He also composed and performed songs on a range of other subjects, including compositions for historical documentaries commissioned by Australian television, a number of which have since been recorded posthumously by musicians interested in perpetuating his musical legacy.

Henry ("Harry") Robertson was born in Barrhead near Glasgow in Scotland in 1923 into a musical family, his mother playing the piano and his father the fiddle, while an uncle taught him to know and love the songs of Robert Burns.

[1] In 1940 he commenced a 5-year apprenticeship with Rolls-Royce Limited at their then-new facility in Glasgow, working on the Merlin engines used by the Royal Air Force's well known Hurricane and Spitfire fighter planes and Lancaster bombers,[2] as well as in some marine applications.

Harry's spoken introduction to "Wee Pot Stove" eloquently conveys the essence of the situation: I placed the enamelled bucket of home brew on the deck of my cabin.

[7]Returning to Middlesbrough in 1951, he married his wife Rita and took employment in the local steelworks, but inspired by his visits to Australia the couple, along with their newly born daughter decided to emigrate with the intention of settling in Brisbane.

However, their initial plans had to be amended when Robertson was directed by migration authorities to work at the Newborough power station in Victoria, where the family stayed until he was able to obtain better employment with BHP in Port Kembla.

[11] Tangalooma operated as a whaling station from 1953 to 1962, however in 1956, Robertson took shore-based employment in shipyards on the Brisbane River, working for Evans Deakin and Company fitting out new tankers with engines, and also began to make more time for songwriting and performing; his songs "Shop Repairing Men" and "The Casuals" (dealing with activities at Cairncross Dockyard) date from this period.

In 1967, young Australian men were also being conscripted to fight in the Vietnam War, and Robertson was inspired to compose several anti-war songs dealing with these events ("Freedom Free For All", "Brother Jack", "Is It True?").

[2] Over the next few years, Robertson worked with film director and producer Ken Dyer, and composed music and wrote scripts for the ABC's A Big Country series, including a 1971 program entitled The Whalers, which depicted the last remaining whaling station in Australia at Albany, Western Australia, and won the Penguin Award of the Australian Television Society as well as the Shell $2000 Award for Production ("Albany's Whalers", "The Thrill of the Hunt"); the 1972 film No Longer Alone which dealt with the 1872 construction of the Overland Telegraph Line ("Poling in the Dry", "Poling in the Wet", "The Pole"); another entitled The Sleeper Cutters which dealt with workers in the timber industry cutting sleepers for the new railway lines ("Hard Timber", "Fettling on the Line"); plus Scratching for a Living which documented the history of tin mining on the Atherton Tableland in Queensland.