Alastair Bain

Alastair was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, in 1940. His father, a Scotsman, was an engineer for the British India Shipping company and was stationed in India. His mother was Australian—she was, interestingly, one of the first female medical students at the University of Sydney, although she never practiced. Alastair had an older brother, John.

During the latter part of the Second World War the family moved back to Queensland for a while, as the security situation in India became precarious. After the war they lived in Rangoon (now Yangon) for a time.

In the late 1940s the family settled in Leura, in the Blue Mountains, a place to which Alastair always remained attached. Alastair attended The King's School in Sydney, from which he graduated in 1958. He was a keen sportsman at school and did well in athletics and Rugby Union. After that he completed a BSc in Economics at University College London, before taking an MA at the University of Chicago, where he wrote a thesis on T. E. Lawrence. He started but never completed a PhD about political cartoons from the First and Second World Wars, also at the University of Chicago. At the University of Chicago he met Patricia (Pat) Halligan, and they married in 1963. They had two children, Lauren and Joshua.

He worked for a time as a lecturer in political science at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow before he joined the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London in the late 1960s. He worked at the Tavi until the family migrated to Australia in 1983. Although they never lived there permanently, an important place for Alastair during this time was a cottage he bought in County Kerry in the southwest of Ireland—this was where the family spent most family holidays. Alastair had first been introduced to the area by his father, who was a keen fly fisherman. Alastair often spoke about re-locating to Ireland and becoming a children's author, but he never followed this path. Pat very sadly died in 1979 from cancer and Ala