Starting with a Quest

From the Ohio Boys Home in the New England Tablelands I was sent by train to Sydney to attend the selection board into the Australian Army. I was 15 years old and a few months. It was Christmas of 1963.

I was a country boy brought up in a home run by the local Church of England for children from broken homes. Actually I went to the home at about aged 11 from foster care in Armidale. For a couple of years I was in the care of a Greek family who found me getting in the way of their lifestyle. They managed the main Hotel in the town and I was getting into puberty a little early and was a little too curious about what adults do that I shouldn't know about, so it was off to Ohio.

My parents had separated when I was about 3 and my mother whom I always remembered as the most loving person in the world, had left me in the hands of the Sourey family away from the influences of city life. I suspect though, that it was the Child Welfare department that had done that after a bad foster care scene in Glebe blew up with me attending a children's court where I was charged with being a neglected child. Go figure.

It was in Armidale that my mother visited me once in the couple of years I was there and I was never really allowed to think too much about her as coping with growing up in the place I found myself was enough to cope with. Thinking about a mother I hardly knew and trying to understand the reasons behind anything at that age was not going to compete with my dreams of saving the world after I then managed to "walk on my hands" and balance on a fence with my batman costume catching on the splintery planks.

I had become aware of Science Fiction stories and wanted to know how to be better than I was in order to prepare myself for a life I thought would be involved in saving everyone from "the bad forces". I was going to grow a cabbage as big as a tree and thus vegetables large enough to feed the starving children of the world. The idea was to overcome and to excel. The successful germination of a small patch of radishes in the back yard of the hotel inspired me to ask questions about the nature of Life and Growth and how to become an "Experimental Farmer".

It was this aspiration that gave my carers the explanation of why I was going to the orphanage at Walcha. It was there I was going to learn about agriculture and farm life and become an Experimental Farmer, an agricultural scientist. The plans for a new kind of water sprinkler and a soil processing plant I had been working on was going to start me off in my life's calling. The composting machine and the use of music to make plants happy would at last be something I would be able to develop as a gift to the world.