Australians at War Film Archive

Well I was born in Surrey, England on 16 July 1922 and after – when I – that was July, and then

in November we set sail for Australia – I’d better start again I’m getting muddled up. In November of 1924 we left London and came out by ship, the Baradine, and came to Melbourne, and we arrived here in January of 1925. We moved from

Melbourne down to Geelong, and about two months after that, my mother gave birth to my second sister, Betty, and we lived in Geelong for about five years and another sister was born. And then we moved, the old man got a position with the

Shell Oil Company, and moved to Warracknabeal in the Mallee and we were in Warracknabeal for two to two and a half years, and that’s where I commenced school and then from there, we moved down to Ballarat and we were in Ballarat for a couple of years, and I was at school there at Ballarat College. And then – I think it was about 1934 – we moved down to Melbourne and

I resumed school. And I went to Hampton High School ,and that’s where I obtained my Intermediate Certificate in 1938. From there, I was lucky enough to get a position with The Herald and Weekly Times, in the compositing room, but I wasn’t very happy with that position, and I had applied to get

a position on one of the interstate passenger ships as an assistant purser. I was successful with the firm of Hallett Parker, who had two passenger ships or actually four at that time. They had the Wanganella, which was on the Sydney-New Zealand run. The Westralia which ran on the Australian coast from Brisbane round to Fremantle, which took a fortnight, and then on the way back

via Adelaide, Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane another fortnight. They also had a ship called the Zealandia, which ran from Sydney to Hobart on a weekly service and was a 50% share with Tasmanian Steamers, they owned the Marana. I was appointed on the 31st of May of 1939

to the Westralia as assistant purser and I did four complete, four or five complete voyages to Brisbane to Fremantle and return. On one of the voyages on the third September 1939, Westralia happened to be sailing or steaming from Sydney to Melbourne and we were just off Wilsons Promontory and on the radio

we heard the announcement made by Mr Menzies, who was then the Prime Minister of Australia, that we were at war with Germany, and of course when we arrived in Melbourne being a passenger ship with many portholes and windows, there were a team of painters came down on board they painted over the windows and everything so that there would be no light showing on a passenger vessel.

From there, I was on Westralia until I think it was November of 1939, when she was taken over by the navy. And all merchant crew were taken off and I was transferred to the Wanganella for a short period as assistant purser on the New Zealand run and then I returned back to Melbourne where I

went into the head office of Hallett Parker and awaited further posting and that came to the Marana on the Tasmania ferry run and I was there for assistant purser for a period of six months, I think it was. And then the then purser, a man named Drysdale, he decided to join the navy and he went in

as a lieutenant into the navy and I, at the tender age of 17, was appointed purser by the Marana. From there I served for some considerable time. We had problems, we had problems on the Marana there was one occasions or two occasions actually when the vessel didn’t sail at all on two weekends. This was because

we had shortage of crew and the crew was apprehensive of going out in the Bass Strait because of mines and also submarines and possible radars. And I must make mention of the fact that the only persons on board that we had trouble with in that regard were the ‘so coal

crowd’ because she was a coal powered we had a team of 9 engineers, a donkey man, two greasers, 15 firemen and 10 trimmers, which was a lot of fellows down below and of course, if we’d hit anything or had been hit, well, those poor blokes wouldn’t have lasted five seconds. Any rate, we got over that

and the vessel continued on for some time. Of course one of the main problems there was, the civilian personnel had great difficulty in getting from Tasmanian to Melbourne or from Melbourne across to Tasmanian because of the fact that there was no aircraft flying in those days, not in the way they are now. And Marana, because the Taroona, which she operated in

cahoots with around the Melbourne Launceston run, had been taken over by the forces and she was now stationed in Townsville, and operated from Townsville through to New Guinea trooping. So Marana was left to do three trips a week for a period of four years, I would say. And at times, the ship was completely taken over by troops, which made it very, very difficult for

the civilian population to move.

Yeah. Well the next – during the remainder of the war I sailed with the Wanganella from 1943 to 45 and it just so happened that I happened to be in Sydney on the V Day [Victory Day], and I was returned to Melbourne and I joined the head office staff of

Hallett Parker once more, and in 1948 I was sent to Sydney to join Westralia again, and she was going to be put on the run from Sydney to Japan and we carried troops and families up to the occupation

forces that were stationed in Japan. I did six trips going up there as purser of Westralia: after that, I transferred to the Wanganella as purser because she’d had trouble, she’d run aground at the entrance to Wellington Harbour in New Zealand, and I was purser of her then through to 1950, when I came ashore permanently. And one of the reasons

I came ashore, because I had a wife and I had two daughters, and we thought it was time I settled down. I resumed work with Hallett Parker in head office. I eventually became assistant to the head office accountant in Melbourne, and in 1961

Hallett Parker was taken over by an organisation called Boral. Our ships were sold and most of the staff were placed in positions in shipping companies elsewhere, and I remained the last person in head office other than our managing director, Mr Tom Webb, up until April 1962.

From there, wife and I had five months overseas and went by ship both ways. I came back, resumed Union Steam Ship Company in Melbourne and I was with them for just on 10 years. They were eventually taken over by Thomas National Transport, TNT. I transferred to – I worked

with the Union Company for a short time, then I transferred to a Wool Company, Wool and Sheepskin Organisation called William Horton. William Hortons were eventually taken over by – can’t think of their name now, doesn’t matter and then I went to Dalgetys. And Dalgetys eventually sold one of the sections I was in

to Thomas Cook, the travel organisation. And I transferred over there, and created a new office for them in Melbourne, and I remained with them until 1982. And from 1982 till 1986 I was on their administrative staff in Victoria, and I then retired.

Well my father was born in Carnavonshire in north Wales. He had two brothers and a sister. During the First World War,

or prior to the First World War, he was in the territorials I think they called them, in England. And in – when war was declared, he became a Lieutenant in the Welsh Artillery and in 1915 went to France, and was in the artillery for a period, I don’t know, can’t remember for how long, and from there

the RFC, Royal Flying Corps, decided they would help out the artillery in spotting because up till that time, artillery would just fire shots and they had no idea where they landed. So he became an observer with the Royal Flying Corp. And he did that duty for, I would say from memory

possibly 18 months and then he decided to join the Royal Flying Corps as a pilot. Eventually became a pilot, flew aircraft like Sopwith Pups and one or two Camels, but it’s all so far away I can’t quite – anyway after the war, he worked in London in

office, something to do with an agency for something or other I can’t remember that. My mother was born in South Africa, and she was born over there during the Boer War, because her father was in the administration of the British Forces over there. He was a civilian. She also had Welsh – her parents were Welsh.

So as I say, in 1921 they were married and I was born in 1922. Then we came to Australia by ship and settled in Geelong, with the old man worked with the Ford Company. He eventually obtained a position with the Shell Oil Company,

and we moved to Warracknabeal. From there we went to Ballarat, still with the Shell Company and down to Melbourne and at the beginning of the war, 1939, he volunteered and re-enlisted and was a recruiting officer in the old Kellow-Falkiner Building in St. Kilda Road,

Melbourne. And he was there for some considerable time, and then he was moved to Sydney to the recruiting office in Kings Cross. He saw out his time during the war in postings at Laverton, and I think at Pearce in Western Australia. Then he after the war joined the public service, and he was in the War

Service Home Division and that’s when he retired. My mother during that time also during the war she worked with the administration section of the Munitions Department, which were situated in Bourke Street in Melbourne and of course after the war, resumed home duties. My first sister, Betty, was

engaged in 1943 at the age of 18 she joined the AWAS [Australian Women’s Army Service] and in December of ’43, she was posted to Brisbane to an organisation called Advanced LHQ [Land Headquarters] which were – they had – they used to do deciphering and all that sort of thing. From there,

well she continued for the rest of the war in Brisbane, with LH

Well that I’m not a 100% sure I can’t quite remember. But he was – I have an idea it might’ve been part of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, but I’m not 100%.

Very little. Very little. I think that’s one of the problems with a lot of return

fellows, they never really talked about much. I was a member of the Beaumaris RSL [Returned and Services League] for a number of years before moving to Malvern where I am now, and on a Friday and Saturday, of course there was always a big gathering in the bar. And it became quite evident that the ones that used to – the fellows that used to talk about various events –

situations that they were in, we were pretty sure that a lot of them used to blow up the situations.

Yeah, and in many cases they may not have even been there. And I think that’s one of the things that happened that the fellows that usually were involved in a lot of these incidents just didn’t talk about them at all. I may be wrong, but that’s just my thoughts.

He didn’t tell me really, I had to ask and he very rarely said anything much at all.

That’s a long time ago now. Being a boy at that stage, oh, possibly.

What it was like in France in – I mean I’ve got books at home here World War 1, World 11 and sorry – three volumes of World War 1 – and I’ve read quite a lot of that, but no he was never forthcoming with very much at all.

No, no,

he was lucky.

I can’t recollect that it had any real effect on him.

Not to the same extend as my late father-in-law, who was in the second landing at Gallipoli in 1915. He later went on to France, and he was gassed in France and was sent back to England for hospitalisation and so forth and eventually came back into France again and had

bad effects on him. And he eventually came back and he lived for many years. He retired as a colonel, but he very rarely said anything other than the fact the effects of gas were quite evident at certain times. You could see it coming out in his face and his skin, but he wouldn’t talk about it.

No.

Mainly, the fellows, the returned fellows coming back, and they used to come to the school and round about Anzac Day they would come and talk about ANZACs [Australia and New Zealand Army Corps] and

what some of the fellows did, and didn’t do and so forth but it was all hazy, and I can’t remember really that it had any great effect on me. Later on, after this last one of course, you have a different attitude and you think back and thought, “Gosh, those blokes really went through a lot of problems,” but no,

it was just one of those – it didn’t impress me greatly for some reason or other.

Mm.

Oh I think in those days

I mean having parents, English parents, I was brought up with the idea of the royal family and everything about that, so it was just instantaneous. I mean if I hadn’t been at sea, I would’ve at the time that the war was declared, the Second World War, I would’ve endeavoured very quickly to try to get myself into the services, but at that stage of course, I was only 17, so.

But I know a lot of fellows did enlist at 17, but no, no it was just one of those things, you did it for King and Country.

And myself I think. And family, but no I just felt it was one of the things to do.

That’s a very difficult question, and I don’t think I’ve ever really thought of it that way. I just thought well here we are, we live in the British Empire, we’re part of it and we’ve got a reasonably good life. Even in those days we were just coming out of the Depression, the lifestyle

especially in Australia was pretty good, and no I just thought, ”Well, righto,” they’re aggressors, and the way Mussolini and Hitler especially had been going on, I mean we didn’t want to transfer to that sort of existence.

No.

He was, I think he always voted liberal. With that I don’t know though, I would assume that.

Well, I can’t remember being in school at Warracknabeal, but I was only a little fellow but the only things I remember there were the

dust storms. We used to have terrible dust storms, and one of things that used to upset a few of us as boys was being told that we would have to go straight home, because you know you used to like to take your time and wander off. Do this and that. But the teachers used to say, look there’s a dust storm coming and that meant everything blacked out in those days

and you’d just go straight home. Other than that, no in Warracknabeal I can’t remember. Ballarat, I think I was a fairly ordinary sort of student. I played reasonable cricket when we came down to Melbourne in the School 11. I remember getting a hat trick in an inter-school event but

no, I don’t think I was ever anything special as far as school was concerned.

They were all events that took place I would say from the – well history just went back – it was

pretty comprehensive, what it did for us I’m not sure now, but it’s a matter of remembering dates and so forth which was always a problem. But no, the history was purely just what happened over the many years. One thing I didn’t like when I was at

school and that was especially when I was in Melbourne, they used to call me the Pom, John the Pom, and that hurt to a certain extent, and I think that’s happened of more recent times with people coming to Australia as immigrants as we did. I mean, I know

Italians were referred to as ‘wogs’ and I think that might’ve happened even some time ago, but no that hurt me because I thought, “Here I am. I’m English stock what have they got against me?” But John the Pom, but anyway I grew out of it.

No really, no I don’t have much recollection of that at all.

I think they were all I think, as you say, Anglo Saxon because at that stage we didn’t seem to have, not where I was at school at Hampton, Hampton High, in that area, I can’t remember a lot of people coming from other nations. I mean that may have been more prevalent in the northern suburbs

of Melbourne, but not so much down there.

Well, it wasn’t too bad because my father being in permanent employment and here again I can’t be specific and say

what he received in any way of his salary or anything like that. I suspect he may have had a reduction in salary, but of that I’m not sure. But no, it didn’t have a great effect on our family.

Yes a lieutenant.

Yes Shell Oil Company.

Yes well swagmen, I can remember in Warracknabeal especially, that they were – you would see quite a few of them because Warracknabeal was a reasonably large centre. In these days, it would be termed pretty small but there used to be a lot of fellows as they used to say ‘humping the bluey’ and apart from

no, I had no real contact with them. I mean, I knew there were people, fellows that couldn’t get a job and they were being hard done by, but other than that. And as a boy and playing I don’t think it had a great effect on me as to how other people were existing. I mean,

I got three good meals a day, and that was just about it. I mean if I’d gone to areas, when we moved to Melbourne we lived in Beaumaris, and it was a quiet area down there. People just sort of went about their way

and existed, but I didn’t see what you might term as poverty and that sort of thing.

Oh it was – it was mainly bush, tea tree and wild flowers and things like that. It was very pleasant area and of course

it wasn’t until after the war that housing just went mad down there and after I came ashore my parents had a house down there which is still there, my sister occupies it. When I came ashore, my wife and I had built a house down there at Beaumaris and two daughters went to school there. Well they went to school in Brighton and it

was just a very pleasant laid back area. At one stage there, because of all the young fellows who’d come back from the war and they called it ‘nappy valley’ because so many children were born in that area.

