My mother (Hilda Evelyn South) Mount Isa Queensland 1936.
Mum had a great affinity for animals, and was loved and supported by many pets throughout her life.

Mum and Dad 
(Hilary Fines-Clinton Nevill, known as "Bill") newly married, Mount Isa 1936.
Both Dad and Mum looked back on their time together in Mount Isa, before their move to Africa, as the happiest times of their lives. Dad also had a particularly happy childhood growing up in a large family in Dunedin, New Zealand, after his family migrated from Dorset.

Mum and Dad, Mount Isa, 1937. 
I don't have many photos of Mum. She considered herself plain, and did not encourage photography.

Ann Althea, Janet Adrianne and Jon (christened Charles Jonathan), Melbourne 1953.
We had arrived from Luanshya, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) on the SS Hector in 1951.

Mum and dad were keen photographers. After we settled in Hampton, Melbourne, we used to have "movie nights" where we would watch 8mm movies of our time in Africa.  In Africa dad was working in the Roan Antelope copper mine, then one of the largest copper mines in the world. Mum had hoped to work in Africa, but the ex-pat culture prohibited wives from employment. The mine culture also necessitated the employment of three servants from the local community: in the language of the time, a house boy, a cook, and a garden boy.  Mum had a lot of time on her hands.  

While tensions mounted in Europe, our life in Africa at that time was happy and peaceful. However, once World War II began, our family was "locked in" to the mine, under British government orders.  My sister Janet was born in December 1944. WWII officially ended with Japan's surrender in September 1945.

Jon and honey-eater, 1957.
Janet had found the young bird below a nest, and as the parents refused to have their baby back, she raised it herself. It stayed with our family for some years after growing up, flying in and out of our house through open windows.

Jon and Chum, 1961.
Chum considered himself one of our family, and came everywhere with us.

Jon ....  taken a couple of years after the car accident in 1968

Sea cave, Bitangabee Bay, New South Wales, 1970.   
Rosemary's favourite photo....  mine too...  If you can't see her, have a closer look.

Rosemary Nevill nee Thorburn 1972.
Rosemary formerly smoked cigarettes, but gave them up on the day of our marriage. 
She took to smoking a pipe, but that turned out to be a lot of trouble...

Rosemary is a wonderful woman. Intelligent, affectionate, intuitive, and like me, a lover of animals and the natural world.

Rosemary and I spent two years in a VW Kombi campervan, exploring Australia. We were lucky to do the trip early, 1974-76. A wonderful trip, with experiences now impossible to replicate in today's crowded world. Today, the "outback" of Australia has changed (from a traveller's view) almost beyond recognition...

During our adventures, we found all sorts of interesting places, some natural, some unnatural....

Butterfly, MacDonald Ranges Northern Territory 1973.
The butterfly, by the way, was black and white.

Frogs, Edith Falls, Northern Territory 1973.
Frogs are usually cryptic, so hard to study or photograph. The frogs at Edith Falls however seemed to rely just on keeping very still against a background for which they were well camouflaged. There are eight frogs in the photograph below, taken of a rock face beside a small waterfall.

Galahs, leaving after feeding on melon seeds, Northern Territory 1974
I like simple photographs... here we have just grass and wings...

Katajuka (The Olgas)  Northern Territory  1974.
These huge red rocks rise suddenly, dramatically, from an enormous expanse of flat and open plain... In those days there were very few other visitors. Almost every campsite we used in the far north of Australia we had to ourselves. It is different today.

Rock Wallaby, MacDonald Ranges, Northern Territory,  1974.
After the photo was taken I tried to follow her; she leaped so easily from rock to rock I thought the climb would be easy. Actually, it was so steep and difficult the climb was impossible!  Red-brown rocks, red-brown wallaby... The north side of Redbank Gorge.

After finishing our outback adventures, we spent about a year in Broadwater, renting the disused school from the Victorian Education Department. Broadwater was, at that time, a dying town in Victoria's western district, with only a handful of residents remaining.

I worked (unsuccessfully) on finishing the 16mm film we were producing during our trip. The film was intended to be a commercial one-hour documentary of Australia's national parks. While we sold uncut footage to Channel Seven, as well as 6x7 colour transparencies to a company producing postcards, our attempts to produce an income from photography and film-making were essentially unsuccessful. 

We had several chooks (only one pictured) as well as our cat Blackie, and magpie Little M.

We moved from Broadwater to Melbourne, and rented a house in Hampton that used to belong to Rosemary's grandmother.

