Australians at War Film Archive

Bendigo. Long Gully, Bendigo. 284 Macintyre Street.

He was a miner, a gold miner.

No, I called him Flash Harry. That’s his photo

up on the back of that. He was supposed to be in the Bendigo Volunteer Rifles but later on when I checked up on the archives down at Middle Brighton, I found out he done six months as a recruit and the other six months he didn’t even attend but wore this uniform and looked good. Before the war, he was a pretty good singer. He won a lot of prizes up around Bendigo. He was a

silver tenor, and they’re very few and far between, and he won quite a few prizes. And he played in a band, they had timpani drums in the Hopetoun band, and that’s just out of Bendigo.

Three sisters, no brothers. And I was the second eldest in the family. And when dad died in 1918, he took sick in 1916, he worked in the

Harbour Trust and he eventually had to go to bed and in the finish he died out at the sanatorium. He had what they now call miners’ complaint. His arteries became Miners’ Phythsis and then developed into consumption and that’s what killed him.

Six, no six and a half. He died on the eighteenth of December 1918 and I would have been

seven.

No when I turned eight, Mum said to me, “You’re man of the house.” I said, “What do you mean by that, Mum?” She said, “Well you’ve got to give me a hand to support the family and also to bring up your sisters, three of them.” And that was some herald. I was nine years of age and it was a pretty tough life. But still, I got through it.

Well, I was in school until 1925 and Mum wanted me to go to get a higher education and I said, “No, I’m going to give you a hand.” And I went and got a job. But I went to the 1501 State School down at Yarraville till 1923. My father took my sister and I down and enrolled

us at 1501 in May 1916, and we both enrolled in the same class and that’s why I finished state school early. Got my first certificate when I was twelve and I had to go down to Williamstown High School. And the first year I was down there, ‘24, we had a teacher, geometry teacher. His name was Bill Woodfull, does that ring a bell?

He was

captain of the Australian Test Cricket team.

Yeah. 1925 he went out to South Yarra and became principal of the Melbourne Grammar School, the Melbourne High School.

I went to work for the Melbourne Harbour Trust on the thirtieth of June in 1926, as a junior clerk.

And then in 1927 they transferred me down to Williamstown dockyards and after about thirteen months I couldn’t see any future because unless you had a higher education, you’d finish up as somebody’s clerk and that wasn’t promotion. So I took on an apprenticeship, shift carpenter and joiner. And I finished me time there in

1933 and then instead of getting a year as a journeyman, that was like as a tradesmen, they gave me one week as a carpenter’s assistant and then I finished. But the Depression was on, very severe Depression too, until 19… working on doing odd jobs when I could get them. And I was working on the building

of the Footscray Town Hall with RP Crowe, and I got a telegram to go back to the Harbour Trust to see the time keeper. And then when I got back there, I’d worked in the office, and I met Bob. He said, “It’s only two weeks as a labourer Harry, and that’s what my proper name [was]. That’s what I got called when I started in the Harbour Trust. See the Chief Clerk there was Pompy Elliott, his name was Cyril

Elliott, but he got the name Pompy, which is a famous name in the army. So he said, “What’s your name, son?” I said, “Jack.” He said, “Good God no. There’s Jack Gower, Jack Hoskins, Jack Ferguson, and all this sort of thing.” He said, “What’s your name?” I said, “Henry John.” He said, “Right, Harry, that’s your seat over there.”

Yeah well everybody got retrenched in those days, like the

inspector dropped down to foreman and the foreman dropped down to a leading hand and a leading hand would drop down to a tradesman, a tradesman would drop down to an assistant, the assistant would drop down to labourer, and the labourer got put off. And they might get two weeks on, one week on and three weeks off, or one week on and four weeks off, all depends what trade they were in. Apprentices, we didn’t go off. But when it came up to ’33 I just got retrenched.

Well I went into see Bob and I went down and they were putting the neon lights up along the Yarra River then, 1936. And I’m working there as a labourer and we had to walk along the rock wall and build foundations for the light poles and put the neon lights up. And the chief electrical engineer came down and he said, “Row me across the other side son.” and I said, “I can’t

row, Sir.” He said, “Well hop in and I’ll teach you.” So we just hopped in the boat and sculled across the other side. And he said, “Now you’ll get back yourself.” and he said, “Have I seen you before somewhere?” I said, “Yeah, I worked in the head office.” He said, “No, I’ve seen you before.” I said, “I served me time as a joiner.” He said, “Well bring your tools in tomorrow.” He said, “You can do the other side of the river.” So that two weeks turned into… I retired in 1976.

So that was forty years.

Well 1929, compulsory training was still in, compulsory military training, and I was called up on the first of July 1929, might be a little wrong there. But I went with the 32nd Battalion at Footscray and then you were drafted out to different units, all depends

what you done. And if you were anything to do with food, you were into the supply corps and if you had anything to do with tools you went to the engineers and if you had anything to do with horses you went to the cavalry, all that sort of thing. Well we’re standing there waiting to go into the PBI, Poor Bloody Infantry and this departmental bloke came in in his breeches and leggings and walking stick. And I knew him.

He went with a girl that lived a few doors up from me, he was a Lieutenant Charlie Brandt. And he said, “Anyone want to join the Garrison Artillery?” You had to be five foot eight to get into the other force. I was only five foot seven so I went to the 2nd Heavy Brigade AGA, Australian Garrison Artillery. And 1929 they had a NCOs’ [Non Commissioned Officers’] course down at

Queenscliff and I went down there and I qualified and on the twenty-fifth of November 1929, I got my first two stripes. And the Scullin government got into power while we were down there and they abolished compulsory training. So we had to find our own way back from Queenscliff to Melbourne.

Wouldn’t issue you any travel warrants, see you had to get

travel warrants from the government. Well we went up to Geelong, that was the garrison artillery, the medium artillery and the fortress engineers all at the one school. So we had to go up to Geelong. So we went up in Solomon Been and Morris trucks all the time, that’s what it was like. Well when we got to Geelong we had to wait there until the medium artillery with their Hart 6-inch guns and Hart protractors

came up, and that was military convoy, puts your slowest vehicles in front. So we went from Geelong to Melbourne at six mile an hour. Well I got off where Geelong Road joins Summerhill Road, in full marching order and I was down home at Yarraville Station before they got into town. And that full marching order is a rifle, bayonet, belt,

pack, water bottle and a haversack, backpack, blanket, shoulder roll and coat. Oh but still I done it. Well then I went on and every six months we sat for examinations for promotion. In 1931 it turned [out] Colonel Tassie, he was our

garrison commander, he said to me, “I’ll give you a commission if you want” I said, “No Sir.” He said, “Why?” I said, “Well a number of reasons.” My pay from the garrison artillery had kept me, that I, drill training and camps, that gave me money to help support the family, and I couldn’t keep up with the officers’ mess which was down at Queenscliff, staff officers.

So he offered it to me again in November, I said, “No, Sir, for the same reason.” The next year he offered it to me again, he said, “This time you’ll have to compete with the other sergeants that are in the militia now.” I said, “I wouldn’t take it if I got nothing. I’m not taking it now.” He said, “Right, you’re staff sergeant and I’ll make you back to quartermaster.” So from then on I was doing nothing but a quartermaster’s job. And that

carried right through until 1944, WO1 [Warrant Officer Class 1] went up to New Guinea.

On the 4th of September 1939 we were mobilised. I was down at Fort Queenscliff at twelve o’clock on the 4th September. And my war service commenced under

DBS [?] like routine numbers, I think I was 2255. But the militia records were that bad that they couldn’t keep track of them at CARO, at Central Army Records Office, and they had it in writing and endorsed, ‘War Service staff’. And then they kept their old

compulsory number 44433 until in 1940 they decided they better form the AIF, [Australian Imperial Force] and those that didn’t join the AIF and were in camp, they enlisted for full-time duty. That meant for the duration of the war. So I wasn’t eligible. I wasn’t classified like A1 so I didn’t get into full-time

duty so I was transferred from Queenscliff where I was actually battery quarter marshal sergeant at Fort Queenscliff. And then I was transferred up to the 2nd Army Junior Leaders School at Seymour, and I was made WO2 [Warrant Officer Class 2] regiment or master sergeant. Then, Lieutenant Colonel Myers was the chief instructor. In 1942, in April,

I came down to give my sister away at the wedding and I got food poisoned, that was, the caterer had made the sandwiches the day before, and put them in the ice box (there was no such things as refrigerators in those days) and there was five of us at the wedding got poisoned. And one was my aunt who was staying with us at the time, I was married by then. I went to the

doctor and he sent me up to the area doctor who sent me out to Heidelberg [Hospital] and I finished up back, they kept me there. I walked from Heidelberg Station to Heidelberg Hospital, and the doctor there said, “We’ll keep you in for observation.” I said, “All right Sir.” Two o’clock the next morning, chap came in, I also knew him because he went with another girl in the

same place as the lieutenant had gone to. And he said to me, “I’m gonna give you a shave.” I said, “I bloody shaved before I left home.” He said, “No.” he said, “I’m gonna shave down below.” I said, “What for?” He said, “They’re going to operate on ya.” I said, “You go and get the doctor.” So he came down, little bloke he was, I said, “What’s this I hear?” He said, “Well we decided if anything happens to you on the way back to camp and we haven’t done anything about it we’ll get into trouble.”

So they gave me an appendectomy, took me appendix out. And I was six weeks in hospital, and then I went down to Rockingham which was a convalescent place. Finished up at the convalescent depot down at Ballarat, and while I was down there, it’s all recorded on those sheets if you want, and I went down there and while I was down there I got quinsy and I was at camp hospital for a week.

Quinsy was throat trouble. And then they decided they put me at Ballarat Base Hospital which was right next door to the lunatic asylum and you could hear them screaming and screeching during the night. So I asked for a transfer and I had to get leave and go up the AQEG [?] up at that street up near Victoria Market, I can’t think of it offhand.

Quinsy. And I went up and they put me at Caulfield Hospital 108, and they give me a tonsillectomy, took me tonsils out. And I asked the nurse, asked the doctor when he does that if he’ll have a look at this nose of mine and see what’s wrong. Because when I was down at the Fort Nepean, I transferred

over, instead of finishing my three months in camp, they transferred me over to Fort Nepean, to acting battery sergeant-major because the sergeant-major had gone out. And while I was over there I was playing football on the barracks square, and I come down after I took a mark and I landed on that

foot, on two scaffolding planks and chipped a bone in my ankle. And banged me nose down on Sergeant Riley’s knee, and they put me in the Casualty Clearing Station at Portsea. I was in there for a week and I was just strapped up. There was no sort of equipment or anything in those days that weren’t preferred for war. And I asked for voluntary discharge. The

doctor didn’t come round to see me one day so I asked to see him and I said, “I want to go back to the unit.” They were bringing in a lot of these what they call four bob bloody chockos [chocolate soldiers], 21-year-old call-ups. And I had to go over there and give the WO2, the regimental quartermaster sergeant a hand to kit them, equip them for camp, give them all their

cutlery, clothe them and everything. I got the pay truck to come out that day and take me back to Fort Pearce and the next morning I went over on the Mars to Queenscliff. And I was there going to my room which was opposite the chief there, Colonel Myers’ room. And he said, “I’ve got a telegram here for you, staff.” So when I got the telegram

I just opened it and I couldn’t speak so I handed it to him. Mum died Friday, my mother died on the 14th March 1942, 1940 at St Vincent’s Hospital. He said, “You just missed the bus to Queenscliff. If you know anyone down at the cadre that’s got a car I’ll give you a week’s leave and you can both go up and come back in a week.” I said, “Two days will do, Sir.”

All I had to do was shift my two younger sisters who were not married then, and I arranged that. And my elder sister and me finally cleaned the place out and she took one of them and the other one went to a friend of ours. They wanted to adopt her in any case. So she was the youngest, the last to be born and the first to die. Poor old Tess. But, where was I?

Oh well I was up at Seymour, that’s right, and I said to the…when I came, I was eighteen weeks away from the unit altogether and the papers had piled up on my table and I spent days and days posting all those papers into the ledgers.

And I had eleven ledgers. The only thing I didn’t have ledgers for, that’s the store’s ledgers, was garrison artillery, fortress engineers and searchlights. I done some of that. But we trained skills, people who came back from the Middle East and people who wanted promotion. It was call the 2nd Army Juniors Leaders School and I was regimental quartermaster sergeant up there. And when I came

back, I had to go for renal and urinal investigation over to Puckapunyal Hospital. And the night before, the Hygiene WO said to me, “Come down to the mess and have a drink of gin.” I said, “What for?” He said, “It’s good for the kidneys.” I went over the next day to get this. When I left, the boss kept chasing me

round where I went to the different hospitals to get me to come back to the unit. He was missing his WO2 RQMS [Regimental Quartermaster Sergeant]. So eventually they sent me back and I didn’t get a medical board and you were supposed to have a medical board before you left the depot. And I said to him, after I came from this renal examination…. When I went there they tested the urine in the test tube,

and instead of being a bluey green colour it was brick red. So the sergeant took it up to Major Morrow who was in charge of the hospital, and said, “Look at this.” And he said to me, “What have you been doing?” “I haven’t been doing anything.” He said, “Well I’m afraid.” he said, “We can’t go any further with this exam. We’ll have to send you down to the university.” He said to the orderly room corporal, he said, “Write a letter to say that Mr. James has got to go down

for examination.” So while he’s taking me out on the balcony overlooking Puckapunyal, he said, “Have I seen you before somewhere?” I said, “You do as a matter of fact.” He said, “Where was that?” I said, “You come down to a ladies’ AWAS [Australian Women’s Army Service] camp to get some tables and stretchers for the AWAS that were coming, in.” And I said, “I was coming out with a load of them.” And I got them from the girls up in our

unit, we had a bunch coming in too, and he said, “I remember you.” He said, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do.” He said, “What do you eat over at the school?” I said, “Well every morning we have half a grapefruit and every Friday we have half a chicken.” He said, “How do you manage to get that?” I said, “Well we get a shilling a day extra messing allowance for all the students in the camp.” and sometimes we’d have 1100. “Oh.” he said,

“You’re living too high. I’ll put you in the hospital and feed you on plain army tucker and we’ll see how you make it, and as soon as you can give me a clear test.” he said, “Then alright.” So sergeant, he kept going down to the orderly room, the medical room and I said to the sergeant “How’s it going?” He said, “He’s doing good.” So when it got better, he took it up to the major and he said, “Oh good, take him into that

room there.” And he said, “Strip off and I’ll come in and examine you.” So I stripped off and he examined me, usual medical examination. And he said, “You got any other things wrong with ya?” I said, “Oh a bit of tinea in between the toes.” which was common in those days. Because you had to walk into a bath with Condies crystals in it before you went in for a shower, then the duckboards had to be taken out and put in the sun so they could dry out.

And the next day he classified me A1, so the next day I went down to Broadmeadows and enlisted in the AIF. And that was on the 15th December 1942. And I went back, I said to the old man, I said, “I’m in the AIF now Sir, I want a transfer to another unit.” And he said, “You get someone to take your place.” he said, “And I’ll let you go.” So later on I

heard that there was a new unit being formed down at Victoria Barracks, Australian Water Transport, that’s when the 2nd Army decided to form three groups. I went down and I said I wanted to join the unit, and the recruiting sergeant said to me, “What do you want a job as?” I said, “A quartermaster.” I said, “I did the quartermaster’s work since 1932.” He said, “The old man’s not

here. He’s coming down from Sydney tomorrow.” He said, “Can you get down tomorrow?” I said, “I can get down any time I like.” So I went down the next day and Lieutenant Colonel Backhouse (he’d been on Gallipoli when he was fifteen) he came down and he said, “What do you want a job as?” I said, “Quartermaster..” he said, “Oh I’m afraid.” he said, “I can’t tell you what you’re going to be until

we send over to the west to get some, see if we can get a quartermaster over there.” And they bought an old guy back, Captain Fonseeka [?] from Rock Nest Island. And he says “I can make you a regimental quartermaster sergeant.” He said, “Do you know anything about ships?” I said, “Yeah, ask me a few questions.” Having served in the naval dockyards. He asked me what a companionway was,

which was port and which was starboard, and after he asked he said, “Well you seem to know your work alright.” And I said, “I should do. I served me time as an apprentice ship rod and joiner.” And he said, “Oh I can send you up to New Guinea tomorrow.” I said, “What as?” He said, “WO in charge of workshops.” That’s army workshops, watercraft, or small craft. I said, “No.” He said, “What do you mean, ‘No’?” I said, “I’ve put the tools down when the war started.” I said, “I’ll

pick them up again when its finished.” He said, “Well then I’ll make you regimental quartermaster sergeant.” So I said, “I can’t get away from the unit.” I told him the fact that I’d been trying eight weeks to find something and no one wanted the job. So he said, “Don’t worry about that. We’ll send the signal back to Second Junior School Leaders School. It will be there when you get there.” So when I got back there the next day I

said to the orderly room corporal, who was a bloke from… What’s his name? Came from that place over in South Australia. Barossa Valley. And I said, “Sergeant.” I said, “is there a telegram here for me?” He said, “No.” I said, “You sure?” He said, “Positive.” I walked across the passageway to the RSM’s place, and he had a wax moustache and he’d

been in the glass house in India, Alf Maslin. And he came and he said, “Sergeant Borg.” he said, “is there a telegram here for Mr James?” “Just came in sir.” So that was it, be released immediately and on the train the next morning to go down to Victoria Barracks. So I just told the quartermaster sergeant, who didn’t do any bloody work, he just gave his friends what they wanted. And got

packs from the bloke that empties the pan and supplied rucksacks and all those sort of things. And he used to call him ‘Branch’ and he’d call me ‘Mister’, the old bugger. But I put a lock across the door between his office and my store and locked it. He said, “Who put that lock on the door?” I said, “I did.” He said, “What for?” I said, “I’m not having you letting your friends in there every night to take what they want.” Oh the place was in a hell of a mess.

Yeah I got a photo behind there, I done the assault course up there and I’d already done training. I’d been training since 1929. And all the training I got in quartermaster’s work or from the bloke in charge of Fort Gellibrand, AIC [Australian Instructional Corps] man,

Brusher Bragg. And he taught me everything there was to know about quartermaster’s work. So I done a field sketching and map reading course up at the school and cause I had the advantage over other people, cause I had an office I could go back to of a night and do work. But they’d spend the time down at the messes drinking, and I topped the school, I’ve got all me papers

there, all me books.

Well I went down to LHQ [Land Headquarters], Q Branch, Small Craft, Australian Water Transport, and when I finished me, I was doing recruiting. One time I had to go down to Geelong to bring back a

5-ton barge from Geelong back to Port Melbourne and I had another bloke with me. And it was only a five ton, the capacity, and the smallest barge there was. And you had to find your way through Corio Reef. You had no steering wheel just two engines. And you used port and starboard engines, and if you wanted to move you’d pull on one and pushed on the other. And when we got through the sand bar

at Corio Bay then we had to go up through Werribee and there was an offshore wind blowing off Werribee and the bow was bang bang….. and the spray was coming through the gate and we got saturated. I ruined a perfectly good pair of officer’s army boots too. But we took it back and the old man said, “I want all my staff to get their sea legs.” And I’d been going round the Port of Melbourne

as an apprentice, attending the barges and dredges that got damaged during a storm out in Port Phillip Bay and sitting on the side of a 44-foot work boat. I had all the training I wanted. And when I finished that job I was sent down to Mount Martha, marched into Mount Martha as the regimental quartermaster sergeant, and took over activities the

next day. Well then I had to get all the equipment that was necessary for the camp. They had a wooden shape of a boat about that high, and it was called AV000, the Kapooka, and they used to train men on how to tie up a ship and they had an anchor over the side and taught them, different officers. I don’t know why I got a photo but there is a photo in

in one of the books, I’ve got the old Kapooka. And then we got word we had to form three groups, and that was 13 small ships, 16 small ships, 53 Port Craft Company, 54 Port Craft Company and the Australian Water Ambulance Convoy. That was the medical section and headquarters. Well then we got another signal down

that we had to equip and train and have them ready to march out any time soon. And in the meantime they cut down on our war establishment, that’s the number of personnel they had, and the war equipment tables. And the boss said to me, He said, “I’m sorry, staff.” He said, “

An amphibious landing barge. It was like a ship with four wheels, and they landed us on the

beach at Lae and then we marched up the road and we embarked on 3 ton army lorries out to Milford Haven, which was….. and we got out to Milford Haven and two groups were, we had to relieve them.

