My parents met at the East Gippsland fire brigade ball in 1943. My father, Lionel Maxwell Pam, was home on leave from New Guinea, where his air base would soon launch the Aitape–Wewak campaign in the war against Japan. Immediately after his demobilisation, in the year the war ended, they married. My mother, Alice Jean Hill, was the daughter of a Gippsland coal miner, one of eight children raised on a subsistence income through the long, tough Depression years. My father's family had even less money: my grandfather, Gabriel Pam, walked out when my father was nine, and at twelve his single mother could no longer afford to keep him at school, finding him work selling newspapers along East Melbourne's Punt Road.