The CRAB CLAW RESTAURANT

Perhaps rebellion was in Errol’s genes. Though intelligent, he needed his father’s connections to gain admission to a succession of schools. Disinterest in schoolwork accompanied a nettlesome genius for pranks. Classmates remem- bered him as a “large precocious lad…a person you’d look at twice. Handsome even as a boy of twelve… His main attribute was that he was keen on girls.”

His Tasmanian high school remembered him as a forger of school papers with “contempt for convention and a desire to shock.” When grades and pranks ended formal education at sixteen, his professor father found him a dull clerkship in Sydney, which he fled after “borrowing” petty cash and betting slow horses. Hearing of a gold strike in New Guinea, he headed at eighteen to that primitive jungle territory. According to the biography Inherited Risk , besides prospecting, he survived five years on his wits as