We weren’t actually in Lae we were out on the Huon Gulf at Milford Haven because we had to be out on the beach.

Oh thirteen months I think it was.

Yeah I can tell you a lot of the stories about what happened.

When we went to relieve 2 Group

and what happened to 2 Group, they were coming back to the mainland on leave.

If you just like to work on that thing there, you’d save a lot of this and I’d be worn out.

I got down to that when we were in Milford Haven.

I can explain all those things later on, but

when we changed, all their equipment was packed and I checked all the stores that was supposed to be there, because having the Q experience before, I knew to [what] look for. And I said to some of my blokes “Go down along the track, either side of the track into Lae” (or it was a road) “and see if anything’s hidden in the bushes.” So they came back with quite a lot of kitchen stuff and other stuff. The wise head prevails.

And instead of these blokes going back up to Lae, Backhouse took them up to Borneo, and his excuse later on was, when he was asked, “I wanted experienced troops”. Well how the hell were we going to get experience, we were all trained troops, trained for the job. We had to go down to the Cerberus [HMAS Cerberus] and do a couple of weeks down there, knotting and lashing, signals, manual and all that.

And he’d take them up to Borneo and we stayed at Milford Haven, and that’s as far as we got. There was a lot of work to do. We operated headquarters from there. Across the other side of the bay, was a place called Labu, that was the Huon Gulf and 16 Small Ships Company finished up there. 13 Small Ships Company went up to Puruata Island at Torokina, and 53

Port Craft Company, they went up there too. And 54 they finished up at Bribie Island and they became 54 Port Landing Craft Platoon. They done away with the company business and reduced the staff. And the Water Ambulance Convoy, they had a 40 foot work boats and a 62 foot fire supply launchers.

and barges and they used to go in and pick up the wounded off the beaches, they’d make a rendezvous with the, I can tell you all this later. And the walking wounded would run up the ramp as soon as they lowered it and they’d carry the others in, stretcher cases. They’d put the ramp up and go out and they’d load them onto these 40 foot work boats. Then they’d take them out further and they’d put

them on the 62 footers, which were built in NSW [New South Wales], and they’d take them out to the hospital ships, might be five or six miles out to sea. Because that part of New Guinea was volcanic and reefs, and barges had an eighteen inch draft forward and a two foot draft aft, because that’s where your engines were. And the navy couldn’t go in there, and I used to

stick it up to the navy when we had meetings in the RSL [Returned & Services League]. I’d say, “Yeah, we went where you blokes couldn’t go. You talk a lot but you didn’t do too much.” Stick that down to them. In fact our mob was called ‘Saturday Afternoon Sailors or ‘Popeye’s Navy’.

Oh usually in the tropics, it was alright. You had your four seasons,

like you had your violent storms and you had your tropical downpours, you had your earthquakes, it was just typical jungle. And the camp was cut back off the beach and on the beach there was a Japanese bunker that was supposed to have been filled in. The barges would come in and they, 300

yards off shore, there’d be this flat surface about three foot. But as soon as you got out there, it was three hundred feet. In fact they never ever depth Huon Gulf while we were there, never ever got bottom. And the Markham River used to empty out into Huon Gulf. I can tell you a story about that too. I got caught in the jeep one time,

lucky I didn’t go out to sea. But it was just typical. Anyway out there was jungle, and I’m looking for one bloke one day and I couldn’t find him, he was a postal corporal attached to our unit. And we also had a Fairmile Crash Launch Air Force, out of….WO1, the flight sergeant and a AC, EAC [aircraftsman] and they used to

come up to me every day and get their rations and go back and cook aboard the launch. Their job was to pick up any flyer that went down, they’d go out in the crash launch. And our pay sergeant and army medical corps (we had a regimental aid post there) and this postal corporal was missing, so I got worried because out there in the jungle, you didn’t know what was out there, and I said,

when they came in, I said, “Tell Corporal Watts to report to me, when he comes back wherever he is.” I didn’t know if he’d gone into Lae to get the mail or not. So Wattsie came in and I said, “Where you been Watts?” He said, “Out in the jungle getting butterflies” I said, “You been out in the jungle getting butterflies and have me worrying me guts

out about ya?” He said, “Got nothing to do with you.” I said, “Listen, while you’re in this unit, you’ll do what you’re told” . “Oh.” he said, “if I had two pins, I’d knock your block off [punch you].” So years later when I was at the hospital visiting, the Royal Melbourne with the RSL, I saw this bloke sitting outside opposite the lifts. “Oh.” I said, “Wattsie, how you going?” He said, “Not bad, who are you?” I said, “You ought to know who I am.” I said, “I’ve got two pins here.” He said, “What do you mean?”

I said, “You said if you had two pins you’d knock me block off.” I said, “Here have two pins, have a go.” He said, “I never said that.” I said, “Alright, forget about it.” But I fired one shot during the war, and this was after the others had gone up. I took out me .38 Smith and Wesson. I’d heard a noise out in the jungle and I fired out in the jungle direction. I never heard any further noise. I knew there were no animals there,

but this bunker, I always reckon there was somebody in there and it could have been somebody from that bunker that come out into the jungle. Cause a lot of things you could get to eat there. And you might of heard about it, but after the war they found a bloke up on the north coast of Australia. A Jap that had been living there and didn’t know the war had finished. And that’s what could happen, see. But

that was the only anguish that I fired. I didn’t hear any further noise so I didn’t worry.

Oh we never saw anything. As I say, all we were doing, the companies were out in different places cleaning up, I mean there was still activities going on. Some of our barges got sunk at sea, some of our launches got sunk at sea. Some got sunk on reefs,

some the enemy fire. In fact a Spitfire got shot down just outside of the Huon Gulf up near the Solomon Sea. Butno, they’d moved on and we were left to clean up MacArthur’s [General MacArthur’s] mess. He wanted to get into Tokyo before the British did, and he was island hopping. And everywhere he’d leave someone and go onto some other place. But all that was left back in New Guinea were

base troops. Jungle, what do you call them, from the Adirondacks [Mountains], you know, the hillbillies. One bloke saw the wristwatch, the Lumenstahl I had. He said, “What have you got there, guy?” I said, “A Lumenstahl watch.” He said, “Oh I’ll give you $60 for it.” I said, “What am I going to do?” and he said, “Oh you can get another one.”

That’s the type of people they let back in these places with a few regular troops. But they’d, any troops coming up on what they called the transit ships, they’d pull into the tin can wharf, which was just on the other side of the road from where we were. And they’d have two arms come out like, these wooden wharves, and then these tin can pontoons floating

in between. And trucks would go on that side, go over there load, and go over there and unload, and then back into base. And the troops moving up the line like, they’d go into the PX [American canteen] and they’d be back at a certain time and they move out during the night to the next stop. But our blokes were bringing people back from the other side of the bay and landing there and an ambulance would always be (we had an ambulance with us)

they’d always be there waiting in case someone came over. And I remember one night this meri [indigenous woman] come over, that’s the name for the wife, carrying this boong on her back. ‘Boong’ is a word for native boy, although they call them fuzzy wuzzy angels. I done the first aid, his back was just one massive ring, and she’d carried him in from up on the mountains,

and they went up like that from the back of Labu. Because that’s where our Bulldog Road was, and Labu was the original base for the Wae-Bulldog Road job. I went over there a few times, I followed some of the jungle trails looking for stuff we could get from the old Yankee camps.

Ringiji. It was a skin disorder, something like a

ringworm, you know you get dermatitis and tinea and all that sort of thing. I was in the hospital a few times with dermatitis around the scrotum area, but it was the heat, and they give you a jock strap to wear in the day time and that calamine lotion to put on you at night. And, oh God you used to sweat that much.

Oh we had,

when we originally got there we had a camp down the back of boss boy and I think about twenty natives, they were camped out the back. And one night there was a hell of a row went on and the colonel said to me, “Go down and see what the trouble is, sergeant-major, down in the camps.” And I went down and one of the Yanks had taken some of the boys from the camp and taken them up to Ramu Valley to get fruit and vegetables and the

big gardens up there where they used to supply 107 General Hospital which was in Lae. And he’d bought his meri back with him, the boy, that was his wife. I got a photo of her, Aras and another boy, the cause of all the trouble and I told him. He said, “Get someone to go with you, one of the boys and take her

back to Kaiapit.” That was the village she came from up over the Markham River. And the Markham River in the flood was about two miles wide but in the dry it was just like three deep swift flowing channels. They’d be about four feet, five feet across, and they were all round pebbles because the water kept rolling the stones. So we took her up there and the guide went across and we followed him

and we took her up there, this meri and the guide back to Kaiapit and bought back another bloke. Well when we got back to the edge of the river from there, the guide went across and we got arguing in the jeep one night, a bloke with me, in fact I had three blokes with me. And

we were arguing and the guide in the meantime had gone a different way and finished up over the other side. There were three of these streams, see. I said, “There he is over there.” and we made straight for him. Well we got through the first one and the second one we got into and we got into the third one and the jeep just went straight down and was lying across the river and I said to the two, “Two of you,

get in front and the other bloke and I’ll get behind.” I think it was Sergeant Harris, big bloke. And I said, now when it got stuck, “Now you two get ashore, and then we’ll come ashore after you.” So they got on the bank, it was on the bank this time, not the like the edge of the channel, and I said to Harris, “You go ashore now and then I’ll

follow ya.” And I took one step and I put me foot on top of a big rounded boulder and went down. And I’m just hanging onto the jeep which is starting to move and Sergeant Harris said to me “Throw your hand sergeant-major.” so I threw out me hand and he grabbed it and pulled me back. Otherwise I’d have been out feeding old Markham Billy which was the shark that inhabited the mouth of the river. That was the closest

I ever had.

Pidgin English.

Well they gave you a book. They gave you a new testament of this Pidgin English, this dictionary on Pidgin English. Now one day one of the boys came down to me and he said (we used to call them boys) he came down and said, “Sutlam, sutlam em mo

bugarup pinis” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Sutlam em mo bugurup pinis” and he handed me a shaggy torch and the batteries were gone. He wanted new batteries. It means that the torch is buggered. And this other day it’s raining like hell, a tropical storm and were sheltering back and he said, “Rain he stop, master.” I said, “It’s not, bloody still raining!” He said, “No rain he stop.” He got

through to me that ‘rain he stop’ along this place. It meant the rain stopped here, still raining. Good language, in fact I’ve got the Lords Prayer in one of me books there in Pidgin English.

No a ‘New Testament’ was sort of a bible that everyone carried around with them or was supposed to, the same as sulphur drug dressings. And this Pidgin English was just to help you.

But they were good the natives. They were good boys. But this camp we had when the 15th of August came, ANGAU, they were the Australian New Guinea Administration Unit, I used to have to go down to their camp in Lae, and get three boys every day. And that’s all I was allowed, three boys.

Well Meyu, he used to be the cook’s offsider and I got a

photo of the lean-to that had a copper in it and he used to wash up all the cook house dishes. And Fergus he was like a Fitzroy larrikin, run like a deer and climb like a monkey and he spat at one of the blokes one day, and this bloke, we were over at Labu and this big fabricated cage the Yanks used to use for stores, he went up this like a monkey. And Carpenter was the bloke from

Proserpine in Queensland, he was chasing and he couldn’t catch him. And Oramuts… we had burn-out toilets there. Was a trench dug and a 44 gallon drum that you put a seat on one and a lid on the other which had a funnel and a flue that went up through the roof - and pebbles in the bottom. And he’d chop up this wood and he’d lay it like ‘that’ ready for the

next day. So the next day we’d take the seat off that one and put it on that one and then burn out part of it there. And you’d pour gasoline down it and drop a match in and it used to burn away to an ash. And then they’d wash it down through the pebbles. But he’d sit there with a bit of wood

and that’s how he used to chop his wood, or diwai, he’d call it. And he’d always wait until I’m ready to take them back and he decides he wanted to wash. So one of the boys said one day, “Drive off without him masta.” I said, “Why?” He said, “You drive off and see what happens.” I went out to the road and I’m driving down the road and he comes running down through the bush like,

“Wait, wait, wait, wait!” And he had a few hairs on his lip and I used to have a red moustache waxed when I was up in New Guinea and he said, “You got grass on face all same sar-major. Me no, sergeant-major.” “Oh yeah ,you got grass on face.” It means he had hair on his face. That cured him though. But Normie, do you remember, well Normie Bracken [Boxer, George Bracken]

used to be an Australian Aborigine champion boxer, well this Meyu was a dead spit of him…or Oramuts, I don’t know who…There was Oramuts, Fergus, Meyu and oh the boss boy. When they took so many natives away.. Aras was the boss boy, mission trained native. He was as cunning as a rouse, a shit house rat. And another little bloke that used to help the sigs [Signals].

And we went down to the adjutant, the mosquito net was down on the tent and they were all supposed to be out on the job. And we went down and we found this sig. So the adjutant said to him, “What are you doing here Mooney?” And he said, “Who’s doing the battery?” And he had this native trained to connect up these batteries in series and he’d go back and have a sleep. Well the next time I saw him was ten years after the war

down the first march I went to, and he turned up on the army parade as drunk as a lord. He was an alcoholic, he became an alcoholic. Sig Mooney.

Oh one time I wanted a hut built for the new CO [Commanding Officer] that took over, and the boss boy, I’d say, “You make floor for

that, you cut diwai.” Diwai is what they call timber. And they’d go out in the bush and they’d measure up and they’d come back and every piece of wood they cut and put in was the exact size. Oh they were marvellous, very good on learning. You could teach them anything and they’d know it straight away. And they built the hut for the boss, and I had me own hut up there of course. I got a photo of that.

We were over at Labu and this Carpenter… (I know his name wasn’t Sid, that was the locksmith ,he used to work with us after the war, and he lived at Proserpine. I never went through Proserpine. That’s up in Queensland and the train stopped overnight to let some passengers off there.) and that’s it and nothing happened to him, he was just a typical Fitzroy

larrikin.

A real larrikin.

Well one time they’d come up, ANGAU had sent someone up, called a parade, and the boss boy would say [gestures]. That meant come up here. And he’d be standing at the back of the parade and I’d be standing at the back watching and his got his hand behind his back and he’d

(I looked down and our blokes looked) an aluminium ring with a piece of a toothbrush engraved in it and he was trying to get this off cause they weren’t allowed to wear any jewellery. But they were strict on them. I reckon they were mongrels some of them. They’d get them down there they’d have ‘Delhi Belly’, swollen belly and they’d have them lifting four gallon drums filled with sand up above their

head. Oh terrible.

I don’t to tell you the truth. In fact we had the sergeant on the transport. He was an ANGAU up in New Guinea with the convoy. He used to be a mad Collingwood [football club] supporter, in fact he was secretary to their social club. And no, they had so many different jobs ANGAU had to do and they supplied natives for them.

So they had five people for the army and people to carry people around, carry stores and do everything. But just used them as labourers, that’s all.

Oh as I tell you, lifting weights above their head. Cause all our rations used to come in four gallon drums and then later on we got these crates that used to be carried as deck cargo, of potatoes,

and they were octagonal shaped crates. And just like with gaps in between and deck cargo was getting washed in the Coral Sea, and they might get five good potatoes out of a crate. And then they got this dehydrated potato and they got powdered egg. And the first egg we used to get was in kerosene tins and when you’d open it, on top of the yellow would be all this red and

green and blue stripes floating around. We used to stir it up. But our boys, I had quite good cooks. They were stationed down the back of the camp, so they could get their good sleep. All the same, the black market. But they used to soak it in big trays with water and the water come back into it and they used to make some scrambled eggs, and different things out of the eggs.

Then they’d got down to the beach and when the Yank’s boats pulled in down there they’d trade with them, and we had what they called goldfish, herrings in tomato sauce. They used to be in oval shape tins. And the Yanks took a fancy to this, so they’d trade us with their chilli con carne, which is made in Krafts in Melbourne. A tin about that high, like a jam tin with all this meat extract in it,

beautiful stuff. And ice cream powder which we used to make, the cooks would make up for us. But the cooks in the meantime, while they were off duty, they’d be threading all these little shells, and they’d put a wire in them and a loop either end, and then they’d put cotton wool in and then plaster of Paris and then they’d string them all together and making bracelets and necklaces so we’d sell them to the Yanks.

They said, “They’ve got the money, let them pay for it”. And then when we got two bottles of beer per man per week…We were short of officers, I said our war establishment was cut down, and I was amenities officer, canteen officer, recreation officer and also doing me own work as sergeant-major. And I used to have to open these two bottles of beer, which they paid one and threepence a

bottle for, and they used to say me “Oh don’t take the tops of them, sergeant-major.” I said. “I’m going to do what I’m told.” I said, “What do you want them for?” They said, “We can sell them to the Yanks.” So bottle openers in those days used to have a little sort of a tip come out there, little pointed piece, and that would give the leverage for opening. And I’d just mark it with that and these Yanks were paying fifteen dollars

a, no yeah fifteen dollars a bottle and our blokes were paying fifteen bob for. And they got caught out one night. They used to go round, like the cooks, and collect all the beer the people didn’t want to drink. I used to give mine to the sig sergeants who used to like bridge. Until my.. Jack Manson used to live in Portarlington and played football for Geelong, he was my batman

but I just used to use him as an assistant. I didn’t have anyone wait on me. And he said, “Look, do you want to give them to Impy and Reedy and the other blokes?” I said, “No, why?” He said, “I’ll get you fifteen bob a bottle for them” and I said, “Well I may as well be in this too.” So one bloke came to the camp one day, he said, “I want a bottle of beer guys?” No beer in the camp.

I said, “Well I’ve got a bottle of lemonade” “Oh.” he said, “anything will do” so Jack Manson said, “Don’t give it to him, just give it to me.” And he came back and he said, “Here I got fifteen dollars.” For a bottle of lemonade which I paid threepence for.

Put it in the, we had a pay sergeant attached to it, put it in your pay book. But one bloke up there before us, he was only a

corporal. He’d get a barge and he’d go out and meet some of these interstate boats that used to bring up the stores and Macdhui [MV Macdhui] was one of them. And he’d get all his grog [alcohol] bought up for him and different things from the mainland. And he’d go out on the barge and meet the ship and tee up what was coming in and then he’d bring it into the bank. One day the provos [Provosts. Military Police] were waiting for him, you know what the provos were,

don’t you? And they said, “What are you doing with all this stuff, guy?” He said, “Oh one of the boys is having a party. ” He said, “Oh is he?” And he got some boy, bloke to come down and he said, “You sure you’re going to have a party?” He said, “Yeah.” He said, “We heard you were running the sly grog [illegal alcohol] business?” “Not me sir.” But he had 10,000 pounds in his pay book.

They checked it eventually, yeah. I don’t know what happened to him cause they’d moved on when we left them. That was before we actually took over the camp. A lot of black market went on.

No not mine, nothing to do with their duty, they were

still doing there jobs. After all, I started to help meself, so I can’t say anything against them. But it was late in the piece that I did it. But no, two bottles of beer meant a lot to some of the blokes. In fact I’ve got a book there called ‘Soldiers at Sea’ and all one particular unit done was run sly grog and the bloke was the best straits cray fisherman and he got into the

DT [delirium tremens, symptom of alcoholism] in the finish. See the spiders come out of the woodwork. No, I was responsible to see that they done their work. And for discipline that’s all.

