In 1988, at age 61, Head met his birth mother, Agnes Isobel "Nessie" Rolls (née Peillon), for the first time.

She was the granddaughter of a French goldminer, Paul Peillon, originally from near Lyon, who was killed in the explosion at the Brunner Mine disaster in 1896.

Head attended the Royal Military College, Duntroon in Australia achieving the rank of captain in the New Zealand Army.

Head was a keen photographer, and in 1976 he and his son Geoff visited Chile to make three audiovisual programmes of family life in that country for the Department of Education, which were used in New Zealand primary schools' geography studies.

He was concerned by the use of cluster bombs and nerve gas as well as anti-personnel mines and horrified by the amount of funding available for countries to develop weapons of war with little regard for humanitarian consequences.

Until Head began campaigning, officials and humanitarian NGOs in New Zealand were relatively oblivious to the scale of the impact of landmines on innocent civilian populations in war-torn countries.

In 1993, paying his own way, as he often did throughout his leadership of CALM, Head attended the first international NGO conference in London to seek information and an idea of a role New Zealand could play.

In 1996, after years of well organised effort by CALM, New Zealand ceased the operational use of landmines and in 1997 signed the Ottawa Convention to which 152 nations are now signatories.

He was a major organiser for a CALM conference in Fiji in 1997, which spread the landmine issue to South Pacific nations.

We owe him a debt of gratitude, not only the people of New Zealand, not only Parliament, not only the organisations that he has convinced to support the campaign, but those women, children, and men in other countries who have been saved as a result of the activities that have started, and who will avoid being maimed or killed in the future.