5. Did you encounter any sexism?
In those days a man couldn't train as a midwife in New Zealand, which was a bit strange. All the gynaecologists and obstetricians were men, so why would I get excluded?
So I went to Melbourne to get my registration. I don't like to be told I can't do something. My path in that field was trying to make the women as pain-free and relaxed as possible. I never had a woman refuse my care.
6. Did you deliver your own daughters?
I was going to deliver the second one. My wife Daniela and I were living in a remote part of Queensland and didn't have any family around to help. So I had Emily, who was 18 months old, asleep in her pram in the labour room. Just as Josephine's head was crowning, Emily sat bolt upright and said, "Daddy, Daddy!" I just pulled my gloves off and said to the other midwife, "You go ahead, I'll get Emily". She wouldn't go to anyone else except Dad.
7. What kind of father were you?
I was more like a housewife than a father. Daniela was training as a GP, so I'd have the meal on the table, looking out the window thinking, "is she coming soon?" Every Thursday we'd have a mothers' group. I remember one day we went to morning tea on a sugar cane farm. I walked in with my nappy bag and the girls and a burly husband sort of did a double take. I just said, "Gidday I'm Andrew, come to have morning tea with your wife" and he said, "yeah, yeah, come in, no worries".
8. You ended up graduating from four universities - Massey, La Trobe, Monash and Queensland where you got the prize for research. Do you look back and curse your school teachers?
I do still think about that, yeah. I wonder how they sleep at night. I knew I was no slouch academically.
9. How did you get into Red Cross work?
A friend suggested it. I do struggle with the mundane but I'm not one of those people who go looking for danger. My first job was at a field hospital in Sudan. There were plenty of gunshot wounded coming in. The first day I was fluffing round a bit and a surgeon said to me, "Andrew, don't think - just do". And from then on I was right. I spent a year in Afghanistan as a project manager helping a hospital in Jalalabad get back on its feet. That was very rewarding. Osama bin Laden was still hiding nearby in Tora Bora, so the atmosphere was quite tense.
10. What's the most dangerous situation you've found yourself in?
The 10 months I spent in north Yemen. Security was so tight that we had to go to work each day at a different time and by a different route. While I was there, a group of people that I knew at Sa'ada Hospital were killed. Nine of them went out on a picnic one day with their kids. We heard that they were all missing - children, everyone. A year later they found their bodies in shallow graves. The children had been spared and put with local families. I've lost a few colleagues. When I was in Kandahar in 2011 my friend was nearby in Quetta, so we talked a lot on the phone. He was abducted and killed by criminals. I lost another about 18 months ago. A quiet gentle man whom I worked with in Iraq. He was killed a year later in North Africa. Their deaths probably make me more determined to do a good job.
11. Are you more frightened of global warming or global warfare?
Global warming. People are very wasteful as a species. I ride a bike and walk. Just having one less car is helping the planet.
12. How would you define happiness?
Kind of like a contentment in yourself. There's different ways of achieving that. For me it's seeing a smile on someone else's face.