Leslie Greener
Illustrator, 'The Happiness Box'
Captain Leslie Greener in Malaya, 1941 (Courtesy National Library of Australia)
Captor and captive reunited at Osaka airport, 5 October 1966 (Courtesy of Life, 15 May 1967)
Greener as Egyptological artist at the tomb of Ramses II (Courtesy of the National Library of Australia)
Captain Herbert Leslie Greener, son of the paymaster at the siege of Mafeking, was born in Cape Town in 1900 and educated in England. Prolific author, artist and Egyptologist, he served in the Indian Army and as an intelligence officer in the Australian Imperial Force’s 8th Army. A prisoner-of-war in Changi, he drew on this experience in his 1950 novel, No Time to Look Back, which was published in English, French and Japanese. In late 1966 he reunited with his prison guard Jusuke Terai in Japan and the next year Greener’s account, ‘A man may hate another but should not hate a whole nation’ was published in Life.
Over many decades he worked as an archaeological artist, with University of Chicago in Luxor, then with University of Pennsylvania in Cairo on the Akhnaton Temple Project.
When a journalist on Pix in Sydney, in 1949 he moved to Hobart as Tasmania's founding director of Adult Education.
Greener married New Zealand artist Rhona Haszard, British Margaret Edmonds who bore his son, Guy, both wives predeceasing him, before he married Chinese Tasmanian Dorothy Henry. He died in Hobart in December 1974 and is survived by Dorothy, Guy, stepdaughter Helene Chung, two grandchildren, Shelley and Sam, and two great-grandchildren.