The Boer War, no I knew very little about it because I know Australia sent troops over there but I wasn’t terribly interested in the fact that there had been a war there. The First World War, of course, was a different thing,

there again I’d read quite a bit about it. Couldn’t get much out of my father from what went on. He didn’t want to talk about it. No I can’t – I was never terribly interested in wars.

Well, none really, it was just a matter of hopefully learning something, and I went to two good schools and that eventually, I don’t know, I always had a certain leaning to going to sea and I did at one stage

think, although I eventually worked out that I wouldn’t have been – had the qualifications for it but I was interested in becoming a naval cadet at the age of 13, but I think the entrance exam must’ve been far too great for me, and I wouldn’t have been able to do it but I had that inkling to go to sea. Now I knew that my father had been flying, I had

no idea at all of ever becoming a pilot, never interested me. And I wasn’t too keen on going into the army so there was only one thing left, but getting back to your main question was what I had thought I might do was really going to sea. In some capacity or other.

I’m not too sure. It was just one of those things. I used to ride my bicycle

from Beaumaris up to the Yarra, north wharf and so forth and south wharf, just ride the bike along and look at ships and so forth, and from then I just had this inkling that that’s what I wanted to do.

Well, of course in those days, we didn’t have television and we didn’t have radio to the extent that we’ve got now, so a lot of those things were sketchy. I mean, it was in newspapers, but I’ve always been rather sceptical about what’s in newspapers. And no apart from really

hearing about Hitler and some of his antics, I didn’t know a great amount about things at all.

No.

No, I think the twelve months leading up to third of September 39 it was

fairly evident that something had to happen and I mean we had the incident in 1938, I can’t remember what date or what month, of Chamberlain going to Berlin and so forth and trying to make some sense out of what was going on there. And I think the alarm bells were ringing then, and I was fairly conscious and the old man used to say the same thing

that there would be another war, it was the only way it was going to bring some sort of sense out of the antics that were going on in Germany at the time.

Well as I say, I – after I left school and I had this job at the Herald office for a short period I wasn’t happy there and I didn’t want to continue on in the place. Well, I was quite happy there but my main thing was getting to sea and because of a problem I’ve got with my right arm, in that I can’t use it properly

through an injury I incurred as a younger fellow, I knew the chances of joining one of the services was pretty remote because as I said earlier my father who’d been a recruiting officer for the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] in Melbourne here told me I would have a lot of trouble because of a lot of things I couldn’t do. So I thought, “Okay, the next best thing is the merchant service.” And whilst I had to undergo

a medical certificate before going to sea, that wasn’t seen as a problem or a difficulty for me in the profession that I wanted to continue in a clerical sense.

’39.

Well, I just felt that the war is here and what little I can do, and seeing I was in the merchant service and I was quite happy there, and wanted to remain, it just continued on from there. And I just felt that especially with the losses the merchant services were incurring in those times and they were pretty

considerable, that it was equal to if not in a more dangerous situation that some of the forces. No, I was quite happy with the fact that I was there and helping out in that particular sphere.

Oh they were quite happy. They said, “No, that’s what you want, go ahead.”

Oh, about half a dozen of us, three of them I think ,enlisted in the air force. two didn’t come back. There were another two that enlisted in the army. one was

certainly lost, I think the other fellow came back but I can’t remember. There were about half a dozen, but I think possibly three or four were lost and maybe two came back.

Oh yes, I think I was on a bit of a high going aboard a ship and realising that you’re part of a crew. There was also a certain amount of trepidation because of the fact that you were joining a vessel without any real training as an officer of a ship

because the duties of a purser are very much in the clerical senses, and I’d had very little experience in that because of the job in the Herald office in the compositing room, which is nothing to do with the clerical side of anything, and that was a little bit difficult to take and I

suspect that some of the hold hands there played a few jokes on me and told me to go look for things that never really existed on a ship, and you’d go round and do the rounds and say can you tell me where such and such a things is and they’d say oh, oh you’d better go and see somebody else. And you’d done the rounds there, but I mean that’s just an initiation

program and once you got over that, and you realised because these fellows had been at sea for some years and they knew everything that was going on. But no, that was – you got over it, it took a while and it was the same thing when I retired that my wife said to me it took me twelve months to

accustom myself and to her and she to me of being home all the time. I think that’s one of the things when you’re at sea and doing a different life. And of course in those days, being at seas, we used to get a fortnight a year’s leave, not like they do now. I mean the conditions they’ve got now is just so foreign to anybody at sea back in 1939,

entirely different world. But no, with the – I generally just settled down and accepted life as it was.

Westralia.

Mm.

She was, well she was a passenger ship on the Australian coast, a passenger cargo ship of 9,000 tons operating between Brisbane and Fremantle. Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Fremantle and then back again on a round trip taking one month. And then in November 1939, she was taken over

by the navy and we, as merchant crew, we all vacated the ship. Then she became a merchant cruiser and did certain duties around the Australian coast I think mainly, or into the Pacific or wherever they wanted her to go, and then she was then reconverted to an assault landing ship up at Port Stephens or she operated and trained out of Port Stephens on the New South Wales coast,

and then was engaged in many landings, could’ve been 10 – 12 landings in the Pacific Islands to the end of the war.

…Infantry, yes. She was a 9,000 toner. There were three ships that were coastal passenger ships on the coast. There was Westralia, there was Manoora from the Andes (UNCLEAR) Steam Ship Company

and Kanimbla, which was from McIlwraith McEachern, and those three ships were the three main landing assault ships.

No, no, well you’ve got plenty of high seas in the Great Australian Bight, but I know what you mean. No, well we had – there was a very efficient and very fine merchant

fleet on the Australian coast pre war. As I say the number one vessel possibly Kanimbla she was the last one to come out from England – Kanimbla. Manoora, Manunda which became a hospital ship. There was the Duntroon from the Melbourne Steam Ship Company. There was the Canberra operated by Howard Smith. There was the

Ormiston and Oronje, which were AUSN [Australasian United Steam Navigation Company] ships which were part of the P&O Group or somewhere through the line. And the MacIlwraiths also had the Katoomba. They all operated on the Australian coast and they were pretty popular because of course there was no aircraft in those pre war days so people went by sea between Sydney Melbourne,

wherever they wanted to go and these ships just went back and forth, back and forth. Some of the – whilst Westralia was on the run to Western Australia some of those vessels just traded between Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Townsville and Cairns and return and that was a similar fortnight up and a fortnight back.

So that they were fine ships and very popular.

Nothing very much, other than the fact I remember when I – when we got to Adelaide and from Fremantle on one of our first voyages the purser told me

I had to go down and check cases of celery in the number 2 hold, “Of God checking in celery,” I thought to myself, you’ve got wharfies and so forth down there and chaps that did – tally clerks that was their job, anyway that was one of my sins I had to go down there and do that job which was a pretty awful thing and another time

also one of the early voyages going across the Bight, it was a particularly bad voyage and I remember I wasn’t feeling very well, and I walked out of the office and went onto B or C Deck, I can’t remember now, and the next had happened a gust of wind came along and I lost my cap. And I thought, “Oh God, that’s a terrible thing. I can’t jump overboard and get it.”

But no, other than that it was all pretty... Oh, I think at one stage there getting back to the way some of the old timers’d take you down and say, “Now you know all those people that are sitting on the Promenade just enjoying themselves you’ve got to go along there, the purser give you a special bag and you go along a collect sixpence from each of them to allow them to sit on the

deckchairs.” And I thought, “Oh, this is a bit funny.” That didn’t last very long, but any rate they tried it on but other than that, no. I do know that the purser I sailed with a very tough difficult man, and he made life not easy and at one stage or 2 or three times, I had qualms as to whether I really could stomach him

and continue on but I stuck it out.

Yes.

I don’t think there was anything unusual about it,

it was just one of these things we expected at some time or other and politicians of course had been making boasts about this, oh if Germany does this or does that or does something else, well – and when the announcement really came, I think we just accepted it.

No, I don’t think so.

Well, that really comes out of the navigational side from the master and I was not privy to that at all, I was too low down the line. What instructions he would’ve had through the navy and so forth, I don’t know.

I don’t think it affected us at all, we just went about our duty and I think this was

pretty common with the merchant navy right through the war, that you just went ahead and did what you had to do. If you were unlucky enough to cop something, whether a mine or whatever it was just bad luck and I mean, I really don’t think that if anybody really had great thoughts

apprehension about being at sea that the fact that these dangers were around continuously that you would’ve stayed at sea. That’s my thought, and to me we all went about our job just the same way we did before hostilities and yet that danger was ever present we had no idea what was going to happen.

Yes well ships, merchant ships, especially passenger ships, had numerous windows and portholes and so forth, well of course as soon as war was declared, they all had to be blacked out

because the ship had to go with no lights on because even somebody lighting a cigarette, it was amazing and I don’t know the distance, but they tell me it was quite considerable, that just lighting up a cigarette could be seen quite some distance away. And of course that was absolutely taboo,

and you were not only by doing that action out on an open deck you were not only endangering yourself, but your crew plus the ship. That was one of the few things that was all, otherwise we went about things in a normal way.

Oh no well we – they put a gun on the stern and

that sort of thing. They put a 4.7 that hadn’t been fired, this was on the Marana, that hadn’t been fired since the World War 1. They had it in store, I believe, down at Port Melbourne somewhere or other, and they took and put it on the stern one and we went outside and fired the bloomin’ thing. I was part of the gun crew. We had no idea what was going to happen. Whether – we did have a naval gunner there of course instructing us

but you really had no idea whether the things was going to blow up or what, so that was just another thing.

No, when she became a naval vessel, she was reconverted in Sydney.

Well, in November 1939.

Yeah.

Well, as I said we had to sign off when we got to Sydney at the end of that particular voyage and that was October – November 1939 and we were just signed off and that was when I transferred to another ship. And I dare say all the other fellows transferred. There were

three or four engineers of Westralia and we had nine that transferred to the navy, they went over the ship. A chief engineer, a man named Cumberland the second engineer named Bain, and the third engineer, can’t think of his name now, a little fella. But they went over and they went to the navy. Oh and also the chief electrical

officer, he went over too. A fellow named Anderson. But no, they were the only ones that went over.

Oh I think so, yeah, as far as I can remember. Apart from the sternness of the fellow the purser that

I worked under, but no she was quite a happy ship.

No, just about all those fellows were all from an early age had joined

the service. The Dick crowd, you joined up as a Dick boy and then you became an ordinary seaman and then an able seaman. So they did their time there and of course the officers well they had to sit for their examinations for their certificates. What they called the second mate’s ticket, the first mate’s ticket and then the master’s ticket.

Engineers, well they – chief engineer depending on the size of the ship – depending the chief engineer, second engineer, third engineer, fourth engineer and possibly a junior fourth, depending as I say the size of the ship and the number of engineers, they all had to have certificates which they had to sit for and then the rest of the engineers were usually non certificated fellows. The fellows in the –

either if it was a coal burner, the stoke coal crowd, well they normally went in as trimmers and not that I know much about that, but trimmers I believe used to even out the fire with long rakes. The firemen used to throw the coal in, and trimmers used to even it out so that they got an even steam through. And stewards, well stewards joined the ships and usually as

cadets stewards, served a time and then graduated through as stewards and they then eventually if they wanted to and thought fit became officer type stewards and chief steward, second steward, third steward whatever and the – if a ship had as they used to in the old days two classes, first class and either

second or third class or steerage, or sometimes you’d find then that each one of those sections would have a chief steward looking after them, but he would be head of the second area or the third area, the steerage, they all had to report to the chief steward and of course you had radio officers

and ships with over twelve passengers, they had to carry a doctor and he was a more often than not an elderly gentleman who had given up practice ashore and was very, very good at dispensing Aspro [aspirin] to you. You’d go along with a sore something or other and he’d say,

“Oh, here you are, a packet of Aspro. That’ll fix you up,” and that was in those days. Didn’t have the medication that we’ve got now.

Wanganella?

Well, she was another one of these passenger cargo ships. She was of 10,000 tons and she later became a hospital ship and I was just on her on

the New Zealand run, Sydney New Zealand. Sydney, Auckland, Sydney, Wellington. Very similar to the Westralia on the Australian coast.

No, no.

I’ve never been in a convoy during the whole of the war. I was on ships that were just loners.

Not every ship sailed

in a convoy. Convoys were not always available, or mostly of course ships had to wait until a convoy was formed, but no the ships I was in didn’t ever go into a convoy.

On Wanganella?

She was 10,000 ton – she had a crew of

180-odd, 185 I think it was.

Sydney to Wellington.

And Sydney-Auckland.

Back and forth, mm.

Well as far as the – on the Australian coast, Japanese submarines did operate. Some ships were – quite a few were torpedoed. I think about twenty-five were lost, I’m not sure of that.

Others were hit by torpedoes. A very good friend of mine, who lives in Sydney now he’s retired, he was an engineer on one ship called the Barwon which had a – cargo vessel, and that was hit by a torpedo off Wilsons Promontory and the thing just bounced off and didn’t explode, luckily, but no, well – I mean

Japanese submarines were not as effective as the German ones. I mean the German ones in the Atlantic were really high tech and they were excellent seamen. They were a real menace. The Japanese ones here were – well they just not in the same class. There were mines laid of course, we had a lot – the navy

put out a lot of little minesweepers at least and they must’ve been quite effective, but nobody ever knew how many mines had been picked up or anything like that. That’s all part of internal operations. We didn’t have a problem with aircraft, which of course they did in the Atlantic and especially in the Mediterranean,

where you’ve got aircraft coming over you and bombing you incessantly, we didn’t have that on the Australian coast. But we did, the Wanganella went through to Italy twice during the war bringing back New Zealand troops. Wounded New Zealand troops, because New Zealand had a number of troops in Italy fighting where we didn’t have, or very, very few in Australia went there.

