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Two words sum up Bill Moody
"Gentleman" and "Soldier"

Obituary from The Courier Mail (Brisbane) 30 Jul 2010 (original version of which is in Documents)

TWO words neatly sum up Bill Moody ? soldier and gentleman.
But he was also a royalist, to the core, and the day his MBE was presented to him by the Queen when she was visiting Brisbane for the 1982 Commonwealth Games was one of the proudest days of his long life. Only protocol ? and the thought of the uproar that would have ensued ? kept him from giving in to an urge to hug his beloved monarch.
By that stage the distinguished soldier and career public servant had come a long way from his humble beginnings at Mareeba. The eldest of the four sons of Marion Ruby and William John Alexander Moody, he grew up at the Atherton Tableland tinmining town of Herberton. It was a wonderful place for boyhood adventures, and had the added advantage of offering good tin scratching even though the town's mining heyday was waning by then. The pastime provided a handy source of pocket money in those tough Depression years.
Mr Moody attended the local school but left at junior level to work as a postal clerk. His love of the monarchy possibly dated from that time because he was given the job of welcoming Governor and Lady Wilson to Herberton in 1933 on behalf of his school. According to an account by The Cairns Post "Master Willie Moody gave a perfect and natural delivery, delighting all those who heard".
Any postal career ambitions he might have harboured were nipped in the bud by the advent of war. At age 18 he signed up with the 15th Battalion and after jungle training at Canungra he was commissioned as a lieutenant in 1942. Then it was off to Bougainville as a platoon commander. It was on that tropical New Guinean island that he earned his Military Cross on July 9, 1945, a fortnight before the atomic bomb blasts over Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war in the Pacific. Nevertheless, the war on Bougainville did not effectively end until August 18. when word finally filtered through about the Japanese surrender. Mr Moody was the first Australian officer to accept the surrender of a Japanese commander in the field in the southwest Pacific.
After his discharge the next year he returned home and married Janet East in 1947 before starting part?time accountancy studies. It was his vehicle for advancement through the commonwealth public service in a long and varied career in which he rose to director, Department of Supply for the Army, in Queensland and PNG.
He was also made an associate of the Chartered Institute of Secretaries in 1960, and continued his involvement with the army through the Reserves (he retired from it in 1971 with the rank of lieutenant?colonel). Subsequently he was awarded an Efficiency Decoration for his long and distinguished army service.
Mr Moody probably would have advanced even further in the public service, but he rebuffed many offers to move to Canberra and Melbourne because he so loved the Brisbane home he and Janet built following the war.
A year after he retired from the public service he was appointed MBE for his exemplary record of civil service.
Mr Moody was a man who, once he took something up, saw things through. So when he decided to use his retirement to become a voluntary English tutor to help migrants master the language, it came as no surprise to his friends that he ended up being TAFE's longest serving volunteer. His 23 years of service as a language tutor were recognised at a ceremony in 2004. But his greatest reward was the numerous tributes his grateful students wrote to him over the years.
They and his public service colleagues ? always remembered him as a true gentleman.