Andrew Warren Eklund was born on 9 March 1918 in Ayr, Queensland, where his father Hugo Andreas Eklund was a civil engineer. His mother Kathleen Annie née Warren was the daughter of a gynaecologist. He was educated at the Brisbane Boys' College and Queensland University. After qualifying, he did junior jobs at the Mater Misericordiae Public Hospital and joined the Royal Australian Army Corps, serving in New Guinea and Borneo, where he was wounded in action. After the war he came to England, where he was one of the many of his contemporaries who were adopted by Sir Gordon Gordon-Taylor, studied for the primary under Frank Stansfield, and attended the clinical teaching of McNeill Love. He passed the final FRCS in 1956 and returned to Brisbane, to become visiting specialist surgeon at the Repatriation Hospital and Princess Alexandra and Royal Brisbane Hospitals. He married Thea Poole in 1941. They had four daughters. He was a keen yachtsman, racing an A class yacht. He went on to be chief of surgery at the Lyndon B Johnson Tropical Medical Centre in Pago Pago, Samoa. In June 2000 the College was notified that he had died.