So no, on the Australian coast we just mines or and a few of the ships apparently hit mines. I think one ship, well I’m not sure whether it hit a mine or a torpedo didn’t go off properly was a cargo ship called the Allara and it had half its stern blown off but it got back to port.

Mm.

Yes she was – Wanganella was taken over as a hospital ship. The first hospital ship operating on the Australian coast was the Manunda from the Andes Steam Ship Company, and she was reconverted I think in 1940 and Wanganella was

converted in 1941 to a hospital ship. And then they later decided, I think it was 1943, to take over the Centaur and she became a hospital, and of course she was eventually sunk with a terrific loss of life. 268 lost in that sinking both army staff that’s

army nursing staff and merchant seaman lost in that. And then – but also we had the use of the Dutch fine passenger ship called the Oranje and she was a hospital and she operated in conjunction with these smaller hospital ships because Oranje I think from memory was about 25

to 30,000 tons, somewhere in the vicinity, and she helped out but she also did a lot of work around the Mediterranean and so forth with the British Forces taking troops back to England.

Well, you can get some very nasty weather across the Australian Bight, you really can, but a lot of people don’t realise it’s equally as bad if not worse is weather between Sydney and New Zealand across the Tasman the weather can be very, very bad there at times, but I mean that’s just one of the things when you go to sea you just put up with it

and you accept it. I know at time we used to have for typing manifest and all sorts of things we had a typewriter with a carriage that long not like the little ones in the old days, that long and if you were running in certain seas ,the carriage just wouldn’t work it would go over and you couldn’t get it back because of the movement of the

ship but those sort of things were – I mean that happens with any ship that’s at sea, you have problems with weather from time to time.

Oh, just the movement of the sea.

Don’t know about that one.

You’re tired and you just go to sleep. I still do it if I was going to be called at 4 o’clock in the morning

in here now. I’d wake up just before 4 o’clock. It’s something you just got used to and it never ever worried me. I knew I had a steward would come and wake me if I had to get up at 4 but invariably I would be awake five minutes before and that still happens.

Well I was always lucky, because I had a cabin on my own being an officer. So in the Marana which ran across to Tasmania, they use to have cabins astern that used

to carry I think about twelve. I’m not sure, but something like that but quite a considerable number of crew each containing members for that particular section. I mean stewards or engine crew or deck crew, but you’d never intermingle, those they were all separate. But I can’t be more specific than that.

The Wanganella.

No.

Very, yeah..

Oh I don’t know,

I mean it’s just like life I think, wherever you work you’ll move from one place to another and there may be one or two that you don’t specifically like, but really it’s got very little to do with it. I mean, like I said earlier that

first purser I said, with I found him a very difficult man to work with and I think actually it did me a lot of good, the discipline and so forth that I had there, and the fact that I just had to do certain tasks and there was no messing around, I’m sure was good for me. Now whether in later times when I

had crew under me, what they thought of me I’m not sure. But no, I think with crew you just sort of accept what you’ve got.

Well, it seemed to me that the fall of Singapore was really brought about by this getting back to the British Empire, where people thought places like Singapore was just something that nobody would’ve dared to attack.

And it was just a place that was going to be there for ever and ever. But when one considered what the Japanese did, and they did it so easily in that they just went ashore in Malaysia and I’ve been up there through that area through Kuching since, and it’s just a matter of

just walking ashore and just riding around wherever you wanted to go, and they did that on bicycles and so forth. No, it was a bit of a shock to think that it had gone but it didn’t worry me.

No, I had little contact with him during the war, because he had postings in different places as I said in Melbourne

while I was at sea and in Sydney and then in Western Australia – Pearce. I had little contact with him during war, because as I say being at sea you’re just not home.

We lost a ship up there.

We lost the Zealandia which was another passenger cargo ship which ran Sydney Hobart and she was doing a lot of trooping and she just happened to be in that first, in Darwin that first raid, and she was hit and of course she was sunk there. No, that became quite a shock I think to people, but I really can’t remember any specific

reaction. I suppose if I’d people, friends or relatives there at the time, it would’ve affected me more but I just thought, well, it’s one of those things. And that Darwin was a long, long away from down south. I think that’s what a lot of attitudes were.

Well, I though they were pretty horrible the way the treated the soldiers captured in Singapore and so forth and the treatment from thereon was abominable there’s no doubt about that. And I knew some of the fellows that had come back from up there and

it wasn’t good. They were apparently pretty good fighters, but no I wasn’t terribly happy with them, but at the same time I know some fellows that weren’t necessarily treated by the Japanese in the sense of being prisoners of war. Some of the fellows that maybe fought

against them, they carried on the animosity towards the Japs in a big way, and also their attitude to the younger Japanese still persists. My own view on that is that there were two definite generations and as bad as it was, I mean we live with Germans of today

and Italians of today, things change.

Not on the ship I was on, almost entirely Australian or British.

I know a lot of the ships that used to operate on the Australian coast had very mixed crews. The Norwegian ships and the Swedish ships that used to operate around here during the war, I mean they had a mixture of crew everywhere.

Well. one of the things with those foreign ships they would engage a crew in their home port. wherever they were

and they’d come out here and they may not necessarily go straight back again. They could be here for 12 or 18 months. Yeah, so the crews, the ships would come out here and if you got sick and something or other happened, you got killed in a car crash or something or other thy had to get replacement crews, so that they would naturally

engage Australian personnel. So that you had Norwegian with Australians, Swedish with Australians whatever and that’s how the mixture developed.

Yes, well in peace time, it was a matter of what they called manifest of cargo and passengers lists. They could be quite extensive on the coast, of course, it wasn’t so

bad with passengers but on the run to New Zealand, you had to fill out customs and things because of two different countries and with their immigration policies and so forth, security policy so that going to New Zealand you had to give quite a lot of detail, which was taken of a passport or a document of identity and that was then put into what they called a manifest of

passengers. When you became – there were other incidental things we had to do – when you became purser, you were also the secretary to the captain and in a clerical sense, so that he would dictate whatever he wanted or so forth and you had certain duties, entering

in log books and so forth, to assist the captain or whatever. But they were, then of course the big one was wages. So that wages for crew when you had a big crew, 180-odd crew on a ship used to take quite a lot of time. Depending on where you were trading of course, dependent on the

time that you had to do duties, on the Tasmania run, you had to be pretty quick off the mark as son as you left port you were in to doing your work because you also had to, especially when you were in and out of port everyday six days a week, left little time for other incidentals and of course the wages side of it was very important to your crew because if you couldn’t

do your wages part of it well it would take – you would find trouble with your crew. But they were the main things as a purser.

Mm?

No chief steward. Chief steward, in Australian ships, the chief steward had full control of that. I believe in

overseas ships the purser used to become involved in quite a bit of that, but Australian ships, no.

Oh not really,

closely is a difficult word because a captain is, well is usually referred to often as ‘god’ on a ship and, well, I don’t know how close you can get in that respect. No it was, you just did your duty. I sailed with one

captain who I got on extremely well with, but with others I was quite happy to do my duty and they stood their ground and I stood mine.

Well, they were sort of non communicative in respect of certain things that were going on in a ship

that possibly had no effect on me, unless I for so reason or other I became involved, the captain would just keep it to himself or maybe his chief office but not necessarily me.

Well, especially with regard to

during the war, anything to do with the navigation of the ship and the problems like that that would usually be a thing just between the master and the chief officer. Whether the chief engineer came into or not, I’m not sure. Maybe on some occasions, depending on where the ship was going or what, so that the chief

engineer was well versed in what was happening and I dare say that did happen but not necessarily the purser.

Yes he had to. I think you’ll find that most captains do have a lonely life,

in that they sort of keep that situation. One was something I think most of us that had responsibility accepted that fact of a master, especially at sea he has complete control, and he’s the man to

if he wanted to converse with you, or give confidence to you, or so forth, I think he would give it, but if it wasn’t necessary, he would keep it himself.

Well, I was chief purser.

Yes.

Oh yes, my word, as an assistant purser, yes, yes.

That was on the Westralia, yes.

Well as I mentioned to Sergio earlier that was – he was a very difficult man to work with.

He was hard, and I found out later on, on one of the ships that I was on I think Westralia, the first one the main purser he’d gone away on leave or something or other and the relieving chief purser came along and said, “Well you know the trade. You know what’s got to be done for the next port and I’ll leave all that to you.”

From then I found – what I would do – (INTERRUPTED) I’ve forgotten the question now –

Oh yes, I found out that with the relieving chief purser, he would say, “Well look, you know what happens before you get to the next port, which reports you’ve got to put in, this, that and the other,” and I found out that the original fellow had been getting me to do quite a few jobs to keep me busy and occupied, which he used to apparently throw away

quite a lot of things, and sort of say, “Well yeah righto that’s all right,” but when it came to me distributing them to different people, they’d say, “Oh we’ve done away with those and we’ve done away with this,” and I found that I was doing a lot of extra work that I didn’t have to do. But in the long run, I firmly believe that the sternness and the fact that he had me doing these jobs and you had to do them on the

spot or within a given time, there was no messing around that it stood me in good stead later on. No, I once said to him when I met him Sydney, “Thank you for your guidance in my earlier days,” and yet I could’ve easily cut his throat in the earlier days. I don’t think it did me any harm.

Well no, I accepted it. I knew that I was going into a new venture, an adventure that I had nothing, knew nothing about and that you’re one of many on a ship, and when you’re on a ship everybody’s got to pull together, there’s no way

of one person going out on a tangent, you’ve got to stop together as a crew.

Well, it differed with each department, and sort of the

misdemeanours whatever, they might’ve been with the deck and engine crew and the stewards if there were misdemeanours of some type that the chiefs of the departments didn’t like, well the person would be sacked. Not necessarily the next port,

but the first return to that person’s home port. Now when you sign on what they call ‘Articles of Agreement’, and every member of the crew had to sign on, you had to state your home port and the home port unless stated was normally the port you were engaged in, so it was more or less unwritten law that you would be returned to your home port by the ship.

That used to happen and also on your discharge document they also, I think there were three criteria, I can’t remember now exactly and each one normally was stamped, ‘VG’, ‘VG’, ‘VG’ that was the normal thing. If there was a misdemeanour of some consequence,

one of those and I can’t remember which specific one would be marked ‘G’ and that would immediately bring alarm bells to anybody when that fellow went, or person went along to sign on another ship after being sacked, and somebody saw his last discharge with having a ‘G’ on it, they weren’t very happy.

That’s

right, and it’s a lesser degree and that – I can’t remember having seen anything other than a ‘VG’ and a ‘G’, I don’t know whether we had another degree that took us lower down.

Yeah, I can’t remember that.

No.

No, not that I know of. We did have one occasion on Westralia, this was after the war when we were going to Japan for the British Commonwealth Occupation Force, we were coming back from Kure where we used to go on the Inland

Sea, and we were half way down, I can’t remember, I think it was before we got to New Guinea from Japan where we used to go in to get water and so forth and the, now what was, it the 40 hour week I think it was, came in, from the 48 hour week, and some of the delegates on board,

mainly from the deck crowd said they weren’t going to work a certain number of hours because of this that and other, and the reduction of the hours that were necessary to work, and that caused a bit of problem on board because the old man said as far as I am concerned you will retain doing the work that you had to do under the 48 hour work,

until we got back to Sydney and that would’ve been about another week on, and then we’ll find out exactly what it’s all about, because we only heard it on the radio. I mean it was good enough that the hours had been reduced, but the implications and all of that so after these fellows saying well we’re not going to work any harder and so forth or any more hours they sort of said, well okay, let common sense

return here and we’ll find out exactly what the situation is when we got back to Sydney. But that was the only time in all the time I was at sea that I’ve heard of any problem.

Not necessarily, because the

captains were, as I said earlier they kept to themselves. Anything that they might’ve wanted down would’ve been promulgated through the head of that particular department that he wouldn’t have gone over the heads of those departments to initiate any change. And I think that was –

no – that was common right through.

Oh yes, that’s possible, well they would’ve said to the chief officer, or the chief – not so much to the chief engineer, because everything

was going on down below with him or the chief steward, and he would’ve possibly had a discussion with them about a possible variation. But as I say, the masters I sailed with didn’t sort of issue instructions very much different to what had been going on before.

Well, I was single of course back in the early days. I was married back in 1945, in February ’45, but no apart from then

apart from thereon when I was still at sea during the war years, no it didn’t really concern me. I mean I knew my family were doing various things, the old man in the air force, my sister in the army and so forth, but no.

No, I wouldn’t have thought of that word.

No, no.

No, we were a very close-knit family and we all got on very well. There was no, no there was – I went to sea of my own volition, and nothing to do with anything, I got on very well with both my mother and father, no.

Oh yes, naturally.

Eye opening?

Oh, naturally,

because in different ports I’m sure you learn things by seeing things done in a different way, and this gets back to your captain query again but no, I mean different places do things in different ways, and I think just helps your general education.

Well, one thing I think Sergio mentioned about the leave and so forth, we had a fortnight or maybe three weeks leave a year.

Whereas now, and on other days, I mean public holidays, they were just non existent you just didn’t worry about those, you just worked and that was all there was to it. But from what I’ve been led to believe, crews now depending on where they operate, they seem to operate for, or seem to be at sea

for say out of twelve months, maybe six months of the year, and that they get paid and so forth, but we had to do all the time.

No, it was a different era, and no I didn’t have any girlfriends.

Oh yes, when I was at school and that sort of thing and friends of the family, yeah.

Not really. No, well,

no. No.

Well, it just depends on the length of a voyage. I mean if it was only an overnighter or two nights or something or other which was mainly on the Australian coast you’re only away form a port maybe two nights at the most between

Sydney and Melbourne you’re only one night. Melbourne to Adelaide you only had one night at sea and this sort of thing. So that no, you didn’t have time for that sort – well I didn’t, but I don’t know about other people.

