Family First Ward of the State - RAAF Nuclear Tests Veteran - Cold War Diplomat - Businessman

This is a true story told by a man who believes he is a survivor, and not a victim despite what he has endured and lost. The brutality, despair, loneliness, loss of family, and childhood have been off-set by the life he later experienced and pursued with Judith, his wife of fifty-plus years, and his surviving children Adrian and Samantha. The author, his siblings, and especially his mother was subjected to the brutality of a man ill-suited to the responsibilities and role of a husband and father of six. The family unit finally disintegrated. The father had gone too far, and the children were taken away with the older three children placed in orphanages and the younger three either adopted or fostered out to families. Victims received little to no assistance from Law Enforcement or the appropriate State Government Departments of that time. Women were very much on their own and had to endure. It would be another forty years before the author and his siblings were finally reunited. The author spent his formative years in orphanages run by the Christian Brothers in Western Australia. He went on to serve in the Royal Australian Air Force (at the Atomic Weapons Tests at Maralinga and at No. 1 air Trials Unit, Woomera); he traveled and lived in Canada, and later moved to Washington, DC with the Office of the Air Attaché; he served with the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFAT) as a Career Overseas Officer, serving in Moscow, Santiago de Chile, Chicago, and Moscow again; as Personal Assistant to the Secretary of DFAT; as Director of DFAT Office in Sydney; and as Senior Foreign Affairs Representative to South Australia. After retiring from DFAT he had a successful career as a Restauranteur and Businessman in the film industry. He retired and volunteered for a while before joining the Administrative Appeals Tribunal at the Federal Court in Brisbane. Several years later he joined both the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) and DFAT as a Protocol Officer facilitating the visits of foreign Presidents, Prime Ministers, and Foreign Ministers to Brisbane.