Boy sailor / Greg Reynolds

This is my story. It is about a group of young boys forced to find their way in a man’s world. The story starts with a throwaway statement ‘let’s join sea cadets’ from Gary, a friend of mine when we were thirteen years of age. This led to us enlist as junior recruits at HMAS Leeuwin in Western Australia a couple of years later. Entering the gates of Leeuwin changed us. We were a dynamic group of free-spirited fifteen-year-old boys that became a guarded group attempting to meld into the rigor and discipline of the training regime, we had entered.... After completing his required six years, he decided to exit the Navy to look for other career options as a civilian. He eventually joined the Queensland Fire and Rescue Service in 1980. For thirty-seven years, he felt privileged to serve the community as a professional firefighter, in Brisbane and the Gold Coast regions. He attained a senior officer rank of Superintendent before retiring as the Acting Director of the Queensland Combined Emergency Services Academy, at Lytton in 2017.