A handful of asides scattered through other members' own articles fill in some of the person behind the byline. As a young man in the early 1960s Bruce worked at Ace Aquarium, a well-known Brisbane fish shop of the era, to help pay his way through university — and when he graduated in 1966, the shop's proprietor recalled being sad to lose their best casual worker "to the medical fraternity". It's a detail that explains both the "Dr" and the affectionate nickname "The Doc" that turns up again and again in other members' trip reports over the following decades.

Bruce was based in Brisbane through the 1990s, the years of his most active ANGFA Queensland and National presidencies and many of his Cape York, Top End and New Guinea expeditions. In later years he relocated to Far North Queensland, to a property on the Little Mulgrave River near Cairns that visiting members and photographers — including Gunther Schmida and Franz-Peter Müllenholz, on the trip pictured above — have described as "a paradise", and which has served as a base and hospitality stop for collecting trips up to Cape York ever since.

Other members' trip reports return again and again to the same handful of "Bruce stories". On a 2010 helicopter-fishing trip up the Katherine River, when the aircraft turned out to have room for only three of the four-person party, Leo O'Reilly recorded that "Bruce Hansen, being the gentleman he is, offered to remain behind although it must have killed him to see us fly away that morning." A Queensland newsletter report covering the final club meeting of 1993 notes that Bruce had just won a two-foot fish tank in the conference raffle for the second meeting running — "this being the second fish tank won by the good doctor in as many meetings. Terry Gilbert had best beware of his title" — and other members' own accounts recall him as a reliable source of jokes at working bees and gatherings alike.

His reputation for humour travelled further than Queensland. After Bruce gave a convention talk on "the dangers of our hobby" in Sydney in 2009, a group of visiting German members — Ulli and Franz-Peter Müllenholz and Gilbert and Hilda Maebe — found it so funny that they adopted the nickname he gave them, "the Boomerangs", writing in ANGFA News that they would "come back as sure as death".

Found by searching the full text of every digitised ANGFA publication for mentions of Bruce, not just his own bylines — there may well be more still to find as later ANGFA News and ANGFA Vic News issues are fully indexed.

A Top Trip to the Tip — the ANGFA Cape York Expedition, 1991

Fishes of Sahul, Vol. 8(1)

"There's nothing like the company of fellow 'fish nuts' on a collecting trip to add an extra dimension… the ANGFA Cape York jaunt had so many special memories that it would take a dozen articles like this one to recount them all."

Kikori Kaleidoscope

Fishes of Sahul, Vol. 9(3), October 1995

"A chance meeting on the tennis court with an old acquaintance offered me a window of opportunity in the form of half-price air fares to PNG during the Master's Games in early October 1994…" — a solo survey of the Kikori River system in Papua New Guinea.

Fish in Focus: Craterocephalus "stercusmuscarum" group species

Fishes of Sahul, Vol. 34(2), June 2020 — with K.G. Moy, D. Wilson, G. Briggs, P.J. Unmack & C. Scharpf

One of the longest entries in the recurring "Fish in Focus" species-profile series (26 pages), co-authored with fellow life member Glenn Briggs among others.

Springs in Spring

In-Stream 11(6), December 2002 — with Barry Meiklejohn

"Ever since the desert gobies from Coward Springs — Chlamydogobius eremius first impressed me as aquarium subjects, a visit to the habitat of these little desert dwellers was a priority item on my holiday 'wish list'." A desert-goby collecting trip through central Australia, one of his most heavily-illustrated newsletter pieces.