A cheeky grin and generous to a fault is how Jack Joseland's many friends throughout western Queensland and beyond are remembering him this week.
Jack, aged 26, died on Monday morning when his gyrocopter crashed while mustering on a property in the Yaraka district.
The tragedy of a young life lost too soon has greatly impacted the tight-knit community 220km south of Longreach, which has fond memories of a quintessential bush bloke.
"Jack was just Jack," family friend Wendy Sheehan said. "He always made you smile."
It was at Wendy and husband Peter Sheehan's property, Trinidad, where Jack probably got one of his first flying jobs but he did plenty of work there, both on the ground and in the air.
"There's plenty of 'Jack stories' that will be told in future, but we just remember how he always had time to stop and have a yarn with you," Wendy said.
His ease in talking to anyone, young or old, is part of what made Jack stand out from the crowd in the eyes of fellow Yaraka resident Andy Pegler.
"There are a couple of young ones, when they walk in to a room, they'll always look you in the eye and say g'day - one of them was Jack," he said.
For Andy and others, Jack's affinity with animals is another thing they remember most about him, especially the little mob of feral goats he looked after at the family property Newhaven, and how he bartered with his aunt Susan Glasson for a Boer buck to build up their genetics.
Andi-Claire Pegler says he was always full of plans of how he was going to run his goats.
"He always had big plans, he was very bush-focused," she said. "Even when he was little, he was always good with animals and had a good stock sense."
Inside the house, that took the form of mustering mobs of marbles around the house, Andi-Claire said.
She boarded with the Joseland family and others to attend school at Yaraka and remembers lots of talk about motorbikes and mustering.
Jack's parents Tim and Kerry returned from Highland Plains on the Queensland-Northern Territory border north of Camooweal to Yaraka together with Jack and his older brother Mal in the late 1990s, and his younger sister Bella was born soon after they'd settled in.
He did all of his primary schooling at the one-teacher school at Yaraka where he, his cousin Georgia Glasson, and Andi-Claire formed a solid bond.
"There weren't many of us - a lot of the games we played we had to make up because we didn't have enough for a team," Andi-Claire said. "I remember in Year 5, Jack got hopelessly involved in golf, hitting the ball around the schoolyard, which was pretty much dirt and burrs."
Jack often stayed with John and Neen Hawkes, and they and their children remember him as one of those old souls in a young person's body.
"I considered him part of our family," Neen said. "It would be hard to find someone as genuine, and his long stories were legend."
Yaraka's horse and motorbike gymkhana, a feature of the June-July school holiday calendar, holds one of Mary Killeen's most vivid memories of Jack.
"He was only a bit of a kid and somehow he got in the lead in one of the events," she said.
"There were some bloody good riders in his age group but he won the round.
"He was ecstatic and I remember him saying, 'when I realised I was in the lead, I wasn't game to look back, I just went for it'."
Soon after he finished school at the Toowoomba Grammar School, Jack did a six-month stint with Neil Dunn's earthmoving business at Moomba in South Australia before going contract mustering.
He bought his first gyrocopter six years ago and flew his first helicopter solo on November 25, 2017.
He spent a period of time with Cloncurry Mustering before returning to the central west to pursue his dreams.
In one of those twists that fate throws out, the world has a lasting memory of Jack thanks to a YouTube video from country music singer Josh Arnold.
Posted on Sunday afternoon, Josh's Aussie version of 'Thank God I'm a Country Boy', featuring Lee Kernaghan, has an array of photographs of bush blokes loving life in all sorts of ways.
Closing out the clip is one of Wendy Sheehan's photos featuring Jack with his characteristic smile spraying up mud as he rides his motorbike across a paddock.
Longreach's Guy Tindall is one of those who grew up with him, went to school with him and then worked alongside him, and is one of many young western Queenslanders left with memories of an enduring friendship with a true gentleman who always put others first.
"He was the true embodiment of an Australian larrikin," Guy said.