AUSTRALIAN oil industry legend Frank Rickwood has died at his home in Barbados, aged 88.

He suffered a stoke in January.

Rickwood became, at the pinnacle of his power in 1974, the global head of oil and gas exploration and production at British Petroleum, for which he earlier worked extensively in Africa and Latin America before pioneering the development of Alaska as a major oilfield.

His passion was reserved for Papua New Guinea, in whose emergence as an oil province, and imminently a big gas producer, he played a prime role over five decades.

The son of a newspaper editor, he was born in the coalmining town of Cessnock in NSW's Hunter Valley and, after graduating with a BSc honours from Sydney University, swiftly became a field geologist with the Australasian Petroleum Company, for which he conducted numerous surveys in PNG, starting in January 1946 -- on wages of pound stg. 45 a month.

In 1950, he became senior lecturer in geology at Sydney University.

But he also continued his field trips to PNG, where his focus was on the Southern Highlands, which he viewed as especially prospective for hydrocarbons, since borne out by its development into the centre of PNG's thriving oil and gas industry.

This was a province little explored by government patrols, and Rickwood consequently made frequent "first contact" from the outside world with highlanders.

After he retired from BP in 1980, he joined the board of Oil Search, becoming chairman in 1992.

The company had been established in 1929 to explore for oil in PNG, and it was finally under Rickwood as chairman that it paid its first dividend 64 years later.

When he finally retired from the board in 1997, his successor as chairman, Trevor Kennedy, said at the annual meeting: "Frank Rickwood played a major role in the early 1980s promoting exploration in Papua New Guinea" -- within a global industry in which his credibility was high, thus attracting investors and explorers.

This renewed effort led to the discovery of the Kutubu oil field in early 1986, which has driven the industry since. Rickwood's book The Kutubu Discovery tells the enthralling story of the long, patient exploration epic -- including his own sorties -- that finally brought fruit.

In closing that annual meeting in Port Moresby, Kennedy said: "No one has loved this place and its people more."

Rickwood -- who was awarded an OBE by PNG, an honorary doctorate by New England University, and the first Haddon Forrester King Medal by the Australian Academy of Science -- was a considerable art collector, and a friend of celebrated artists Jeffrey Smart and Justin O'Brien.

He owned for a decade the 1875 mansion Minimbah, standing in 55 hectares in Singleton, near his birthplace. But he sold it for $1 million in 1994, and settled for good into his home in Barbados, where he was portrayed by American Town & Country magazine as a predictably popular dining guest.

After such a life, he never lacked for good stories to recount -- in English and in Pidgin.