I did not trade one beer. I never traded with the Yanks. What

my troops done as long as they done their duty I didn’t care a damn what they done. There was only one thing I objected to one time. My hut was up about that high off the ground and was built by the boys and had steps going up to it. And I’m coming out of the hut one day and I notice the steps weren’t there. Some of the buggers had pulled them out during the night. So I called a parade and I got the CO to come out on the parade, and find out what happened. A

man to step forward, the man that done it one pace to the front or one pace to the rear. Nobody owned up. He said, “Right sergeant-major, take back the parade.” I took them back, and I confined them to barracks for two nights. They didn’t take any bloody notice of it. They just got in their jeeps and went out to where the Yanks were showing pictures or a concert.

No up in the jungle.

Nothing. I mean it was my responsibility I had to deal with the men and I only handed one bloke over and that’s that corporal I told you about, he gave me lip like that and I said, “Right you’re on A46.” so I paraded him up and

conducted the prejudice of good order and military discipline, in that he did so and so. And he got fined so much and that was all put in their pay books, and then routine orders. You had to use this, I mean you knew how to deal with people and I’d been dealing with them since in the Boy Scouts in 1926.

There’s only way you can control men, if they disobey the routine order, then you can charge them. Well one of the things in routine orders is at all times you all had to be properly clothed, sleeves down, trouser legs down unless you’re engaged in manual activity. And if you got anything, you were charged with not being correctly dressed, and you got malaria or dengue fever later on,

that was treated as a self inflicted wound. Yeah, and a self inflicted wound was a bad thing, because that meant you didn’t get any pay while you were crook, nor did your dependants get any pay. And that was like blokes used to blow their fingers off or blow their toes off to get sent back to the mainland. Oh lots of things

went on people done.

None.

Cause I said we were there in 1944 to 1945 and peace was signed on the 15th August 1945 but work still had to be done until… I was one of the first

out of the unit because I’d been in the army so long. And I had a wife and daughter, and my daughter was born on Anzac Day 1945 and when I came home, my youngest daughter was born Armistice Day 1946.

That's there all up there. That’s the collage I had made.

Oh except for that case where they pulled the steps down, I had no trouble with them. I could handle the men.

Well I mean I learnt to handle men in the Boy Scouts. I was started in 1926 as a Patrol Leader and then I became Camp Master and

Group Scout Master and then I was a King Scout with two cords. And I knew what to do with people. You’ve got to learn how to deal with people. And if you can’t deal with them, then you’ve just got to find some other way.

Well when I started work in 1926, I used to sit in a train going to work and I used to look at the people in the seats opposite me and I’d think

she’d be a so and so, he’d do such and such. I used to get, read their eyes and you could form an opinion on people’s characters. And you had to live with people to know what they were like. It’s just a knack you’ve got to acquire. Some people you rub them up the wrong way as soon as you see them. Especially morons, I had trouble with one of them up at Sir Williams Hall

Hostel up in Heidelberg [in Melbourne].

Oh yeah I’ll tell you what happened. The Depression started to life in 1936 and when the AIF was formed they had a chance of getting something to eat and something to wear and somewhere to live. And a lot of them joined the army for that particular reason and that reason only. Then the

rumour went round that the war would be over by Christmas. Well it wasn’t over for four years, five years. But you’ve got all sorts, we had blokes on the Water Transport that had never seen water let alone seen it at sea. They come from up in the bush.

Yeah.

All I know is I got orders to report to a HQ, what do they call it, General Details Depot, return to the mainland. I’ll tell you the day. That photo was taken when I turned the corner to come down the street. I said, “Fancy coming back to this bloody place.” There’s no way you can describe it.

I wouldn’t have had six years working day and night and under all sorts of lights and on boxes and on stools and chairs and looking that way and writing and then looking that way and writing again and pull down this ledger and you’re stooping over desks. And I’d applied for cervical spinulosus and they reckon they could see nothing

in my history to account for it. I got blurred vision up in New Guinea and they corrected it. The next day they gave me these round wire glasses, wire rims and wire loops and they corrected the astigmatism. And yet it took me five years to get a pair of glasses after the war.

I lived in that street, which came up to the main street.

Yarraville.

And I used to stand on this corner and I’d catch all the blokes that came up from the factory down along the river, and

you know Yarraville was known as the Birmingham of Australia - factories from Footscray all the way down to Newport. And I’d catch these blokes that come through the park and they’d buy the Herald [Melbourne afternoon newspaper] off me. And later on I had a paper round and I used to go with a bloke called Skinny Mundy and he’d do one side of the street tonight, and I’d do that side tonight, and then he’d swap over to my side. On Saturday nights,

when the Sporting Globe came out, the newsagent used to go right down to the station and get the Sporting Globe out of the train, the guards van, and when Skinny got his, I’d be standing over the other side of the fence and he’d drop them over to me and I’d run across to the British Saloon and sell them in the British Saloon.

We got twopence a dozen, we had a strike and

then we got twopence halfpenny a dozen. But another things was the trains used to come up from the Newport Workshops, quite a lot of them, and the blokes that would come to the station, they’d put their heads out and ask for the paper, and you’d have a money bag here, and you’d fiddle round in the money bag for change of threepence. And the train would start off and you’d run along the train, and they’d say look keep it. That was the dodge

we used to use. Anything for money.

No. You went back to the newsagent and there was a platform like that along the counter, had all the comics and that on it, and you had to put your money on there, two bob and two single bob and 4 sixpences, and then threepences all in amounts of a shilling, and then pennies and halfpennies.

And we’d reach over to get our stack of papers and put them on the table, and pick up a couple of comics at the same time and that’s how we used to get our comics. You had to, there was no other way. It was a very bad time.

Oh Comic Cuts, that’s going back along way now, I know Comic Cuts and another one that sat on it, and you opened it and its was NOSMO KING and when

you straightened it out it said NO SMOKING.

‘Ginger Meggs’ was around later on. And ‘Bluey and Curly’. But I’d go into all the pubs and sell the papers in the pubs, and there was about five pubs in Yarraville then, the Bluestone, the Railway….

it was just something to help bring a few bob in, just to help Mum out cause Mum had to go washing, ironing and down the old tin shed in the corner with an old wooden copper, with wet wood that wouldn’t burn. And my older sister and I used to go down and bring back a big wicker bag of washing. We’d take it home and Mum would be up till midnight and

after ironing it, with an old box iron and a couple of flat irons. We had a wood stove and when I came round the house, when I ran out of paper, with my paper round, I used to go from the Yarraville Station right up Somerville Road, cross over Geelong Road and serve one Trust customer. And they’d be about

four papers I’d have to deliver to in Kingsville which was on that side of Somerville Road, West Footscray, Kingsville, Yarraville. And one bloke there, old Sam William, used to live in an old bluestone cottage. He come home every night drunk as a lord with two bottles of beer in a paper bag under one arm.

Didn’t go to anyone else’s

round.

All depend on how big he was.

No, no we didn’t interrupt one another’s paper round. I remember one time, this bloke I went to and he was a trust customer, that’s when you didn’t pay the newspaper boy, you paid the newsagent.

And he had these five big dogs in the front of the house. If the gate was open I didn't go near it but if the gate was shut I used to put the paper through the pickets and he reported me to the newsagent, old Holmes. He said, “If you do that again, I’ll sack you.” I said, “Well you may as well take your bloody papers now and sack me.” I said, “I’m not going to go up there. I’ll

get eaten alive by those dogs.” And this is a funny part about this. When we got up to New Guinea, the man that was the orderly room corporal, got Mentioned in the Dispatches, he was the son of this newsagent and he had a dance band in Yarraville, Lance Holmes. And he was old Holmesy’s son. Fancy running into him in New Guinea.

Oh we used to read…. the bloke in the bottom, the old swaggie…. I remember when I was doing a typing he came down to Williamstown High School, we had to translate into proper English one of the words he said, and he said me and

the missus, so I put down mistress.

No the First World War was over in 1918 and in 1916 my uncle, who served on Gallipoli, he was shot

through there and across his heart and come out of his left side, and he and his mate had been asked, they volunteered to go out and get water, so they got this kerosene tin with a handle on it, went out and got their water. On the way back his mate got killed and he got the bullet through there, and he lay in a sort of a shell hole all night, and when he didn’t turn up they come out to look for him. So they took him back

and bought a sniper up with them, and they put him in this shell hole. So the next morning when light came the sniper saw movement in the tree and he shot it down and killed it, and it was a Turkish woman. And that was my Uncle Tom, my mother’s youngest brother, the bachelor.

He told me what happened to him, yeah because I’ve got a photo there that was taken down at Anzac Hostel,

Brighton. This big mansion was taken over by the Repatriation [Commission] as the best place to put their returning TPIs [Totally and Permanently Incapacitated] and Uncle Tom was down there. And although my mother took me down there, I wasn’t allowed to go and see him because I was six years of age then. 1916, no I wasn’t six, and I took a photo when I was down at Anzac Hostel myself, after the war.

In the identical spot, cause I could identify it because there were two trees, like there, and two palms about that high around the water fountain. And when I went down there, the palms were about 35 feet high but the two trees were still there, they were there, so I was able to identify that spot so I took a photo there. But who took the photo of me, I don’t know.

No my mother told me because she’d see my uncle and I didn’t. I’d seen him after the war, he went down to live with my aunty down at Wonthaggi, and I rode the bike down there and saw him. And he came to see us, a bloke brought him down from Queensland, what do you call him, anyhow, but his crutches were on the

side. Oh this bloke he bought him down to see the aunty and he finished up in the Anzac Hospital in Brisbane.

No. All you saw was the Depression, or what do they call it

in those days, what was the name of the big, like a Depression.

No not a recession that was later that was ‘34. Oh they had soup kitchens and no work for anybody.

Well this was a,

Williamstown was the first place in Melbourne where they landed. If there had been water there, it would have been the capital of Victoria. But there was no water so they went up to Melbourne, up the bay.

Nothing. You, compulsory training when you reached the age of 18 you had to serve two years military training, navy training or air force training. And you went to parades, you went to camps and it was all money, you got paid for it. But unfortunately they lost all my

records when I came down here to do a tribunal, they were lost in dispatch somewhere. But no it was money, as I say we had a strike. I remember when the First World War ended they just opened a new theatre, one got burnt down at Yarraville, the Lyric, and we got a free night there. So when war ended

we all got out and marched up and down the streets, celebrating the Armistice.

Everyone.

Men and women, kids.

Banging drums and banging tin cans and banging pots and pans.

No flag waving in those days.

Oh you didn’t see much of the police in those days.

I remember the police strike. That was a terrible thing.

A day. But when the troops…see there was so many men lost in that First World War, there was 20,000 in one day

in one battle, both sides.

The worst part of it was Verdun, I read a book on it called the ‘Hell of Verdun’, the continuous bombardment the whole of the day.

You didn’t see much of them, because they’d been away

that long all they could do was get home, wanted to get home. I remember my mother and I and my sisters were down at Port Melbourne, to see my mother’s cousin from Pyramid Hill come home. And the spring on a boat, you know what the spring is? The steel hawser that goes and holds the bow and the stern in fixed position. Well a bloke was sticking his head out the

porthole and looking at the crowd and this spring tightened up and chopped his head off.

Hmm.

What was that, that would have been 1918, I’d have been seven. Not a nice thing to see, I worked on the waterfront for fifty years, at the Port of Melbourne.

Oh the crowd just went ‘Ohhhh’, just that fact that a bloke had got all the way through the war and come home and then lost his life. But he mightn’t have been there, he might’ve only been in the war for a year.

No.

That was 1929.

No war in Europe then.

No I was working down at Port Melbourne Station Pier, and you see these Japanese come off the ship, ordinary cargo ship. And they’d be in white uniform in white peak caps, they had box cameras hung round their neck and they had a book and pencil. And they’d walk right down Station Pier until they got to Beaconsfield Parade and they’d stand there and they’d have a bit of a pow wow and then they’d move out in different direction.

And they knew more about Melbourne than we did. They had their headquarters picked out as one of the big hotels in Melbourne.

I don’t know whether it was the Menzies or the Federal, one of the two was picked out as their headquarters. That was what they called 5th Column [enemy spies].

No didn’t realise at all, we knew they were up to something, but we didn’t know what they were up to. It was this time they were over in

America, declared war they were over in America, making agreement for peace. No but it was just, came very much into your mind when you’re coming back home, you knew where they got all their information from.

No other evidence, we weren’t prepared for war.

Well militiamen were, see we were called militiamen later on. What militiamen were trained to do was relieve permanent men, permanent army men from whatever job they were doing, like supplies or ordnance or garrison. And I remember we had a Colonel Shirley Goodwin, he called a CO’s parade one day at Fort Queenscliff and the CO’s parade everybody turned up, cooks turned out

white uniform, white caps, and they paraded in front of the Fortress Engineers Barracks on the parade ground. And Shirley gave them a lecture about how we were expected to serve our country and all this sort of thing. Then he gave the order, all those that wanted to enlist in the AIF, those in the front rank take one pace forward, and those in the rear rank one pace to the

rear, march. And the middle rank would stand still; there was only three ranks in those days. And the whole of the militia bar, about three, went out and there was about five of the PMF [Permanent Military Force] went out, and they had a nice and easy, comfortable job. They had their own canteen where there families could come in a buy all their groceries or anything they wanted. I know I bought a suitcase out of the canteen.

They weren’t prepared for war.

Well they had six inch guns, but they still, I remember the old gun that used to be at Fort Gellibrand, with a sign over it ‘Russian War’ and the Russians were going to invade Australia. I suppose you’ve seen those have you?

No I went down to Fort Queenscliff one time when a friend of mine come out from England. And we went down there and they’d had all these bamboo guns that they’d put up along the cliff to make it look as though they were heavily fortified. And we had 3 guns, A1, a B1, A1, A2 and B1

and they were the only six inch guns there. They had two over at Fort Nepean and they had a 4.7 at Fort Pearce. And we used to fire a hundred pound shell with a full charge from Queenscliff, or a hundred pound shell with a half charge from Nepean. And fire at targets out in the bay or out in Bass Strait.

29 yeah.

Yeah he abolished compulsory training. Billy Hughes [Prime Minister 1953-1923] tried to get it back but he lost his vote.

That was the Labor Party, [Australian Labor Party] that was policy. And they still don’t believe it. You remember the bloke that sat down in the middle of Swanston and

Collins Street with the people blocking the four streets? What was his name? Cairns, [Dr] Jim Cairns [Deputy Prime Minster of Australia 1974-1975]. They were against the Vietnamese war which I don’t believe we should have been involved in. Because that’s America’s trouble. America’s never fought a war where someone hasn’t done the dirty work for them. The only battle they ever fought in

was the last battle in 1918. That’s the only action they ever saw.

No, no way at all. In fact I was saying about a bloke that was Prime Minister, he used to sell all his scrap iron to Japan. They called him ‘Pig Iron Bob’. Remember him? Pig Iron Bob Menzies [Prime Minister Robert Menzies: 1939-1941 and 1949-1966] and we got all that back.

Down at Footscray on the Coode Island they had a Women’s Aircraft Battery down there and this morning people were coming home from mass and church and this shrapnel raining down on Footscray and Yarraville. They’d fired at a Japanese plane that had come up from the Bass Strait.

No it was an Anti-Aircraft Battery.

They did fire on a light Japanese plane that came up from Bass Strait.

Yeah early 40’s.

That’s a fact, because the women that lived next door to me had come home from mass down at St Augustine’s,

and there’s shrapnel raining down. Cause when the shell fragments, then the shrapnel drops.

I was a staff sergeant battery quartermaster of the 19th Battery of the 16th

Royal Australian Artillery.

I was mobilised.

All of the militia were mobilised, except those in special occupations.

I was to report to Fort Gellibrand that was at

Williamstown, in full marching order and me cufflinks. So we marched in, we arrived at Queenscliff, we used to go down in the [UNCLEAR] in those days. Arrived at Queenscliff at 12 o’clock, we had lunch. After lunch we went down to Crows Nest camp which was down on the Geelong side of Fort Queenscliff, and I had to equip,

for sleeping accommodation. Get palliasses for their bedding, straw, issue their blankets, eating utensils and feed them, with the assistance of the quartermaster that was down there. Every camp I went into and I’d go into two a year, I’d go in Easter and Christmas, with the advance party and come out with the rear party,

because I wanted the money. And I’d have to do all this, I had to train them all. Mainly my work was to go to the store and get all their cookware, stuff to put up tents and then the straw and everything, just look after them.

Well we were there trained to take over from the permanent

artillery. They’d go out 3 o’clock, they’d knock off. Some of them would go home to their families, others would get dressed up and go out. Life of paradise while down there.

No not really if you were in a unit, unless the unit got shifted over or you volunteered to go to some other unit,

you didn’t know when you went away.

Nothing.

They formed two special branches, we had the 18th Battery and the 19th Battery. One was down at Sandringham near the football ground and the other was in Fort Gellibrand. And once a month I had to go down there and check up to see if they needed any equipment. And I didn’t like, that bloody sending me up to Sandringham Football Team.

Oh it was a long walk from the station. And…

Sandringham Town Hall, that was down behind the football ground. Had to walk around that big concrete fence.

Well see I was coming back from training one night, and Fort Gellibrand and I’m whistling as I’m going up the street, and somebody yelled out, “Is that you Jack?”

I said, “Yeah.” and it was the bloke over the road, Charlie Rogan. And he said, “They’ve just taken Isabel round to Kelvin Grove.” that was the hospital, the maternity hospital. So I went inside put me rifle down and got undressed and proper clothes and walked round there. And I went to Kelvin Grove and they said, “She’s in the labour ward.” I said, “Can I see her?” They said, “Yeah.” Well I went in

there and she grabbed hold of me hand, nearly broke it. She was a big woman, not a big woman but she was well built, and the nurse said, “Come on, you’ll have to get out of here and come back in the morning.” And when I got back in morning they said, “You’re the father of a lovely daughter.”

Not QM, quartermaster

sergeant.

Yes quartermaster, regimental quartermaster and battery quartermaster or company quartermaster.

Well apart from that the fact that I was up in the Junior Leaders School and I got to know people that had come back from the Middle East. And other blokes that had

come up from different units to gain promotion and I got to know a lot of men. They had to come to me if they wanted anything and one thing come to my mind. A bloke came in one day and he said, “You the quartermaster sergeant?” And I said, “That’s right, sir.” He said, “We’re from the Herald [newspaper].” I said, “Yeah.” “Do you know any jokes about quartermasters?” And there was I thinking of ‘Bluey and Curly’ and I said, “Oh I can tell you a few.” And

they said, “Oh we know all those.”

You see so many men I suppose thousands of men had gone through my stores. Two at Queenscliff, one at Crows Nest and one at Fort Queenscliff. And then the men that went through and we had three watches on the gun

at the guns at Fort Nepean, and we’d have a board. You’d have one watch on and one watch in reserve and one watch off duty. Then you had to keep track of all these men, those that were on leave, those that were in the hospital or sick, and those who were absent without leave. And you got to know so many men.

You had to know ‘Routine Orders’, ‘Equipment Standing Orders Part One General’. And I knew that from cover to cover, so much so that I was recommended for an officer’s selection board. I went up before the board, and the brigadier in charge and a colonel from the A Section, a colonel from the Q Section and so they asked me questions, then the

Q bloke asked me questions and I knew that more than he did, and the brigadier said to him, “He knows a lot more than you bloody well do.” Then they got me on the A business. Well of course I knew the administration, Army Military Regulations and Orders and I passed that, and the Major Gully was in charge of the unit, Backhouse had gone up to Borneo, and he signed the certificate to say he would be happy to have this

soldier as an officer under his command. After the war, peace was declared, they wanted me to go to BCOF [British Commonwealth Occupation Force] and I said, “No I’m going home, I’ve had enough of this” and they said, “Oh I’ll be home before you.” the adjutant said. I said, “I don’t care when you get home.” He’d come back from the Middle East. I said, “All I want to do is get home.” And I was first out of the unit

and he didn’t get out for a lot, lot longer. Burrows I think his name was.

Oh no I know about the army and I keep watching these documentaries and I’ve been back to the Duke of Wellington my last one, wasn’t it.

But they were singing that song the other day, ‘Good old Collingwood Forever’. Do you know where that came from?

