On 18 December, 1938, when I was born, the estimated world population was 2.2 billion people. It is now estimated to be 7.2 billion. Not my fault. You may remember, WWII was declared in September 1939, less than a year after I was born. Not my fault. Our family was living in Roseville at the time. My father had worked in the bank and he joined the militia about the time I was born.
 
When - 5 years old, my father, by then a Warrant Officer in the militia, was conducting hand grenade throwing practice at a camp near Tenterfield. He made a lousy throw and his grenade exploded sending a piece of shrapnel “no bigger than a sixpence” through his heart. There were no other injuries on his body and no one else was injured.
 
My first memories are from about the age of 6.  We lived in Kempsey, on the Macleay River on the mid north coast, the town where my mother had originally met my father.  We moved - she could use her school teaching skills as she raised her two boys. She never remarried.
 
Kempsey was paradise for children and I had many an adventure along the riverbanks and around the town on my bike. I knew no other life. We had major floods three years in a row and I still retain vivid images of army amphibious ‘ducks’ in the flooded town and watching houses being swept away. Later my brother was sent to Shore school is Sydney as a boarder while I attended the local public school.
 
In 1951, my mother decided there were not enough opportunities in the country for her boys and moved us back to Sydney. I was 13 at the time. After a year in Lane Cove, we moved to Kingsgrove in the south. No tranquil river there, no floods, no rabbit traps, no barefoot running, no place for a bike. I joined the sea cadets and learnt how to sail boats and tie funny knots.
 
I was a poor student at school and when I was about 15, I started an apprenticeship with a local electrical firm. In the next few years, I learnt many skills, not all of them beneficial.  Drinking and surfing were high on the list and I could dance the Pride of Erin and the jazz waltz before I was 20.
 
At the age of about 19 a couple of mates and I repaired an old ute (a four cylinder Hudson) and drove it to Darwin and back via Adelaide in our Christmas holidays.  That’s started my taste for adventure.
 
A little later, I joined a CMF (Citizen Military Force) army unit training at Georges Heights. The Ist Royal NSW Regiment (Commando), the training was very rigorous but we had a great life running everywhere, shooting, blowing up things, training on “rubber duckies” and climbing the cliffs of Middle Head. The regular army soldiers called us “cut-lunch commandos” but earning a green beret was one of the proudest moments of my life.
 
By the time 1961 rolled around, I’d completed my apprenticeship and wondered what I’d do with my life. In those days, as many of you would know, a trip to Europe was a “rite of passage” for Australians. But I wanted to do it differently.
 
So I decided I’d work in Germany, the land of our old enemy. Having been raised on wartime propaganda, I knew they were all sadistic mass murderers, but I wanted to find out for myself.
 
So I went into the storeroom at the factory where I worked and tore the label from a cardboard carton of electrical equipment from a German supplier. I wrote to them and very shortly I was working in an electrical factory in Bavaria. It was already about 16 years after the end of the war but Germany was still recovering. Very few people spoke English and in the factory almost every person older than me displayed some form of war injury. Usually missing limbs or burnt faces.
 
I was in Germany for about 15 months, the most I could squeeze out of my visa, it was one of the best, and life changing, times of my life. Eventually, however I had to leave, so after a quick look around Europe and Scandinavia, including a few months work in London and a summer in Spain, I started to hitchhike home.
 
I won’t bore you with the details except to say that I was able to travel through places like Bagdad, Pakistan and India, because of the hospitality and kindness of the local people. People whom these days we would probably wouldn’t trust.  A sad world.
 
I didn’t know it at the time, but Singapore was to be a node for many significant events in my life.
 
I met up with an old friend in the Australian Army who arranged for me to stay in the army barracks. It was totally irregular. I was there for more than a month, then as the time to continue towards home approached my friend said, “I’ve made some enquiries and I think we can get you to Oz on a NZ air force plane.” - and he did. It cost me 10 pounds Sterling for an overnight stay in Darwin and my fellow passengers included Naval captains and Army brass. I walked off the Dakota or DC3 at Richmond, no customs checks or passport control. I had to ask someone the way to the railway station!
 
But fate has a way of catching up. A few weeks after I returned a fellow whom I’d met in Singapore said to me, “I have to deliver an engagement ring to a girl living in Rose Bay, would you like to come for the ride. There are four or five girls in the flat and they are all air hostesses with Ansett.” I was 24 at the time, what could I say! One of those girls was June White, who in fact, had just resigned from her hostie's job with Ansett. We married about a year later, by then it was 29 January 1966.
 
In the next few years, I studied at night, gained my matriculation, attended the University of New South Wales at night while working as a draughtsman. We bought a house at Wiley Park in Sydney’s south and, in 1968 June and I had our first baby, a boy. We named him Jeffrey.
 
By the end of 1969 having just graduated as a Civil Engineer, I thought I might be able to squeeze in one more adventure, so I found another job in Germany, this time with the American army. I worked as an engineer on the reconstruction of an old Luftwaffe base not far from Munich. This was very interesting work but it lasted barely a year when June became pregnant and we moved back to Sydney for the birth of our daughter, Kathryn.
 
Back in Sydney, I worked for the state government for a few years before joining Comalco and later another company making building products. I gathered another university degree, a master’s degree, this one in Industrial Design and, finally in 1987 at the age of 49 (I had promised myself I’d do it before 50) I started my own engineering consultancy.  I ran this successfully until I retired in 2004.
 
Has anyone seen the film, “The water Diviner”? In it, the Turkish officer tells the hero. “May you outlive your children”. “It sounds like a blessing”, he says, “but it is actually a curse.”  How true.
 
Words are not enough to tell you the feelings when, on 20 April 1991 our son Jeffrey died of asthma. He was 23 years old. The hurt is worse than any physical pain.
 
But life and time do not wait for grieving parents, even when you think it hasn’t much purpose, so June and I settled back into our routines. For me it was work and Rotary. I have been a member for 28 years and served on almost every position in the club, except Treasurer - I wouldn’t like to be a member of any club that would have me as treasurer!
 
When Dick Dawes restarted our overseas project work, our FAIM projects, I served on 3 project teams to New Guinea, one to Nepal and 5 visits to Indonesia and Timor Leste teaching English. Shortly before I retired, I’d gone back to the University of NSW and obtained a certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). As it happened, I also took golf lessons. The golf lessons did me no good at all, but the certificate has been useful. I still teach once a week in a small way.
 
My widowed mother who worked so hard to raise my brother and me, died in 2001 and four years later, my brother aged 67 also died.  His son had already died overseas, aged 21. Thus ended the Curtis name, or at least my branch of it. I am no stranger to death.
 
I have never been short of things to do in retirement. Apart from teaching, I enjoy learning the Indonesian language, something I have been trying to do for quite a few years, as well as creative writing, mainly flash fiction and short stories. I have even been published a couple of times.
 
I thought that this would be how I would fill out my remaining years, but then in 2012 our daughter Kathryn announced her marriage to a kiwi, Jeremy Martens. And on 3 March last year, my grandson James Christopher Martens was born.  So the wheel of life takes another spin.
 
Despite the tragedies, I feel I’ve had a fairly interesting life so far, and who knows what is yet to come? I can’t wait for the next chapter.