Justin Paul Fleming was born on 26 September 1917 in Sydney, the first son and second child of James Fleming, a hospital administrator, and Ethel Mary (née Downey). He was educated at St Patrick's College, Goulburn, New South Wales, Waverley College, Sydney, and the University of Sydney where he graduated with honours in 1940. After resident appointments at St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney, with Douglas Miller (later PRACS), he joined the medical branch of the Royal Australasian Air Force, serving at home and abroad for three and a half years. On demobilization he returned to Sydney where he took the MS in 1945 and the FRACS in 1947. The same year he was awarded a Nuffield Fellowship to work in England where he passed the FRCS and became surgical registrar at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford. He always described his years at Oxford with nostalgia: the scholastic atmosphere and the beauty of the surrounding countryside made a deep impression on his character and fired him with a lifelong enthusiasm for teaching. He also spent some time in 1949 at Professor Michael Boyd's vascular unit in Manchester. He returned to Australia in 1950 to join the staff of St Vincent's Hospital, and the Lewisham and Mater Misericordiae Hospitals. He built up a large practice and was noted for his technical skill and his kindness to his patients. He was highly regarded by his colleagues as an original thinker: he introduced and fostered the idea of surgical audit and developed new methods in teaching and patient care. He was a pioneer of peripheral vascular surgery in Australia where he was one of the first to resect an abdominal aortic aneurysm. He travelled abroad extensively to visit vascular centres in Britain and the USA and was deeply concerned with achieving the highest possible standards throughout Australia. He became an excellent undergraduate and postgraduate teacher, and was keen to ensure that young Australians had a complete basic training before going abroad for further specialty experience. He was Chairman of the New South Wales Co-ordinating Committee on surgical registrar training. Being critical of the lack of specialist political representation by the Australasian Medical Association, and in the absence of anything comparable to the Central Committee for Hospital Services in the UK, he set up the Australian Association of Surgeons of which he remained the first President up to the time of his death. Outside his professional work he was a cattle grazier and golfer. Justin Fleming published a number of articles on vascular surgery and carcinoma of the breast. In 1946 he married Mary Gwenyth Lusby, MB BS, FRACP, and they had four sons and two daughters, none of whom entered the medical profession. He died suddenly on 12 October 1974, and was survived by his wife and children.