During the Christmas holidays of 1945, Gwen Davis, aged 23, was holidaying with a girlfriend and her mother at Queenscliff, a seaside resort on the coast of Victoria. At the guesthouse where she was staying she met a ‘very good looking’ young man, who was also holidaying ‘with his mate’. The attraction was immediate, and he asked her to marry him almost straight away. She replied, as did many other women during this period, with an instantaneous yes. ‘Hasty’ marriages were common at the time. William Robertson was still in the army when he met his wife-to-be. He had served in the jungles of New Guinea in 1942–43, having joined the militia in March 1939, six months before the beginning of the Second World War. When they met, he was ‘doing administration work at Victoria Barracks in St Kilda Road’, and in 1946 was discharged from the army.

Reflecting on that time, and the domestic drama that soon unfolded, Robertson stressed how, despite her initial attraction, there was considerable doubt in her mind about the suitability of her choice. ‘I had my doubts’, she confessed over fifty years later,