David describes his parents as of Anglican and Methodist origins, but they briefly associated with the Plymouth Brethren after he had been attending one of their Sunday schools.

Here he edited Trephine, the annual magazine of the University's Medical Society, and demonstrated talent as a singer and actor - appearing in Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit (play) in 1953.

He had early literary aspirations, filing for copyright in 1954 a work entitled Harem by Installments (The Autobiography of Al B Manleigh Jnr), which does not seem to have ever been published.

[6] He worked in various jobs as a sketch artist, public relations officer, and journalist and became a lecturer in liberal studies, English language and literature, British life and institutions, journalism and humanism.

I happened to find a materialist interpretation of the world more plausible and a libertarian attitude to sex and other appetites more congenial than the one I was brought up in (perhaps I was never really 'saved'), but I was unable to see that in everyday matters of tolerance, balanced judgement, truthfulness, trustworthiness, and the rest humanists were any better than anyone else".

His years of work on environmental policy did not prevent him later entering debate in humanist journals expressing doubt regarding anthropogenic global warming and climate change (AGWCC) stating in 2013: "if scientific consensuses have political and commercial consequences, entire populations can be adversely affected.

"Now it seemed to me that in science ... even more than in the arts the great bulk of people ... were chasing a meal-ticket or social status rather than quenching any passionate search for knowledge.

Within the rigours of their own disciplines, trendiness, deference to authority, purblind commitment to pet theories, however discredited, wilfulness, jealousy and One-up-manship were more noticeable than outsiders imagine.

[14] In 2005 he put $300,000 into a foundation to establish the University of Sydney's "David Harold Tribe Awards" in fiction, poetry, philosophy, sculpture, and symphony.