"They said we'd never match up to the generation before us but we turned out almost as good," World War II veteran and "greatest generation" member Derek Holyoake said this week.
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The 92-year-old naval veteran is one of the last men standing out an army of more than a million who won the war for freedom before returning to Australia to build a better country for their children.
"The greatest generation" is the name that has been given to the World War II generation that lived through the Depression before defeating German and Japanese aggression.
Now, more than 70 years after the final victory, Mr Holyoake said a lack of concern for the environment threatened everybody's future.
"I despair for the world my great grandchildren will grow up in," the former Royal Australian Navy torpedoman, electrician and finally trade school instructor said.
"The country has been degraded. Our air is polluted. The number of species that have been wiped out since I was a kid is unbelievable. When you go from 7 million [people] to 24 million something has got to give."
Mr Holyoake, who said climate change was definitely real, said saving what we have is Australia's greatest challenge.
"Once you've lost it you will never get it back," he said. "Everything else rests on that."
He spent a lot of time around the Great Barrier Reef in the last years of World War II.
"The coral reefs and all of that country was absolutely spectacular. There was no sign of coral bleaching or run-off from fertilisers [then]."
Brought up on a soldier settlement block in the Victorian Wimmera, Mr Holyoake lost his mother at an early age. His father enlisted him in the navy when he was just 16, saying it would be a safe place to spend the war.
"Dad, who fought in World War I, wanted to rejoin the army," Mr Holyoake said. "He put his age down to get back in and my age up so the navy would take me."
Today Mr Holyoake is one of just 28,000 survivors, down from 116,484 just under six years ago, of the more than 1 million Australians who served in World War II.
Locally 425 Canberrans and 70 men and women from neighbouring shires are still receiving support from the Department of Veterans Affairs. This is down from 1496 and 306 respectively just five years ago.
When Mr Holyoake left the navy, to train as an electrician, in 1953 he discovered a world that had already changed significantly from what he had known as a boy.
It was much more multicultural thanks to postwar immigration and there was an emphasis on education and growing a skilled workforce with programs such as the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme established to integrate former service personnel back into civvy street.
