John Burgess is but one of many who have borne that name, however names do not define who we really are and, at the age of eighty, he has looked back on his childhood growing up in New Zealand at the conclusion of World War II. It was a period when post war euphoria gave rise to an era of re-building and optimism.
After he left school he worked in livestock management and, later, on a cropping farm in New Zealand’s Southland, often in below freezing temperatures. During the long winter nights, before the advent of television and FM radio, he had plenty of idle time and he decided to enroll in a year-long correspondence course with the London School of Journalism.
He presented his first freelance effort to the editor of the New Zealand Herald’s supplementary newspaper, The Weekly News and was encouraged to submit a weekly article based on his rural experiences in both New Zealand and Australia. When he left New Zealand to join a yacht for a life of adventure, the editor asked him to continue to submit regular weekly farming articles, as well as writing about his travel experiences.
Along the way, he wrote detailed letters to his parents – that boarding school training never quite deserted him. His mother saved those letters and it was the re-reading of those, as well as some of the newspaper articles written during the same period, that inspired him to set down this narrative of his early life.