At one stage posted to cover General Douglas MacArthur's wartime operations from his headquarters in Brisbane, Leo took up a position in the Department of Information in Melbourne in the post-war era.
Returning to the private sector following the dismantling of the DOI by the incoming government of Robert Menzies, Leo brought his young family to Sydney in 1948.
[1] Leo kept up his historical writing throughout his life, commencing an epic research project into the history of the Australian Overland Telegraph Line in the 1960s.
While notionally an atheist in line with the teachings of Marx and Engels, Leo Kelly was in fact of a spiritual bent and was intrigued by mystical traditions in Buddhism, and Sufism in the Islamic world.
He eventually found his transcendental moorings in Vedanta, to which he had been introduced by writers he respected like Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley.