He was also arrested with The Doors’ Jim Morrison.

Most remarkable of all, and a claim perhaps peculiar to him, he drove to a war. The Vietnam War. From Amsterdam.

To get a helicopter view of Page’s life requires rising above the 1960s, a convulsive decade with its heroes, hedonism, hopes, horrors … and utter humbug. Only the reckless optimism of youth would allow an 18-year-old to believe he could jump into a VW Kombi and drive to another hemisphere. But that is what Page – among the most acclaimed photographers of his generation – did in 1962.

Born in Kent in May 1944, Page turned up 13 days before the Allies’ Normandy landings, World War II’s great hinge of history. In the latter stages of that conflict, as the Japanese withdrew from occupied Vietnam and the French lost influence, communist revolutionary Ho Chi Minh led the independence movement that – assisted, ironically, by the US – established the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in Hanoi.

This set off the Indo-China Wars, the second of which we know as the Vietnam War.

Before Page arrived, he had travelled Europe, often on long cycling tours in the warmer months. “I stopped doing sport in school so I could do cycle racing – time trials and long distance,” he said from his northern NSW home this week, after calling Australia home since 2002.

“My dad came out of the ­Depression of the 1930s … and he never got to travel outside a couple of walking trips in Germany and Switzerland – the Alps.” When Page was 11, his father took him on short breaks to Holland and Belgium “by bus and train – I was encouraged to make my own way”.

This set him on his adventurous path during which, looking back over 60 years, he believes he “was vicariously living for (my father) in a sense”.

At 16, he was in a motorcycle ­accident and almost bled to death, with a lacerated temporal artery, and suffered “my first broken hip”. It was the first time he was declared DOA, and he wrote about it in his 1988 biography Page After Page.

“I had died. I lived. I had seen the tunnel. It was black. It was nothing. There was no light at the end. There was no afterlife … it was a long, flowing, no-colour wave which just disappeared (but) I was alive … This was the dawning, the overture to losing a responsible part of my psyche. A liberation happened at that intersection. Anything from here on would be free time, a gift from the gods.”

It is unlikely his father would ­always have approved of how he used that gift.

He left home and found work in an Amsterdam hotel where he washed dishes, was a storeman and eventually the sous-chef. “I fell in with a bunch of guys in the red-light area and they were moving hash from Paris to Amsterdam, so I did a couple of runs,” Page explains matter-of-factly.

They would drive an old Opel car to the French capital 520km away where its spare tyre was filled with hashish – “and you were a hundred quid better off”.

In Holland, he befriended an Australian and, in the Kombi, set off for Switzerland when suddenly the plan became an overland trip “to Australia for Christmas”. A travel cliche was freshly minted while the pair had all of £64, the payout from that motorcycle accident. (Twenty years, on Men at Work would famously sing “Travelling in a fried-out Kombi, on a hippie trail, head full of zombie”, a succinct description of the next months in Page’s life.)

“In 1962, there were about 500 people on the road between London and Sydney,” Page says. “By 1968, you were looking at 250,000 on the road … and by the time you get to the backpacker time, the mid-1970s, you’re looking at a ­million.”

Before leaving Europe, their company had grown, starting with two young men who came aboard at the Greek-Turkish border. Later, going across the top of Iran, “we rescued this gay, older Australian bloke in Tabritz. He’d been thrown out of a car (driven by) an older couple. So we ended up with five of us – with one hookah and four extensions.”

The Kombi “blew up” on the way to Kathmandu, just short of the Nepalese border. “We pushed the VW into Nepal with its engine in a crate in the back.” They sold it as parts, and that cash was an ­investment in his unlikely future.

Page had always had a camera. His first was a “box Brownie-type thing” – the Model T Ford of photography – he received on his eighth birthday. When cycling around Holland aged 13 he bought his first 35mm Agfa camera. That was sold in 1962 to pay for a ferry crossing in India – a ferry ride he missed.

“I bought another in Rangoon, very cheaply, with money I got from selling the van,” he recalls.

Walking away from his fried-out Kombi, Page made Burma by road and trains, but not before dramas in India and some Silk Road business. In 1962 a “white man was a rarity” in Asia and Page scored a role as an extra in a film in Bombay, and, having sold everything he owned, “I smuggled hash out of the Khyber Pass”.

He became so sick with dysentery, blood poisoning and malaria that, weighed at hospital, he came in at just 40kg.

Finally, he made his way to Laos in the landlocked heart of South-East Asia where he picked up work for the recently launched United States Agency for International Development.

Communication with home was infrequent, postcards and the like sent poste restante to nearby cities. “It was chitchat about gran and the cat,” he remembers, but then life in Laos for Page had its own mundanities: “You get up in the mornings, roll a joint, have a Vietnamese coffee, go to the US aid compound and pick up a truck and six locals and go and dig up the jungle for a garden project.” He was 18.

