Growing up on the road with his musician parents, David Kirkpatrick's friends were Sampson the strongman, a contortionist named Sally and a pair of trapeze artists famed for dangling by their teeth.
Kirkpatrick, the son of country music royalty Slim Dusty and Joy McKean, was born in central Queensland as the family's travelling variety show stopped in every corner of rural Australia in the 1950s.
His parents were performing up to eight shows every day alongside a troupe of eccentric acts.
"It was a busy time in their life, so if Sally the contortionist had finished her part in the show and I was running around causing mayhem backstage, she'd take me in hand," Kirkpatrick recalled to AAP.
"Sampson was a great bloke."
The tours enraptured rural audiences just as Dusty's recording of A Pub With No Beer went global, topping the charts in Britain and Ireland in 1959.
Those exhilarating days - complete with twirling cowgirls, long outback drives and living out of caravans - are revisited in Kirkpatrick's band's debut album released on Friday.
Two Tone Pony's 12-track offering Born on the Road is a dream Kirkpatrick quietly conjured as he spent decades working as an emergency medicine physician on the NSW central coast.
Though he followed a different professional path to his parents and sister Anne Kirkpatrick, a singer-songwriter, music was always humming away in the background.
After first learning drums at boarding school Kirkpatrick came around to the guitar in his late teens, teaching himself how to play with a Beatles song book.
His dad agreed to lend him an instrument.
"I still have that beautiful, old acoustic. I used to keep that under my bed at school."
Kirkpatrick had the largest collection of records among his friends, featuring Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Black Sabbath.
He recalls his father picking him up from school for the holidays and agreeing to go to a record store to browse the hard rock section.
"I bought Black Sabbath's Paranoid - I'm sure I did it to work them," he said.
"You've got to take your hat off to Slim and Joy."
Those diverse musical influences come together for the debut of Two Tone Pony, a five-piece band comprised of old friends.
The group, originally formed to play at Kirkpatrick's daughter's wedding, has produced poignant odes to family life, friendship and an enduring love of road tripping.
The stirring track Slow Lane, about taking time to appreciate life, was written on the busy M1 freeway between the coast and Sydney.
"There's a bit of a mythology in Australia about the road.
"I saw so much of Australia when I was small ... it was part and parcel of my parents' life, travelling and constant movement.
"Dust never settles on you."
* Two Tone Pony is playing in Tamworth this weekend with shows in Sydney and on the NSW central coast in September.
