Lane Cove is a tapestry of characters equipped with unique stories of journeys travelled unbeknownst to anyone unless asked; Richard Stephen has experienced a life of adventure and tragedy – he is one of these people.
Who Is The Man In The Chair?
Celebrating his 81st birthday last Thursday, 3 July 2025, the Lane Cove local of 50 years looks unassuming as he rolls through the familiar streets on his electric wheelchair, a drastic change of pace from his previous ride. A motorcycle incident in the Northern Territory rendered him quadriplegic ten years ago, leaving only the ability to slightly move his arms.
It’s a cruel fate for anyone, but Richard’s state is especially unreflective of the life he has lived. He was a trained pilot, with a skill set which allowed him to live on the frozen continent of Antarctica for a year, run a successful electronic engineering business, and be one of the first humans in history to witness the moon landing.
A once locomote fellow with a thirst for new experiences, the ex-adventurer, now bound to his chair, often contemplates his present life.
“Some days I’m very philosophical about it, and other days I feel incredibly frustrated,” Richard uttered, visibly struggling to exert an adamant introspection.
Richard had the fortune of living a thrilling life before suffering a life-changing blow. Whether you see this as a silver lining, being able to appreciate a time well spent or, salt in the wound by understanding what was lost, he potters on regardless, living the best way he can and allowing us to listen to and learn from his life story.
Early Adventures
Richard was always a tinkerer, he built a business from it after all. From as early as five-years-old he can recall pulling apart the electronic devices in his home in order to understand how they work.
This is still evident today; before ITC could even enter the Lane Cove local’s home, a desk of pried-open devices laid bare at the front door, their exposed wiring implying it was once in the midst of repair or repurpose.
A sound of a button’s click from the inside of the house preceded the doorway pulling open via an electronic swing operator with Richard in his electric wheelchair welcoming us behind it. Although he has been with it for roughly ten years and lived in the house even longer, he awkwardly reverse-manoeuvred his permanent seat up the hallway into the living room.
The walls and shelves were fitted with memories and knick knacks of a past life, the dining table stacked and spread with papers and his greatest treasure collected working on the end of it, his partner of 55 years, Penny. A cheery gal, she swiftly greeted us, asked “Dicky” if he needed anything before exiting the room for the interview to begin.
If it wasn’t picked up in the intro, Richard’s life was one of seeking adventure, but to him, it was simply living.
With a keen interest in aviation and electronics from an early age he had his sights set on the sky and trained to become a commercial pilot. He received his pilots licence and was a part of a flying club in Bankstown. He was also into skydiving with his last jump being at 66-years-old, jumping 17,000 feet. For context, 15,000 feet is considered the highest altitude for skydivers without needing to use supplemental oxygen.
However, his career as a commercial pilot did not come to fruition as “things got in the way.”
Rather, when beginning his life story, Richard immediately recalled the days he worked at Overseas Telecommunications Commission (OTC), a company responsible for all international telecommunications services through, in and out of Australia. Employed as an operative technician the young tech-head said he saw a whirlwind of technological advances during his stint at the business.
“There were ten or 12 years worth of very intense evolution. Things went from being very basic and hadn’t changed for a long, long, long, long time to communication by satellites and underground submarine cables, all that sort of technology evolved in the time that I was there, pretty exciting times in that industry,” Richard reflected.
There are few things that universally timestamp a decade in retrospect, the moon landing fits this category – and Richard was among some of the first people in history to see it.
Images of the man on the moon were telecasted to Australia and the United States via the Australian OTC facility. This historic feat all happened on the then 25-year-old’s shift – But to him, it was just another Sunday.
“I remember when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, climbed off the capsule and said, one big step for man and blah, blah, blah… it was pretty humdrum, because from the very start of my work for that organisation in 1962, we had involvements with NASA and the Mercury space shots and things. So you know, you became quite adjusted,” he said.
Turns out, it wasn’t man’s interaction with a white powdery abyss in space which opened his mind, but rather the kind on earth. Richard’s expedition to Antarctica in the following years changed the trajectory of his life forever.
The Great White Continent
When he was 30-years-old, Richard was offered an opportunity for an adventure of a lifetime through OTC – 12 months working out of a research station in Antarctica.
He had been living in Melbourne when himself and his then girlfriend Penny mutually decided a change could be good. So, in 1974 his beloved set off around Australia to backpack and the young adventurer embarked from Melbourne on a trip to the bottom of the world.
After a month of travel the crew fared at Casey, one of three permanent research stations in Antarctica. It’s located approximately in line with Perth if you were to travel straight South.
Richard had been a keen alpine skier so the sight of snow was not unfamiliar to him, but this landscape was something else entirely.
