Malcolm Elliott Lyon OBE (18 September 1930 – September 2007) was an Australian public servant and diplomat. Born in London in 1930, Lyon moved to South Australia in 1940 when he and his mother emigrated from England. He studied at St Peter's College, Adelaide, before transferring as a boarder to Geelong College for his later schooling. He graduated with Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Adelaide, where he was at St. Mark's College. In the middle of his degree he moved to France to study for a year at the Britannia Institute in Paris. Returning to Australia, he travelled with his mother and two friends overland from London to Mombasa before boarding a ship. Along the journey they encountered lions and crocodiles and had to dig themselves out of sand more than a dozen times, an