As the child of survivors of a war-battered, sorely depleted driftwood generation, I have acquired reasons in plenty to call myself lucky. Perhaps more, far more, than merely lucky.

Born in Russia, the son of Polish, Jewish refugees, my life might have evolved in line with any number of scenarios, the final actual one being arguably among the least foreseeable.

We may, for instance, my parents and I, in the postwar years, have remained incarcerated in the Soviet Union, or have settled in any of the ports of transit along our journeyings – in Warsaw, my parental home, or Germany or Paris – while, had other papers become available ahead of the Australian visa, we might, at wanderings’ end, have found ourselves in Israel, the USA, South Africa, or Brazil, in each place to be potentially caught up variously in wars, confrontations or currents more dislocating, more life-menacing, terror-threatening, or officially oppressive and stifling than anything experienced in this our actual final destination, Australia – Australia, which, at the time of our arrival in 1951, was a place far from another bruited European war and known for its sheep and its fleece, though, regrettably, for little else.

Here, the relative freedom, the relative egalitarianism, and the relative mobility generally characteristic of Australian society - relative, because freedom, egalitarianism and mobility can never be either absolute or total – coupled with a sound work ethic and frugality brought as part of my parents’ otherwise very meagre baggage, permitted me within a decade-and-a-half of reaching these shores to attain to a profession – medicine – scarcely dreamed of by my forebears, subject as they were to the numerus clausus operating in educational institutions in Poland and seldom free from the poverty, crowding and limited opportunities that were their lot.