A baby conceived out of wedlock, in the late 1940s and within the conservative surrounds of Yorkshire, could elicit a vitriol that any prospective mother would wish, with all her heart, to avoid. Unlike Britain, just released from war, the attitudes of British society were still constrained in a time warp.

Tracking back through those early days in Yorkshire, to a day six months before George was born, we come upon a tumultuous event taking place in the dining room of a large, stone-built residence (bought a few years earlier to house the extended family) .......

After Dorothy arrived home, with her baby disguised as a package in a cardboard box, life in the big house never really returned to its accustomed adult domain. The new baby was adored by all, and then when nine months later the wife of her brother - living in an attached section of the same building - gave birth to identical male twins, the transition to child-centred household was complete.

It could be true for most people that later life is grounded on childhood experience. At seven, George enjoyed the country lanes of sometimes sunny Cornwall, ambling back and forth each day, between high hedgerows, to a tiny village school about a mile from home. He was excited by the world around him, and it seems likely that those early encounters influenced and characterized his life from then on; they formed the makings of the person he would become.

Until his teenage days George had been doted on by elders and shielded from family reality of massive debts and living beyond their means. This fabricated sense of serenity began to develop new cracks which couldn’t be plastered over after his granddad found a fresh spouse and George a new school. Then, darker times began to come to light.

With the morning sun glistening off its bows the massive ocean liner tracked across Port Phillip Bay to dock in Port Melbourne. Out on deck a lanky teenager - now transformed from Elvis ‘flop-top’ to Beatles ‘mop-top’ - leant on the wooden top-rail, casually watching the melee down below. To his left, the four people he had expected to see, made their way up the gangway from shore to ship. He gave a gentle wave then snapped a picture with the new camera his family in Cornwall had given him, just before leaving.

!The day after George arrived in Australia he travelled by car with his newly adopted family, back to their home in Ballarat, a small provincial city in the hills, two hour’s drive from the pick-up point in Melbourne. Travelling by car through the sprawling city suburbs and then across wide-stretching plains before climbing through forested hills, was a revelation for the young Cornishman. He was stunned by the differences: the roads, the houses, the trees, the land itself; a multitude of opposites compared to where he had come from!

George had arrived at a place where he could claim some contentment. With those earlier, sometimes confusing years in the rearview mirror, he rapidly adopted the new life the land down under had to offer. More by luck than sound management he had navigated his way to Australia, but what might life have been, if those crucial decisions along the way determined alternative branches along his Tree of Life?