton wool in a square tobacco tin. It looked ghastly and frightened all of us, especially Helen. Having succeeded in frightening the hell out of all of us, Mother explained that it was all a joke . . . a hole being cut in the bottom.”

. . . of growing up in the world: “In 1948 I got a job in New Guinea, servicing and maintaining the Australasian Petroleum company’s Port Moresby fleet of vehicles and boats. I had ten local Papuans on my staff and I had to learn Pidgin very quickly in order to have any communication at all. The pay was good but the heat and humidity, especially in my tin shed workshop, was terrible. I sweated as never before. Native wash-wash boys did our laundry, but as they couldn’t read our name tags, we rarely got our own clothes back. 

The Papuans were called Fuzzy Wuzzys because of their massive crop of black curly hair. They were the happiest folk I had ever seen, perhaps partly because they chewed beetle nut which tended to make their teeth red and themselves a little drunk. Port Moresby was a man’s town. The native girls wore grass skirts and were very pretty, but it was greatly frowned upon for Australian men to mix with them. There was an extreme shortage of white girls and you needed to have the qualities of Clark Gable in order to get a girl on your arm”

The beginning of adventure outback as a crocodile hunter: “Returning from New Guinea in 1949 I joined up with a team of would be crocodile hunters from Brisbane, who were undertaking hunting in the Gulf of Carpentaria. The venture turned out to be a classic failure, blokes were scarred, fighting each other, worried about girlfriends and wives and were not suitable to the task. However for me it was one of the most thrilling adventures I’d had to that time . . .”