Boer War.

‘Goodbye Dolly Grey’

They used the theme.

Good old Collingwood Forever.

Oh we still had to do our training. I was still learning Q work, because at Fort Gellibrand they done their training, then we’d go down to Queenscliff for a camp, and we’d do actually

training on the guns, 6 inch guns, and we’d have a shoot one shoot, which meant we fire the guns on one particular day only. And when I became quartermaster sergeant down there, I’d be battery commander’s assistant which was if anything, the battery commander was casual see so I’d take over until they got another officer up there. And you had to be in the battery’s commander’s post and you had to know all about

the speed of the wind there and monitor all the orders that had to be given. You had the three guns down there where you could see them. And I remember one time we’re doing training and the gun was loaded and the order to fire. You had two layers, one there who was the site layer, he laid for line and the range finder, he’d put the range

on his dial on the gun, but if it was pitched, you’d go down in the pit and use this range finder down in the pit. And the site layer got target on line, he’d call out ‘Fire’ and then they’d slam the breech shut and they’d pull the lanyard. Well one day an old bloke was there and he was number one on the gun, he was supposed to fire,

he had the gun down next to a coal fire and he pushed it in and it misfired straight away, and he had to drop the breech and he had a big bucket of water there and you had to stand clear because the 303 cartridge would be in the breech and that would fire and ignite the charge and anything that came back when it ignited, that’d blow back out that hole and you’d get

burnt, like a laser.

Sol Calt [?], was his name, Sergeant Sol Calt.

Oh God yeah. We’ll you’ve got to feed a man, you’ve got to clothe him, you’ve got to find somewhere for him to live, you’ve got to equip him and you’ve got to get all his expendable stores that are

necessary.

Yes, but I liked it.

Oh how can I explain it. Well when you’ve had Boy Scouts and the Cubs, and one of my Cubs I used to take, I took them to camp at Mount Evelyn one time and one of them became a Footscray and Victorian rover [footballer]. You remember Jimmy Thoms, well

his brother was a gynaecologist up at Footscray Hospital, Doctor George Thoms.

Oh you wouldn’t. Well Jimmy Thoms, you train people see and you’d have to feed them, see they were fed. You looked after their health in general.

I reckon it was. That’s my opinion of it.

Oh well down there when we were at Queenscliff, these blokes were training to go overseas, and they went overseas. And they thought they were going on a holiday because the war was going to be over by Christmas. And then they got over there and they found the bloody war, it wasn’t over by Christmas after all.

Well I mean the times those days were terrible.

You didn’t know where the next meal was coming from. My mother used to cut down clothing. She looked like a rag and bone merchant.

No that was Queenscliff. Gellibrand was only our training. You know Fort Gellibrand, where

Williamstown Football Club is?

I knew I could do it.

No I had a family. I left the family behind as it was, even to go down to Queenscliff. And then I used to take them down there sometimes, get a hotel somewhere, the Queenscliff Hotel or over at Sorrento. And they’d go down there for a week and my daughter

won a baby competition down there when she was one year old. That’s her up there.

No, no the, there were five hotels down in Queenscliff one with the old whale barn there, that was right as you come off the pier. In fact I’ve got a photo there I took in 1916 when we went down to the Harbour Trust picnic when my father was working there. It’s got my grandmother, my mother,

my grandmother’s two friends and my whole family and that was down at…that’s when they used to have the big pine trees down there. And you’d come off the boat, for the Harbour Trust picnic, you’d come of the boat and they’d have a kiosk there, and you’d have a bag of lollies, boiled lollies when you come off the boat. And you got a toy when you come up to the kiosk.

Yeah the Mars, later she became AT139,

Army Tug 139 and Angus McDonald was the skipper on it. He used to have his pipe, little Scotsman. They made him a lieutenant and Mamma Beasley and forget the other bloke.

I don’t think they mined it, I don’t know because

I left Queenscliff in 1931 and went up to the 2nd Army Junior Leaders School, to get away from the water, I’d been round it all me life, working round it. And you didn’t get sunburnt, you got wind burnt and salt air is not good for you I can tell you that.

Yeah that was used by the Yanks first and they used to, when they come back from Guadalcanal, they went to Ballarat and they gave them Alfredton, the park out there, and they didn’t like because it was all swamp, when it rained it was all water. And they moved into the

big park and took over that, oh they took what they wanted. I remember down on the Victoria Dock at the end Dudley Street, there was a gate there and they wanted to get a plane out and the gate wasn’t wide enough so they just ripped the gate, took the gate down and ripped the post down and drove up Dudley Street with a plane. They got down to Point Cook and there was no phone there for the CO [Commanding Officer] so they went out

down the street and took one of the public telephones. Oh they just took what they wanted, they thought they owned the place. When I was up at Seymour that was their base camp and they used to bring all the stores up there, and they, there was nothing but trucks down at Dysart siding outside of Seymour and Puckapunyal.

The same,

only I was the regimental quartermaster sergeant then. 3rd Group Australian Water Transport, R.A.E. [Royal Australian Engineers, AIF] And the RAE business used to get under the noses of the engineers and old Nichol or whatever his name was. He was writing the history and I’ve read some of his books up at the State Library, and he didn’t like anyone else using the name ‘RAE’. Our colour patch had the purple field on it, well that was

peculiar to engineers and we were called sappers, not privates. We were sappers because we were at sea.

No when, I told you when I had this urinal inspection and I was classified A1, and I said to sergeant-major

what about making me fit to join the AIF. See when I had that tonsillectomy what’s it name, appendectomy, and the paper said ‘not a normally healthy man.’

You could only go out of Australia if you weren’t A1. You had to be A1 and

was medically fit for action.

Oh I’d been training to go overseas. When I ended up down at Queenscliff and I could have got out of the army altogether because I was in a reserved occupation. But I just walked out went down to Fort

Gellibrand and then I told [UNCLEAR] I was on war service. Because as a reserved occupation they could have called me back. Now we had an electrician, Bobby Webster, he went up town one day. He enlisted in the AIF and he came back and he said to Senior (he was a First World War man), he said, “I’m in the AIF”. He said,

“Oh are ya?” So he rang up the chief electrical engineer and he told him and they took him out straight away. They said, “You can’t go, you’re in a reserved occupation.” He was a leading hand electrician.

No well I’d been trained for action, well normally I would have

just got straight down to Fort Queenscliff. And I could have gone in there, but I wasn’t A1.

No I wanted to do what I’d been trained for. I’d been taking the government’s money since 1929, so ten years I’d been taking money from them. And although I had a wife and a daughter, I mean it wasn’t a fair thing for them either, but

I just had to put that in the back of me mind.

No I just told her I had to report to Queenscliff.

No she knew what I was doing, cause I’d come home the night she had the first baby.

No, yeah Anzac Day

1937, no ‘39. We were married in 1937.

Well I worried more about, I was telling ya. The 18th and 19th Batteries they formed two units, two companies, that meant garrison artillery and fortress

engineers. And they were to go L Force (MacArthur didn’t like the 18th and 19th business) That L Force was to go to Ocean Island, but the Japanese got there before them and they finished up at Rabaul. Now I was to be battery quartermaster sergeant of that force and the bloke from South Australia, had come over here to Melbourne

and he got married on the strength of expected promotion to battery quartermaster sergeant. And Tassie said to me, “You don’t mind do you, if he goes?” I said, “Under the circumstances, I don’t.” He said, “There’s always another chance.” And the M Force went to Darwin and they were there during the bombing and I’ve got a pamphlet there, Defenders of Australia,

Pearl Harbor. And Pearl Harbor in my opinion, was just a war of attrition from then on. It was a war of attrition for the kick in the teeth they got. And the Yanks were everything as brutal as the Japs, believe you me, and they burnt them out of fox holes with flame throwers. And their whole attitude was to save face and get to Japan and take over Japan.

Made no difference. I had a job to do and somebody had to do it.

They were sent to Canungra first to do jungle training.

Everything they did was expendable. They had a thing was built for a certain job, a barge or work boat we built for a certain job and when it done the job, it was left there.

I didn’t transfer them.

All I did at the Army Juniors Leaders School was to train them for promotion in their units because they had to go up to New Guinea, but they had to do their jungle training and all that before they went.

Group.

They had as I said they had two

Small Ship Companies, two Port Craft Companies and one Water Ambulance Convoy.

Yes it was originally some of them come back from Tobruk were under 1 Army, 1st Army. All the man transport was formed in England and the barges went over to the port at Tobruk.

And some of those soldiers come back to Australia and joined the Water Transport. In the early part that Water Ambulance Convoy was known as Sea Ambulance Transport. I’ve got the breakdown of all the groups and that.

We had to

form, get volunteers into the unit. W were like on recruiting duties, and as I say I had to go down and bring up one of the barges, I brought up the first one. An ordnance officer took us down there in his car and I had to get that barge back up to Melbourne, tell you what, it wasn’t fun. Two engines there and no cover, they were just

completely open.

Like a big tub.

Fords at Geelong.

Fords Motor Works.

Oh I had one bloke with me. This bloke two of us down to Geelong and he was the deckhand and I was the coxswain.

Oh it wasn’t a big tub.

Capacity to carry five ton of cargo which means that would just take an ordinary lorry [truck], and so many troops.

They were. As I say there was no steering wheel, and the motors were over here, two Ford motors and you had a lever on each like a Bren gun carrier, you know the Bren gun carrier? You lock one side

and the other side would spin it round, and then you had to adjust your steering. If you want to go that way well you let that motor out that way and pull this one back and put the brake on and turn it, and that’s the way to control it. The bow had this ramp on it, it went up and I can show you photos of it. It was just like that it was open and when you hit the

sea that would come through that and you’d get drowned. They had 5 ton, 20 ton, 40 ton and they built two 120 ton. But they only ever used one and that was up at Jacquinot Bay. 53 Port Craft Company had it.

One group done the Torres Strait Islands, they fed Merauke, they fed Hermansberg Mission, and if it wasn’t for them they would have starved, because there was no such thing as Water Transport before.

And you had to improvise, if you had a barge with nothing on it you had no shelter you had to improvise some sort of a cover for it. And you’d grab what you could to build it. If anything went wrong you had t…o in one case we had to put a barge ashore because the tail shaft had gone so invented a diver’s helmet out of a gas mask and a water bottle and they’d go down,

all these snakes floating round the water, sea snakes.

New Guinea.

You had nothing to cook on, you had a Primus stove and you put the billy or whatever you wanted to cook on there. There was no provision for anything, they weren’t prepared for it.

Can you get that book for me over there? That’s where we operated, that’s the South West Pacific area.

Hmm yeah. We got orders that we were to go to 2nd Army.

And headquarters went up first after having formed these companies.

Yeah well 1 Water Transport Group was the original and they operated up round Milne Bay, Port Moresby and round the Torres Strait Islands.

The 3 Group, there was 13 Small Ships, 16…that’s our lot.

We were 3 Group. We come under 2nd Army.

Lieutenant Colonel Backhouse. A.N. Backhouse. I believe he was on Gallipoli during the First [World] War.

No, no that was Lieutenant

Colonel Miles, he was a chief instructor up at 2nd Army Junior Leaders School or SAJLS as they called it.

Oh we got pre-embarkation leave, I’ve got a photo of that somewhere too, taken at Williamstown Gardens.

No Williamstown Gardens yeah, that’s where the old gun was.

It was just war life, and if you didn’t you deserted or went AWL [absent without leave] and they picked you up and give you six months hard labour. I’ve seen men trying to go away that came back from the Middle East. When

I was down getting in, enlisting, this bloke came along dragging a bit of string along, He said, “What are you doing?” He said, “Taking the dog for a walk, Sir.” making out he was troppo [unstable], he didn’t want to go back up to New Guinea. He’d been to the Middle East and he didn’t want to New Guinea. I think they got up to all dodges [tricks]. A man that was a sergeant was there when I was doing that school when I was a gunner, he was

in the First World War and their transport was down the south below Tasmania on its way round through wherever Egypt or wherever it was when the war finished, so he didn’t get to the war. But later on he became lieutenant colonel in charge of the 12th Field Artillery and got the DSO [Distinguished Service Order] at Alamein.

No we didn’t sail up; others came up from Melbourne, convoys. But we all had to equip and we had to get barges on, the necessary vessels and in that book it gives you the story the 3rd Water Ambulance, what was it, Number 3 convoy and they picked up and they went from Melbourne and they were off Mackay when the

peace was declared, over.

We went up by train, and we came home by train. I disembarked 5 trains to get to Melbourne.

Hmm. One funny experience I had when I got the train at New South Wales,

we had to go to a camp out there and have a meal, on one of those double decker trams you know, the conductor was along the running board and took the fares. And I was made OC [Officer in Charge] of train, I had to go through and check everyone had settled in the train, and I opened the door and, ‘Eeeeeek’, it was the AWAS [Australian Women’s Army Service] were in there, and the lieutenant came running down and she said, “Don’t worry about this sergeant-major.

I’ll look after this end.” So they all changed and everything.

Yeah and there was one bloke on that train, he was our adjutant, finished up, he was a sergeant but finished up as our adjutant, Ray, oh the name escapes me, sitting there, Ray Tyrrell. I said, “What are you doing?” He said, “I’m going home.” He’d been prisoner of war he was taken in Rabaul,

yeah prisoner of war of the Japs.

Oh it was terrible you’ve got no idea what the Coral Sea’s like. You heard of that big storm that just come through, America got that big storm, that was from the Coral Sea.

Oh I was used to it, I mean I rode it out.

I’m sitting like on the bulwark sort of, on the side of the ship here and our table was there on the ship’s carpenter, the chippie [carpenter] was there and these two blokes that had just come back from being sea sick, and these two carafes were on the table and the water was going….. and these blokes were watching. And the chief said to me, “Have a look at them sergeant-major” and I watched them and ‘urggggh’, oh

terrible. If you’ve never been sea sick you’ve got no idea what its like.

Well we left five men on the barge and as long as one man was on deck to hold the wheel it was alright, the others were just sliding round with their boots on or on deck sick. And they spew [vomit] all over, and the toilet, they’d have a tyre slung over the side with a rope

and you got over the side, or if you just wanted to make water, you just piddled over the side and if you wanted a bog [wanted to defecate], you sat in this tyre and put your feet up against the belting round the gunnel and just hoped a wave didn’t come up too high.

And, when they went over to Tol Plantation to sign the treaty over there, some of these

brass hats were on board and they’d say, “My man, where’s the toilet?” “Over there.” “We can’t see anything!” “Just have a look over the side.” They said, “Sit on there if you want to do anything but if you don’t, just piddle over the side.” “Oh dear!” Brass Hats, that’s on their caps.

No,

the sea has no respect to a person.

Oh we didn’t have many officers in port because not only was it us, but the Taroona took other units up to New Guinea, different places, and they dropped us off on the way up.

Actually it didn’t mean anything, because I knew that I wanted to go and I was happy to get out of Australia. One occasion I had sent a signal round to all the units on the island asking if they had any spare officers, and the signals come back, no spare officers. So after tea

I’m just sitting in the office there, doing something, and this fellow walked in, used to be a warrant officer up at SAJUL with me and his name was Shaw. And this lieutenant came in “What are you doing here, Shaw?” He said, “I’m going back to the mainland on leave.” I said, “Are you?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Give us a look at your movement orders.” [He’d a] supercilious look on his face, and I said, “Yeah they’re in order” and give it back

to him. I said, “You want to take a tip from me?” He said, “What’s that?” I said, “Don’t go near the officers’ mess in Lae.” That’d be about two or three mile out from where we were. He said, “Why?” I said, “I’m just giving you a bit of advice.” See because when I told the CO there were no spare officers on station, he said, “Right.” he said, “have your kit packed. Nine o’clock in the morning you catch the

plane up to Aitape and I’ll commission you in the field.” And of course when this Shaw turned up, I thought if he got to see the CO that was the end of my getting a commission again. So he went into the officers’ mess at Lae. He was there with Colonel Backhouse, and the colonel said, “What are you doing here, Shaw?” He said, “I’m going back to the mainland on leave Sir.” “Are you? Got your movement orders?” “Yes, Sir”

“Oh, they’re in order. Be on a plane at nine o’clock tomorrow morning and go to Aitape and wait and take out a detachment out there.” I wasn’t fated to be.

Ah, I gave it me best chance.

They were. They were responsible

that the men were all there, and the officers had their jobs to do. And as I say we were short staffed. We had a transport officer that looked after the transport, I had the other jobs to do. Recreation officer you had to keep men active, like keep them doing something, and the other one, was to serve the beer and also get tobacco and

cigarettes and then the blokes that were going down on leave, they’d want some tobacco and cigarettes and they’d buy it off the canteen. Well they were getting cigarettes there for twopence a packet and tobacco also was Log Cabin, jungle sealed and you had the rubber seal on it. I had five tins in me trunk when I came home.

Pardon

Yeah.

Yeah it was these vacuum packed with a rubber seal and I had to break them open.

Well I had sergeants I could hand over to, and they’d do orderly room jobs and work around the camp, and they’d have corporals.

No, if you didn’t have mates in the army, you may as well cut your throat.

Oh they were all mates. Although they didn’t like me but I had to take it.

Well if they did that in the Water Transport, they wouldn’t have got anywhere.

Because officers either were the skippers on the boat. They might be first mates, they might be second mates, they might be engineers, but they had to all work together and if you didn’t have a mate as I say there no good you being there.

No. I wasn’t the typical English Pommy sergeant-major. That’s the only type they were, the Poms, rank,

Poms were always taught to obey and in the Pommy Navy they did everything at the double. I had a bloke work with me at Port Melbourne, Jimmy German, he was a what do you call him, chief petty officer shipwright in the navy in England, and he was always running everywhere he went, they had to do everything at the double. You know Alf Maslin, I was telling you about? He was in the glasshouse [gaol] over in India, and that was where all the prisoners

were sent. And once you entered the door, the gates of the glasshouse, you did everything at the double. You never walked, you run. And the British troops were always being taught to obey, but the Australian, he was a bloody larrikin, he done what he wanted to do and you acted accordingly. A bloke’d come to me and he’d say I want this, I want that. And I said, “No good what you want mate, it’s what you ask for.

If you want anything, you ask for it and then I’ll have a look at it.” And then I’d have a look and say, “Oh no, that’s good enough for another six months yet.” And this bloke came down Mount Martha one day and his mates had said to him, “Where are you going?” “Going to get a new pair of trousers at the Q Store.” They said, “That bastard won’t give you anything, he’s lousy.” But my job was to see the man got what he wanted and if he didn’t want it, he didn’t get it. If he didn’t deserve it, he didn’t get it.

And I looked at them and said, “They are a bit tatty aren’t they, you can shoot peas through them.” I might give him a pair of trousers.

It was A, M, R & O. Army, Military Regulations and Orders and then there were King’s Regulations which means that the soldier was treated, or assaulted in any way… any officer who strikes a

soldier, not his superior, he can be court-martialled, that’s why I had the regimental sergeant-major at Queenscliff court-martialled.

Hmm.

Oh he whipped into me with a bloomin’ leather stick ’cause I wouldn’t do what he told me to do. I was in charge of the store and he sent this gunner up to get a couple of medicine balls, and I said, “Who told you to come up here?” and he said, “Joe Steel.” I said, “I don’t care what Joe Steel

wants.” He was a 5 bob a day gunner, see. Joe come up and this bloke got in the corner and he said, “I sent a man up here to give you an order and you disobeyed it.” I said, “I’m in charge of this store not you, Mr Steel.” and he had this short leather stick and he belted me round the calves see, and I had welts come up there. And I’m going out the

gate and he said, “Where are you going?” I said, “I’m going down to see the doctor.” I went down and saw the doctor and he said, “Who done that?” I said, “Joe Steel.” So I told Barker Hayes then who was the battery commander and he said, “Oh we’ll get him under King’s Regulations” so he looked up and he said, “Any officer who strikes a soldier not a superior is guilty. He said this right in front of the

adjutant that was in charge because what’s his name had gone overseas, and he said, “Oh you can’t do that.” I said, “Why can’t I?” He said, “Because you disobeyed an order.” I said, “He had no authority over me.” So anyway to finish up, what’s his name General…., big fat bloke up at HQ, went over to America as an ambassador, he’s sitting there, with his

pot in his lap. We all marched in; March, Halt, Left turn, Salute. We saluted, took caps off and he said, “Joseph Beck Steel?” “Yes, Sir” “Joseph Beck Steel, Sir. Twenty-seven years a soldier, Sir. MM [Military Medal], DCM [Distinguished Conduct Medal] and Croix de Guerre, Sir.” and I said, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” and this

Smart, he said, “We’re here to fight the Japs and the Germans, not one another.” And they knew about the Japs before they came into the war. ‘Course they didn’t come in until 1942. They bombed Pearl Harbor.