Well, she only travelled between Melbourne, Devonport, Burnie and Launceston, and of course in those days as I mentioned earlier, when the Taroona was taken off the Melbourne Launceston run and was sent to Townsville to operate from there to New Guinea for trooping, it left the Marana with -

the only vessel and only contact with Tasmania because the Zealandia, which operated from Sydney to Hobart had been taken over as a troop ship, and of course was eventually bombed and sunk in Darwin Harbour. The only contact really for most people was the Marana, Melbourne across to Tasmania, the north west coast.

That’s right and cargo. She used to take cargo over for Tasmanian ports and coming back during the season she’d bring back mainly potatoes from Tasmania. Bagged potatoes,

because they were in short supply over here in Melbourne and swedes. I’ve never seen so many bags of swedes, I didn’t think they could exist. But no, they used to operate and I remember there were also a couple of ships that used to run from Sydney to the north west coast of Tasmania also picking up nothing else but potatoes and swedes for the people of Sydney.

This would be 1940 through to ’44. I left the ship in ’43, but it was the same thing and of course Melbourne to Tasmania, or across to the north west coast, there were a lot of Tasmanian troops in the Australian Forces and they used to be sent home on leave to Tasmania, and of course they had to come back again,

and the ship was always, if not full, half full of troops so that the amount of accommodation for civilian people was pretty limited. In 1943, because of the fact there were so many troops being carried on the Marana they appointed a permanent OC [Officer Commanding] troops,

Lieutenant Colonel Hopkins, and he had as an offsider a Sergeant who had won a DCM [Distinguished Conduct Medal] in the Middle East, Sergeant Berry. And they were there just to make sure that the conduct of the troops on board didn’t get out of hand. So they were through possible to the end of the war,

but I wasn’t on the ship then, so I’m not sure how long they carried on, but those two were there as permanent persons on the ship.

Oh yes, yes, very friendly with them. They were a nice couple of them.

No, not really. No they were there as OC troops, they had no interference at all with anything to do with the ship and their job

was to as I said the conduct of the troops, army, navy and air force, was as it should be and they did a very good job.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

And Burnie.

Occasionally Launceston.

Seas can get very bad, as we well know from the some of the Sydney-Hobart yacht races, and my experience of there, and as I say I was on there for two or three years, was that the weather during the winter was not necessarily the

worst. We used to get very bad blows in summer time, and they’d just blow us just like the weather we’ve had in the last few days we’ve had a lot of very strong winds blowing here across Melbourne, and the weather wasn’t too good. But the when they used to – with the dining salon on the old Marana,

we used to leave Melbourne at about 2.30 in the afternoon, and we used to get down to the heads just before 6 o’clock and 6 o’clock was always the time for the dinner so that as soon as we got the heads and it was bad weather, people’d be lining up ready to go into the dining room and the next with it being tossed around all over the place after going through the rip they’d make a ‘B’

line for their cabin, or wherever they had accommodation. A lot of people didn’t eat their meals at all.

Yes.

In the early days, I think I was and Westralia I think possibly three or four times. I can’t remember on any other ship

from there on. I think it was just a matter of getting used to it.

Maybe two or three months, something like that. But the main thing from what I can remember, just going ahead and doing whatever you had to do, and you forget about seasickness.

Well, different people react differently, I mean you find that with passengers. I used to find that often people would stop in their cabin for their whole voyage and just wouldn’t venture outside.

Absolutely,

they’re all different.

That’s right, well some ships rode better in a head sea or a beam sea or one of the quarters depending on which – where you were going and just

some well a lot different.

Well, a head sea is one you’re going into, you’re going into it and you’re tossing up and down and a beam sea is when you’ve got the sea coming on your side.

Yeah. That’s yeah…

Well,

you can get sea, that sort of swivels the ship and going along like that.

Stern sea, I suppose, I can’t remember.

Yeah.

Yes, she was.

She was then a hospital ship.

Well, they took out a whole lot of cabins just cleared cabins along the decks inside and just created wards

and instead of having as I say, individual cabins, they just had these long wards with a certain amount of hammocks and fixed beds in the wards. Some, on some decks they had to leave cabins of course for the nursing staff and so forth and the army personnel that constituted

the rest of the people other than crew on the ship so they had to – I’m not sure where the army were based on the ship but I suspect that it would’ve been on (UNCLEAR) cabin.

The crew do, the army had nothing to do with that. On a hospital ship as the Wanganella was the merchant service personnel carried on the normal duties of the ship, as far as navigation and engine room facilities. The only ones that had a difference was the stewards’ side of things.

They had to – there was a variation of things there. The galley staff which of course was very important on a ship like that, because they had to have variation of food, with the patients that had been brought on board, they just – they just carried on in the normal way.

Oh yes, well that had to repainted white because before the normal colours were a black hull but the Geneva Convention stipulated

or stipulates that a hospital ship should be painted white. It should have a red cross on a funnel, only one, Wanganella had two funnels, but she only had one in which the red cross was painted. They also had to have red crosses on the hull. Normally three on each side. three on portside, three on the starboard side,

and on some of the Australian ships they also had a number Wanganella had number 45 now other ships – funny thing the Manunda which was the first Australian hospital ship did not show a number on its hull. Centaur did and also

Oranje did, and that was all part of the Geneva Convention and their stipulation of how the exterior of a hospital ship should be seen. And that was mainly brought about by the fact of the hospital ship, because of what it was doing. It was carrying injured or sick

Soldiers, and that they should be given some protection. Now that didn’t always happen. On the Australian coast the original bombing of Darwin, the Manunda, the first Australian hospital ship was hit by bombs and there were a number of people killed. Incidentally, the assistant purser was killed

on that ship. The Centaur had horrific loss of life with 332 people on board, there were only 68 survivors. That was a real tragedy. I have read, I’ve read the history of Admiral Cunningham, the British admiral who was in charge

of the Mediterranean of the great proportion of the war, his autobiography and during his book there’s mention made there of attacks by German or Italian aircraft on at least six of the hospital ships. I can’t quite remember where any of them were sunk, but they were definitely attacked and hit. So that

the fact that it had all this protection, it didn’t necessarily mean that they had protection.

I don’t know, not having been an airman, whether you’re flying at some terrific height and you see a vessel down there,

how you would identify that as different from another merchant ship or a naval ship exactly?

No. We don’t have roofs on ships? No you only have the…

No we didn’t have anything on topside at all.

At which time?

The first time, I was pretty elated because it was our number one ship,

Westralia was looked upon as number two ship in the fleet and the fact that I was going aboard number one ship, yeah, because occasionally there they had a bigger staff. We quite often had two assistant pursers on board, which meant the ship was bigger and more work to do. No, I was quite pleased.

No, no, no.

Initially, assistant.

Well Westralia was 9,000, Wanganella was 10,000. And the Marana was only 3,000 – 3,041.

No, that’s tonnage.

No..

Yeah, yes, I liked her better, well of the three, yes.

Don’t really know, I suppose it was partly to do with the personnel, and

I don’t know, you either have a favourite or you don’t. Some people like Collingwood [Football Club], other people don’t. But I found Wanganella was the ship that I was happy with, because I did two stints with it afterwards.

I had no trouble. Entirely different person.

Oh yes, that’s one thing, but you know attitude of your superior helps you a lot.

Well she was Sydney, at that time, during the early part of the war was Sydney

Wellington, Sydney, Auckland.

Well, very similar to Australia really. Some of the pronunciations of some of the words like sex and sax and so forth, they have funny ways of delivering their words, but no New Zealanders were generally very much like Australians.

Oh yes, usually up to the pub ‘cause you wouldn’t leave the ship till late in the afternoon. Go up to the pub and have 6 o’clock closing, they had over there. But one of the things they used to have also, I mean we got our evening meal on board, but anything for a change, and they used to have all sorts of items, fish and so forth they used to put on the bar

round about half past 5, and you didn’t go home on an empty tummy other than your beer. But no, that’s about the only thing.

I suppose so. You just at times, especially after the war going up to Japan, I used to go up and spend a bit of time on the bridge with the watch keeper, the officer on watch and

I had sort of got a fascination for cloud formations. I used to love looking at clouds and it’s amazing what you can see in your imagination of what’s in a cloud. A lot of people might think you were a bit silly, but no the sea is a fascinating place.

That’s right.

Yes, well it’s the weathers, it’s calm, it’s medium, it’s boisterous sometimes, you think, “God, what the hell am I doing at sea?” – you’re getting shocking seas or you get fog and of course in the early days,

the ships didn’t have things like radar. So the main instrument you had of trying to locate whether another ship was roundabout where you were, was foghorns and they used to be they’d go on with a dull “rrrrr” “rrrr” was continuous through fog, and that was just one little thing.

And I mean later on with radar and so forth, that was virtually eliminated.

No.

Yes, I used to see a few of those in the Indian Ocean.

I don’t remember seeing them elsewhere. I remember on one occasion, coming back from Fremantle to Adelaide, when I was on Westralia that we apparently ran into a whale and hit a whale and the progress of the ship was retarded considerably

until they, somebody on the bridge I think, realised what was going on and how they extracted themselves from the whale, I’m not sure, but apparently whether they went astern of whatever it was, or slowed down the speed, but there was a lot of blood and so forth in the water, which we eventually went through but…

No the bow hit it. We went straight into it, but I mean they’re such huge things and they’re roaming around the ocean, and I suppose it’s just like hitting a mine you’re just as likely to hit a whale especially down in the waters around the Great Australian Bight. But there was no damage to the ship apparently.

No.

No, oh yes, oh dolphins you saw, I can’t really recollect in what area, but you saw them now and again.

Well during the war,

I think it was only about three voyages, only relieving on the ship then.

I cam back to Melbourne and I went on Marana.

Yeah, yeah, and that was when I was made purser of her

I was only 17, 17½, and I was made chief purser of Marana. And I think that might have been only because being so young and the fact that other fellows had already gone away in the army or one of the other forces. Anyway, I did the job to the satisfaction of everybody.

Well, the main time was up till ’43, and the time before was just a short period in 1941 it must’ve been. I can’t quite remember but I went from Wanganella to Marana and then I went back to

Wanganella back in ’43, so I was on Marana as I say for 2½, 3 years or something.

Oh that was a hospital ship. Well we went to the Middle East, twice to Italy, twice through the Med [Mediterranean],

and we used to go into Taranto, which was the old Italian naval base. We were taking back New Zealanders. As I said earlier, New Zealanders were engaged in the fighting in Italy, Australian forces generally weren’t. I think maybe air force

personnel but there weren’t very many. And I noticed the other day in the – I went through the new forecourt at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne here, and they indicate there the number of people that were given the Italy Star during the war, and I think it’s only in the vicinity of about 3½ thousand or 4,000 of Australians and of course, I was one of those.

But we got the Italy Star but yeah…

Yeah, yeah they were all sick or injured. And we took them back to

Wellington and Littleton in the South Island.

I have no idea. We did not enter into the area of the wards. That was nothing to do with us. We kept running the ship. The army medical side of the things kept the wards and the operating

theatres and so forth, that was all their duty we did not interfere at all.

Twice.

Nowhere else in the Med, no.

Oh well, you had to go up through the Red Sea and Suez Canal area,

Port Said and Suez Canal but other than that, no.

Yes, we stopped at Tewfik, which was the port for Suez, on the way through. And we didn’t, I don’t think we stopped at Port Said, I think we went straight through there, because there was no point having stopped in

Suez first and we just went straight through to Italy and then came back and then on the way back instead of staying in Port Tewfik, we went to another area – not too sure, 50, a 100 miles away called Attica, that was named after the Attica Mountains which were close by, and the British Army had a huge

base there and they built this wharf, huge wharf at Attica, and we went alongside there and that’s where I saw for the first time Egyptians being employed for sweeping the wharf, this big concrete wharf but the Egyptians didn’t sweep them with normal brooms,

they were in groups of about 20 and 30, and they had little hand brooms and they were sweeping this massive wharf with hand brooms which seemed rather weird to me and then somebody explained to me that it was giving them employment. And usually a British lance corporal, or something like that, in charge of them going around kicking them up the backside if they’re doing something that you thought they shouldn’t have been doing,

but no.

Oh yeah, no doubt, yeah, yeah.

That’s right, yeah.

Yes,

on one occasions we, it must’ve be the first trip, either one of them, no, it was the time we were at Port Tewfik and I think four or five of us went ashore and got a taxi from the wharf and went up town and just wandered around Suez, which was a pretty scungy sort of place. There wasn’t really very much at all, and of course worse in the wartime,

and I remember one of the younger ones in our group got caught up with one of these chaps walking around with postcards. And of course, postcards in that area at that time of the year as a lot of old soldiers in the Middle East would know, there were these guys who would go around, “Filthy postcard, filthy postcard!”

And one of the guys was looking at two or three of them, and the next time there was a hue and cry of the fellow that’s selling them, and he was apparently telling his Gypo [Egyptian] friends that one of our crowd had taken some of these cards without paying for them. There was a near riot. I somehow or other rushed off, got hold of a taxi, and told some of the guys to follow me quickly,

we hopped into the taxi and we went with the lick of our life back to the ship, but no, just one of those things that happened.

Filthy postcards – no well I had little to do with them really and nothing much at all.

Not officially, I think we all understood when you go ashore in a foreign place, and also we thought at that time that there were quite a few Egyptians that weren’t fully okay with the British and their

efforts in the area. I don’t think everybody was, all the Egyptians were behind the Brits. So, you never knew what’s – what you might’ve encountered. But as I say, that’s the only thing I encountered with them, so I wouldn’t know of anything else.

No. Weren’t interested.

