Merrily, and with unadulterated fondness, Pan regales tale after tale of her childhood -from the names of pets to the intricacies of her early life with her Chinese parents.

But then, it was a childhood filled with colour and perhaps all that much easier to remember.

Now 51, Pan — a GP whose career incarnations have included actor, model, newspaper columnist and author — spent the first decade of her life exploring the remote paddocks of Badgerys Creek, where her father, “a real life Crocodile Dundee”, was an animal geneticist with CSIRO.

Back then, life for Pan — who was this year’s Mosman Australia Day ambassador — was spent tending to pets of various kinds that came through her father’s laboratory, alongside her elder brother, who was her constant companion in the absence of other children.

Rabbits, chooks and ponies (of course, Pan recalls every name — there was Carney, Candy, Robert, Timmy “who used to bite my ponytail” and Sattersocks, named because of his white socks), joined a bull called Bimbo and a cow called Broom-Hilda.

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“Dad started off working on drosophila flies and then he was working on sheep, then cows and then pigs,” Pan said.

“Whatever he was working on would become our pet. While they were doing sheep, we would always have a lamb — and each lamb, even though it wasn’t the same lamb, was always called ‘Lamby’. We could never think of a better name than that.

“It was very isolated. I went to school and did ballet and violin, but when we were on the station, it was remote.

“We could run as far as we liked because you could just never get to the end of it.

“It was like the movie The Truman Show — you know, how they’re on that film set but they can never get out.

“They can see the horizon, but they can never reach it. Well, it was like that for us.

“We could just walk in any direction as far as you liked and you were still on the CSIRO field station. You never got to the end of it.”

Most of the time Pan would wander about in cowboy boots — the legacy of her father’s time at Perdue University in the US studying a PhD in animal genetics.

“He brought back many pairs of them for us in many sizes, so as we grew up we had a lot of cowboy boots,” she said.

“When I was older, I felt self-conscious walking around with my pointy-toed cowboy boots as no one else wore them. But when I was much older, I thought they were cool.

“Dad was quite mad. In winter, we always had an open fire and he would take out one of the minnows my brother and I had caught on the station, and slap it against a hard surface to knock it out.

“Then he would put it in a tablespoon of soy sauce and hold it over the fire and cook it. He’d say, ‘That is absolutely delicious’.”

It was, to all intents and purposes, a unique childhood.

“But it was the only childhood I had,” said Pan. “So I couldn’t really compare it with anything.”

While day-to-day life on the station was remote, the family often made the hour-long trip to Sydney.

“If you wanted to get Chinese food or even Chinese ingredients for Chinese food, you had to go to Chinatown.

That was the only place you could get it — it’s not like now where even Coles has an aisle with international food,” Pan said.

There was another drawcard to leaving the expansive fields of Badgerys Creek — the water at Balmoral. It was a spot Pan’s parents adored.

“The only beach we ever went to was Balmoral,” she said. “My parents never swam in China, so they were quite fearful of the beach.

“Balmoral was the only beach they knew of that had a net.”

Sydney soon became home. Pan was sent to board at Abbotsleigh School for a year at the age of 10 — and her brother to Knox Grammar — and shortly after, her parents relocated from Badgerys Creek to Wahroonga, where they eventually bought a house.

“It was certainly a change, going from living on a field station to living in Wahroonga — I mean, we were suddenly living in an actual house with actual neighbours on an actual street, with an actual normal address,” she said.

“I remember in first grade, when the teacher was trying to teach us about what an address was and how to address an envelope.

“She was saying, ‘There’s a house number and a street, and then a suburb’.

“She went around the class and everyone had to say their addresses. And of course, when she got up to me … well, where I was living just definitely did not fit into that pattern.”

At Abbotsleigh, Pan flourished academically but also proved to be an exceptional ballerina. Her parents adored the likes of Margot Fonteyn, Rudolf Nureyev and Gene Kelly — “even though it was a very Chinese household, a lot of Western cultural icons were revered” — and encouraged their daughter’s obsessive love of dance.