No, we were both reprimanded.

Because Smart thought I’d done the wrong thing.

No at this time, he was actually warrant officer class 1 but when the war broke out they were…. he was a lieutenant, temporary Lieutenant warrant officer class 1.

Oh it was a different atmosphere. The same as over in Egypt. When they went over to Egypt they were bloody larrikins. They used to go to all the brothels and sell everything to them, that was the First World War.

Yeah well we were only headquarters

and we were stationed at Milford Haven, but the people that done the actual work such as carrying men and supplies and bringing back wounded and all that sort of thing, they were actually fighting the Japs, aerial bombardment. We weren’t allowed out at night, we weren’t allowed out in the day time because of the Japs, the zeros and all that coming

down. And they had to have a look at the weather before they went out and then they’d go out at night. In that book, there was two barges that went out at night and you had to hug the coastline, because you had nothing to steer by, no compasses and you didn’t have any lights. And you’d keep in touch with the coast so that you could see where you were going. But this particular morning, it was raining like hell during the night, and the rain

was still there the next day, so they couldn’t see the shore, and they kept going on till they’d gone past their estimated… where they were supposed to go and they finished up… and they pulled in and they fired the recognition signal before they got close to shore and they were met with mortar and machine gun fire. They’d run into a Jap’s nest. They just

turned turtle and…….

Headquarters were in control of all the units and had to move, tell them what movements they had to take. You go to so and so, you go to so and so, they’d send that signal out to the unit.

Oh wasn’t a target.

Oh well they’d gone ahead see. They’d gone to Borneo by this time, and MacArthur was island hopping around the Pacific.

Bloody awful. Imagine what it’s like in the jungle over the equator.

No it was just jungle growth and they had to clear everywhere they wanted a campsite.

Oh yeah, I’ve gone up, going on that trip to Kaiapit and you’d see mounds and you’d scrape away at them and one time we uncovered a big heap of ball bearings in their jungle proof paper and that, and drums of

gases, the Yanks called them. The natives had stolen and they’d stored them in the jungle and the jungle just grew over them. They took more stuff when the Yanks went than anybody else did.

I had a hut. But the others had barracks, because it was headquarters, and they had stretcher and a mosquito net

and always had to be up in the day time and down at night. And that’s why I say we found a mosquito net down, something must’ve be in there, so the adjutant got inquisitive. You’re getting rain storms, you’re in tropical storms and would rain for days sometimes. And after the war, they brought out what they call bath units, army bath units and we had this

corrugated iron circular…. and we’d put this circle round, it’d be about that high and then these bath things that would come in, we’d put these pipe showers up and pump water into them, and you went in there and got a shower. When you got out, you had to find somewhere to wipe your feet, because it would become a mud heap. But it wasn’t, nothing to write home about.

Yeah.

No you didn’t use, you used malthoid for roofing or thatching. The natives would thatch it.

Mmm, but they had to be built up, you had the officers’ mess, then the store, you had the colonel’s office

and all those utilities like, and you’d sit at your desk, office, and I used to have to make out rations sheets, which you’ve got to put in the day before, how many men you were going to have tomorrow. You had to account for the men that were on the job, the men that were on leave, the men that are sick in the hospital, the men that are AWL and you had to work,

anticipating how many men would be there the next day, and then they’d just send you out that number of rations.

Oh just the normal army equipment. Ledgers, not ledgers, A.M.R.& O. and King’s Regulations and I had to leave them behind. I couldn’t bring them home with me. But they, oh just usual administration

work.

Oh rolls and duties, general work.

No the only thing I took up from Australia was a leather case, and it started to go mouldy up there, so I went down to the postal corporal and I made a skirt, like a grass skirt out of parachute silks. They had

cords like silks, and I took it into the post office and I said to Sergeant Hamley, I said, “You got any relatives down in Victoria?” He said, “I’ve got a father, stationmaster of Footscray.” And he was my cousin, he was a cousin of mine through my family. My mother, one of her sisters married a bloke called Fred Hamley, he was a pastry cook out at Oakleigh. And this Hamley

was a stationmaster. And then I said, “How about posting this?” He said, “Leave it to me, mate.” He said, “I’ll put it in the official mail bag and it got straight down to Melbourne.

No, signals were on their own. They were a separate unit. We had them at Milford Haven. They were

pigeons..…..see in the early part of the world, they had nothing. Australia wasn’t prepared and they used to take two pigeons out in their boats that went out and in case they had any messages to send, they’d send the two pigeons out. In fact in the ‘Soldiers at Sea’, they’d have one bloke was standing out there with his khaki cap on khaki uniform and a pigeon in his hand and

they’d have a message attached to the, like, carrier, and they’d send them back to base. Well one day they sent this message back to base and one pigeon got accidentally shot down somehow or other but the other one got back. That was when I was telling you these two barges, that they had run into a Jap post.

Sent two because if one didn’t get through the other

might.

More or less like cigarette paper, flimsy paper.

No we did have ink in those days.

Actually I didn’t write any so I wouldn’t be able to

tell you if they used a pen or a pencil.

I don’t know. See all I knew about the pigeon….Sergeant Ball this time and one bloke called Slim Sanderson, I took a photo of them. I’ve got a photo there taken, they were separate by they messed with us, they had their meals with us.

Nothing.

Oh there might have been.

Oh there’d be skits and that you know, bits of paper stuck up here and of some fancy sheila [woman].

Oh yeah. Oh no we went up to Madang and the bombers up there. We were in the graveyard. One was ‘Bums Away’ instead of ‘Bombs Away’. This was ‘Bums Away’ and this was a picture of a beauty, with two boobs and they’d use it as target practice.

‘Boobs Away’. That was the name of the bombers. They had all fancy names.

Oh the Yanks were a different kettle of fish. I didn’t like them. When we first got up to New Guinea, we had to go down to get water, we had a three ton water tank. We had to go down to their watering points to get water. We got it and brought it back, you couldn’t drink it, they’d double chlorinated it. The only way you could drink it was to boil it. They damn well nearly poisoned the lot of us. We didn’t have a big crowd at 3 Group headquarters, we might have had thirty men that’s all.

Officers not men.

They weren’t with us. They were in Lae. They did have a place next door to us, a camp, it was like a plateau and they had this camp with their big full tents, wooden floor boards, about that high off the ground and a trap door in the middle

and that was a cellar where they kept all their goodies. And they were pulling these down one day and I said to their officer lieutenant, “What about giving us one of those for back at camp?” “Oh.” he said, “I’ve got to destroy them.” So they just put a torch to them, as they called it, and burnt the lot. And this place I was telling you about, they sent a patrol out one day and they found a hole in the side of the, it was like

a cliff face, and they sent a patrol in there to see what was in there. And when they got in there they come back they found it was a Japanese hospital, with troops wounded and all that in it, so they went back and reported it, what do you think they done?

They dynamited the heavens to it, buried them all alive.

Oh it was on the way into Lae.

No that what they told us happened. There’s only, it’s what do they call it… might have been hearsay, but I can’t swear to it that I actually heard it, I only

got the information from someone else.

Oh they wouldn’t have known it until they got there because the Japs were in there long before the Australians got there.

No actually our camp was here and then there was a road into Lae. Then there was a tin can wharf, and the Docks Operating Group used to unload all the Australian vessels that came in there, and the Yanks would unload theirs. And they had Korean prisoners of war and they’d come down with a jacket on with a big red P

on the back of it, POW [Prisoners of War] and they were cheeky buggers. If we said anything, they’d spit at us and everything.

The Koreans, yeah.

They had different colour uniform on. I never actually saw a Japanese in uniform. As I told you, they’d moved by this time, they’d been driven out of

Lae and I used to go to the Malahang, the [UNCLEAR] Chapel and that’s where the action had taken place, and this chapel was fibrous cement and there were holes in it everywhere. And at Malahang, which is just down from Lae, there was a Japanese ship had been bombed and it was rusting away on the beach.

Oh just the day of a soldier’s life.

Well I had to do all the work that had to be done for the day. See I had transport there and had drivers, had one driver to go into Lae and then one driver to go to Labu

they wanted one driver to go up to Aitape, not Aitape, Kaiapit or Madang, where the Yanks’ big air base was.

Not Madang, Nadzab.

It was normally the corporal and myself. And the adjutant would have his office

with his staff. All the officers worked through the adjutant not through the CO.

Just log books and whatnot, note books, army forms, plenty of those. In the Q, there was F forms.

No.

Oh you had to have all that, they had a roster there.

Oh we had the ordinary pen and ink. Had to keep attendance rolls and leave rolls and

oh, it’s hard to name it.

No not so much. We’d get the signals to send messages out to the islands where the different units were, and we’d pass all that onto them. If anything had to be done, but I was up in the RSM [Regimental Sergeant Major]. I was responsible for discipline mainly and

they reduced our Q [UNCLEAR] to a captain quartermaster who was a regular army man, you know, a trade group 3 stores clerk, and I had a sergeant, two corporals and so many sappers working for me, including two girls, AWAS who used to help work in the store. Now that was the 2nd Army Junior Leaders School.

‘42.

No, that Corporal Watts the bloke I told you about went out in the jungle and chasing butterflies. And the jungle was impenetrable, you had all these lantana vines which was like a string with barbs on it.

And but you used to get some tom thumb tomatoes, about the size of your thumb and they’d grow on vines and you’d have bananas growing, paw paws, plenty of food around in the, what was the cleared areas. But the Ramu Valley was way up where they used to have the gardens for feeding all the people down in the hospital.

We had, I told you we picked up four Thornycroft Jeeps at Brisbane.

They were the Australians, the others were the Yanks. And they were just inside the fence of the camp and I went down to get my jeep one day and it had gone.

My jeep and it had gone. I had my own jeep because I used to have to go into Lae and do field returns and get different orders and that to come out from Lae. And they had the provos

search the whole area. They went up as far as Nadzab and they couldn’t find it. All I can presume that one of these Yankee troop ships had pulled in and they’d come over and pinched it during the night and taken it away.

Well it was gone and they couldn’t find it anywhere in the area. Lae, in Nadzab or anywhere else, Butibum.

Hmm.

Wasn’t.

I heard of two battles they had, you might’ve heard of the Battle of Bourke Street?

Yeah I heard that too when were up there, we could hear the rifle fire, that was at

South Brisbane, now known as Roma.

Hmm.

Yeah it was Roma Station. I’ve been up there. I’ve been all over Australia since the war. But the Battle of Bourke Street [Melbourne], the Yanks are walking down with the Australian girls on their arm as usual, one side of Bourke Street and some of the Australians were walking down the other. And they objected to this very much the Australians,

and they started chiacking [teasing] the Yanks and the Yanks started using their fancy swear words, so where’s it all end. There was a Battle of Hosies, you know where Hosies is, no not Hosies, Princes Bridge, there was a Battle outside there one day, fist fight.

I didn’t see many cases of it.

No well I know other people who did. One bloke got caught for it one time in the AIF was going away. They were up in the grandstand

and somebody was pinching money from under their kitbags, which they used as pillows. And they set a trap one night and they caught this bloke. Know what they done with him? They threw him out the grandstand and he landed on the picket fence down below, on spikes, you know.

Mmm.

Oh he died alright. And another bloke I was telling you about, when we were in the militia, had a bloke got kicked out of Duntroon

the Army Military College, and two brothers, Pretty Bernard was one of them, his father was in the garrison, in [UNCLEAR] Battery in the First World War down at Fort Queenscliff, and this bloke came down and joined us. He was a sergeant with us, a good sergeant, a good soldier, but he was a bastard to tell you the truth and nobody liked him. And one day,

he used to be walking round the camp, he got lieutenant in the AIF and they were calling him ‘shark bait’, ‘shark bait’. And he couldn’t do anything ‘cause he didn’t know who was calling it to him. But this particular transport unit was going on to go overseas and he was pissing up, as we call it, with the nurses and carrying on with them, and he got that drunk he went up on the top deck and he’s spewing over the side and a couple of blokes got up behind him and

got him by the feet and chucked him overboard. And this bloke I told you, I had to relieve the sergeant-major at Fort Pearce, Harry Yeomans, he’d been overseas to bring back the Italian prisoners of war. And while he was over there at Alexandria, he heard about this court-martial where they dealt with this particular case and they treated it as lost at sea.

Oh that was murder but still, you weren’t popular, you had to be very careful.

We had a bloke,…Jack he lived on this side and George,

the plumber, he was a plumber and Jack was the mate, what was his name, oh I’ll think of it, but he was over in New Guinea. I forget where he was now, he went overseas with the AIF anyhow. But they took three prisoners, it was in New Guinea that’s right, and they were sent out on this patrol to see if they could get any

prisoners, so they took three blokes prisoner, which was unusual, cause the Japs would rather commit hari-kari [ritual suicide] than be taken prisoner. And they took them back to the company commander and he said, this sergeant, he said, “Take them down to intelligence and they can question them.” So he took them so far down the

headquarters where the intelligence offices were and he rolled a cigarette and popped them off, three of them, blew their brains out. And he went back, “Your mission has been accomplished, Sir”. The next morning intelligence rang up and they wonder, “Where’re those prisoners you took last night?” They said, “We sent them down to you.” The sergeant, he was for it. But Jack told me this. He was actually in the same unit

that took these prisoners but he wasn’t on that patrol. So our blokes were just as bad.

No one knew what happened, they stuck together.

Well I told you Harry Yeomans told me. Oh the shark bait business, that all came out in the court-martial, all the evidence.

Yeah Jack told me, Harry Yeomans told me when he came back from the Middle East.

I had to go in to get, we had to get field returns of anything that happened, like any people that had been up on charges. And this particular bloke,

the quartermaster, he used to get a jeep from me and a driver and a barge and he’d go down. And I told you about the fifteen bob a bottle, the officers were selling theirs too, but they’d get a bottle of whisky and two bottles of beer, so they were paying about five bob for a bottle of whisky and they were selling it for five pound. And this officer, he’d take all this stuff down… to Finschhafen

and he’d trade it to the Yanks for Camel cigarettes and jungle hammocks and bring it back and sell it. So the black market went on all the time.

I told you, down at Portarlington here, my batman, Jack Manson, he told me what,

I was giving me beer to the sigs to play bridge and he said, “Don’t do that Sergeant-Major.” or Jack he used to call me Jack, I didn’t bugger round he didn’t have to salute me cause I was a non-commissioned officer. And the highest non-commissioned officer in the Australian Army, the highest rank, but he, I made a few bob, which went into me pay book

of course. I can show you me pay books.

Yeah I’ve got them all over there.

Yeah he was my, he was posted to me as batman but I didn’t want any one looking after me cause I had to look after meself. My father died and I was made man of the house. I had all that experience, besides 1929, I learnt to cook, bake, cook plum duffs,

beef steak puddings in basins, and with linen over the top and string round. My mother was a good cook.

Well I had to when Belle got crook, she got this short term memory loss and also this Meniere’s disease, which was the balance of the inner ear, and she’d get sick going on a boat or a car or a

tram, when she got her feet off the ground. Unfortunate, but she was good, good woman, good mother, good wife. But when she started to get crook, the doctor said after two years, I had to do everything. I’d get the district nurse in, I’d get the council workers in to do the house and I had to do all the cooking and luckily I

could cook. And the doctor said, “Your father won’t be able to look after your mother any longer, you had to find somewhere to put her.” So we went to one place down at Newport and everything, instead of having glass frames, it had to be celluloid and all these wheel chairs and walking frames and walking sticks. I said to Kay, the youngest daughter, “What do you think, love?” She said, “No way Dad.” so we came up to

Westhaven and got her in here.

I used him to give me a hand round the place, like in the canteen and the recreation, all that sort of thing.

No just someone

trying to get out of work. They’d take on the job as a batman so that they could get some of the goodies from the officer’s mess and they’d get out of going training or drills or work whatever it was.

No not a down side only an up side for them. In other words we used to call them arse lickers, to be polite.

There were none to get. We got our rations if they got through… if the boats got through the Coral Sea our rations would be on time, if it didn’t well we just had to wait. And you’d get your meat in a wooden case about that big like a fruit case and it was bound with wire and they’d break the

wire off and then they’d cut the case and cut this meat into four pieces, put a hook in it and hang it up to thaw it out. We didn’t know whether we had horse meat or kangaroo meat or what it was, but the cooks made a good job of it. All depends on your cooks, what quality of food your men got.

Danger?

Oh no that was some of the barges in that unit. No that one was those two barges that went up past Wide Bay or Ocean Bay to the other, when they made land. But there

were cases of mosquito, not mosquitos, zeros bombing barges and sinking them at sea. They’d go ashore on a reef and sink. Oh there was quite a few cases. And see when we were up there, the war had moved on and as I say instead of taking a 2 Group Headquarters back to the mainland on

leave, Backhouse took them up to Borneo.

Yeah we knew all about it.

That’s nothing. I told you I had a drink of beer in 1914, the war was on then, and my uncle went away to Gallipoli. I knew all about the First World War.

Oh my mother did, she was the eldest in the family and he was her youngest brother. He was born in 1885, enlisted in the AIF on the 8th August 1914 and he was a horse driver, so he would have had a lot to do with the evacuation

if he’d have been there.

Oh no just they used to sing a lot of songs.

Oh I don’t know but the theme song of the Collingwood Football Club was the Boer war song, ‘Goodbye Dolly Grey’. Oh just, ‘Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile smile smile’, all those old things.

No, Dad had died. Dad was crook. He took crook in 1916 and miners’ complaints, which afterwards turned into Miners’ Phythsis and finally into consumption.

The last two years I just watched him die. And we had too much on our plate to worry about anything else.

Oh well, that was life.

No one, only myself. My mother had the first tea rooms in the arcade in the mall in Bendigo.

I’ve got a photo of her and her two assistants and she left there on Christmas Eve 1908 to get married and handed the business over to those two.

Oh yeah, they were a big family. I got two photos there, one of my father and one of my mother, and it must have been her

wedding photo, because in this photo taken in Bendigo, are the grandfather and the grandmother, and the aunts and the uncles. The youngest one was only small, Auntie Marion and that’s where my uncle lived or she used to go out and see him when he was in the hostel at Brisbane. Auntie Marion, she was 88 when she died. But oh no we used to go out and visit her son out at Dennis.

You know where Dennis is? Well it’s where the old Collins home used to be out on the Heidelberg line, and they used to live on the corner there, and just across the road, then a nature strip, then the railway line. And we used to go out there and see her son, Jack, Jackie Maldon. When he had a birthday, all his cousins were invited to the birthday. And anyone came to the door and sang out ‘Jack’,

there was about seven of us used to run over. There was Jackie James, Jackie Hoskin, Jackie Jacobson, Jackie Maldon, Jackie Tragear, Jackie, what was his name, oh the uncle, he used to live up in Wagga Wagga. But about seven of us.. Jackie Button, I’ve got a photo taken when the family was out there, but somehow or other I don’t think I was in the photo.

At that time they didn’t look any different to anybody else. Cause that was the time when the very bad Depression was on and they had soup kitchens and men out of work. And the only thing different was that

when the men were at war, women took their place in offices. And in the offices, they used to wear starched collars and everyone was ‘Mister’, oh funny, bowler hats. I had a bowler hat I used to use in concerts.