Oh absolutely, yeah, I think amongst our fellows it was just common sense and you knew it. And I think the difference there was that these trips from Sydney to Italy and back to New Zealand and back to Sydney used to take

us three and a half months, it was a pretty long voyage, and for those that had family back home, I mean you knew you were getting back in a certain time. It was different for troops, because they were stationed permanently virtually in the Middle East, and you know some of those guys were there two and three years. That would be a bit different for them, I think.

Well, just as I explained earlier just the clerical side of the ship, wages and the rest of the thing.

We didn’t have any. As I said earlier, anything to do with the carriage of army personnel or navy, air force was completely under the control of the military that was on board. Nothing to do with us at all.

No, it was all army personnel, nothing to do with us.

That could be so.

Can’t remember. Can’t remember.

Well, we also had, and I just thought of this you were also the censor on board, so letters written for back home they had to be censored. You just glanced through them quickly just to make sure that there was no reference to any military activities or anything like that. But that was the crew

and here again, we had nothing to do with the army on this, the crew side of things that they knew what they could and couldn’t say, and it was a job that had to be done.

I can’t remember, no. If I ever did, I would’ve referred it to the

chief purser at the time but you just used your common sense. I mean, you get so many letters going through that you – no I can’t remember any specific occasion.

Oh, I think we did a trip to Darwin with an AGH, that’s an Australian General Hospital, we took them up to Darwin. I’m not sure, I can’t specifically remember whether that was between or when it was but it was round about that time. And then we

were tied up in Sydney for three months, or something like that at least. Because they had no specific work for us. The war was starting to, in the Middle East, was really starting to run down, and of course Italy had capitulated, so that the people there what we took back to New Zealand in the Oranje

I think she was doing the same thing, we sort of covered all that and cleaned up. And it was decided then that we should be sent to Morotai, which is north of New Guinea and based there and then we followed in the landings of Borneo. The first landing was the Tarakan and the second one

was at, I can’t remember now, either Labuan or Balikpapan. I suspect it was Balikpapan but I could be wrong on that but we there and that was about 3½ months we were based on Morotai doing those three trips there and bringing people out. It was at

Labuan that we picked up some Indians, that had been left behind from – I think it was the Sandakan March the infamous one and those poor guys were about four stone it was just pathetic. But they were taken on board,

and they weren’t sent back to Australia or anywhere. We took them back to Morotai, and they were put in a hospital there to monitor them, and also to try and rehabilitate them, because they’d been through a terrible time. And I remember they use to have condensed milk, they used to have these little tins

of condensed milk, but there again they were so emaciated that they had to be very careful with the amount of any food they took, because they would immediately be sick because they just couldn’t absorb food. But no, that upset a few of us but you know…

Well, we took them back to Morotai,

the Australians had, there were AGHs there, I don’t know one or two, I wouldn’t know but they were taken back there for – because they thought they were in too bad a state to be taking them straight home.

Mm.

Well all we did, we were just

standing off, as the invasion fleets on the three occasions left Morotai, huge number of ships and they were small ships, all sorts of things and we were left behind in the harbour and they did their landings and we followed in at a later time. I don’t know whether it was three or four days later, something like that but we weren’t involved in any of the action. Possibly

five or six days, I can’t remember exactly, yeah that was up there. Then we eventually picked up a load of people that they had in the hospitals in Morotai and so forth, and brought them back down to Sydney and we arrived in Sydney two or three days before VP Day, which was Victory in the Pacific. And I think that was the 15th of

August ’45, and there were great celebrations in Sydney that day.

Oh, I can’t remember ,everybody went silly I think. Most of the people were trying to find a pub that was open, and that was one of the problems in Sydney a lot of the pubs didn’t have any beer. They talk about the pub with no beer, well that was Sydney. But no, everybody was happy,

I mean at last the whole thing had finished.

Oh yes, all that sort of thing, yes.

Go out with them?

No, I was on that very day sent down to Melbourne. I left the ship then and came down and went into a Melbourne

office of Hallett Parker and I remained there until I rejoined Westralia at the commencement of its voyages to Japan as chief purser. And as I say I did six or seven trips – I’m not exactly clear on that up to Japan – where we used to go Sydney to a place called Dreger

or Langemak, which were small naval establishments just south of Finschhafen in New Guinea, and that was mainly to take on water which was always a problem on Westralia, she didn’t have a great capacity for water on long voyages. And then we used to go up to in the Inland Sea to a place called Kure, K.U.R.E., and we’d berth there.

That was an old Japanese naval base and shipbuilding yards, which was not far away from Hiroshima, and as I indicated this morning, some of the photos there taken alongside where the atom bomb dropped.

Well the heat of the bomb melted just about anything that

was metal. Building that were, say concrete buildings with reinforced steel, and the concrete had been knocked away and the steel was just grotesque forms. It was just melted. And they had some sort of tram service in Hiroshima, and the

railway lines or tram lines were just in all sorts of disarray, and things just melted everywhere. Anything that was metal just melted. And of course the in those days, that was 1947, it was only slowly trying to get back. It was utter devastation of the whole place.

I know it’s a very controversial thing but I firmly believe that, that shortened the war considerably because it has been reported in a number of articles and books that the Japanese had orders from Japan that Japanese wherever they were holding prisoners and especially in Singapore and Malaysia

that if they had to give up in Japan that any prisoner of war was to be killed immediately. As I say, I’ve only read that, but I’m a firm believer that it was a terrible thing to happen as far as the civilian population are concerned, but it did shorten the war and shorten the number of lives that would’ve been

lost, because they were going to fight to the very end as far as an invasion of their homeland, but be that as it may.

Yes, I mean I made mention of the fact that the civilian population it was a terrible thing for them. I mean I should – I can’t – the numbers of people that were killed, it must’ve been a huge number but that’s war. I mean it’s like getting back to –

and I haven’t mentioned this on Wanganella on the way through to – the first trip through to Italy. The ship was at anchor in Bombay Harbour on the 14th April 1944 – ’44 – I can check that, but I think it was ’44 and the –

we were just there at anchor and we noticed in the distance about two mile away there was smoke coming, well that’s nothing unusual, but this smoke seemed to get louder and all of a sudden there was an almighty bang, incredible noise and it was just chaos happened and we saw

parts of ships being lifted out of the water landing on wharves and debris everywhere, it was an incredible mess. Bodies floated all over the place, all the ships in the harbour that were there were picking up bodies, well of course they were all dead and eventually because of this explosion which was caused by a ship that had a full load of cotton

and explosives. Apparently caught fire and a fire then went into Bombay itself, and they reckon of an area of three square miles was devastated by fire, and it was I have read that approximately

3,000 people were casualties of that particular incident. But it was quite a devastating event, it really was. Now that was something that was not publicised in a general way as to what happened in Bombay at that time, but it was quite an event.

Yes, some of them were picked up, but of course the – was amazing when we were back there what three ½ – four months later there was just no sign of

anything it had all been cleaned up. They did a wonderful job. But at the time was pretty devastating, but I dare say those sort of things happened at different parts of the world. Last year, my wife and I were in Nova Scotia, and we were in Halifax and Halifax was a point where a lot of Atlantic convoys used to assemble

for the trip across to the UK. And they had a similar thing, an explosion there which devastated half of Halifax. So these sort of things are just not known generally. People involved or people near to those involved they’d know about things, but not the general public.

Mm, that’s right.

Mm, but that’s war, so when you are involved in it to that extent as we were in those days you just accepted it. If it happened it happened.

Yes, one of the things I first – we became very friendly with an army organisation we took them up on one of our voyages for the occupation force, and we became pretty friendly and when we used to

get into port, they used to supply a jeep for us for three or four of us. The chief officer and second officer, myself and a couple of others on one of those trips, they had a driver as well and one of those trips we went down to Hiroshima from Kure, and one of the things that took me awhile to sort of get used to is Japanese

working in fields, in their vegetables gardens or paddy fields whatever they were, and they were just sort of standing around and then the next thing they’d go and have a pee. And there just standing there, the men are standing there and the woman just squatted on there and I thought what a funny thing to be doing in front of everybody, but obviously that was the way of doing things up there and they were quite happy with it.

But other than that, no, Japan was – didn’t really mix with any of them there at all other than the fact we used to buy a few things. We had a very good rate of exchange and the Japanese in Kure in the little shops there they had, or would get for you quite a few

items, pearls and things like that, and one of the things were fur coats, and I remember they were prohibited bringing those sorts of things into Australian and I remember we had trouble with a couple of the able seamen but they were smuggling these things in.

And we had a bit of bother and one particular fellow had to be discharged – got rid of him. ‘Cause they were -apparently we would be coming alongside of the wharf at Pyrmont and the other side, although every now and then, they’d have a patrol vessel after we got in to stop this business of bringing prohibited things in,

these people used to lower certain items that were contraband into small craft and they’d be whisked away. This particular fellow got caught bringing in three ,I think it was, fur coats. So all sorts of things happen when you’re at sea, you never now.

Well only as I mentioned, the Egyptian, that’s Port Tewfik and I don’t think we ever went ashore, I can’t remember going ashore at Port Said and Italy when we went there, there was a curfew on so we weren’t permitted to go

ashore. Well the curfew was at night and not in the daytime, so we came in alongside the oil pipeline wharf in Taranto and it was pretty hot when we were there, and quite a few of us went for a swim, and course the result of that was we had stupidly been diving into oil. Because when you’re alongside an oil pipeline jetty

there’s a seepage of oil everywhere. Well we came out of that a bit of a mess, but that’s all. I didn’t actually though at that time step foot in Italy. We were alongside the wharf as I said of the pipeline jetty, and we just went for a swim.

Well that was in Taranto Harbour, which was the main Italian Naval Base which had been really bombed, very heavily bombed.

It’s right in the heel of the shoe.

Yeah, see come through – the bottom of Italy it has like a shoe going and then it comes round here like a bit of a heel and

Taranto’s in there.

No.

That’s all, nothing at all I knew nothing about it. I don’t know – the odd reference to it in the newspapers and of course that wasn’t great. I mean, the

British troops were the main ones there, but a lot of New Zealanders but as I mentioned earlier very, very few Australians and I don’t think any of them were connected on the ground side of things. So, consequently, the press back here in Australia didn’t report on that to any great extent. Other than some of the more prominent battles there the main one being the assault on Mount,

what was the name, Monte Casino, and that was called a huge battle but no we didn’t go ashore.

No, no. That was well before.

I have no idea.

That’s right.

Didn’t come across any of those. They may have had some on board that they took back to Suez for transfer

to the British military hospitals, there but if there were, I didn’t know them. I doubt that there would be many at all.

Not Bombay, Colombo only. It was purely for water. We went from

Suez to Aden on some voyages and called in there for water. Otherwise we went straight through to Colombo.

Yes it was available but I only went ashore once in Aden out of four and

Colombo, I think we had so little time there on the way back, on possibly the second voyage I don’t think we had time actually with things we had to do on board. There was no, I had no time given.

No from

Colombo, we went down to Fremantle and we were there for a day and a half possible, that was water again and fuel and then straight on to Wellington in New Zealand which was quite a long voyage. And then we disembarked all the New Zealanders we had on board, and came back from Wellington or from Littleton actually, cause we went Wellington, Littleton and we came back from there

virtually with no sick personnel, sick or injured personnel.

Well my last voyage on her was the voyage to Morotai and then we did – followed in the three landings in Borneo and then

back to Morotai and we picked up quite a lot of injured people and sick in the Morotai area and direct down to Sydney. And we arrived back in Sydney, I think it was three days or something like that before VP Day, Victory in Pacific, and that was on the 15th August 1945.

No.

Not on that particular last voyage no.

Hollandia, yes, we went in there only once. Well we called in at Lae, no I’m sorry I’m wrong I’m sure from memory now that that last voyage we called in at

Lae, because there were a few Australians there, ready for repatriation to Australia. That’s right, we topped up there.

Yes last voyage. And the vessel set off again, I think a month after that and went up around Kuching and I think it went to Singapore and picked up generally a lot of personnel that had been

held prisoner in those areas.

Well, we just lay at anchor and we were just waiting for these offensives against the

three points in Borneo, but we did nothing we just sat at anchor.

No, each one was a separate offensive. Tarakan, Balikpapan, Labuan.

Well, it followed in

the first one, Tarakan came back to Morotai, and then went on to the one Balikpapan, I think that was the order –either that or Labuan and then came back and then we went to Labuan, and I think that was the time we came back through Tarakan, because there were still quite a few there that had to be sent back to Morotai and that was the

extent of that. That took about three and a half months I think we were away up there.

Well, it was, what we saw of it was standing off the beach and just a whole lot of damage done to the oil refineries there, but we couldn’t see any more. At Balikpapan, we were second or third ship in after

the place had been cleared of mines, and we anchored in the Harbour there and a few of us went ashore but when we were wandering around, the remains of the oil refineries before some army bods came along and said, “You’d better get out of here quickly there’s a lot of mines around here.” And we said, “Fair enough,” and we were off. But there was nothing to see, it was just damage that’s all.

Yes.

Yes there was.

Not at the bombardment, no.

No, we went – on the three occasions we followed in afterwards. Possibly three or four to five days later, so we saw no action.

I believe in land, but I don’t know,

it was not visible to where we were.

I really can’t remember, I wouldn’t know the numbers, it’d be a pure guess.

Well I believe at Tarakan there were quite a few.

Here again, I have no figures and I would only be purely guessing, but there were a number of casualties there.

Well, they were just lying on stretchers or…

No the one that affected me and quite a few others on the ship when we saw these fellows

in Labuan, especially the Indians that had been left behind from the Sandakan March, when we saw their condition, I mean they were just skin and bones. It was…

Oh, I wouldn’t know.

I have no idea,

because we had nothing to do with the army personnel. They were brought aboard put in the hospital section of the ship and that’s where they were treated, so I didn’t know.

Well the majority of them weren’t, because I mean they were just so emaciated. But I dare say they were but I didn’t

observe them.

No, I didn’t endeavour.

