John Lane spent most of the first ten years of his life in the village of Eastcombe which was located in the 'heart of the Cotswolds'. Placed in an orphanage at the age of two, Lane was one of many children from Dr Barnado's Homes who had been fostered by Baptist families in this area of the United Kingdom. Having lived with a 'poor, but gentle' foster mother during these formative years, Lane's sense of a secure family environment was replaced by a 'disciplined...institutional' existence when he was selected for migration to Australia.
Arriving in Western Australia in 1933, Lane was subsequently placed at Fairbridge Farm School in Pinjarra, fifty miles south of Perth. Established a decade earlier, Fairbridge offered care and vocational training to migrant children who came from an under-privilged background in England. During the following five years at Fairbridge, he was to demonstrate particular talent in both his sporting and musical ability. Lane has described his relocation to Australia as having offered a future which would never have been available to him had he stayed in England. He has since drawn on his life as a 'Fairbridgian' to write the autobiographical Fairbridge Kid (1990) and more recently worked to rekindle interest in Fairbridge so as to preserve the many extant photographs and records belonging to the institution.
After completing his education and having also worked on the farm at Fairbridge, at the age of sixteen Lane found employment on a property in the south-eastern township of Gnowangerup. But with the outbreak of World War II a year later, Lane was to leave his farm job, falsify his age and in 1941 join the Australian Imperial Force (AIF), serving until he was captured at the fall of Singapore. For over three years Lane survived as a prisoner of war in Japan, an experience which he recounts in his autobiographical work, Summer Will Come Again (1987), and uses as the inspiration for his novel, Sayonara Australia (1991).
Following the war, Lane re-enlisted in the Australian Army Music Corps in 1950 and later taught at the Australian Army School of Music in Victoria.