Later, we sold the VW campervan, sadly...  

We took our dingy on adventures around Wilson's Promontory. 
On one occasion, our boat became stuck in a cliff crevasse, as the ocean water level dropped.  "Jon, I told you this would be a dangerous place!" The outboard's propeller was spinning in air...  

Both Rosemary and I would have liked to raise a family.  Unfortunately... that did not happen.

Rosemary and I split up. Rosemary married Dave and moved to East Gippsland.

I bought a Holden HQ 1972 panel van.

My mother said: "Jon, I wish you would buy a new car!"
In spite of my mother's misgivings, the Holden made a substantial contribution to my wealth and happiness. It never let me down (although it was plagued by small matters requiring attention). Its running costs were low (the kit for a full overhaul of the gearbox, in those days, cost only $60, and needed no special tools). It ran on dual fuel (petrol/LPG).  At that time LPG fuel cost only 22 cents/litre.  I bought the panel van at a government auction in 1976. I sold it, with a good deal of sadness, 33 years (and 480,000 km) later.

Cape Liptrap, west of Melbourne, was one of my favourite destinations. When I first visited Cape Liptrap, there was, buried deep in the bush, the remains of a shack which had apparently been built by a hermit. His furniture, some of his clothes, and cooking gear were still there. There was a rocky beach where you could walk from one end to the other without stepping off driftwood. There were heaps of reef-dwelling fish, abalone and lobster in the shallow water. All these things have vanished with the passing years.

Two friends, Robyn and Kate, walking a narrow path, almost a ledge, along the Cape Liptrap shore.

The Skerries are a rock outcrop about 500m off the beach at Wingan Inlet, Croajingolong National Park, East Gippsland, Victoria.

The Skerries, in those days, had a small colony of seals.  
Younger seals are curious and playful.

I met Nerida, Jasmine and James during a holiday at Wingan Inlet.

Jasmine, James and Pia Deane, 1990.
I met Jassie and James at ages two and four.  Here James was nearly four, Jasmine six years old.  

Monolith Valley, in Budawang National Park, was one of the wonderful places Nerida introduced me to in South Eastern New South Wales. A long walk from the carpark to the camp, but a magical place... we usually had it to ourselves, a spectacular wilderness...  
I returned to Monolith Valley, alone, in 2021 (see the photo essay amongst my hiking stories).

Nerida and I took Jasmine and James to the Eyre Peninsula, South Australia... quite a long road trip. The kids slept in a small tent beside the van. A very happy time, and wonderful memories...  Including snorkelling with seals (Australian Sea-lions) at their only mainland seal colony...  Point Labatt...  We were lucky... today entry to the seals' beach is prohibited. 

The snowman is wearing my glasses....

ACS, 1998

Miriam, Friendly Beach, East Coast of Tasmania, 2003.
The day was cold and windy, and the air full of wind-swept sand...
This was a happy time for me, living together at my house in Coolabah Road Sandy Bay Hobart.

Two great hair shots... Miriam above, Alice below....spinifex, hair and red-rock hair....Alice at Diamond Bay Victoria 2014. Although the photo of Alice is recent and so out-of-keeping with the other photos, I just had to put the two shots together.

Scotty Seabrook. 1943-2017. One of nature's gentlemen. An great intuitive engineer, he could imagine and build mechanical devices in a way very few people can, even after decades of training and experience. A much loved father, husband, brother, grandfather and friend. He was still racing motorbikes at age 68. 

Of course the years rolled on...  James started working for Foreign Affairs, in Canberra.
Jasmine died of an uncommon heart condition. We were devastated...
Nerida married Kevin.

I moved to Hobart, Tasmania. I married Hong-Ja (Sophie) Kim. 

Sophie has a wonderful cheeky smile... An extremely talented woman. In 2016 she ranked No.7 in her age class in competitive table tennis Australia-wide. She has an extraordinary singing voice. At age 66, she had the same figure, body-build, that she had when she was 20. She loves keeping fit, physically and mentally. She never buys new clothes, but she's always looking glamorous. She has a great talent for languages, and is fluent in English, Japanese and Korean, and has a knowledge of French and Chinese. And she's a good Bridge player! And now learning to play the piano!

We married in 2005, and had some great times together.  
Unfortunately there were intractable problems in our marriage which only became clear after we had been together for some time.  We separated in 2011, and divorced in 2019.

James and Lana have a child, Eli. James was 36 when Eli was born.

Lana, Ellison and James, 2020.Ellison Bao Deane-Phi, 14 May 2020.

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