Mm.

Only what I’ve read, that it was a terrible it was a death march

and I mean there were very few that survived that march, I think most of them, and there again I’m only guessing on number but I believe it was somewhere near 2,000 or something or other that started the march and I think very, very few survived it.

During the war?

Well I didn’t enjoy any of it in a real sense, because the war was on but

oh no I suppose being – I don’t know because sort of the word of enjoy is a little bit hard to define ,because going through even when you were leaving Australia you were going for a purpose, and there was

the purpose was to bring back these poor unfortunates. The fellows that had been badly injured or wounded in war, and that wasn’t a pleasant prospect at all, so no I don’t think there was any time where that sort of was thought. I mean as far as I was concerned, it was just

we were doing a duty and that was the end of it.

Well the Middle East, I didn’t join the ship until after it completed the Middle East battles say in the desert, Tobruk or Alamein or any of those places. She had been there on earlier voyages bringing back fellows from there. So my real contact with that situation was Italy bringing back the New Zealanders.

It just seemed the same type of operation and I really can’t – I never ever thought of it, it was just there.

No I didn’t,

none. I was lucky. I believe the ship in earlier voyages in the Middle East was involved in near, a couple of near misses with bombs dropping but I wasn’t there.

I was back in the Melbourne office of Hallett Parker, and I resumed work there in a clerical sense and then I eventually became the assistant to the chief accountant in head office.

Well, immediately after the war I was only in the Melbourne office for about just over twelve months, I think, and then I was back at sea again with Westralia on the Japanese run. So then I did six or seven voyages to

Japan with the British Commonwealth Occupation Force, and then I transferred over to Wanganella because she’d been repaired after gone aground in Wellington in New Zealand, and I went there leaving Westralia and joining Wanganella as chief purser again. And then I served another twelve months, twelve to fifteen months before coming ashore

permanently.

Well, they were quite interesting. The first one when we left Sydney, we had over 300 I think it was women and children on board, and also quite a lot of troops.

And we had an army complement on board there again permanent force, and they were under the command of a lieutenant colonel and they had a quarter master and all sorts of people, and a dental guy and I can’t remember them all, army staff. Anyway we had those and we set off and the

old man had a meeting with the chief steward, myself and possibly the chief officer and it was decided, and the OC troops, it was decided that guards would be set up at the entrance to the accommodation, and I don’t know whether I should be saying this but any rate I’ll say it, and so away we went, there

were very few incidents, I believe I didn’t hear everything of course, of troops trying to get into the accommodation where the woman and children were, but when we got up near the tropics we had a different situation, we found that some of the women were trying to get to the troops. So instead of having the guards on one side of the door we had to move them across to the other side of the door. But

that was resolved eventually and in subsequent trips up there we also carried women and children but not to the same great extent because the initial group we didn’t have any trouble. But I suppose that’s life.

Well it happened, I can tell you.

Oh yes.

I think we had, would’ve had a least a week in Kure each time we went up there. Mainly I think we took up other than personnel we’d take up supplies and things like that for the Japanese, because

so short after the war they had very little of normal supplies and things and so the forces had to be sort of well have their own supplies of everything. No, we used to have time and there was no restrictions

on us at all. Other than the fact of going down to Hiroshima which a few of us, because we had this association with one of the army units up there who looked after us very well we didn’t other than just wander up to the village just to get away from the ship, we did nothing. Oh a couple of times we went to some of the islands in the Inland Sea and especially one called Miyajima, which

is quite a well-known island.

Miyajima

And they had a famous Tori, a Tori as in out in the water and so forth with an arch over it and this Tori was there and was also the island was supposed to have nobody every die on it.

That if anybody that lived on the Island and there weren’t a lot looked like dying, they’d whisk them off very quickly and it was a sort of sacred Island. And that used to be quite enjoyable go over because it was a very relaxing area but other than that didn’t go anywhere. On one trip we went to Yokohama, of which I can’t remember the reason for going there

but we had to go up there and although we all had inoculations for everything and vaccinations, when we got to Yokohama the army came aboard and said well anybody that wants to, American Army that is, anybody that wants to go ashore has got to be revaccinated. I said, “Look everybody, the crew here have all got their certificates in their booklets and they’ve all been done,” and

this army fellow said, “Well, I’m sorry, but nobody goes ashore unless it’s done.” So I had to rush up to the old man and tell him and edict was put out through the ship and of course that put the kybosh and a lot of blokes wouldn’t go ashore because they didn’t want to be done again. So around about that time the old man said, “Well I’ve just been asked to go ashore to the authorities in Yokohama,” the American

authorities who had control of the place and seen them and he said, “I’m not going to go, you’ll have to go,” and I said, “Yeah, but I’ve already had vaccinations I’ve had the lot why have I got to be…” “Well somebody’s got to go and it’s you.” So I had to go ashore, I had to get done again and this medical fellow from the American he was a bit of a butcher and you can still see the mark on my arm a huge thing

I got a terrific blister came up with it but that’s just one of the things that happened when you have a senior officer that just refuses to carry out an order that he was required to go ashore, and I had to go in his place. But no, that was only one time when we had, well I had any individual trouble with authorities up there. I must say the Kure area was under the control of the

Australians, and they operated there, but Yokohama being a bigger place I suppose was totally under the Americans.

Didn’t have much opportunity to see anything other than as I mentioned earlier the Inland Sea was a very attractive place what I saw of it. And of course Hiroshima’s on the Inland Sea as well, but

no other than going down in a jeep from Kure to Hiroshima, I didn’t see anything of the place at all.

Well here again other than going into the naval mess, there was nothing to go ashore there

for because it was both at Langemak and Dreger a very small Australian installations obviously it had been bigger during the war but after the war it had been wound down considerably and there wasn’t much there and as I say other than the invitation for us as officers to go shore the only place you went to was the naval mess.

No, none.

None.

No, well the army used to have certain things on the way up and coming back like boxing tournaments and other sort of activities like that but they weren’t frequent and

the army did engage the assistance of the merchant service crew in setting some of these things up but I think I was only involved in being timekeeper or something or other for some of the boxing matches that was all.

Not to my knowledge, no.

Oh yes, but by and large, whilst I was a day worker all the other fellows were on watches. You were either on the 4 to 8, or the 8 to 12, or 12 to 4 now it didn’t always fit in, and these guys when they came off watch especially going through the

tropics and she was not a ship to operate in the tropics the air conditioning and that sort of thing was non existent in those days. We just a punkah, what they called a punkah louvre system, you’ve heard of the punkahwallas, and that was reasonable for people on the upper decks, but people on the lower decks the air never really got down to, through there.

Well here again, you still had watches going on, and the number of personnel that you could mix with were fairly limited. And if you had nothing in common with a particular person well, or they in you,

there was no association.

Oh, I can’t remember.

Well as I mentioned, I’ve got a great friend, a great friend of mine, Doug Taylor in Sydney who was a senior engineer on both Wanganella and Marana,

and we’re still very good friends in fact I was up there in May. My wife and I drove up there and Doug’s 87 or will be in the next, a couple of weeks time, and he lost his wife about three years ago and I thought well we should go up and see him. We write to each other regularly but just about all the other fellows I knew have all gone, they’re dead.

And also Wanganella especially was a Sydney crew with mainly Sydney people who lived in and around Sydney area, and of course living down here in Melbourne you don’t, there’s no association.

Oh, I think so, because of the fact of the actions Hitler and his cohorts, I mean he was a despicable man and the things that happened

and the thousands well millions who were killed.

Well after the war, yes, they might’ve asked one or two questions but being, well when I say this perhaps I’m wrong but being two daughters, they very rarely spoke about it. Other than

sometimes at a dinner table if I’d been to an RSL function or something or other they might ask questions on it. But I find, they’re alive still, one lives in France has done so for a few years with her Australian husband, and the other daughter, the younger one, lives in London and I find that they’re more interested now, as they’ve got older than they were

when they were younger. I think being younger they had other things to think about.

Yeah, exactly, it was. It was the whole of the system under which we lived at the time. And it was the system that I and many others imagined was freedom as again a totalitarian state, where you had, well you had no freedom at all, where you were told what you had to do all the time.

No, that was the main reason.

Yeah well, the Empire has diminished so much. I mean so many countries have gone, the first one I suppose, the biggest one of the lot was when India gained their own independence.

What was that about 1947 was it?

’47 and no, well there were other countries, there was Ceylon at that time was that the same?

’48 was it. I still look upon those places, because they still form what they call the Commonwealth of Nations within sort of the British

umbrella. No, the – just sort of feel that – at that time it was just something we did. Now, I think the question was, yes, and I think

really my background of having UK born parents, although my mother was born in South Africa, but it was under the British sort of flag in those days, I still have that leaning to Britain and so forth, whilst it might be out of date now

but inwardly there’s still that feeling there being born under it and I think that might be with a lot of people that have come here, their allegiance whilst they make out to be Australians, they still feel like I do that there’s that inner feeling somewhere or other of their main allegiance back to where they came from.

I might be wrong, but that’s been my thought.

Oh at the time, yes I think so. I mean I know the British Monarchy’s gone through a lot of problems of recent years what

the cause of it all was the Queen or Prince Phillip or whoever, and then Charles and Diana and all these other, the other one. I mean it would be a terrible thing to be born into that sort of regime, that’s just my thought. But no, I’ve still got a leaning towards that. In other words, I don’t know whether you’re going to ask the question

of whether we should become a Republic, that’s possible what you’re leading to, I would prefer whilst I’m still alive to live under this present regime, a Republic as far as Australia’s concerned and the people that push for it, it seems

to be an unknown quantity, that was I felt at that big convention or whatever they called in Canberra, that there were too many people pushing and shoving, and not really knowing what they were after. So for an old guy I’m quite happy the way it is.

Well the same way as the previous question, having served under that flag, no I don’t want it changed. As a matter of fact a couple of weeks ago our executive were at an unfurling of the Australian Red

Duster, that’s the merchant navy, merchant service flag at the Shrine of Remembrance. Now there’s been a Red Duster there within the confines of the Shrine, but I believe it’s a British merchant flag but the other day we unfurled and it now flies at one of the mast heads in the concourse outside the Shrine, the

Australian Red Duster. And to me that’s it. I get a bit emotional over that one.

No I don’t want it changed.

Very complex, very complex question

that just so many things. I mean technology.

Mm.

Don’t really know.

I think it’s, I’m sure it’s similar to what a lot of other fellows, army, navy and air force fellows that I know – just one of those things. I think possibly

one thought might be the fact that you’re prepared to give your life, not that I ever thought about that, I never worried about it. I mean if a mine or something or other or we were going to be bombed or torpedoed, if it was going to happen it was going to happen I’m a fatalist. But having survived that and admittedly never having been involved in anything, so I was lucky, terribly lucky

it was just the fact that I was prepared to do it. And as a volunteer not as a conscript.

Yes, okay, well possibly what’s going to happen next. How it’s going to evolve. What will be the outcome of all that’s gone on. Other than that,

I think the wind down had been coming. I mean the war had finished in Europe, it was still going on in the Pacific, but it was only for a limited time. And of course, the fact that the bomb dropped well it just cut it short straight away. No I don’t think I had any great feeling at all, I think it was just okay it’s over, thank goodness

because by that time, having been involved at sea from 1939 through, it had all been part of your life for so long and as a young bloke it – you thought, oh well, at least I can get home and see what goes on, on shore life.

Well, there were a few things, I mean you had to get into a suit to start off with, well I had to, and all the men wore hats the things that very few men wear these days, except these funny American baseball caps but we wore proper hats,

and that sort of just gradually disappeared. There was a certain standard in dress amongst men, of course women always had a certain fashion, but men’s over a period of time, men’s dress as I see it, but them perhaps I’m an old guy, there’s a certain deterioration in standards in

the way we dress and our approach to people. Once upon a time before the war and during the war if you opened a door for a woman or something like that, or stepped aside when you were stepping into an elevator you would be thanked but that’s gone. I mean you keep a door open now for a women and by and large she’s

almost at the point of saying, “Well, what are you doing that for,” it’s quite extraordinary, but I mean that doesn’t get away from the fact that there are some – most people are very fine people, and really what you wear is not what’s inside you. Your dress is a very superficial thing, and

I was also told when I did come ashore, “Don’t take too much notice of the wealth or otherwise of especially a man, if he’s got very good clothes, because it might be the only thing that he’s got to wear.” In other words, look at a person and try and find out

what’s about them, and not just gauge them on their dress. But no, I think, I mean technology changed, the availability of television from 1956 on, and these other things and now computerisation which although I was involved in computers of a kind

before I retired, nowadays I’m afraid it’s a little all beyond me. And well, whether that’s good for all of us or not, I don’t know.

Well, I can refer back to any earlier question, with regard to what life was like, and what I knew of the First World War when I was a young fellow, I think the same thing applies now, although I was told and we were told every Anzac Day what the fellows in the fields put up with, I don’t think that these days

although there is signs now, especially with the Anzac Day march in the city more people are becoming interested in the thing, but I don’t think that the average young person these days if you were to tell them what – not what I did because I didn’t get myself involved in anything, but a lot of fellows that were in the actual actions what they had to put up with,

I don’t think the average person of this era comprehends that. I mean, righto, the ones in Vietnam might know because it’s so recent. But I still think that my approach to the thing after the First World War would be very similar to a lot of the young ones or the younger ones after the Second World War.

Not really, no.

That was a difficult one, because I mean a lot of those young fellows they weren’t like a lot of us

who were volunteers. I mean the Australian Navy, the merchant navy, the army especially AIF [Australian Imperial Force] were all volunteers, and I think a lot of the RAAF were too, I’m not a 100% sure. I know or I believe some of them were sort of more or less confined to Australian activities,

but I’m not a 100% sure of that. But no, I just feel that Vietnam was a very nasty affair, and it wasn’t helped by the situation that the only ones that really wanted to go there were

very, very few and a great majority of them were conscripts, which we really didn’t have in Australia before then. You see the Korean War, most of those were volunteers that had been up in Japan a heck of a lot of those fellows who had been in the occupation force went up there, followed on. But Vietnam was a different thing.

