He was on the Sepik River in 1959, aged 25, when he first saw Gigi through a telescope, and decided to marry her. Gigi saw him come to land standing in the boat, perfectly poised, feet apart, firmly planted as if he were standing on water. His moustache was glistening with spray over full firm lips.

 “I thought: What is this? Some magnificent sea monster”, she said to her son, “except as the boat drew to shore I noticed he had a telescope under one arm. He reminded me of a warrior I once saw in Mare in the Loyalty Islands, with high cheekbones, fine firm jaw-line, walrus moustache, and a magnificent pillar of a neck. And like the warrior, chin high, neck turned, cloth tied and tightly knotted on his head, he looked proudly down with violet blue eyes at me, la doctora, who had come to investigate his property: the Elements. He was a man of the Elements.”

As he drove the vehicle this way and that slowly gathering the herd into a single direction, Sandy John smiled at her description of his Father, seeing it as a genuine explanation rather than a lame excuse for Lipe’s sometime exasperating behaviour.

After their marriage, Gigi continued, they had retired here to White Waters, a beef cattle property of some one hundred and thirty hectares on the Brunswick River near Mullumbimby, where he, the man beside her, their son, Alejandro Juan Arroz, otherwise known as Sandy John Rice, was raised from birth, as their late, only child.

From early on in his teens Sandy John had initially foregone Lipe’s insistence on the use of stock horses, utilising, to his father’s disdain, first a trail bike, then a quad bike, together with a pair of Australian Kelpies, the latest, Puppy and Dolly, sitting somewhat aged, in the back of the ute. Recently though, to their delight, he liked to take them foot mustering for the daily round-up, since White Waters now housed a relatively small mob of easy care dairy cattle, grazing languidly not too far beyond their milking stalls.

Though to his Mother Sandy John was a beautiful mystery, to Lipe he was an annoying enigma, and from an early age the son did not connect with the father. They argued non-stop over years about everything: about farm management, the self focus of modern youth, abuse of the Internet, the vicious spiral of its use as a weapon of mass destruction, the resulting maladministration of a sinking dying world, not to mention the contingent ensuing shocking diminishing employ of scratch pens and biros, and so on, so much so that, after receiving a university degree in journalism, marketing, and music, from nearby North River College, and fluent in English, French and Spanish, Sandy John relievedly left his home at age twenty-one, to travel the world.