Barry Maughan was born in Tarragindi in the outback of Australia

 It is now a southern suburb of the City of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

Barry grew up poor. It was just his mother (Ethel Stewart) and him, after she divorced his father (Howard Maughan) who was living in a nearby state

Barry and his mother had a tiny house with no indoor toilet, not a lot of plumbing, and only outdoor showers

Barry and Ethel's home was called a temporary dwelling

Barry's mother ran out of funds but luckily she had a friend who was married to a contractor who helped them

A famous story Barry remembers is when his mother Ethel didn't have enough money for one side of the house, Ethel's friend found them a Texaco sign and that became their wall until his mother had the funds to replace it → talk of the neighborhood

Barry explained that at times it felt like he was "pretty much living in the outdoors". He got to know the animals in his environment really well and frequently found poisonous snakes. 

When Barry was just a little kid, he went out and collected chrysalis and watched butterflies hatch. When they would create pupas, he would spin the silk, sharing that his early days were like a “life of discovery”

It was all dirt roads where Barry lived so he spent much of his youth playing in the dirt. He remembers "always being barefoot and his feet feeling like leather", explaining that "he ran around for 9 months with a singlet, t-shirt, and shorts"

Also, Barry rarely got hurt but if he did hurt himself, his mother had this one medicine that she would put on any injury called The Man and Beast ointment