And I think they assimilated into the community very well, in spite of their sometimes horrific injuries and illnesses, because of sort of advancement of some of the activities in wartime in the field.

Well I think the East Timor thing was very well done. I’m for that. I mean that was a nation that was under terrible duress from Indonesia, and I think it’s

still – they’ve still got a lot of problems there now to come to terms with. I mean the Indonesians they’re cruel that nation. They were generally very good as far as the Australia was concerned during World War 11, we had troops in there that were being hounded. In fact, I had a brother-in-law who was up in Timor, and he was one of the lucky ones to

escape and get out of the place, but he had some months when it was just life and death every day. But no, I really got – that Middle East situation I really know little about it. Although I know a few blokes that were at sea that went up through there, and about the only thing that they

complained about was the fact they didn’t get a medal for it. Be that as it may, I think there’s too many medals being given to too many people these days. They’re like the medals, I mean they’d give a medal for anything. God.

Not in the strict

terms of going to church every Sunday, no. We used to go occasionally, but I just think that the general atmosphere in the house and our attitude or my parents’ attitude to life, and the way we should bring ourselves up was sufficient for us. In fact, Jan and I go far more times now to church

that we ever did, either of us, years ago. But then they tell me the churches are just full of old people these days, the young ones don’t go. So I don’t know what that means.

Uniting.

No.

No, there was one incident on Wanganella, we used to have three clergymen there representing the Church of England, Catholic and one other, the rest of them and on Wanganella we had a daily issue of beer, a bottle of beer a day,

which was all very good. And most of the fellows, especially in the hotter climate used to dispose of those pretty quickly, usually with other people you didn’t have to drink the whole lot yourself but, also taking into consideration that you were there on the ship, and you just couldn’t get boozed, not like certain people on certain destroyers.

But, no, we had a situation where in our section of the accommodation, we had a fridge and we had certain areas allocated in that fridge for each one of us, the officers, to put our beer and the steward would put them in that particular spot, and later in the day or something like that, you’d think, “Oh I’d love a beer,”

and there was one of those clergymen that used to get in before us and he’d always put his hot bottle in and take a cold one, and this went on for ages. They were some of the things you had to put up with. You didn’t want to be really down on one of the clergy, and I’d never say which one it was either, but there you are, one of things that happened.

Small but there you are.

Humorous, oh god…

No, well I…

Well no, I didn’t know anything about it. No, the time we were up there was just –

oh – this army establishment up there we became very friendly with the 14th Works and Parks and they were a good crowd of officers, and most of them would come up with us on the ship and they used to have functions now and again, and invariably there would be one when we were in Kure and we’d been invited out and quite a few of their

officers had Japanese house girls that used to look after them. And they’d always been dressed in their kimonos and so forth, very Japanesey like and they used to, when I turned up there, they knew I had a taste for gin and they used to always have what they called Bowls Gin, I don’t know whether you know it, the Dutch gin,

Colin [interviewer] might know, you don’t, well they used to – this particular officer used to say to this house girl, “Now that fellow over there don’t let his drink get down.” We’d just fill it up all night with Bowls gin, and for the next couple of days, you weren’t sure what was going on. But that’s just one little thing but no,

we nearly had a calamity on one occasion, we were going to the Middle East and we were about two days out of Colombo, and we got an urgent message came through from an Australian destroyer that they had a very sick guy on board, could we take him. So they –

we prepared for this, and we had a life boat, a motor life boat ready to put in the water and over the horizon came this destroyer coming at a heck of rate and slowed down and stood off about half a mile away. By this time our boat had been in the water and came along the destroyer, took the sick sailor

who had appendicitis or something or other, and they brought the boat back to us. The destroyer went like a rocket and was way, way, away because it didn’t want to be sitting around two ships in the middle of the ocean like that. And it must’ve taken us an hour to get the boat back on board, and made you wonder if we’d really been in any trouble what would’ve happened, but there were all sorts of people giving advice as to what should’ve been done

and shouldn’t be done. That was just one incident that happened but no, perhaps I’m rather humourless I don’t know.

No.

No the fellows I was with,

we weren’t interested in them. I was just quite happy to be with our own fellows. I mean, we heard rumours about quite a bit of animosity between Americans and I remember coming back from Taranto, Italy and we were berthed in Fremantle,

and the OC troops who was of the New Zealanders gave the OC troops of the ship, an Australian colonel, the word that if some of his New Zealand walking wounded could go ashore, they’d look after themselves and they were very well behaved. And apparently when they got up to the streets in Perth they saw Americans, and there was a great big

fight developed, and I think some of the walking wounded were almost stretcher cases back on board, but they certainly knew had to handle the Americans at the same time. But that sort of thing happened I think. I think the great part of that was due to the fact that certain bits of information were sort of sent around and mainly

Through, I think was Tokyo Rose who was on radio in Japan, saying that whilst you Aussie troops are away, the Americans have been looking after your women, and of course as soon as those fellows came home and saw an American they weren’t very happy. You know those sort of things happened.

I remember yes, listening to her, oh yes.

She didn’t say very, very much I think it was very, very, similar to what Lord – what was his name, Haw Haw used to say to the Tommy Troops over in the Middle East or fighting in Europe, the same similar type of thing. You know, all your troops, all you fellows are away well the Americans

or somebody other’d be looking after the women folk. That was a common one.

No, no, I did towards the end of the war yes, who I eventually married, we married in 1945 but that was towards the end of the war, but during the war no.

It didn’t worry me, no.

Yes well they were off bounds. I mean, they had their job to do

I think on two occasions in Colombo that we, some of us took some of the nurses ashore there, and we went to a dance or something or – either Mount Lavinia or the Galle Face – I can’t remember which one, but that was just for – there was nothing to it – it was

just straight out, we took them to just relieve the pressure on them or on us too.

Well, we didn’t fraternise with the nurses, with the sisters, it just didn’t happen.

I think it was,

but I can’t quite remember, but I do remember that one fellow, no two fellows married nurses from Wanganella that one of them, that’s right, one of them happened to be the assistant purser before me, and he married a Victorian girl. He’s passed on, but she’s still alive and also

an engineer had married, a Sydney fellow he was, and he married one, whether there were any more I don’t know. But generally, there was just no time for that, they had their duties we had ours. And it was hard to hide away on a ship, I dare say it could’ve been done,

but if you were a merchant service crew, and you were found wandering around the medical area I think you’d been taken to task pretty quickly.

Well as I say, I don’t know, it could’ve happened I don’t know.

Oh yes, if they wanted to, yeah, but

I really don’t – I wouldn’t know – not as far as – as I say I wouldn’t know.

With the sailors?

No, well they had their quarters, they had their duties and no.

When you were an officer, you just didn’t do it. I mean we found that as pursers, we mixed more with the deck officers more than we did with the engineer officers, although my best friend is an engineer, but that was just exceptional. But generally we mixed with the deck officers and not the engineers, but certainly not with

the crew. I mean there were some very fine fellows in crews, no doubt about that, but it just wasn’t done.

No, I’ve got a terrible voice. When we got to church, my wife says shush, shush, shush.

We had a service just recently, we have it every year down at the Flinders Naval Depot and that’s the Sunday close to the third of December when the war was declared, and the reason for that was that it was so it’s special to the merchant navy is that the fact that on the day war was declared – or was it the day after a German submarine sank the Athenia – which was a big passenger ship, transatlantic –

and there were a lot of women and children being sent from England across to Canada, I think it was, and that was pretty disastrous and terrible thing to do first day of the war, and so the Sunday closest to the third September, we always have a service down at Flinders at the Naval Base, and some of the voices including mine are pretty horrible. We mumble

along. But as for singing, no, please.

Definitely, because all the troops that went across to Gallipoli fought there, and fought in France were taken over by merchant navy crew and brought home by merchant navy crew because there was no aircraft serving during the First World War. So the Anzac tradition,

the merchant navy was just as heavily involved there in a different way, as it was in the Second World War. And Jan and I went across to Turkey, five or six years ago, five years ago and we were there about

five days after Anzac Day, and we did a tour of Turkey and stayed the first couple of nights in Istanbul, and then went straight down to the Gallipoli Peninsula and spent the day there which was – I mean, I wasn’t there, my father wasn’t there, nobody that I knew other than my late father-in-law,

who was there in the second landing, but I felt quite an emotion going around those places, because you’d heard so much about Gallipoli and the fact that the Australians were there. And yet Australians and New Zealanders were far outnumbered by the number of British troops there on Gallipoli, and yet the feeling one gets here, in Australia, that

the Australians were the main ones on Gallipoli, but it wasn’t the fact but just the same they on percentage of population that they sent away at that time was huge, and of course the casualties were astronomical because of the terrain. They still got some of the original trenches, or so they tell us

are still there, and usually they are on top of ridge looking down on these poor guys, Australians and so forth whatever forces they were trying to get up the ridge met with these fellows. But that was very emotional, yes, that say my father-in-law was there but anyway.

I think so.

Don’t know. Well, they were different. They were not as sort of,

Well, humdrum as normal life in a civilian way. It was a type of adventure. I mean it’s a terrible way of expressing it, I think, but it was just unusual, and well I’ve tried to express myself

in these two or three hours with you, I feel I can talk more about what happened then, than what’s happened since. I mean, I can talk about when I came ashore, I took up cricket again and was involved in a team that finished up in the premiers of one year. I was involved in yachting on Port Phillip

Bay, and helped with the setting up of the Beaumaris Yacht Club as treasurer. I played golf and I’m just in my 41st year with the golf club since I came ashore. But they’re – to me they don’t sort of – they’re not events that happened to me back in possibly those more informative years,

you know…

No, no.

No.

Well, I think mainly because I was lucky, I didn’t have any

actual engagement in a way of battles or forces or anything like that. I was not subjected to bombing and I was just luck. I was just lucky.

Oh yes,

we’ve got – I said earlier we’ve got one fellow on our committee here in Victoria who was torpedoed of Mallacoota, well I’ve now discovered at lunchtime today there were two of them that were torpedoed one in the iron crown and the other one in the iron knight. Now we can talk away about things, and I mean if George or Bill sort of say

such and such, well as far as I’m concerned that he was – oh, and there’s another one too, there was a fellow who was a steward on the Centaur who was lucky enough to miss it all. I mean, he was one of those rescued of the 62 out of the 300 odd that were on board. But no, we can talk about those things because they don’t get emotional about the thing.

I’ve only spoken to them and put it this – I’ve only spoken to them while we’re all reasonably sober now I think sometimes if fellows might’ve had or they did have a bad time, three of them being torpedoed and on the Australian coast, they then may get into a sort of different mood or

sphere because of alcohol, I don’t know, I haven’t mixed it with them. But in normal ways, where we would have two or three beers together, no, there is no aggression nor animosity, nothing, but we just talk normally. They know I was one of the lucky ones. I mean we had a bloke who’s dead now,

Alan Wickow, and he was on a ship up in New Guinea, I expect it might’ve been Port Moresby and he was – the ship was bombed when it was unloading and I think it was the stern, and the bomb dropped in the stern, or near the stern, and did quite a bit of damage. Alan happened to be up the forehead end of the ship

and he applied for at one stage some sort of recompense from Veterans’ Affairs and he was more or less told because he was at the forehead end of the ship and nothing happened, that he really didn’t qualify. Now I mean, that’s unbelievable.

I mean you’re on a ship that gets bombed. But getting back to that again, no, we just sort of accept those things as something that happened if you were lucky enough to escape it all. I don’t know whether you saw last night oh, you mightn’t have been home, we watched This is Your Life

on Channel 9, and they had this fellow Jason McCartney, who used to be a North Melbourne footballer, who was badly burnt up at Bali, and he’s put all that behind him now. Well outwardly anyway, what he’s really thinking inwardly I wouldn’t know, because I’m not a psychiatrist. But no, I think people react differently.

Not really, god I mean no, physical beauty. It was all so different, I mean, well I suppose Colombo

and going out to Mount Lavinia, and that sort of thing I mean that was pleasant. But I mean that was just something you did once or twice. I mean Aden – was nothing to endear you to Aden. With Suez, nothing. We didn’t even get ashore in Taranto.

Bombay was taken up there with the after effects of the terrible explosion there. Borneo, well, two places I only saw the jungle and the other one, we shouldn’t have gone into the oil refinery, we got out of that pretty quickly, so there was nothing to look at that there.

New Guinea was just jungle. So I – no.

Japan after the war, well as I said it was difficult, because we really didn’t have the transport to go anywhere and we had certain duties to do on board

and other than going down to Hiroshima…

Oh yes we’re getting back to stories this is quite a simple really, but we had a second electrician on Westralia, and this guy had a rather mean approach to life and it was – I don’t think I ever heard of him giving you a free glass of beer.

So he said to me one day, “What about coming up and having a beer before lunch,” so I said, “Oh yeah, terrific,” so up I went to his cabin and I’m sitting down, gets out a bottle of beer and takes the top off and the next I “ooohhh” went up in the air like a rocket and he had wired across the seat where your thigh is an electric wire

and he’d just press a button and bang you’d get this right across your thighs. I tell you what, that brought you up by the round turn very quickly. Yeah, I never went back to his room again.

Yeah, he did that with anybody. I tell you what, it’s not nice, anyway.

Can’t think at the moment.

Yeah well, as I mentioned earlier, about deck chairs on the promenade deck when I was on Westralia before the war, there’s a bag, the purser’ll give you a bag and you’ve got to go around and collect sixpences from all the people sitting in the deck chairs. But I mean that was jus a prank that new people on the ship

put up with.