Yeah my uncle. He lost his left leg at the knee, had to amputate and

eventually he lost his other leg.

Yeah Uncle Tom or Joyce Thomas.

Well they volunteered, him and his mate volunteered to go out to get water, and they were coming back with this kerosene tin, I think I told you did I, and his mate got killed and he got shot through the right shoulder, passed over the heart and came out he left hip.

Well he lost his left leg at the knee.

No he was shot through the shoulder.

Cross the heart and come out the left side, well they had to amputate the leg see. And I’ve got a photo there of him standing behind a chair and the left leg covered.

Oh he lived til, I think he

died in 1949. I’ve got a family history there and I got photos of that family the Tragear family and the James family.

Oh well he was looked after he was a TPI [Totally and Permanently Incapacitated]. See that’s what they called them when they came back to Brighton Hostel, Anzac Hostel, Brighton. And oh I mean they just

had to live that’s all. The Veterans’ Affairs, not the Veteran Affairs in those days, they were called the Repatriation Commission, they looked after them. He was well treated.

Oh it’s a bit hard, see different country towns looked after their people more than city blokes. Yeah I remember going up

to Pyramid Hill and the Tragear family, they settled around Pyramid Hill and Rochester. And we went down, I was only a kid in knickers, and this uncle that had come back from the war, and he took us one day to go down, he got his shot gun, he said, “We’ll go down and do a bit of shooting.” So we went down the paddock at the back and this tree was absolutely covered with

galahs [parrots]. So he fired two shots and he got nine galahs. So he took them back to the kitchen and we had galah pie for tea that night.

Oh its just like rough meat. It wasn’t good tasting but it was food. And he give me a pair, me cousin was much taller than me, give me a pair of these long trousers and he give me a hay band, and he tied them round

me legs, like dungarees, you know. And I said, “What are these for uncle?” He said, “You’ll know.” And we went down stooking hay, and when you move the hay stooks, the mice’d run out and they’d run up your trouser leg. I was up at a place called Brim I think it was, where there was three silos up there, and they had the mice plague and

you’ve got no idea what it was like.

No I learnt about human nature when I was going to work in a train and I was in different things. I joined. The Manchester Unity

Independent, which was a friendly society in 1915, so I got to mix with men. Then I joined other clubs and that sort of thing, and I just got I suppose. the knack of talking to people and I’ll always read a person’s eyes. And you can always tell people’s health by looking at their eyes. You can tell what sort of mood they’re in, what sort of health they’re in.

You’ve got to learn to read faces.

Yeah.

No I never worried about them. And you asked me what duties I done up there, well I just done the ordinary sergeant-major’s work. He was in charge of all the lower ranks, and the

officers looked after themselves, they were run by the adjutant. Oh just a normal duties that had to be done round the camp. Such as might be hygiene and cooking, oh doing ordinary work like clerical work and statistics, WO’s and all that sort of thing. And the store keeper’s name was Rodgers, and he was the only man I can remember, and he was a

little Jew bloke, funny little man. But he took the place of all my other staff, and this captain Newman, he took the quartermaster’s job.

Alright. They had to deal with the men through me, and that was the liaison between the men, I was a more or less…..although they had a liaison officer, I was the liaison between the other ranks

and the officers. And if they wanted a man for anything they had to come and see me.

Yeah.

Yeah, the middle man. But you had the senior authority of the lower ranks. It’s pretty hard to think back now what jobs I had to give the blokes, the natives used to do all the cutting of the kunai grass.

And I’ve seen them with a stick and a piece of bent iron or whatever they can get, just flattened out there and they cut this grass like a scythe, and they cut to within that far of a banana plant or a paw paw plant without touching it. Because that was food for them and they had to protect that, and I had some lovely bananas up there. They were pinkie coloured skin and a creamy coloured flesh, beautiful but they were only small.

Well they had, no they grew them, planted them for me around the hut. And I had a lot of canna lilies, volcanic soil see and everything grew like wildfire up there. The kunai grass would grow up to six feet or more.

Oh reds, yellows, normal canna lily, and they grew more profusely up there because of the

volcanic soil.

Nothing, we didn’t have much food.

Oh you’d get these tom thumb tomatoes, we’d get bananas, or we’d get paw paws. And in the rations one time I had to get

watermelon. Well I got one watermelon, it weighed 75 pounds. That was grown up in the Ramu Valley.

Yeah 75 pounds in weight. That was the ration for the unit, that’s a big watermelon you know.

About that size, that size round, 75 pounds in weight.

As I say they grew them up in the Ramu Valley, that was a big farm and most of the food from up around that way was bought down there. We didn’t get much food. Rations

we got, as I say, potato, then they get this dehydrated potato, no I can’t remember. I know we got rolled oats and we got plenty of currants in drums and sultanas. Oh we lived alright, we had to, there was nothing else to get. Now and again as I said we’d swap stuff with the Yanks or the cooks would and they’d get this yeast and

make ice cream.

Powdered ice cream, yeah they get it in powder. Another thing we used to get a tin about that size with lemonade power in it, and you’d put so much of a tin of that powder and so much water and they used to make all their lemonade, which they’d go down to the PX and get down the canteen, down there. Didn't cost anything.

Good,

all depends on your cooks. If you had good cooks you had good meals. And if you didn’t. As I say when they first got this powdered egg, they used to just try and put in water and cook it, but you had to get the water back into it before you could do anything with it. And they used to get some horrible bloody meals. Just like the early days of coffee machines you remember. One for

coffee, one for milk, powdered milk.

Oh his ability to communicate with the men was the main thing. If he couldn’t communicate with the men he didn’t get anywhere because they’d just ignore him. No we didn’t have that many, we were short of officers, I had to take

over a couple of their jobs. But Carvery was a good bloke he was….. and Captain Brown, Lieutenant Cecil, a typical English Pommy, big like that one that used to be in MASH [television series]. Remember Nick that used to be in MASH.? What was he? Bostonian, Massachusetts. But the padre we had there he

used to get a jeep from me and go up to the Papua New Guinea Infantry and he’d go up and do services with them. Take up the communion wine, but in the finish he was selling the communion wine on the black market. And he give us a lecture one night, and it was all about his family over in England. They were apparently big mine owners, Captain Brown. And he was telling us he was christened in a gown that was 150 years

old and had been handed down through the family. Wasn’t much of a parson, boring.

I wouldn’t like to tell you. They didn’t like him. He used to get a jeep and as I say and go up to the PNG camp and give services but…

Well as a matter of fact my mother had two uncles.

One was a Methodist minister at Hyde Street, Footscray and he was also head of the Orange Institution in Victoria [Loyal Orange Institution]. And the other one was out at East Malvern. He was originally a school teacher, but that’s Uncle Charlie he took on the ministry. And he had a daughter was in the Victorian string quartet and she’s scribbling one day when he was

going out and he said, “What are you doing there?” She said, “I’m looking up the family history, Dad.” He said, “I wouldn’t go back too far if I were you.” She said, “Why not?” He said, “You’ll find you’re descended from a race of smugglers and wreckers.” They came from Cornwall, down on the coast at St. Just. Poor old Euna.

Well I went to bible class when I was.. up to about 22 years of age and I had a mate, he was my best man at my wedding. He was a little red headed bloke and his brother was teaching the class, his twin brother, but he was a tall bloke and dark hair. And he’s talking away and he got this book out and he’s talking, I said, “Now put that book away and talk without it.” “Oh.” he said. “I can’t do that.”

I looked at me mate and I said, “What do you reckon Hal?” That was his twin brother. Nodded and walked out of the bible class and never back to it. But I had religion crammed down my throat. My mother was very strict on that. The day after we came down from Bendigo, we walked out of town, Gower Street across the park to the Methodist Church and that was the next day, she was very…. I mean

I don’t hold any objection to anybody that’s got any religious belief as long as they don’t interfere with me. In fact the chaplain or whatever she is that comes here, she came down to have a talk with me one day and asked me how I was going and all this sort of thing. I knew the chaplain down at the old place. But we got talking about religion and I started asking her questions,

she got a shock. I know there must be somebody controls, some being that controls the universe because we all know we’re going to die sometime and we don’t know when, we don’t know how, we don’t know why. But that’s, you read it in all your religious teachings. Some are going to go to heaven and some are going to hell, some are going to purgatory. But all depends what

religious belief, but my belief is we’re put on earth and from the day we’re born, we start to die. And that was told to me by one of the class mates at Sunday School, by a man that had come back from the First World War, old Charlie Speedy and he said to us, “You know, sons, boys.” he said. “From the day you die, the day you’re born you start to

die.” And I always remember that, Charlie Speedy. He’s a man that went through part of the First World War.

Oh different part. I remember down at Mount Martha, where I was the quartermaster sergeant, I didn’t go on the church parade. But they called the troops out on parade, they said

“RCs [Roman Catholics] on the right, the rest of you fall in on the left.” So the parade formed in and marched up to Balcombe to the chapel. And I had to look after the blokes that were RCs and there was about seven at the time. So I give them medicine balls, got the medicine balls out of the Q Store and I said, “Here do a bit of exercise with these.” So

the next church break the next week, there wasn’t so many RCs fell out. They found out didn’t get out of work. But it made no difference to me. I was looking for one bloke one day down at Mount Martha and I couldn’t find him anywhere. I said, “Where you been?” He said, “I’ve been to church.” I said, “There’s no churches round here.” He said, “My father told me that the church is where the heart is.”

As I got older all this stuff and I’d been round the world and different places and seen people with different religion and different religious beliefs and cultures. I thought now they’re getting brain washed, they’re pumping all this…. I remember my uncle, the one I said was the Methodist minister and president of the

Loyal Orange Institution of Victoria. He used to have a lot of arguments with old Dr. Mannix [Dr Daniel Mannix] who was the Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne and he challenged him one day he said, “You come out in public and debate with me.” And you know what Dr. Mannix said to him? He said, “You give me the man as a child and you can have it for the rest of your life.” In other words they’d pumped that much into it, that the belief stuck there. But a lot of people have given

that away now. I mean I’ve been to church, I’ve been to St Pat’s Cathedral [St Patrick’s] to mass when the old Commissioner Duncan died. I’ve been to, the chap next door to me I went to, what are they called, big mass, funerals, I went to one of them down at St Augustine’s Church.

That’s the only job I never liked. Being a WO and being short of officers, I had to assist in the censoring of mail. And censors, if they made any mention of any place, that was cut out of the letter.

Well I didn’t like reading people’s mail, and cutting pieces out of their letters. But there was nothing I could do about it. I was ordered to do it, so I done it. But all these things are not necessary now.

No I wasn’t interested. I just glanced through it and all I had to do was spot any reference to the area in which we were.

You couldn’t communicate to the enemy, if they happen to catch your mail, where you were, where any unit was and that was the only idea of censorship. Because some blokes would open their mouth too big and they used to have signs around, ‘The Enemy Listens’, ‘The Walls have Ears’, Fifth Column

They didn’t get a chance to make it.

They got told when the first bit was cut out and they were shown their letter of what was cut out of it and if they put it in again, they knew the same thing would happen. So there was no other way they could get the mail out but through the postal corporal. And he’d take the mail down to the base post office at Lae and was put in the mail bag and sent back to Melbourne.

Only once a week.

Not long. All depends if you were sticky nose or not and I was never a sticky nose. As I say, my business is private and belongs to me and my medical business is private and belongs to me. And that’s what narks [annoys] them here, they don’t know anything about me.

They had no choice. All mail had to be handed into the office and then the officers censored it. You couldn’t get, unless you had a way of getting into the mail office in Lae, you couldn’t do anything about it.

Oh well I mean that wasn’t my job, I didn’t know. They’d have the officers that could deal with that. See they’d get it from the intelligence mob.

They could’ve but I never saw it.

No.

Alright, I had a bloodstone ring

which I had to get cut because it used to rub these fingers, and it arrived there on me birthday. Good ring it was too. I think I’ve still got it in that drawer there. No I found them, well the mail of course, it all depends what ships were available as to when you got mail. See they only carry them by ship, there was no such things as planes carrying mail in those days.

Nothing.

No.

All they did was, you’ll see in that book they handle so many million tons of cargo, so many million trips they made, that’s the whole unit, like. You’d have small craft, you’d have 300 tonners, 250 tonners and all sorts of craft. But they’d have

trawlers and ketches and luggers and lighters.

Only me wife. I didn’t have anyone on the side.

Oh no. They were in the process of getting married,

they had their own worries. One got married in 1940, no Mum died 1940. One got married in 1942 and the other one, that was the youngest. The eldest was married three times. She buried the first two husbands and the third one buried her. And he was the uncle of one of the Labor politicians. You remember Ralph Willis,

Federal Treasurer? Well he was Ralph Willis’ uncle and I had the pleasure, when he was younger, of kicking him out of my sister’s house. Was going down the passageway to the kitchen and this young bloke and girl, who was sitting with her legs across the passage. I went and I said to Dorrie, “Who’s that couple sitting out in the passage?” “Oh.” she said, “that’s Dorrie Willis’ son.” I said, “Did you invite them here?” She said,

“No.” I said, “Up. Out. You weren’t invited to this place.”

Oh just ask how they were, nothing about meself. I didn’t have to tell them. They knew I was away and all they wanted to know was how you’re getting on. And I’d say I’m getting on alright, but there was

nothing much to write about.

Oh how they were. I mean you don’t go away and leave a wife and kid behind. You should see some of the photos in there of the wife and young daughter. When I left Australia, she’d be five.

Oh it was,

but see you had a job to do and you had to do it. It was hard to be away from home.

Comfort. Getting round in mud and tropical storms and now and again an earthquake. We had two while I was up there. And we were on our way to Lae one day

after one, it was just a rumble away, and when we were going along one of these tin can wharves that I was talking about, and it was just hanging, and there was only part of either end of the pier. And they sounded it afterward, 105 feet of water had gone down into it, disused wharf. And another time coming home from Lae and of course you had no lights at night,

we weren’t allowed to show a light, and we’re coming round the back of the air strip at Malahang, and the planes used to come up, come along the aerodrome and take off straight over the Gulf [Huon Gulf]. And I’m going down and I saw these two slits coming at me and they were hugging the bank too because the beach was just over there and the water. And I just sort of had an automatic reaction, turned the wheel one way and then the other. I’d have been run down

by this ten wheel Yankee truck. That was another narrow squeak I had, one of the two.

To tell you the truth, I don’t know. We had one bloke up there he was a sergeant with us, he went down to Australia and done

an OCTU, that’s the Officer Cadet Training Unit and he came back, he was a lieutenant. But he didn’t come any further than Bribie Island and he was an orderly room lieutenant there. And I was walking along in Bull Street in Bendigo one day and there’s a window, office window and I looked into the window and I saw this bloke standing there, I said, ‘Gawd, I know you mate.’ And I went in and said, “Dave King.” He said, “Yeah how do you know?” I said, “I could tell your ugly mug [face] anywhere.”

He was in realty and he had an office in Bull Street. He’s dead now too.

Oh, general topics mainly. A lot of it was about women. You missed home, you know.

But as I say 15th August [1945], peace had been signed, VP [Victory in the Pacific] Day they called it then… what they call it later, VJ [Victory over Japan] Day, didn’t they? And the day after that, the routine order came out from army headquarters. Part 1 always came from headquarters and Part 2 were always local units. And this said, ‘the wearing

of the anchor and purple field is to be cancelled herewith and you will revert to the Corps Transportation.’ which was an oblong light blue coloured thing, Corps Transportation. They didn’t like us being in the engineers. And I was the only one that wore that colour patch while I was in New Guinea. The other blokes

said, “No bugger it. This is our colour patch, this is what we’re going to wear.” And I’ve seen some horrible pictures of it, brown instead of purple, they wash it and it’d be brown.

No, they wore the anchor, I had to wear the Corps Transportation. Cause as a sergeant-major, you’ve got to obey orders.

The war was over.

No they were proud of it and so was I, that’s why I’m always crook because I’ve never seen that in any of these charts when they show the First and Second World War Corps badges.

Oh not, just that we went to more Yankee picture

shows [movies]. I remember they had a concert party there one time and they had the stage there and the Yanks sitting there and us sitting at the back. And one of the girls came out with a short sleeve dress on and she started to sing and this big blob came down from out of the tree, I’m not sure what kind of an insect it was, and landed on her arm and one holy scream. I remember when the bloke that used to play the piano, what was his name?

No he was a trombonist. This, oh he wrote [UNCLEAR]…anyhow a little negro bloke and he was out at Nadzab air strip and millions of them, or looked like, and he was playing this piano. Beautiful it was, he played the, that…..oh I don’t know what it was,

but it was a beautiful tune. It was sort of, what do you call it… a piano concerto sort of thing.

After the war finished, any time. In fact I confined my blokes to barracks for two nights. They’d just cleared off, went out to some camp and they had this screen up and

they be looking at the pictures. Cause you took the rotor out of the motor and you put that in your pocket. You know how they got over that? They carried a spare rotor.

Oh yeah. The funny thing about the American pictures, when they were up around Wewak and Aitape, they‘d be showing pictures up there, there sitting this side of the

screen looking at the pictures, the Japs are sitting out at the jungle look at them from the back. And those jungle hammocks I told you about, you could open the zip and get in and close the zip from the inside and swing around in those. But they had to discontinue the use of them, the Japs got in one night and put the bayonet up through the bottom of them and killed quite a lot. That was up round either Wewak or Aitape. They liked

comfort, the Yanks.

Not too good, but they were pervs [perverts]. They’d sit on the log of wood, five on that side and five on this side and played what they called pinochle, was it? And they’d be patting one down the back of the head and fondling one another, oh and when the bloke got beat, the next bloke’d move up

the log and he’d go round the back. I reckon they were a lot of perverts.

I heard of one case and they called it sodomy in those days. That was down at Queenscliff. And the cook down, there he had a dog and he used to take this dog to bed with him.

Yeah he was put up on a charge alright. He got kicked out of the army.

Sodomy. And the same bloke, when we went down to camp one time we used to take a girl up on the cliffs at the back, and one bloke’s talking to a girl, cuddling up to the girl down below and, Tucker, the cook and some bloke up top, Tucker was abusing this girl and the bloke said, “Keep quiet. I’ve got a girl up here.” He said, “What do you think I’ve got down here, a bloody seagull.”

He was an animal but a good cook. He used to, when I had to come up to Melbourne for stores or anything he’d go in and get a bird’s nest, that was a big piece of beef sausage about that size, and cut it about that thick and put it on a hot stove and it would curl up and he’d break an egg into it. Oh, it makes a beautiful meal.

Oh I didn’t like it, they treated the dark people as negroes and black fellows and had no time for them.

I know one case, there were two officers came off a boat at Milford Haven and they had to be

taken into Lae. Well there was two boongs driving, that’s what they used to call the negroes, ‘boongs’ and they were driving this truck and they came down to this T-intersection, and the officers are hanging on they couldn’t get in the cabin with the black fellows, so they were hanging onto the back of the cabin. And when they got down to the end, they just turned swiftly and chucked them out the back. That’s what they done with some of our cooks, I might tell you.

They went down there and the Yanks used to go down and get the beer off them, and they’d buy it and take off. And they said, “Oh we’ve got so many bottles.” “How many you got?” “We’ve got so many.” “Oh we haven’t got all that money with us.” He said, “Well what are you going to do?” He said, “Well you come back with us to camp and we’ll get you the rest.” He said, “Yeah we’ll come back.” So these three boongs were driving in the front and they were looking out the back at these two cooks sitting

out in the back, and they said, “What are they looking at us for?” So the truck pulled off, pulled up half way out to camp, and they got out, and they said to them, “Come with us” And they chucked them out of the truck onto the side of the road and took off. So they lost all their beer and all their money. Oh, it catches up with you.

