Bern Brent has just turned a hundred.
He's been close to death a few times - two heart attacks in his 50s when the doctor decided he had six months to live but neglected to tell him.
And he is a "Dunera Boy", one of 2542 refugees from Germany who were put on the Dunera and sent to Australia. The ship was torpedoed but the weapon failed to explode.
Today, Mr Brent thinks the decision to deport him from Britain, and not let him stay and fight in the British army against Germany, probably meant he was able to survive until his centenary.
"Having been interned in Britain at the beginning of the war, and sent overseas, was the best thing that could have happened to me," he said.
"I was 17 and I would have joined the British army when I turned 18, and I give myself only a 50/50 chance of surviving the war."
When he arrived in Australia, he spent some time in a camp and then joined the Australian army, but as a non-citizen, he was not allowed to fight.
He was born Gerd Bernstein and grew up in a Jewish family in Berlin. Nazis had already started persecuting Jews and in 1937, his parents realised that war was on the way so their son should seek safety in Britain.
But in Britain, there was a fear of potential fifth columnists. "Who was to know that Hitler hadn't sent agents to Britain in the guise of refugees?" the refugee says today.
So from internment in Britain, he boarded the Dunera, bound for Australia.
In a way, he had a brush with death even then. Another ship - the Arandora Star - carrying 1000 internees and 300 crew to Canada was sunk by a torpedo on July 2, 1940, killing 805 people.
And the Dunera was itself hit by torpedoes - but they failed to explode because they didn't make contact full on.
Apart from all that, the 57-day voyage to Australia was no luxury cruise - but nor was it the horror it's sometimes been depicted as.
"Dunera to me was a positive experience," he says, "Because it was instrumental in taking me from England to Australia.
"We were not treated with kid gloves, but as a 17-year-old, that didn't worry me."
After the war, he enrolled in Melbourne University as an ex-serviceman and studied maths and economics.
He taught in Vietnam for four years and in what was North Borneo (now Malaysia) for five years.
Eventually, his parents joined him in Australia. His father had been a prisoner at Theresienstadt, a feeder camp for the extermination camps. His grandmother and aunt were murdered there. His mother left Germany on the last train out before the Nazis invaded Poland and the world war started.
Bern met his wife, Jean, in Australia. They were introduced by a mutual friend and married in 1958. A daughter and then a son followed.
He attributes his long life to his genes. He had ancestors in Germany who lived to the age of 114. His son, Peter, says his father was also a walker so the exercise helped.
In his house in Farrer, there is a little bit of Germany in the shape of a concertina on which he plays "Along the Road to Gundagai".
And there is a bust of his hero, Winston Churchill.
And there is robust evidence of a life richly lived - with perhaps another 14 years to go.
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