I didn’t do it, because I thought no, there’s something wrong here. But I was very close to doing it. No, it’s like the old one, I remember in our office in Collins Street, new boys into the office there, they used to be asked to go across to the post master and there used to be a

post office in the Rialto Building in Collins, across the road from Hallett Parker and the kids’d have to go over there and ask the post master, the post master not anybody else in the place, for the verbal agreement form and as a kid you wouldn’t even think about that, and they’d go over to see the post master –

“A verbal agreement form? No, I don’t think we’ve got any. I’ll check it out though.” And he’d wandered around the post office, come back and said, “No, sorry, we haven’t got any they’re all out,” you’d go back to the office and there’d be sniggers and so forth. But no, those sort of things used to happen in pranks in those days.

That’s true.

During the time I was on the Wanganella I can’t remember, but we did it on Westralia going to Japan I know that. It was only in a limited

form but no, on the Japanese run that was after the war they did it. But it may have been done on other voyages that the Wanganella did to the Middle East, but I wasn’t on.

No, nothing

like that certainly not birthdays. The ship generally tried to provide a little bit of extra fair for Christmas time but there was no big function no, well I can’t remember.

No.

Just stay in my cabin, or somebody else’s cabin and natter away, that’s all.

Oh, yes.

We used to play deck tennis on the aft end of – that was Wanganella and Westralia and

I was quite proficient at that, and that was all I ever entered into.

Yeah it’s a type – what throwing it along – no, no there was just pure deck tennis.

Well you’re throwing it over a net, and deck quoits you’ve got circles

on the deck and you throw the quoit along and try and get it close enough to circles, into the centre of it.

Well, normal tennis, you’re using a ball but with the other you’re using a quoit…

Yeah, yeah, let go with that.

It used to get

very willing at times, you can play a pretty tough game with that.

Oh well not – I don’t know about high seas, because you can slip and it wouldn’t be too good but no, normal weather.

Wouldn’t know, wouldn’t have a clue. We didn’t see them. I mean it’s only a telescope in the water, that’s all you would see.

Oh on the lookout yes, but terribly hard to see. You might see the aftermath of

water streaming past, but no. In fact, I didn’t hear, no, I never heard of any – perhaps we didn’t have a good look out, I don’t know.

Battleships?

Mm, oh you see those every now and again. Mm,

destroyers and…

No.

Mm.

No, bunk.

No, they usually

had a board, a board up and one side was against the bulk head, and the other one – that’s the wall in lay terms, and the other side, you just had a raised ledge which kept you in.

Well people talk about chimneys and things like

that on ships, not really.

Yes they brought from whatever the hospital was in ambulances, motor vehicles

and depending where we were, if we were lucky enough to be alongside a wharf, they were then put on the wharf and depending on the type of injury, or injury mainly, well illness too, if they were very seriously ill they could be brought on board by the ship using its derricks,

and they’d be on a crate, secured, fairly secured and just lifted from the wharf straight on to an area which had access straight into a ward or one of the operating theatres, depending on what was the situation. There were also walking wounded, and they would walk up a specially prepared gangway.

Well it was to take, as I said earlier, women and children

up to their husbands of where with the forces in Japan at that time in the Kure area and there had been a special village set up for dependents at a place called Nakamura and I haven’t been to Nakamura, I didn’t go out there, I had no reason to go there, but they tell me that’s where most of them

were put. Now what happened as far as schooling for children and that sort of thing, I didn’t see any evidence of that because I didn’t even go and look for it but I daresay the defence forces would’ve prepared for that, so that those children that went up there with their mothers to be with their fathers and husbands, that would’ve

been something the defence forces would’ve catered for.

I have no idea, no idea.

No.

There again, I don’t know, because that would’ve been in the hands of the Japanese.

We used to have – as soon as the ship berthed, we had a number of Japanese that came on board and did certain functions, usually fairly dirty work that the crew didn’t want to do, mainly in the engine room. But no, we really had nothing to do with that.

No, never smoked and that’s one of the things that upset me a bit, I know some fellows that didn’t smoke have since they, since the war was over and so forth and they went along to

get some sort of pension and one of the first questions they asked was were you a smoker and was smoking brought about by war service, and they’d say ‘yes’. Now I have this on very good authority, and some of those fellows get pensions. As far as I’m concerned I would never do that. I haven’t done and I don’t get a pension unfortunately.

And it’s life, I suppose, but no I never smoked.

Yes, I know one fellow who’s dead now, just one, that started smoking when he was 14 at school, and that’s a well known fact. We met some

people in Norfolk Island some years ago, and talking away and it just so happened that they knew of this particular fellow that I know of and they said, “Oh gosh, he was smoking at school. He was smoking like a chimney and the war service had nothing to do with it.” But when you see the form it says, “Were you forced into smoking because of you war service?”

Now he got a pension. Here again that’s life.

Yes, I can’t remember what it was, but I used to exchange mine for a bottle of beer.

I used to have an occasional wine

at home before I went to sea, and I don’t think I – I think I was about 19 because I just didn’t like the taste of beer. It’s changed a bit since then but...

No, definitely no, that’s taboo and if you’re in a

position of responsibility, you just couldn’t afford to do it.

Yes, but that’s all.

Oh you’d have a couple of beers a day. Well, a bottle say was four glasses

and if you had somebody else, I mean you’d go to, it just sort of went, but you didn’t have much more than a couple of glasses a day. Well I didn’t, not being a terribly good drinker, but some of them would’ve possibly had more, I’ve got no idea what the crew consumed, I wouldn’t know but I know as far as the fellows I sailed with, the deck

crowd and so forth, no, you couldn’t afford it.

No, but because the rate of exchange at that time was so

good that we used to buy things on the black market, and some how or other smuggle them back on board because we weren’t supposed to take a lot of things out of Japan. But one way or other, with Australian ingenuity, the thing was managed. That was mainly brought about by, as I say,

the very good rate of exchange at the time, and I can’t remember what it was, but I know Australian money, the value was very good in Japan.

Oh there was a certain barter, yes, I mean as you do with all Asian and Middle East Countries when you go to them, you don’t just say, oh that’s a hundred dollars or that’s too

Much, you’ve got to bring it down.

Yeah.

Oh I’m sorry, no not with people off the ship no.

No, not really. If it was going to happen, it was going to happen. As I said earlier, I’m a bit of a fatalist on that. The only thing I used to do, I always made sure that I had a pair of underpants on when I went to sleep at night, so that if something happened at night and I finished up in the water,

and sharks didn’t come along and take a certain part of my body, but other than that no.

I think so.

VE Day, that was ’44, wasn’t it?

Was it as close as that to VP [Victory in the Pacific] Day?

Well we must’ve been if it was May ’44, ’44 was it or ’45?

’45, yeah ’45, I think we would’ve been

either going to or going up to standby at Morotai prior to the Borneo Landings. I’m sure it was May ’45.

Oh I think so, I can’t, it’s a bit of a blur, I can’t remember that one.

I’m sure there would’ve been celebrations.

No.

No.

Mm.

No, I sailed with one, doesn’t really come under superstition, but I sailed with one captain who sailed before the mast

in sailing ships as a young fellow and he went round the Horn a couple of times, which was quite an achievement. Any rate, this guy used to tell, and this was after the war, passenger ship days and he had a table there, and I had a table just here and the chief officer had a table just over there, so we were all – and with passengers. And I heard this particular master

tell the story to passengers, especially to the women, “When I was at sea going around the Horn on one occasions I got thrown out of the rigging and down into the tempestuous sea.” And he said, “Of course there’s no hope of a windjammer turning round because once on the go, that’s the end of it.” And he said, “A friendly albatross came along, picked me up

with its claws and dropped me back on board.” “Oh captain,” they used to say, “that’s an incredible story. That’s not true.” And this fellows used to say, “Yes, yes that’s what happened.” But that’s not superstition though, but just one of the other stories but no not with me.

Yeah, oh well. I used to tell passengers on Wanganella when we used to go across to New Zealand and they used to say, “Where does the ship get the power for the lights and so forth and the engines?” And I said, “Well now, have you ever gone down to the stern of the ship

and looked over the side and there’s a wire extending into the water? Well what happens when we leave Sydney that’s plugged in in Sydney to a certain spot, and it’s pulled in when we get to the other side to Auckland, and then we reinsert it over there so the power then comes from Sydney, and the next time coming back it comes from Auckland.”

People used to say, “That’s not so. What if some other ship comes along and goes through the wire?” I said, “No, it wouldn’t do that.” People used to believe that.

That’s right.

The air force took three of them and I’m pretty sure two were lost. One fellow lived for – until about three years ago, he died. Another two or three went into the army and at least

one of those was killed, but I’m not too sure about the other two, but no. And I think from groups before the war of fellows that would be about an average of some fellows being lost.

Oh I would like to think so, but that’s for others to perceive.

Absolutely, and it did me no harm.

Who me?

Oh I was a pretty quiet sort of a guy pre war, and they quite often

say or they used to say, it brought him out of his shell and I think that really sums it all up. You know, because mixing with men when you leave school, especially in those days, I’m pretty sure that you it did you no harm. It just depends what

Area, who you were with, how you were treated, and all that sort of thing, but as far as I’m concerned it did me a lot of good.

No, I’m not a poetic person.

No, I might’ve had a few that usually had to be written down, and then I’d recite them but no.

We met at golf. She

had played golf for many years. She’s been a member of, I won’t mention the club, but she has been a member of a club for fifty seven years her parents were both members of this club and they put her up for membership when she was only 14 or 15 so she’s been there. And as I mentioned before, I was – I’m in my forty-first year with another golf club, not hers, and we were sort of brought together

by mutual friends, because I found that after I lost Jo, my first wife, that there were quite a few women reckoned that I should be able to meet some nice person to finish off my days . I was in my 50s at that time and I was just very fortunate in

meeting her and it was – Jo died in ’76 and I remarried in ’82. I was just one of those person found I couldn’t remarry fairly quickly yet I know half a dozen or more fellows that were unfortunate enough to lose their wives, got married quite quickly,

within twelve months but I’m just one of the other people that just wanted time and Jan my present wife was obviously what I thought, and we met in 1981 or 1980, I think, late ’80 and

we just – I took her out a couple of times in the next twelve months, so there was no sort of – I don’t know I was quite happy to leave it the way it was, but I did find that women, other women as I mentioned are always very keen to get you married off again. But you know…

I don’t know, I don’t know why.

but I think that’s part of a woman’s make up I think they think, oh, a bloke shouldn’t be on his own.

Oh well, I don’t know about present times. Has that happened to you? Can I ask a question?

But no…

I met her through a friend and that was – she was a university student, a Melbourne University student and living in Tasmania, and she used to come over on the Marana every now and then. And

here again I met her once and I think it was about fifteen months or more that I met her again because of the war situation, and we decided to get married. In those days, during the war of course, there were a lot of marriages took place with people that were pretty young

and it was just one of those cases.

Yeah.

No worry, no worry, that didn’t worry me at all, because I didn’t have any, would you say

crush on her, or anything. She was just a very pleasant person.

No.

Yes, well I know a few fellows that specially if they went to the Middle East in the early days of the war and came back, and quite a few of them were sent on up to New Guinea afterwards and during that period when they had leave after

being away for two years or whatever, it was in the Middle East area and they thought oh no, they wanted to get married and the wives wanted to do the same thing, and I think you would find a lot of the ex-servicemen were in the situation. No I think it was just a natural thing, it was the fact of the parting the couples

being away from one another and maybe looking for affection, which comes to all of us or most of us. No I think it was just…

Well, I was still at sea till 1950, and, oh I had a couple of interruptions because of the ships out of action and that sort of thing, but what was the question again?

Well I think

what I saw of it and what I can remember of it, it was a matter of trying to get back to normality. I think rationing had been a big thing for civilians. Rationing of food, not as severe as in England of course, rationing of clothing and it meant that and also the style of clothing which was pretty and drab and ordinary in those days. It was all right for

in the services, especially if you had a uniform you didn’t worry about it. But no I think that, I’m certain with the wives, the housewives the fact of being able to go into a grocery store, a Coles and Woolies [Woolworths] to see a selection of food now whether that, I can’t remember whether that came back straight away but I know

my late wife and I were living in Sydney at that time, up till 1950, and one of the problems there was the Manarong Power Station, which was the main supplier of electricity to Sydney, and they had just industrial trouble after industrial trouble, there was always trouble there and they had blackouts galore in Sydney, it was just

unbelievable, and whenever I went across to New Zealand, I was on the New Zealand run at that time – used to bring back boxes of candles and here was Joe trying to bring up two little girls, living in Sydney, and couldn’t have hot meals quite often at night, because there was no power, and of course without candles you had no lighting, because of

the electricity blackouts. But that was a big thing living in Sydney at the time, but of course that eventually came good, and the power stations were able to operate fully. No I think that and the fact there were a lot of jobs in those days, unemployment, I think was fairly low and

the fact that most people were working had a job, salary it was, well it was a time of rejoicing, in a way, because the war was over, and all these restrictions and so forth had gone.

Well firstly, the main thing is to try to negotiate anything and not to take a negotiation to a stage where it is unnegotiable –

in other words, a war situation might develop, because it is completely futile, it doesn’t get anybody anywhere, it causes terrific anguish and anxiety. It can ruin countries, and as far as I’m concerned people have just got to do their best to try and live

with other people, see their point of view. And the big thing I hope religion can get together within themselves and be more appreciate of other people and other people’s ideas because I believe

we all look toward one particular person whether we’re white, whatever colour, our own beliefs whether we’re Muslims, Hindus, whatever, Christians, I believe that we all have the same point of the main thing of an idol of

something we’re not sure of, and if we could just be – approach things in a more humane way and just accept that way of life. And let’s all live together.

There’s one little bit I’d just like to mention about the merchant navy … TAPE ENDS