However, when Pan decided she wanted to give up school to do ballet professionally, her father was opposed.

“He had gone through the trouble of sending me to a school like Abbotsleigh,” she said.

“I think they thought it was fantastic to learn to ride horses and play the violin and dance, but he thought that (to give up school for ballet) was the most insane idea he’d ever heard.

“He said, ‘You need to see a psychiatrist, that’s just crazy’.

“I can see now in retrospect, the sort of concerns that my dad had.

“He said, ‘How many Chinese people do you see in the Australian Ballet?’ Which was, back then, zero.

“Now, there are lots of Chinese, Japanese … lots of Asian faces not just in the Australian Ballet but in world ballet. Everywhere you go, it’s completely international. But it was not the case back then.

“I often wonder that if my parents had said, ‘Yep, off you go and do ballet’, whether I would’ve had the guts to do it. I remember them saying, ‘Yes, you can leave school and do ballet, but you have to leave the house.’ But I was not a worldly person, I just couldn’t do that.”

So, to her parent’s relief and her ballet teacher’s dismay, Pan went on to study medicine at Sydney University, supplementing her early medical years at Concord Hospital with acting and modelling.

Campaigns included a 1991 Australian Tourism Commission ad campaign alongside golfer Greg Norman (“I hadn’t been told Greg Norman was in it and I saw this blond guy walking down the path and I said, ‘Gee that guy looks a bit like Greg Norman’ and the hair and make-up lady and everyone fell about laughing.”).

Somehow, in the process of the campaign, Pan was labelled an “Australian-Japanese actor”.

It didn’t offend.

“Actually, Australian-Chinese doctor, oh well,” she said.

“I wasn’t offended at all but the Japanese journalists at the launch might have been a bit confused. They said, ‘Cindy Pan … but Pan is not a Japanese name’, to which I replied, ‘Well that’s ’cause I’m not Japanese’. They looked a bit aghast.”

Following a role in 1992 TV miniseries Children Of The Dragon, Pan satiated her love of dance as the principal dancer in an Australia-wide, 10-week production of The King And I, alongside Hayley Mills.

It was a thrill that clearly left a huge impact on the young Pan.

“After that show closed, that same production ended up going to New York, where it won a whole lot of Tony awards. And, in fact, they revised the same production and they did it at the Sydney Opera House, a few years ago, and I took my boys (Pan, who is divorced, is mother to Anton, 15, and Jeremy, 13) to see it.

It was like stepping back in time,” she said.

“You know how you get dreams about exams? Well, I used to get these King And I dreams, where basically I can hear the overture is being played and I can’t remember even what order the costumes go on and I can’t remember my dance.”

While Pan’s career has been vast and varied (she is also an author — her first book Pandora’s Box followed years as a health columnist for The Sunday Telegraph) these days she is mostly focused on her biggest role — parenthood. “First and foremost, my priority is being a mum. And I guess I just kind of fit work in around that,” she said. A GP who wears her doctor’s hat in Chatswood, she still dances often (this interview takes place directly after a ballet class) and is an accomplished cellist with the Woollahra Philharmonic Orchestra.

As if this isn’t enough to keep her occupied, the optimistic Pan has recently developed a passion for growing flowers — another love affair that is the legacy of a childhood spent enveloped in nature.

There is a photo of a young Pan in Badgerys Creek, alongside her brother, in which both are holding bright yellow dandelions.

“My brother has it in his left hand resting on my shoulder and I am holding it in my two hands,” said Pan.

“Flowers were few and far between at Badgerys Creek so I treasured every little weed. I would bring bunches of onion weed flowers in to my mum and she would say, ‘Oh, don’t bring weeds into the house’.

“I still really love flowers, all of them. I grow roses and they are my treasures. My Facebook posts are often portraits of the roses I have grown. I love them and I’m proud of them.”