Mr Hindley, 89, said what started as a little bit of fun “came out as a winner” when it won the First Prize in Literature at the 2012 RAAF Heritage Awards.

“I thought I would like to sit down and write my life story,” he said.

“It was only for my own satisfaction. It was my daughter that entered it into the competition.”

Mr Hindley was a fighter pilot in World War II and served in the South Pacific.

After the war he returned to Goulburn where he completed a five-year electrical course, but later returned to the Air Force, serving as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam.

His book traces his earliest memories from growing up in Goulburn, through to his later career as a commercial pilot working in PNG.

“It starts from when I was a baby, the first thing I can remember, which was at four years and two months old, when my younger sister was born,” he said.

“In those days your mother had the babies at home with a midwife and I used to go in and give her a kiss on the cheek and say: ‘Get me my breakfast, mum’. I remember that vividly.”

Mr Hindley was 18 years old when he joined the Air Force; however, it wasn’t always his plan.

“I wanted to join the army, but my mother and father wouldn’t sign the papers so I badgered them,” he said.

“Mum said: ‘I’ll sign the papers if you join the Air Force, you’ll meet nice boys in the Air Force’.

“I didn’t want to be a pilot because I knew that I would get air sick and I couldn’t join the Navy because I get motion sickness.

“But I went there because mum said so.”

In that time he also married twice; and had three children to his first wife.

“It was a different life and broadened my thinking, there’s no doubt about it, and how life was led by different people,” he said.

“Your thinking was very limited, I grew up in Goulburn, and it was a very limited existence.”

Mr Hindley was also exposed to the herbicide “Agent Orange” during his time in the Vietnam War; after leaving the RAAF he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, accepted by the Department of Veteran Affairs as caused by the war.

His wife Leslie described the book as a bit of an “adventure novel”.

“The Australian War Memorial hoped it would be a good seller,” Mr Hindley said.

Mr Hindley said two people were the “main driving force” behind his book; World War II veteran, RAAF navigator Derick Rolland, who pressured him to write a short story for Rolland’s book “Airmen I have Met”; and ex-group captain and navigator Douglas Hurst, who wrote a book based on Mr Hindley’s flying experiences in “Hostage to Fortune”.

“The Joys and Dangers of an Aviation Pilot” will be published in about four months and will be added to the Heritage series of publications. All rights belong to the Commonwealth of Australia exercised by the RAAF Air Power Development Centre.

PHOTO (above): “Laddie”, left, climbs aboard a Mosquito in 1952.