Oh well they were actually in different camps. I remember one case there was a ship come in and they had ham and turkey in cases, had to go to the officers’ mess in Lae. So some of the docks operating company blokes came over to us and said,

“The Yanks have got a lot of tinned cases of ham and turkey. Tag them along the road and as you’re going up the hill, get a few cases down.” So they went along behind them in a jeep and one bloke got up and slid this case off into the jeep and went back to camp. Well when we came back to camp, we opened it and it was ham,

so we had ham for tea that night. But the docks operating mob came over and said, “There’s going to be a raid on, they noticed so many cases missing off the truck. So if you’ve got anything around, get rid of it.” And of course we’d eaten it all by then, and they came back and they went to the officers’ mess in the docks operating camp and saw them eating this turkey and ham. They all got court-martialled,

thieving from the American Army.

Of course they did. And if you were a black fellow, you were taken to task quicker. You might remember the black fellow, not the black fellow, the bloke that raped those three women in Melbourne? First one down at Beaconsfield, Bleak House in Beaconsfield Parade and the next one up in Spring Street in front of the

flats there and the other one out at Royal Park. And that’s how they caught him, what was his name? The Australians weren’t allowed to take him. The Yanks said he’s under our jurisdiction, we’ll try him. And they tried him and hung him. I’m just trying to think of his name.

Leonski, yeah.

No, I was up at Seymour.

Oh just scared them, that’s all. But still they just thought they could do what they liked. They had the money, they had the silk stockings. Our women would paint their legs, and put a black stripe up the back of it or a brown stripe up the back. And the Yanks were handing out silk stockings. Oh yes many an Australian

serviceman’s wife was on with the Yanks. Get silk stockings and all chocolates and everything from them.

No. None of our blokes, no. I put a letter in the journal I used to write for the Port of Melbourne Welfare Club, or Melbourne Harbour Trust, Welfare Club about this letter a bloke sent to a bloke overseas. “You don’t

need to worry about the gas, I’m paying the bills, you don’t need to worry about that. And your wife’s having another baby, and they didn’t publish it in the papers.” It used to be published by a place up in one of the lanes up the top end of Bourke Street.

Oh to a certain extent. It did to a lot of fellows that would go berserk and shoot themselves, some of them. I never knew of any particular

case where it happened. It was well known that war does funny things.

No, just parade every morning and roll call, and then

allot them their various duties and they’d go about it.

What time off? In the army, you were on duty 24 hours a day. You were on call at any time of the day. If they wanted you to go out at 11 o’clock at night, you went out at 11 o’clock at night. If they wanted you to get up at 4 o’clock in the morning, you got up at 4 o’clock in the morning. Normally you got up at six. But there was always something to do.

You’d have to go down and help to load a boat or something, one of the barges that came in. One of our own barges, nothing to do with what went on at the tin can wharf. That was done by the docks operating group. We used to always march alongside them on Anzac Day. Of course later on, I designed and had made a banner for our own unit. And my cousin,

he was in Tragear Printers, out the other side of town now, he was mad on races, he spent most of his time studying the races. Tragear Signs, he went under the name of. I wonder if had any photos of that banner. It was about six foot square, canvas and it had the battle honours

down one side and it had the flag and the colour patch and it had two of the different craft on top. And they made a couple of alterations to it. They added in some of the, some other things that wasn’t on my original sign. Well a bloke called Keith Frost out at Boronia, he’s got that banner now. The bloke that used to have it died, he was the president of the association. And he was a

coxswain on one of the barges, the hospital launches. They used to be known as AM, 40 foot work boats and then they changed them to AH, Army Hospital Craft. The names of all the different crafts are in the back of the book. Listed in their name, AB, ALs, AKs, the old Madopa was ketch AK 82. The Quira was a tug and she was

AT 440. And I saw this tug out in the bay one day, all painted black, and I said, “I know that.” She was a fussy little tug. She used to give the Taronga, the big tug, the Melbourne Steam Ship a hand to nose the bow or the stern of the vessel when it berthed. Real fussy little tug. The picture of her that I got from the public library, they moved up to Russell Street end,

when they were doing up the other part. And I said, “Can I have a look to see if you’ve got anything to use as a frontispiece in a paper I’m writing?” “Well.” they said, “We could give you the photo but you can’t use it in the book.” But I used it in the book and it shows you going past Coode Island in that book and that’s when Coode Island wasn’t on it. And you see in the background all the factories down along the Yarra River,

Maribyrnong River.

Oh we played a bit of sport after, but when you’re doing manual work or exercise you could change your dress. You could roll your sleeves up, you take your shirt off. And I was playing cricket one day and I had a pair of blue shorts about that long, and

I’m going in to bat and this big lieutenant from the signal corps, we were playing against, he’s a fast bowler. He bowled one down to me and I ducked to the side and whack. So he bowled another one down and I done the same thing, bugger you cricket. Oh we used to play sport, but the trouble was when you sweated all these little sweat bees used to collect on the pile of the sweat and form on the hair of your chest.

They were a bloody nuisance. They were like a very small fly, but they were sweat bees.

There’s no rank in sport, no rank when you’re in sport.

As I say I was bowling against this lieutenant from the signal corps and I was only a WO, but all ranks played sport.

Oh they used to play different games but a lot of them, the signal sergeants they used to play bridge a lot. But most of the other blokes wanted to go to concerts and picture shows. I put on some entertainment for them. I opened a canteen up there, and I’ve got a book over there called ‘Log Book’ and this Slim Sanderson I was telling you about, he wrote an article, he wrote a letter down to me as a matter of fact

and I’d heard about him so I’d written a letter up to him. And he said, ‘Dear Jack, This is the first time I’ve ever called a sergeant-major, Jack’. And he was tall and he sent me down a photo of this big bell tent the Americans used to use with four blokes. There was a bloke from Geelong, Impy, Sergeant Sam Impy, Slim Sanderson, Sig Mooney, Sergeant Boulderstone.

Boulderstone and this Slim Sanderson finished up that they had to be ready to give the signal when the war finished. When Operation Deluge took place up at Wewak, the Americans came in from one end and the Australians came in from the other and they just drove the Japs right out. And they had to be ready to send the signal back to Australia that this

feat had been accomplished. And Bouldy was supposed to be in the office ready to relay the signal and Slim was to be outside to get the message on the phone, the wireless signal. And he couldn’t find Bouldy so he said, ‘I had to send the signal down to Australia.’

Yeah.

Just sport, and entertainment.

No just lectures anything like a game of cricket or a game of football. Recreation other activities other than war, army. And then the canteen officer, well you had to issue the beer and the lemonade, so many bottle to a man, twp a week to a man. And then when they got

Tooths Beer, they didn’t like Tooths, they liked the Melbourne Bitter and Vic Bitter. But still.

No most of our blokes used to spend their time at the Yankee PX. Go in there. And they’d talk a lot about what the Salvation Army done. You know the only thing they done for me? I went in there one day and I said, “I want to write a letter,

you got a bit of paper and a pencil?” They give me a little bit of note paper about that size and said, “Sorry we haven’t got a pencil.” So they said at the Yank PX, you could get anything you wanted. I got a thing about the Salvation Army. They’re one of the richest companies in the world.

Well we were

supposed to get a cut out of the Comforts Fund after the war, run by the Australian canteens. Oh we got parcels from the Comforts Fund, you got a little box with, sometimes a pair of mittens in it or a bit of cake, different tit bits you know. And the girls would put notes in it, my address is such and such, if she made a pair of mittens or a pair of socks.

We used to get parcels sent up but by the time it got there everything in it was just broken up. They treated the mail pretty rough.

Yeah.

Oh they got broken up. They’d share them out among the troops. You’d share your Comfort Funds parcels when you got them, share them with your mates.

Oh well to an extent, but they were mainly things that wouldn’t crush up. You might get a bit of note paper and a few envelopes. You might get a pair of socks, you might get a pair of mittens, you might get a balaclava, but things that wouldn’t break up, you know, women used to make them. And down where there used to be the old Port Phillip

Stevedore Office in the street where the Seamen’s Mission is in Melbourne, Siddeley Street, they used to use this for dances for the Comforts Fund. And we used it later on for the RSL [Returned and Services League] office.

Oh I got a pair of them. I think I’ve still got them in the drawer somewhere.

No,

what’s the good? You’d be in tropical downpour, you get wet to the skin. You didn’t even bother to change, five minutes later you were dried out. That’s these tropical downpours they were just like passing showers up there. I remember one night I was lying in this hammock with a roaring toothache, and I thought, “Oh bugger this, I’m going into Lae to get it out.” And I got half way into Lae and it stopped aching. So I didn’t go into Lae,

and then I got a, they wanted to take it out and I said, “No, it’s not aching now.” So they put on my dental records. ‘Refused dental treatment’. So I said to the officer, the statistics officer that handled all the records, I said, “You’ve got my dental card there?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Give us a look at it.” And I just tore it up. On my book it says ‘No dental records’.

I was going to get it done when I went down. My original intention was to join the Ordnance Corps when I came back, ’cause I’d had all the Q work. But when I got out at Royal Park, I says bugger the Ordnance Corps, they’re not taking my teeth out there, I’ll go home. When you come out, you got all your pay details fixed up, deferred leave, deferred pay and your coupons for clothing. There’s a

table there on the RSL sitting there you get your ‘Return from Active Service Badge’ and then you join the RSL.

Nothing. See we were headquarters and we had the Water Ambulance Convoy to do that. Now if there was a case where they

got a signal to come and pick up wounded, they’d get the meeting point, the rendezvous point and then they’d get a signal, recognition signal and they’d have the ramp partly up on the barge, that was like the gate. And when they got this return signal they’d lower it down. The walking wounded would walk aboard, the stretcher cases would be carried aboard, the ramp was on its way up

and they were out on their way to the 40 foot launch to put them on that to take them out to the 62 footer, which was equipped with stretchers and that. And they’d take them out to the hospital ships which sometimes would be anchored 5 or 6 mile off shore, because the tides were pretty big up there, 30, 40 foot tides.

Up the ramp, the ramp was like a gateway

and it’s like battens across it, like a ramp and you just run up the ramp onto the deck.

Oh they used to do the same thing.

The launches would be at a place where they could lower the ramp down and they lowered them onto the launches. And the launch would treat the blokes (out of the back of the

launch they had a little cabin where you could go out and sit and have a little smoke.) but on the launch themselves they could treat them, preparatory to their going out to the hospital ship. And this bloke one time I got a fax one time, asked if I’d go give some details about this bloke. Was applying for a pension, his wife was. And she came into the

Advocates Office and she was telling the bloke, and she had these rings on and furs, and this bloke had died and he had a foreign name and she was his wife, and she was claiming a pension because he got affected by the fumes off the launch when he was on the launch, hospital launch. And this signal came down to me and I rang this guy, Tommy Scheys his name is. He’s the treasurer of

our association now. Schey, Maxi Schey, they used to call him Maxi Shay. I rang him up and he said, “If any of those blokes had’ve smoked on that boat with me, they’d have been over the side.” He said, “We had wounded on board.” But they used to go out and smoke at the rear of the launch, as I say they had this little like a cabin, open. But the fumes’d come back out of the back of the launch and they couldn’t sit in there and

smoke. And he reckons, they sit in there and smoke, but the fumes didn’t come up into that cabin and he was trying to claim that’s where he got his troubles, or she was. I remember Kevin Hughes, I think he’s the head man in the Advocates Office now at the DVA [Department of Veterans’ Affairs], RSL, and I was talking to him about it, and apparently he was,

oh he was worrying about this because she had some letters from some bloke in the navy and all this sort of thing, that it could happen. And Maxi said, “No way.” He said, “It couldn’t have come into that part.”

Oh yeah we’d go over to Labu, that was across the other side of the Huon Gulf. I’d

go down to Alexishafen or Finschhafen.

Motor launch.

Oh just after the war was over and take some of the AWAS from the hospital down. This bloke I was talking about, Georgie…. He was our president. He lived down at Niddrie, he died. He was in charge of this Fairmile launch

and they used to call it the poofter boat. They’d take the officers and some of the nurses out for picnics. There was one case where they took old Tom Blamey [General Thomas Blamey] out. There’s one of the other books from, oh I don’t know, I’ve got it over there.

Oh every time you got a chance you’d drop the line over the side. Talking about that, there’s a bloke called Tommy Edwards, lives out Upper Heidelberg Road. He was coxswain of the launch one day, and he had two other blokes on deck with him, the other two were ashore, and he saw them talking there and he said, “What are you blokes whispering about?” “Oh we’re just thinking, Sarge. Can we supplement our rations?” He said, “What do you

mean?” “Get some fish.” He said, “How are you going to get some fish?” They said, “Leave it to us.” So they just chucked a couple of grenades over the side and of course the fish come belly up and they took the little [UNCLEAR] dinghy, which was the little dinghy they had, and they were out there and they’re swimming round the water catching all these fish, or picking them up out of the water. And someone on the bank said, “Shark!” and they saw this fin coming towards them, so the two of them went flat out

for the dinghy. Well Bluey, I can’t think of the name, one bloke went over the top of the other bloke to the dinghy, he was going that fast. Tommy Edwards was telling me about this. I met those two blokes, one lived in New South Wales.

Oh we had a shark there that used to feed off what came out of the Markham River, used to empty

out into the Huon Gulf, and every time you’d go across on the launch, the blokes would fire bullets at it. And of course as soon as they hit the water they’d just ricochet, and they never shot him, but they named him Markham Billy. Yet the boys would be out there in their lakatois [local boats] fishing and never come near them.

Oh we used to get a few fish off them,

but they had to live too.

Oh no we didn’t go that far out, but every barge and every launch that went out on a mission, they’d have a line dangling over the side. In fact that convoy that went up from Melbourne to Jacquinot Bay, they (as I say we were in Mackay when the war finished) they used to get fish, a lot of fish.

Drop a line over the side. There’s plenty of fish up round Australia, the top end.

That’s a question.

The only bit of fish I ever liked was what we used to get down at Fort Queenscliff, yellow fin, yellow tail. A big fish like that with a yellow

tail and we used to get a lot of that for our meals down there. But the best bit of fish I had was when I went up for a trip to Townsville after the war. And I’m looking for somewhere to eat and I went over to the backpackers and they had a two storey building with the friezework and all of that, and I said, “Do you know where there’s a good place for a meal?” They said, “See that coloured place over there?” “Yeah” “Go over there, there’s a little café back off that.” And it was known as Reef

Lodge. And I went down there and they said, “Sorry we don’t open until six.” And I said, “I’m dying for a feed.” So they said, “Come down about quarter to six.” So they got me a seat and this used to overhang the Brisbane River, Townsville River or whatever it was. And they dished me up a bit of this barramundi. Lovely.

It’s all in that album there.

Oh just big enough for me to live in. Put the hammock up in it, have a desk there and maybe a chair. But it was malthoid up about that high and then the

malthoid’d come down like that to stop the rain coming in and then thatched to a malthoid roof.

No. Not up there. Nothing’s waterproof up there. You had to have plenty of air, because of the jungle rot, everything would go mildewed. Even that packet I’ve got over there, that’s stuck together, but now it’s been 60 odd years,

it’s dried out.

Only the desk. I had a tin trunk, only a little cabin trunk, and a kit bag and all the army equipment, that was all.

No couldn’t put photos up there. The humidity would rot anything, even rot leather,

rot your boots. It wasn’t a very nice place to be I can tell you that.

No there was rails on either side and you’d string it between the rails, and it was covered in with mosquito netting and a sort of canvas, and you could zip it up to get in,

zip it down to get back, to close yourself in. Because mosquitos were bad. I’d be sitting there writing under the light and you’d feel this stab in the back and they’d bite you through (the old Anopheles mosquito, little black one) it’d stand up like that and punch a hole through your shirt. And that caused the malaria and the other one was a sort of browny mosquito that caused the dengue fever.

Only at night time, probably catching up on a bit of work, writing, writing letters.

Tilly lamp, no, yeah we had tilly lamps. No we had electric lamps up there that’s right, electric lighting run by the generator run by the sig corps. But I worked under tilly lamps, kerosene lamps, candles,

kerosene lights, anything and everything wherever you were. Electric lights up at Seymour.

Well it didn’t do me eyes any good I can tell you that, because I have double vision there, in fact I can see three of everything. And if there’s numbers on a truck I see two numbers then I see another one in the middle, so I’ve got to close one eye and

have a look to see what the number of a car or a truck is or a telephone number. Oh I had the cataracts taken off both eyes and an implant put in both eyes. And they reckon they might get a bit more out of that for when I was down at Brighton, the optician down there said, “We might get a little bit more vision out of this eye.” But this was the last pair of glasses I got from

Roydhouse in the clinic here.

They were round wire, about that size and the loop on them was wire too, round funny little things. But they just corrected the astigmatism, you look at a thing like that and this one seems to be leaning over that way and the other is straight, that’s where you can tell if you’ve got astigmatism.

And that solved a problem from when I used to play cricket, I’d always go to catch something and I’d miss it, and I wondered how the hell that was, but I had that astigmatism before I went up to New Guinea. But at the same time it developed with all this continuous writing. After eighteen weeks away from the unit, I had a hell of a lot of work to do and I’d work

up to twelve o’clock at night under lamps.

Oh they were all huts.

Oh I can show you all those pictures, got pictures over there, got photos of them.

Yeah, they were all the same, different designs of course.

Nothing much. As I say a hammock, a chair made out of diwai or timber (that’s what the natives called timber, diwai and

food was called kai.) Oh it was comfortable, especially when you’re rocking in a hammock. You’d get a good old sway up sometimes if a breeze’d come through. They had to be open to the air otherwise everything got humid and moist.

Never saw any animals.

I say we saw nothing in the jungle. You wonder when you heard a noise, there were no animals, so if you heard any noise out in the jungle, it had to be a human. That’s why I say I fired that one shot. One odd angry shot. They made that picture [referring to the 1979 Australian film The Odd Angry Shot set during the Vietnam War and starring Graham Kennedy]. I think Graham Kennedy made that, didn’t he?

Oh I’ve got a photo in

there of the batman, the CO’s batman coming back from the Middle East, and he brought this Rhesus monkey back with him. There’s a photo in there of him standing outside this CO’s hut. But when he came back to Australia (he came back on the same ship as me) he had to give it away and he gave it away to the Yanks ’cause you weren’t allowed to bring that sort of stuff back to Australia.

Yeah he brought it back from the Middle East

with him.

No rules. There weren’t many pets around. I never saw birds up there, seagulls maybe, seagulls, nothing else.

I didn’t see them but there were water snakes there, sea snakes. And one of the barges was up on the bank, or the barge or a

launch to repair the tail shaft and they had to go down in the water and they made a prefabricated diving helmet out of a gas mask and a rubber tube so they could straighten the tail shaft. You had to improvise. There was nothing made for Australia, it wasn’t prepared for war.

As I say you cooked on a primus stove but later on they put a bit of a cabin on the back, you see that in the 20 footers and they slept in there and they had a little primus stove in there, do their cooking.

Yeah, I tell you what they used to do. They used to bring these big tank landing barges in. They opened up the doors and they wheeled all this heavy equipment, earth moving equipment and that into the landing craft. They took it out to sea and they sunk it off some island out there. They wasted a lot of stuff and they also left a lot of stuff laying around the beaches. Once it’d done its job, landed the troops,

whether it was a launch or a barge, whatever it was, they’d leave it on the beach and our blokes used to pick up a lot of that stuff, and it was repairable, and they’d use it themselves.

Barges, launches, nothing much else.

Not much, I mean

I know there were, I didn’t see it, but I know there were officers who’d take timber and stuff back to Brisbane and built their own timber mills. But I got a query from a lady over in South Australia, her grandfather owned a ketch called the Harold and that was built in Sydney and the Yanks impressed it in 1942

in Adelaide and he took it round to where their depot was and handed it over to them. And she wanted to know something about it, but they’ve got all the history. I think all she was interested in, there were fifteen Australians on that ketch and I’m wondering if that’s what she wants to know. She gave me the names of some of them and a photo of them on a Liberty ship having recreation leave.

Oh our blokes did. They’d often call into some of their American camps and get spare parts that were there, for their launches and barges.

Nothing, they had to take some back on one occasion. Oh the blokes down there were base wallahs [clerks], as we used to call them. They were just looking after the stores and the bases while they moved on

up further, and they’d leave all these hillbillies and ghetto blokes. But we used to call them.. sort of, wallahs.