Next door, in Vietnam, the war was in full swing and American involvement was ratcheting up. President Kennedy committed hun­dreds of Green Berets, specialists in unconventional warfare, to assist the South while ticking off the spraying of Agent Orange to denude the enemy of cover and food, but still the South was being overwhelmed.

In Laos, Page roomed with an Australian, Martin Stuart-Fox – later to become a professor and lecturer in Asian history at the University of Queensland. Stuart-Fox was stringing for United Press International but was asked to cover the war in Vietnam. “So I ­became UPI Laos for seven weeks,” says Page. “And the Daily Express and The Daily Telegraph – for 10c a word – and got my first pictures published.”

Fortune then intervened, as it so often does in Page’s story. There was an attempted coup in Vientiane. No one could enter Laos. Only Page was there to file words and pictures, and his life changed. UPI called: “I’ve still got the blue Telex offering me $90 a week: ‘Go straight to Saigon. You are now a staff photographer on probation for four months.’ ”

His mad years of wartime risk – the gift from the gods – were under way. It must be a genetic thing, but his parents took it in their stride. When, in 1965, a Saigon-based colleague called in on Page’s mum and dad in Kent, the only thing that surprised Page’s mother was that her son could use chopsticks.

Page’s years in Vietnam – the absurd, fear-crammed dice-rolls, the serious injuries, the deaths of colleagues, the waste and futility, but above all the remarkable photographs he took while on the frontlines as the conflict went from red to white hot – are legendary.

What he captures, in images back then sometimes considered flawed – a face out of focus, or an unremarkable detail of the drudgery of soldiering – is often the ­prosaic routines of fighting in photographs that speak just as ­eloquently as Eddie Adams’ stunning picture of General Loan executing a Vietcong captain on a Saigon street. (Adams regretted that photo becoming the brand of the anti-war movement as its context was seldom revealed: the day before, a squad led by Loan’s “victim” had killed a South Vietnamese colonel, his wife, his 80-year-old mother, and five of his six children. They had been bound and they had all had their throats cut.)

“Any good war picture is an anti-war picture,” says Page.

“You can’t editorialise a picture. It’s what it is.”

During a year from 1967, spent mostly in the US, Page saw the impact of his work. “I got to realise the effect we were having. Every day, every week in Life magazine and Look magazine, on the front page of every paper, every day.”

It was during that time he was sent to New Haven to photograph a Doors concert. Police had pepper-sprayed Jim Morrison in his dressing room (in which the singer was having a sexual encounter with a woman whose boyfriend was none too pleased). Morrison taunted the cops from the stage and “a fusillade” of fold-up chairs was thrown at them. Page, two others and Morrison ended up in a cell together. “I’m still wanted in New Haven,” Page says.

His archives include perhaps 750,000 images, and after being threatened in Brisbane’s 2011 floods, he decided to better store them and was encouraged to collect together the best of his Vietnam work. The has resulted is Nam Contact, a 448-page survey of those years exploring his photographs, contact sheets and facsimiles of documents relating to his Vietnam years. The publication comes encased in a lookalike 1966 Kodak photographic-paper box, with replica vintage magnifying glass and weighs 7kg. Just nine ­copies have been printed, by Sydney publisher Momento Pro.

Looking over those black-and-white slivers of history, Page is reminded of his young self: “When you are young you’re bullet proof.” And in good shape. “You had your cameras, your overnight field gear, four water bottles, three days’, four days’ worth of tucker, trenching tool, a big knife … you got incredibly fit.”

Page, his mate Stuart-Fox and others lived in what became known as Frankie’s House in Saigon. Michael Herr’s acclaimed book Dispatches, about his time reporting the war, describes Page as the most extreme of the “wigged-out crazies running around Vietnam”, a reputation adapted to Dennis Hopper’s character in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Hopper is Page with an American accent. (Even bonkers Hunter S. Thompson thought Page dangerous and rejected Rolling Stone’s request that they return together to record the war’s last days.)

“Francis (Ford Coppola) got a draft of Dispatches when he was making Apocalypse, and got Mike (Herr) to write all the dialogue. He was a bit stuck looking at the helicopter sequence again and again so they flew me up to Los Angeles to help,” explains Page.

“We went to see the first six-hour cut in a little theatre in North Beach, San Francisco. I’m sitting there with Coppola, George Lucas and whatshisname, Steven … Steven Spielberg, Mike Herr and myself. When Hopper first comes on the screen there’s that monologue on the steps of the temple. Mike turned around: ‘You finally made it to the silver screen!’.”

So how did he survive? “You weave and dance – the fear kept you dancing. When you’re young you can do that,” he answers.

“I can’t believe I did it. Did I do that? Obviously I did – the pictures are there.”