On 10 July 1919, Reg embarked at Suez with his mate Morie, May’s brother Eric McSwain and her uncle Mick, arriving in Fremantle on 4 August 1919 to a huge crowd. Five days later, Reg and May married in West Guildford’s Wesley Church.

Following Reg’s discharge from the AIF, he and May went to the family farm Mount View, near Mount Marshall via Kellerberrin. May, a gently-bred city girl, found it a difficult transition to their mud brick house in the middle of nowhere. 

For the next two decades they farmed sheep and wheat, and became parents to four daughters; Betty in 1921, Doreen in 1923, Gwen in 1927, and Lois in 1931. Reg’s daughters remember their father’s old farm horse ‘Dick’, named for his faithful mount lost in Egypt in 1916 and how he ‘lost’ his religion at war, remaining deeply spiritual but needing no church to prove it. They remember a disciplined, sober, thoughtful man who liked routine and order, and his life-long love of art. 

Farming until the drought of 1940-1941, they then employed a manager and moved to Northam. Reg returned to signwriting with Fred Baseden until, in his late forties, he enlisted to serve on home soil at Northam during WWII.

In the mid-1950s, they retired to Trigg, in Perth, where Reg loved nothing more than sitting in his car, drawing the coast and experimenting with different painting styles and methods.

Reg Walters died on 21 January 1973, aged 81. May survived him by more than a decade. She died in 1984, aged 90.

*In 1911 Reg's father Robert turned his hand to farming and selected land at Mount Marshall via Kellerberrin on the edge of the wheatbelt which, because of its view of Mount Marshall, he named Mount View. It was covered in salmon gums and sandalwood which Robert cleared by hand. The nearby town of Bencubbin, 275 km north east of Perth, was not established until 1917.