NESTLED between sheets of tissue and glued to black cardboard, memories of war live within the pages of John Beaton’s photo albums.

John is an Englishman who migrated to Australia in 1963, before that he served in the Royal Air Force (RAF). He now lives in retirement at Dugandan.

When he was 17, conscription into the British armed forces was mandatory.

Already a keen photographer, he decided that arm of the service was the right fit.

“I was taught how to use Speed Graphic cameras, the ones with slides,” he said.

“I spent three months with the Royal Air Force School of Photography in Warwickshire UK.

“On my first posting, I did photography, but most of our work wasn’t so much taking photographs as it was processing printing.

“The more senior photographers took more photographs than us younger fellows.”

He was tasked with photography on the ground, looking after cameras installed in airplanes and developing the cassettes after a plane landed.

“This one here the plane crashed but the pilot was able to eject in time and save himself,” he said, pointing to an aerial view of a wrecked airplane.

A second photo, a headshot of a man grimacing, is inset into the corner of the photo of the wreckage.

It’s the pilot as his survival was extraordinary enough to warrant an inclusion.

There are photographs of oil refineries, other airborne British aircraft and shirtless men doing aviation work.

It was a time when there was conflict everywhere. War raged in Vietnam and the Middle East.

The British armed forces had troops on the ground, in the air and on the water.

Then there was unrest when Egypt and Britain, along with France and Israel, combined military operations in response to the nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company by then Egyptian president Nasser.

The Suez Canal is an artificial sea level waterway in Egypt that connects the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea.

It’s the shortest maritime route to Asia from Europe and one of the world’s most heavily used shipping lanes.

While there was conscription in the UK, there was no war when a 17-year-old John was based at RAF in Gaydon.

He left Gaydon on a troop ship and sailed to Cyprus, where he had his first overseas posting and that was to Malta.

“I was a leading aircraftsman in the Royal Air Force but didn’t lead anybody,” he laughed.

“It was a fairy low ranked position.

“There was unrest all over the place and the Suez Canal conflict had only just finished.”

The young photographer was a member of the British peacekeeping forces.

“Most of the time I was servicing the cameras on the aircraft, the gunsight camera and the reconnaissance camera.

“The camera sat on top of the gunsight and took photographs through an angled mirror of what the pilot was seeing when he was firing his guns.”

The cartridges of film from the airplane cameras were collected and processed in a darkroom on the base.

“The recognisance cameras capture a different thing every time. I had to sign an official Secrets Act that was only a piece of paper, to say I wouldn’t say anything to anyone about what I saw in the photographs,” he said.

“I signed it because from time to time they took photographs in places where, let’s say, perhaps they shouldn’t have been.”

After Malta he was posted to Aden, a town in the south of the Arabian Peninsula.

He was also sent to Sharjah, in what was Trucial Oman or Trucial Arabia (now Dubai).

“Our main runway at Sharjah is now a main road in Dubai,” he said.

Many of his photographs are of the troops in their down time.

Youth captured and frozen in time.

He left the UK for Australia in 1963 as a ‘ten pound pom’.

John met an English woman, married her and now the couple live in Dugandan.

At 87, he still enjoys photography, but the days of wartime have long passed.

Nowadays the shutter clicks only for what brings peace.