Colin McPhedran lived in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales for more than 55 years. White Butterflies is an autobiographical account of his remarkable survival, as an 11-year old and beyond, of one of the most hazardous and tragic wartime refugee trails in the world.Colin was born in 1930 in Burma to a Scottish father, an executive with Shell Burmah Oil in Rangoon, and a well-born Burmese mother. With his mother, brother and sister, Colin fled the Japanese occupation of Burma in 1942, walking through the dreaded Hukawng Valley to India during the monsoon. Barely alive, and suffering malaria and dysentery, he was rescued on the border and spent months in hospital struggling back to life. Having survived, he spent the next four years without his own family, but nurtured by the warmth and colour of the vast Indian culture. Completing his schooling in India, he spent several years in England before arriving in Australia in 1951.