Dad has been gone only a few days and I have already learned much more about him. I am greatly moved by some of the things that people have said to me since he died and I have been struck by how many people, all over the world, loved him. He always had time for people. I took it for granted that fathers spent evenings with their children reading to them, later pouring over books or maps or just talking. Or building them canoes or showing them how to fix punctures in a bicycle tyre. I just assumed that everybody's Dad did that, but I know now how lucky I was. Perhaps I'm mistaken, or my memory is clouded by emotion, but I believe that I never heard him say that he was too busy or that he'd speak to me later. Dad was always "there" for us -not just "around", but actively present. Dad was born a month or so after the great Wall Street Crash of 1929. It must have coloured his life; although always generous, he was also careful and disinclined to overspending. Dad had a rather pretentious name - JEAN CAMBIER MOLTENO WILLIAMSON (named after a French general) - although it was counterbalanced by a most unpretentious nickname, POOK, and this suited him well. He chose this name for himself, as a toddler, and it stuck with him to the end. Moving to Australia was an opportunity to drop it, and to change JEAN to JOHN, but to his South African relatives, he was always POOKIE. Dad was born into the Molteno clan - a most extensive and influential family in the old Cape Colony. I was told this by the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town who picked me up while I was hitchhiking and had wheedled out of me the name of grandmother. Dad's uncles, Ted and Harry Molteno, who were without progeny, wanted POOK to take over their huge apple estate in Elgin. He could have had a life as a gentleman farmer, but Dad's father put a stop to that idea. My grandfather Arthur Williamson was also a formidable man, and this was emphasised by his formidable eyebrows which Dad inherited, too. My grandfather decided that Dad was to become a doctor or a lawyer. Dad told me that he chose medicine because more of his friends were doing medicine than law. Others remember things differently, and that his father said that he would never make a good lawyer. Whatever the case, Dad's choice of career, however it was made, could not have been better. He loved his work; in my mind, he went to work with a smile and came home with one. In Cape Town, when I started primary school, I'd ride to school with him on his scooter - standing in front of the seat, my hands gripping the handlebars between his. He'd arrive home at the end of the day, and I remember a small crowd of us children in the street, badgering him to be taken for a ride around the block. Later, I worked for Dad in his rooms in Florida - an outer suburb of Johannesburg - developing X-rays. From inside the darkroom, I'd hear shrieks of laughter coming from the radiographers who knew him affectionately as Dr Willy. I thought that all work places were like this. Dad had other passions, too. At various times he took up photography; he taught me to process film and print from negatives in the small bathroom under the stairs of our house in Jo'burg. He did pottery, learning from Tim Morris who was to become a good friend one of South Africa's leading potters. His work with X-rays gave him access to silver which was recaptured from the used chemicals. This lead him to take up silverwork and jewellery. In Tasmania he started making furniture and quite a few of us here today have his pieces in our homes. There was the canoe he made for me out of fibreglass, using another canoe to make a mold. The fibreglass caused terrible itching and rashes up his arms, but he finished the job, and the canoe soon saw long service on the Vaal River. I should mention Dad's stamp collecting and his thorough work on family history, his collection of botanical books and his collection of aloes. These are prickly succulents that send up a shoot with beautiful flower. On each family holiday, it seemed, we'd come home with yet another species of aloe in the boot of the car. My Uncle Andrew married Jill whose parents lived across the road from Albert Herzog in Pretoria. Herzog was an icon of the apartheid government, the Minister of Communications and leader of an extreme right wing faction of the National Party. I don't think that Dad ever met Herzog, but Herzog had quite an aloe garden and Dad successfully conspired with his gardener to take a few specimens. Another species was acquired with the aid of a friend in the Orange Free State who managed to pursuade some members of the South African Police to cross the international border into Lesotho and bring pack the rare plant. Dad told me that he never had a traffic offence, but he did have one run-in with the law which came about through his aloe collecting. Always careful to take only small plants where there were many others of the same species propagating themselves, on this occasion he was spotted by some officials who were watching through binoculars, and it led to an appearance in court and a fine. The aloe collection at home flourished in the bed beside the driveway, although it narrowly escaped serious damage when I was learning to drive and reversed Mom's Morris Minor too fast out of the garage. I realise now what extraordinary energy my father had - buying a large old house in Johannesburg, in need of extensive repairs and continual maintenance, the workload he carried in his radiological practice, the holidays he took with us children - walking us up mountains in the rain, driving trips to South West Africa, or the Sunday's when we would walk miles into the Magaliesberg to swim in a cold mountain pool and eat lunch under a tree to esacape the African sun. Dad had some great trips - one was his 1949 road trip from Cape Town to Tanganyika, Kenya, Uganda and the Belgian Congo. On this trip was his legendary encounter with a lion while out walking alone in the Ngorongoro Crater. Years later he was asked what he did when he saw the lion and he said that he just froze. His quick-witted enquirer supposed that the lion didn't like "frozen meat". In Chobe Game Reserve we were camping one night, sleeping besides the fire. Dad told me not to let the fire go out or the lions might get us. Then he rolled over and went to sleep, while I lay awake worrying if there was enough firewood. Before Janet was born he went as a ship's doctor, to Marion and other the sub-antarctic islands. He returned sporting a beard and Ruth burst into tears when she saw him. In the last few years, his declining health made travel more difficult, but he still managed trips to South Africa (thrice), to Canada, to England (twice), Scotland, Ireland, Tasmania, and New Zealand. Until recently he was still talking about going to Italy and the Middle East. And one more trip to South Africa. Living in South Africa one was confronted with politics and I thank both my parents for giving me an awareness of the inequity of apartheid at a time when most of my friends did not question the social order. My parents eventually followed me to Australia, although they went straight to Tasmania. My father missed South Africa terribly, but also found in Tasmania a welcome and, for fifteen or so years, he became a fervent Tasmanian. They made wonderful friends and travelled, of course, all over the state. My parents established a new home on the edge of Launceston, building a house in the bush and Dad, of course, began a new garden. Gardening was a life-long passion which Dad continued until his health problems led to a move from the 18 acres in Tasmania to a flat in Sydney. Despite his reluctant moves - from South Africa to Tasmania and from Tasmania to Sydney, I never heard him complain about his lot. Not about having to move, not about the cold climate where it takes so long to grow a tree, and never once about getting the awful disease which has finally taken him from us. He travelled to so many placed which delighted and enchanted him, but Dad's heart always remained in the Cape where he was born; before to long I hope to see his ashes returned there and taken by the wind across Table Mountain.