He was the subject of an Australian book published in 2010 called Capturing Asia, by former foreign correspondent Bob Wurth.

During his years working on risky assignments, Phua captured many images of wars and uprisings, economic 'miracles' and social upheavals, and the rise and fall of dictators.

Phua's camerawork was seen in Australia through the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, but his most important assignments were also shown around the world, sometimes on the BBC.

On the morning of 8 December 1941, a bomb whistled down and crashed into a well near the servants' quarters in the League of Nations compound off River Valley Road where Phua lived.

To the dismay of his mother, Phua, aged 12, ran into the compound and picked up a piece of still-warm metal, a fragment from one of the first Japanese bombs to fall on Singapore: "I was a little bit frightened but also excited.

Phua still remembered during the invasion of Singapore, watching the retreat of the British and Australians through the streets and a young, bewildered Allied soldier sitting in the gutter, weeping.

When the women had a Japanese client, especially if they had found a captain or a higher rank, they would say ‘I’m hungry’ and ask the soldiers to buy noodles for them.

Phua went on to cover violent race riots in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur and clashes in Borneo as Indonesia's President Sukarno pressed his Konfrontasi, or Confrontation policy, with the newly established Malaysia.

He was almost killed in the war in April 1972 when the South Vietnamese patrol boat he was aboard came under machine gun and rocket fire on the Saigon River.

While filming the shooting of demonstrators by soldiers at Mendiola Bridge near the presidential palace that year, he was hit by a hail of rocks, but his injuries were not major.

Phua covered the funeral rites for Gandhi and the subsequent genocide against the Sikhs in New Delhi and elsewhere in India following the assassination.

The chief of Network Australia, the ABC's overseas TV service, Bruce Dover, was then a correspondent working alongside Phua: "There was a mob hauling the Sikhs from their homes and breaking their legs so that they couldn’t run away, then pouring oil over them to burn them alive.

"[9] Phua felt his life had been blessed, as he had many close calls to death in his photojournalist career, according to friend and colleague, John McBeth, writing in Singapore's Straits Times newspaper.

Like one time a Vietcong ambush came upon him while filming a German documentary aboard a South Vietnamese patrol boat in the Mekong Delta in 1971.

For instance, he recalled, Phua spent much of his time getting access to a block of flats to get a good elevated shot of the prison to cover the news of the hanging of two Australian traffickers in Kuala Lumpur in 1986, for ABC.

Phua worked as a cameraman throughout Asia for well over three decades when he was pressured into retirement by a back that could no longer carry heavy camera equipment.

Phua was later invited to join the board of a Malaysian finance and entertainment company, DKH-George Town Holdings group, chaired by Tunku Abdullah.