Around 28 people populated the base, from plumbers and electricians to meteorologists and doctors, everyone relied on another to complete the job and survive.
Richard’s role was to help conduct scientific experiments. One involved driving a D7 Caterpillar Tractor across 1000km of ice with a small crew, a few vehicles, and a train of trailers for two and a half months. The trip involved planting marker poles every 20 kms to measure the position of sliding ice-terrains over the course of years using emerging GPS technology.
Another project involved drilling holes down past thousands of feet of ice using a thermal drill then retrieving ice cores. The samples were brought back to Melbourne for analysis with researchers discovering trapped air in the form of bubbles dating back millions of years and providing an insight of earth’s atmosphere eras ago.
But it wasn’t all work, Richard said he often enjoyed performing high speed drifts with the tractor across the ice on water collection runs. There was also at least one party a month where everyone’s birthdays were celebrated. The station was provided with the amount of six cans of beer a week, which did not suffice, so they did what anyone would have and decided to craft beer.
An estimated amount of 3000 gallons were made over the course of the trip by a few people who harboured the skill set and were considered “very important”.
There was also an abundance of wildlife in the area which he found interesting, mainly seals and birds, Daily penguins in particular.
“You could only go to the islands when the sea ice was vast and you could walk across the ice to the islands, but when you were there, you could be right amongst the penguins,” Richard explained.
“You could virtually touch them, and they would be a bit defensive of their chicks. But other than that, they just didn’t bother you at all. In fact, they’d be quite curious… As you walked around, they tend to follow you.”
Elephant seals, Weddell seals were present as were skuas, a seabird with possessive characteristics not dissimilar to that of the Sydney Harbour seagull. However, the most amazing naturally occurring element in Richard’s books was the silent firework display of Australis Borealis.
“It was amazing, Aurora Australis,” Richard said, as he was transported back to the Antarctic for a moment.
“It didn’t feel right because it didn’t make any noise. Like a fireworks display, but without the slightest bit of sound.
“They would flash across the sky, change their formation completely and change colour, then sometimes it would be quite static, and other times only last for ten minutes, and then you wouldn’t see it again… It was fascinating.”
A Fresh Take On Life
As his ship breached Australian shores, the 12-month Antarctic expedition had officially ended, his now-wife Penny was waiting for him on the wharf, a true sight for sore eyes he was ready for a new beginning.
“I’d had such an eye opening experience being in Antarctica. I felt that I was capable of doing a whole lot more things than I thought I was,” he reminisced.
Although he lived an exciting life before the trip, Richard didn’t consider himself an adventurer, Antarctica changed that and his new lease on life began.
Not long after, the entrepreneur decided to quit his job and use his foundational knowledge of technological communications, love of tinkering, and new found audacious ambition to start his own business, which he ran for 30 years until he retired.
His thirst for adventure never faded, in one instance, like an Indiana Jones film, a murmur of a historical artifact sent him packing to uncover it.
On a visit to his brother’s house he glanced at an article retelling a trip of a group who visited Cape York during the wet season 35 years ago and discovered a crashed Bell P-39 fighter aircraft from WWII. The purpose of the article was to outline the challenges of navigating a 4WD through the tropical QLD terrain; Richard accepted the challengers unintended invitation.
He made some investigations, tracked down and visited the person in the article who confirmed the downed plane claims.
It took several years of “humming and harring” as with a wife and two kids the logistics of the trip weren’t as simple as hopping on a boat to Antarctica, but in 1988 they embarked.
Before we unintentionally fill your head with sensational expectations of undiscovered riches, Rambo-style booby traps or secret Nazi bases hidden deep in the tropical jungles of Cape York it’s probably best to clarify that Richard and his family did not find the downed WWII plane.
Like any great adventure story, it’s about the journey rather than the destination and the former was no easy feat. The trip took lots of planning to make their equipment and vehicle “bulletproof”. The search lasted about eight weeks, driving, motorbike riding, hiking, camping, all while being equipped only with a metal detector as a compass for their search.
All this to find an aircraft lost to history, read about in a magazine some years earlier – despite coming out empty handed, it was a family holiday he looked back fondly on.
Richard often made free-spirited decisions that inspired unique experiences, but they didn’t all end fondly.
The business which began shortly after his Antarctic escapades was made up of some of his talented friends from OTC who were just as keen on pursuing a self-made venture. When prompted about what the company did, Richard humbly responded “to do electronic things.” Suffice to say it was a tad more impressive than that.
His company, Questek, made electronic systems for the healthcare industry. Himself and his team invented and developed equipment and software for hospitals and nursing homes. The products were mainly associated with nurse call systems to assist people with dementia.
