A few names are tweaked or incidents slightly modified to protect identity but this is what FitzSimons feels necessary to tell his stories.

FitzSimons weaves in stories about police intimidating families with their children's severed limbs and moonshine drinking sessions with the crushed and distilled mash of an aborted human foetus. There are brutal mandatory canings, cannibalism witchcraft and women speaking in tongues in the Rhodesian midlands town Gwelo.

He was forced to leave Zimbabwe after Robert Mugabe came to power, taking over what had been "a strange combination of two political arms (ZANU and ZAPU) who, for awhile, coalesced".

FitzSimons' name was found on an official Zimbabwean death list - likely revenge, he said, from putting someone with power inside. Now 81, FitzSimons is feeling greater freedom to tell more stories as he outlasts people from his past even though a lot of the war was still "not worked out".

"One could've done a biographical account but those can get too self-serving," FitzSimons said. "I'm not good with dates and wars in history. I do people and customs and things."

FitzSimons is a social historian and research fellow at Federation University. He is also a musician at Sovereign Hill. How and why people do the things they do fascinates him.

As Your Worship Pleases features protagonist Michael Neal as a gun-toting magistrate in 1970s Rhodesia. This is a follow to his Nikosi's Anglican priest, Father Michael Gale. In FitzSimons' life this was the other way about, he left the court to study theology and better help the communities in which he lived.

"I became an army chaplain and was unusual in as much as I carried a gun in the army corp," FitzSimons said. Pacifists, he said, did not survive long.

Dispensing justice in such a place demanded a robust constitution, FitzSimons said. And a gun.

Moving to Australia in the 1980s was a big adjustment for FitzSimons. His mind can often still jump him back to Zimbabwe at times.

Early on, FitzSimons was pulled over by police for speeding when he had thought he was doing a reasonable speed, only to realise he had been reading his speed in miles per hour, not kilometres per hour. When he wound down the window, the power imbalance of being unarmed and facing a policeman shocked him.

"The first time we were met by a possum in the roof I woke up searching for my gun, realising I did not have one," FitzSimons said. "We didn't know what or who might be in our roof. It takes a while to adjust."

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