Neil's own account, recorded by Bruce Hansen in ANGFA News, traces his interest back to 1962, when Ian Munro brought the first live New Guinea rainbowfishes back from the field. Neil went on to become one of a small handful of Australian photographers — alongside Gunther Schmida and Dr Gerald Allen — whose colour transparencies of wild rainbowfishes and blue-eyes became the reference images for the entire hobby, reproduced again and again in ANGFA publications and, by his own generosity, in other authors' books. When the well-travelled ichthyologist Heiko Bleher was honoured at an ANGFA Queensland event as "international traveller, collector, raconteur, entertainer extraordinaire and long-time friend of ANGFA", he was presented with a framed Neil Armstrong print of Scleropages jardinii as a memento.

He served for years as ANGFA's honorary journal coordinator, and in "Meet the ANGFA People", his own profile of fellow founder Ken Smales, Neil recalled meeting Ken through a shared interest in aquatic plants in the early 1970s, noting wryly that he himself "served my apprenticeship as a linotype mechanic in the same [newspaper] industry" as Ken's own trade — one tradesman's craft feeding directly into the production of the journal they had built together.

To fellow members he was affectionately known as "Silver Budgie" — a Victorian club report from 1997 describes "Night Owl Neil Armstrong (aka Silver Budgie)" dropping in on a working bee at 2am to retrieve a bag he'd left behind, unable to resist "retelling a few of Bruce Hansen's jokes" while he was there.

Found by searching the full text of every digitised ANGFA publication for mentions of Neil, 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.

Melanotaenia trifasciata

Fishes of Sahul, Vol. 1(1), July 1983

Neil's debut piece — and the very first illustrated species profile ever published in Fishes of Sahul — describing and photographing six distinct colour "tribes" of the Northern-Australian rainbowfish from the Weipa, Alligator, Goyder, Gordon, Coen and Giddy Rivers.

A Wilderness of Rivers

Fishes of Sahul, Vol. 2(4), April 1985

"Cape York! This wilderness area in the far north of eastern Australia that I had yearned to see for so many years…" A 10,000-kilometre, four-week collecting expedition through Cape York with Ron and Elaine Turner, complete with an overturned, burning tent in a freak Goondiwindi storm on the way home.

Meet the ANGFA People … Ken Smales

ANGFA News, Issue 4, August 2000

Neil's own profile of fellow founder Ken Smales, tracing the earliest days of the committee that designed and named Fishes of Sahul — itself a small piece of ANGFA's founding history told by one of the people who lived it.