After resigning from OTC, Richard said he “rowed his own boat,” with the business for the next 30 years.
It was around his end of time at the business when it became involved with a Canadian company who floated Questek onto the Canadian stock market, which was evidently unsuccessful. From there the business took a turn for the worse, some business partners left for various reasons while others became domineering and Richard decided he had enough.
After some years arguing the terms of separation from the company a situation was reached which enabled him to sign off in 2008. For almost a decade, Richard was essentially retired and went back to doing what he does best.
It was around August 2015 when his life would once again drastically change forever. At 72 years old the freedom-chaser was on a motorbike trip in the Northern Territory with two mates. The plan was to travel from Townsville up to Darwin and across the Nullarbor.
However, Richard decided to take a solo detour to see a “meteorological phenomenon” that is “interesting to people who fly planes”.
The plan was to regroup at Mount Isa after a few days – Richard never made it.
A Foggy Mirror
Richard woke up at a hospital in Townsville, he was alone, his memory was shot and he had sustained a spinal cord injury.
This wasn’t his first tragic experience involving a motor incident.
About 40 years ago, his whole family was almost lost to a very serious car accident involving a collision with a truck in Roselle. He was at work when he received a call.
“I dropped my tools immediately, went to the hospital and found that my wife was being admitted to the Prince Alfred Hospital, my daughter had been taken to Balmain hospital, and my son had been taken to the Children’s Hospital at Annandale,” he said.
“Life changed very dramatically for our whole family at that point.”
Richard’s four-year-old son sustained a severe brain injury, his wife received similar, but less serious with the addition of disfigured hands, fortunately, his 18-month old daughter came out relatively unscathed.
It was a traumatic event that would’ve altered the course of the family in many ways, still, it was decades ago, time goes on and they all adapted to life.
One wouldn’t have been able to tell his wife was in an accident as she guided us into multiple rooms around the house remembering and meticulously retrieving archives of thousands of old photographs the couple had taken throughout their life – each box representing a different era.
His daughter lives in Gosford with two little girls of her own Nimu, aged nine and Luca aged six. His son is now in his early 40s and has a wife, a five year old daughter Tosoa and apparently a hereditary thirst for adventure, having constantly travelled to Madagascar where his partner is from and child was born.
For Richard, moving on hasn’t been so seamless, nor does he have the benefit of time for healing. He was 72-years-old when he sustained a vertebrate injury on his C3 and C4 resulting in a quadriplegic condition. The work-free remainder of his life of adventure was put on hold for a decade and substituted for an inescapable chair. A bird’s wings had been clipped.
After the crash, he couldn’t remember anything preceding six weeks of the accident, even as his memory gradually returned the exact details of the cause remains a mystery.
“It’s just a total change in your life that just happens in an instant. It’s like,” Richard paused, thinking deeply for a few moments, as if he were reflecting over a whole decade, “a very, very dramatic change. It’s like you’ve become a completely different person.”
Living With The Present
Unfortunately, there isn’t an unforeseen angle which skews Richard’s situation into a positive arc. A tragic incident was thrust onto him which dramatically changed his life and he’s still processing it.
“I feel incredibly frustrated… I don’t think the same way about it every day, it’s sort of different thoughts about it all.”
His biggest fear – which is not so different from other older residents – is having to one day leave his Lane Cove home of 50 years for a retirement village. A perceived last blow to his cherished free-roaming spirit. Richard noted the sense of irony spending time at a care facility and coming face-to-face with his handiwork in a practical setting.
“I’ve been on respite since I’ve had this injury in a couple of places that I did work on, and there’s the bloody equipment that we installed in these buildings,” he chuckled.
Still, there are many silver linings present. His life-long partner Penny is by his side, her cheery demeanour never far off, Richard also speaks fondly of catching up with his children and seeing his “beautiful” granddaughters.
A surprise drop in from his children and grandchildren only reinforcing this as Tim, Millie and Penny made tea while while Nimu, Luca and Tosoa enthusiastically surrounded their granddad to share their stories of the week.
He even speaks of rekindling old friendships, recently connecting with a friend online he hadn’t seen in 60 years and plans to meet up when able.
Although Richard’s life will most likely never be what it was, from this reporter’s perspective, it still has a lot to offer and is teeming with vibrance and surrounded by love.
Here is a man who lived on a frozen continent back when its only visitors were researchers and lost seabirds. Not only started and ran a successful business for 30 years but created and developed its products. And seized every opportunity of adventure life presented him, just because he wanted to.
He’s a fountain of knowledge and inspiration of a life well-lived, all and all. So, if you see this local legend rolling around Lane Cove, why not go up and have a chat? You may even come out with your own new lease on life.
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