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Flip Phillips was a veteran of Borneo, but Australia's remote Northern Territory was a wilder frontier. His research there would lead to the building of Ord River dam.

At the ripe old age of twenty-two Flip Phillips was given the job nobody else wanted and sent by his employer, the CSIRO, to the most God-forsaken place in the country, if not the planet. After almost circumnavigating the continent, a Connellan Airways De Havilland DH-84, more shearing shed with wings than aeroplane, dropped him in the middle of a bullock paddock on the banks of the Ord River.

A returned veteran of the Borneo campaign, Flip thought he had seen everything but this really was the last frontier. The heat was unforgivable, the rivers crocodile infested and the insects relentless. There was no electricity, no fly-wire, no radio, no contact with the outside world and only one single woman; the sixteen-year-old daughter of missionaries.

Although Flip's experimental plots were attacked by plague locusts and ravaged by cockatoos his research program led to the building of the extraordinary Ord River dam. Among it all, he met and married the love of his life, moved to Katherine, raised seven children and continued a lifetime's dedication to agricultural research in the Northern Territory.