‘Nature, nurture and chance.’ The next few chapters will reveal two examples of ‘nature’—i.e., the effects of my genes—namely, my ability to work hard and my lack of mathematical skills. What about the effects of ‘nurture’, essentially my family life, on my career? This was undoubtedly substantial. As described below, we were a very happy family. Our parents were always loving, to each other and to all of us. We played happily together at home, and we had occasional wonderful motoring holidays. The one I remember best was during the summer holidays in 1930, on what we called the ‘Africa Speaks’ expedition, after a film of the time. This was a trip from Adelaide through the Coorong and around much of country Victoria, where our uncles, aunts and cousins lived. On this trip, and whenever we went into the country, as on trips organised by the Field Naturalists Society (‘Field Nats’), of which he was an active member, Father would explain features of the countryside to us, geological, botanical, historical, in a fascinating way. I was attracted to geology from a very early age; my parents kept a drawing I had made of the section of a volcano at the age of four years, and, while I was still at secondary school, I had accumulated quite a good collection of fossils during our trips around Victoria and South Australia and by exchange, including a Triassic fossil of Ginkgo leaves (I now have the best Ginkgo tree in Canberra in my garden). I am sure that this childhood experience played a large part in my later interest in environmental problems.

My mother's influence was important but less obvious. As was usual in that generation, although she had trained as a school-teacher, after she had children she devoted her life to her family. One has only to read the diaries Father wrote on his two overseas trips in the 1930s to see how much he depended on her (see Chapters 15 and 17). As well as offering all possible support for the children to study at home (there was not even a wireless to distract us then), she made the home a haven of affection and support during the sometimes turbulent times of adolescence, and she skimped and saved as much as possible to ensure that each of the five children had as good an education as possible, within our interests and capacity.