Introduction

The 1930’s film star Errol Flynn was cast often as a shwashbuckler, a bounder and a cad. The term, “In like Flynn,” denotes success for the man in love; there was even a street gang that took his name in Detroit in the 1970s. Was this inborn? Or, perhaps he picked it up somewhere. New Guinea – known also for adventures, quests and bally-hoo could partly have been responsible for helping him become the dashing figure of Hollywood in the Thirties. He spent his prime there, from when he was eighteen, until he turned twenty four. This is the saga that sealed this debonair writer and movie star’s fate. This article celebrates the centenary of his birth.

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Persona Extraordinaire

Errol Flynn was born to Thomas and Amarelle Flynn, an ordinary biology professor and his doting wife, in 1909. He was from the upper middle-class of Hobart, Tasmania. He often told his ladies he was descended from Bounty Mutineers, or a lineage of pirates, to impress them. That he was from Hobart, a prosperous maritime port, and yes, he did sail to New Guinea, in October 1927, is fact.

His Hollywood entre as, “Captain Blood,” was an instant hit. Undoubtedly, he so impressed Hollywood producers of his links to the sea, his extreme good looks that he was typecast from that time as a larrikin. It all began in late 1927, when he sailed into Fairfax Harbour, Port Moresby. He was eighteen years old and ready for high-jinx that would form his personality for time immemorial.

One Hundred Years Young

Not only had this exciting young promise discovered his adventurous side in New Guinea, in the late nineteen-twenties, he is remebered fondly there to this day. Errol Flynn must have lusted after quests and New Guinea was the natural destination. His father, a professor in Biology, would have told him of the place and its’ extraordinary collection of wildlife of every type. As soon as he turned eighteen he was off. This wild place suited to his hot blood. 

He had already started his naughty life, anyhow, after being an expellee from Shore School (Sydney’s finest boy’s school; he was cast out for congressing with the laundress) and other varsities across Australia.