They didn’t care. They had a job to do and as I say they were usually, as I say, B class blokes or blokes that normally wouldn’t go away on service.

There were plenty of black marketeers there.

I got married on the 18th December 1937. Because my wife’s birthday was the next day.

Well I met with her a couple of times, and then Centenary Day [Centenary of the State of Victoria] or night, I’m sitting outside the Regent Theatre looking up at the

balcony on Georges, remember Georges on Collins Street? And the Victorian Trumpet Trio was playing there, and this girl went past and I saw the coat, she had a beret on. I said, “I know the back of that head.” I walked down and asked her, “Hey, what are you doing here?” She said, “Going for a walk.” I said, “Mind if I come with you?” So that’s when I started courting, in 1934 and got married in 1937.

And her birthday was the day after we got married and Christmas was the week after, so she wanted three presents.

No.

Oh she didn’t mind. I used to go off to training, as I say, and I came home from training the night

that she was taken to hospital for the first baby to be born. But she went to St. Augustine’s Church School in Yarraville. And she come home crying one night and her mother (supposed to be Brown, her maiden name, it was more like Braun to me, she was a big woman, Polish) and she went and took her back up to school the next day and said to the nun, “You beat my

daughter over the knuckle with a round ruler.” Remember those round rulers they used to have? She said, “Oh she’s a bit slow at catching up.” Well she grabbed her by the hand and said, “I’m taking her down to the State School.” So from there on, she was about seven at the time. I remember when my wife was about that high, she had lovely curly hair, and she came into the Sunday School where I was. It was anniversary and the platforms went up either side and

old bloke we called the Beard, he was one of these Orangemen. He said, “Come in girlie” and she said, “No I can’t come in.” Next minute her mother and took her away from the school.

Well she bought herself a lady bike. A blue Diamond was the bike and any second-hand bike Jack Roy used to do up, he called J Roy.

And she’d have a basket on the front, a bag on each handle and a box on the back, and she was known as the lady with the blue bike. And she used to ride down and do all her shopping in Footscray, and one day she’s crossing over off the footpath, out of a gutter to go up to our street was at the end, and she fell off. And she said, they said

“You tripped.” She said, “I didn’t trip, I was pushed.” And the young chap coming down used to have a truck on the back of his bike carrying bottles round and he picked her up off the ground and said she just fell off her bike. She had too much weight. And another day she was going down the hill at Hyde Street in her bowling gear to play bowls.

No after the war.

But during the war she was known as the lady in the blue bike. She done everything, all her shopping. She’d go to Forges [Forges of Footscray] and put away lay-bys and forget she put them away. That’s when this business set in, the dementia.

Oh yes she used to take people in boarding. She took

one couple in, married couple and he used to have greasy hair and he ruined the sofa. Then she took my sister that got married, she took her in and Bill, he was a printer. Shaws, the printer. In fact one time he was police reporter for The Argus [Melbourne Newspaper], and his brother was the sub-editor of The

Argus. And she took them in, then she took a woman and a daughter, who had left her husband because he was drunk. Finished up he got killed crossing the railway line, down Yarraville. Used to go up the bank, across the line, and down the bank and up the other side. He got killed.

She’d have been mad if she did. I’ve been a one woman man. She said, “Would you ever get married again?” I said, “No way.” We had 57, 58 years together. That’s our golden wedding anniversary in that photo.

Oh when I was in Seymour. I knew a bloke down there that used to take a woman out every night, and he wasn’t just taking her out to walk with her. And he tried to join the Masonic Lodge later on and somebody had known about this business and he was black-balled and he didn’t get in.

No this bloke worked with me and he was a foreman crane driver, electric crane driver in the dock. And he used to, him and a motor boat driver used to do a lot of thieving or pillaging as they called it. And one night he was going up to the gate, the customs gate with a case of things, and he said

to the policeman, the policeman asked him, “Where’d you get that?” “Oh.” he said, “I picked it up on the way up, down along the road.” And he’d been spotted putting into his car but I don’t know what happened to him. But what they used to do, he’d take it and this motor boat driver would be over the other side of the dock fence. He’d pass it over to him and he’d take it in the motor launch to Whitehall Street, the swing bridge,

and take it up to his home up in Walden Street, Footscray and that’s the way they used to get the stuff away. This was a case of razor blades too.

Well I didn’t actually see the case but there was a case when one of the AWAS went missing, or AAMWS [Australian Army Medical Women’s’ Service] I’m not sure which it was,

but one of the women went missing. So they went all round the area looking for her and they eventually found her, she was upside down in a empty 44 gallon drum which marked the road, and she’d been raped and dumped in the 44 gallon drum. That was the story.

Dead.

Cause the Americans Negro

I’ve seen them lined up in Magnetic Island, along the fence and doing their thing with the women up there.

Yeah.

At Townsville, Magnetic Island.

Yeah, but they had the cases, I’ll tell you about this ship down at Malahang Beach,

they’d a case down there where they’d take a van down there and this soldier’d take one or two of them down there, and the Yank boongs used to go down there and they’d have sex in a three ton lorry. Oh it was a common thing, the American Negroes, they had tools about that long. But I saw that case up at Magnetic Island meself.

Well I never saw any of the AWAS doing it or AAMWS or WRANS [Womens’ Royal Australian Naval Service] or WRNS [Womens’ Royal Naval Service].

Oh yeah no intermingling of ranks there, white and blacks. No way.

Oh you used to see them, they wouldn’t be in the same camp, for a start. And I told you about how they liked them when they emptied ‘em out of the truck on the way down. They had no chance of getting out. They just come to the road, one road went this way and, the road from Milford Haven went that way, and they just went

straight down, turned the corner and threw them out the back.

No as I said I only heard the story that went round but I know that it was an AWAS missing. And she was from the 107 Hospital, the hospital up in Lae. And I was up at Sir William Hall Hostel with a woman that was acting matron up there. She’d come from,

the worst thing she ever saw was Beersheba, not Beersheba, the battle up with the Italians in?

Yeah.

Benghazi, that what is. That was the worst hospital, she said, they had terrible casualties there.

No well I never knew of it. I never knew what went on in the American camps because they were only base troops there, as I say. They were just looking after what stores was still behind in Lae while the others moved on up. Base troops only in those days for the Americans

as they moved on. They’d leave somebody behind in the base to look after their stores for them, and treat any troops in transit.

Tin can wharfs.

Because they were steel pontoons.

I know they had different names. In Western Australia they made these barges. They started with ‘D’; Daphne,

Dolores, Delilah and one bloke had a wife, her name was Dolores. He says, “I’m on a flat bottom barge now, called Dolores.” She says, when he got back, “I didn’t like you calling me a flat bottom barge.” And the Daphne had run aground of a reef

and it was left there to rot. There’s a photo in the book about that one too.

Oh some of them were outfitted with stretchers. This was only a small craft. Cause none of the small craft were over 62 feet. Except for the barges but they only just picked up the

walking wounded and the stretcher cases and took them out to the launches where they’d treat them prior to handing them over to the next launch.

No nothing, might have three medics or medical corps men, and the crew of the launch.

Because they

dealt mainly with army medical corps personnel.

Oh, they’d probably carry a machine gun. Or later on they carried a Bofors gun and their pistols, that was all.

I never heard of any.

You must remember by the time we got up there

the Yanks had already moved on to Guadalcanal and these other places.

Oh yeah some of them served in North Bougainville and some in South Bougainville. And they’d be, after the peace was declared, war was declared over, they’d pass one another and they’d

pull and hand one another over cigarettes and chocolates and things. And the same time, other parts they’d be shooting at them, didn’t know the war was over. But some of our blokes served both in North Bougainville mainly with the 31/51st Battalion and the others were down South Bougainville. And they used to take all the prisoners after the war, down to the Fauro Islands, down the south of

Bougainville, not the ones, the ones they talk about now in the soccer. And up in Wewak area, they used to take them out to Mushu Island and you could smell it when you were 10 mile away from it.

Stink. Oh the Japs weren’t clean.

Oh

there’s pictures in there where they used to load them on with all their equipment onto a barge or some other type of boat, and take them down to Fauro Island, Mushu Island. Fauro Island was at Bougainville. I got those photos from a bloke that lived up in Vickers Road Lavington [New South Wales] and he sent me down, he had more photos than I’d ever seen,

in an album. And he sent it down to me, care of a bloke that came down to Melbourne, then it took it back to a hotel in Lonsdale Street, the bottom end, near Spencer Street. And this bloke was going back to Lavington. There was a lot of photos in that, you might notice ‘Courtesy of J. Woodman’. Well that thing I’ve got in that album over there, those two blokes that hadn’t seen one another

for 57 years, Jack Woodman’s the bloke on the left.

No, nothing, cause there was no POWs. They were all up in Wewak by this time or Aitape. They’d chased the Japs right back until they launched this ‘Assault Deluge’ up at Wewak, that’s what MacArthur called it.

Oh didn’t have anything to

do with them ’cause they were carried back and forwards on the trucks. They’d be cheeky when they were going up and down past your camp. See we were on that side of the road and the docks were over on that side, and our barges that used to go to Labu, were down this way. So you’d go out 300 yards and you could walk out, swim out there. But when you got over 300 yards, it was 300 foot deep. It just went down like a

cliff. One barge was coming over one day and they had to wind these ramps down, to let them down, and he said, “Lower away.” And they lowered the ramp and next minute, it hit this cliff and tore the ramp right off the barge. Cause they’d have a bit of power to run up on the beach you know And when you got up on the beach, you had to drop a kedge anchor over into the water before you

got up on the beach because the tide would go out and you’d have to use this kedge anchor to haul yourself back into the water. Some of the trucks’d go off the ramp, and they’d get into deep water and the next minute they’re swamped.

Army headquarters.

The original flag was the bridging train. The bridging train was formed in Gallipoli, that’s when they done the evacuation. They used to run the troops off Gallipoli out onto the transport and they evacuated under night, at nightfall and the Turks didn’t know they’d gone.

Oh that’s a different design

and ‘cause that was know as the ‘bridging train.’ But this flag of ours was supposed to (I went into the Archives Office in where the Taxation Office is) and found that it had to have a red anchor on a purple field and the grey background, for the AIF.

Well because we were vessels, and all vessels in the Water Transport had to have a flag flying at or near the stern of the vessel.

Oh yeah that was after the war ended. See the RAE, they got a crowd they call the Old

Sappers Association and I can belong to that if I want to. I can belong to the 39ers [Association for those whose service started in 1939], I can belong to lots of different organisations. But this Major General McNichol, I think he was, he was writing history of the engineers and he never liked the idea of anyone but engineers having this purple background. It was peculiar to the engineers. See the

ambulance were always red and the engineers were blue and the transport was grey and the sigs were another colour, the field. That means what the colour patch was on, the background. And he wanted to get them out. Well then they had their opportunity when the peace was signed. The next day

I got this Routine Order Part 1 from army headquarters and I had to publish it in our Routine Orders Part 2, which was unit headquarters, that, as from the 16th August 1945, the use of the colour patch would be discontinued and we’d revert to the corps of transportation, because we were transport.

But the flag was supposed to have, when I got the order (I didn’t get the order, when I got it from archives) this flag was supposed to have crossed gold cavalry swords, well we never heard of the cavalry fighting on water. So when the flag came from ordnance, it had these crossed dirks, which was, what do they call them?

the Nepalese Ghurkhas, similar to the Ghurkhas and that’s why it got changed over.

Oh by that time…

We had the pigeons, but they moved on up to Wewak. They followed the troops up.

We had wire signals and we could send out signals by wireless because there was no Japs and that around and they couldn’t interrupt our conversations.

Oh, that’d all be handled by the Signal Section.

See they were a separate unit.

No but they put the phones in for us.

I don’t remember them. No it was wireless.

We might have field phones which you could just ring from place to place around the base.

Oh not very far.

Probably from our place to the camp over the road.

But we could walk over there, unless you wanted something urgent. Walk over there.

Oh aren’t they, they’re all over the world.

In fact there’s a documentary on television now, about pigeons.

Oh I don’t know, the Poms use them a lot, the French used ‘em them a lot.

Oh they could be too. Cause they were good means of communication, they’d find their way home. And I forget what this documentary’s called, it’s on one of the stations at night.

I don’t know what it’s called.

Yeah I know.

I had daughters.

Granddaughter, and great granddaughters.

No they were

trained down at a place in Queensland, Maroochydore. And they were trained down there and then they were brought up and put in lofts up on wherever they were based.

They were called Pigeon Signals. See there’s Wireless Signals, Manual Signals, Pigeon Signals.

Well I had a mate, this mate I was telling you about, that walked out of the Sunday School with me, he had pigeons and I used to go down and give him a hand and clean out the lofts and train the birds and all that. And they were good pets. They make good pigeon pie too.

No just fed them, that was all.

Father yu bilong mipela. Yu stap long in heven. Kingdom bilong yu kam. All who is tok bilong yu. On ground, all the same bilong yu. Tude givim mipela kai kai bilong a day. Forgive wrong of mipela, mipela same forgive wrong bilong narapela. Take away something no good bilong mipela.

Yupela bilong in kingdom kam. Same power, same glory. All same now, all same time. Amen.

But in that packet over there, I’ve got it written on the back of my book before I left New Guinea. It might be a little bit different to that.

No.

See the padre dealt with them. We had boys that came from ANGAU and they came from all over New Guinea. See they were the Australian and New Guinea Administrative Unit. And they went back to them afterwards.

I never went up to Aitape, love.

No I was going to get transferred up there and this fellow came into camp and he was an officer.

He got me job, sure. And this bloke, that’s our national president [of Henry’s service unit association]. He was the only man in the army who I knew who ever had an artificial leg. He was B class and he was in different, local,

he was in cipher units and all that. In fact he got the signal that came through that Blamey was going somewhere. He told me about it in his letter, six pages and he’s about 83, but he’s a terrible writer.

No well that was in the letter that he wrote to me but as I say, I usually keep all letters.

I got a letter the other day from a mate that used to work with me. He’s caretaker of a museum up at Canungra, Air Force Museum.

I remember one day some bloke came into camp, pompous, tall, big baggy bloomers and he slouched round, that was the Duke of

Gloucester. I had nothing to do with him I just saw him come into the camp. But God, he was a horrible looking thing.

Just playing an inspection.

I’m a loyalist.

To the throne.

Hmm.

Yeah.

No, I had to join up! As I say compulsory training. But then when I lost my father, it made a big difference. But still, my family came from Cornwall, St Just and I can trace their ancestry back to 1607 because when the Spaniards raided the

coast at Mouzle [pronunciation for Mousehole in Cornwall, England] or ‘Mousehole’ as we call it, in 1595 they marched up to Paul [also in Cornwall] and they razed the church to the ground and destroyed all the parish records. Well the first authenticated document that they got from that church in St Just, was when Keverne married Margaret in 1607 at Paul. They didn’t bother about the wife’s maiden name in those days, ‘cause the parish

priest or parsons used to go round on a circuit and they’d christen all the newborn. The day they were born had nothing to do with it, the day they christened them was the day they worried about.

Or baptised them.

Well it actually didn’t have anything to do with it, because

they were in England and we were in Australia.

They were fighting with the British.

No they were fighting for King and Country, yeah.

Yeah we fought for the King and Country. You remember Menzies’ famous speech? ‘I did not see her

passing by, but will I love her until I die’.

No only when I say the Duke of Gloucester paid a visit. I wasn’t very impressed with him. Because I was down at Port Melbourne when the Yankee fleet came out here. And I’ve seen cases down there that I was telling you about, these

molls down there and the Yankee negroes. And they’d be under the pier, they’d be anywhere, along the walk between Princes and Station Pier.

Oh I don’t think so. I read articles that the Yanks never won a war on their own in their life. And when they came into the First World War, the only battle they ever fought in, was the last battle that was fought in 1918. It was the only battle they actually took part in. They had a presence over there, but fighting, no. They made many

films showing the pointy hats, bastards, as I call them. I’ve got absolutely no time for them, they got beat at the Alamo, they got beat at the Battle of the…. what’s the other battle they got beat in?...the Mexican battle. They got beat in the First World War. They only came in at the tail end of it and collected the goods. They got beat in the Second World War. They got a kick in the teeth at

Pearl Harbor. They lost the Gulf War [Gulf War 1] because they wouldn’t let Stormin’ Norman [US General Normal Schwarzkopf] go in, and they’re getting beat in this war [Iraq], losing more men now. They’ve got the money, they’ve got the equipment, they’ve got the production, they’ve got everything they need, but they haven’t got it in here [heart]. That’s my opinion of them. Gutless wonders.

They’re too full of themselves. They took all the best,

the brains out of the world after the First World War. They took all the brains after the Second World War and they built all these spacecraft and everything like that.

We weren’t under General MacArthur’s orders at all.

No, no, he had nothing to do with us.

Once he moved away form the area, he’d go to Guadalcanal where they made a big fuss and got a big belting. And they’d go to these other islands, Guam or wherever it was. But he wanted to get to Japan before the British.

No he didn’t leave any orders at all. We came under Blamey and the Australian generals.

No I remember old Tom Blamey when he was Police Commissioner, going to all the brothels in Lonsdale Street. In fact one day, he left his cap down there, and one of the girls took it up to Russell Street and said, “The boss left his cap there.” And I remember when General Cass died and we were in the militia, and they wanted volunteers to go up and do a

ceremonial guard on the catafalque, in Queens Hall. And I was on that guard, and we were doing the graveyard shift as they call it, half past eleven till half past twelve. And we were in Queens Hall and this coffin’s there on the bier and this big clock inside is going boom, boom, boom….. and I went to sleep on me rifle. And the sergeant of the guard came round on the carpet and tapped me on the

shoulder and I dropped the bloody rifle.

Oh yeah.

Yeah but the clock, the silence (apart from the clock) it would put you to sleep. You’re resting with your arms reversed you know.

See the 9th Division came back, and another division came back. You might remember where they stopped, the Japs, when they were coming across the island, and the 6th Division blokes came back. And they were on the high ground and the

39th Battalion stopped the Japs on their side because the other crowd got run over and it took the 6th Division to come up. But I marched behind the 39th Battalion when we were doing a march along Lonsdale Street or wherever it was, and this woman’s carrying the 39th Battalion [flag] and it’s flapping round me ears. But they were the mob that stopped them. But the only reason they stopped them or the main reason they stopped them, the Japs didn’t like cold steel.

I don’t think I was serving under Blamey’s orders. The only thing we did was take his wife and some of his friends out, some of them took his wife and friends out on a trip to one of the islands, and when they got out there they couldn’t find the loo [toilet], “Where’s the loo?”

Thought there’d be everything out there.

Well I left New Guinea in October

1945. And the cleaning up that had to be done after peace was signed was still going on in 1946. And they formed another Small Craft Company. I think it was called 56, 56 Australian Landing Craft Company. They were formed in Brisbane but were only operated for 3 months.

15th was the day, VP Day.

Yeah the war was still going on and even in the clean up afterwards, there was still Japs fighting in Bougainville and up in New Guinea. Pockets of them.

Right up until the day I left there.

Oh yeah.

No. That was all handled by the war ambulance convoy, and the bloke that took over, Major Gulley. He was in charge of this water ambulance convoy and you might see

a certificate in that book that every one that paid off they called it, he gave them this certificate. And that showed there whether the battles were fought and that.

No, no that’s why I got that Governor General’s approval to get the 1945-1975

Australian Service Medal.

Oh business as usual till the day I left.

Oh yeah that was down at Malahang at the (UNCLEAR) Chapel.

Oh I was down there.

We had a Melbourne footballer was an officer. And that quartermaster I was telling you about was right in the front rank.

Baggett. There was two brothers I believe, and one was not in the water transport but he was in Lae, one of the areas in Lae.

Well we had to go down, take your own bottles of beer.

Oh its just general hoo-ha, just general relief that’s all.

Through Routine Orders.

No we knew that peace talks were going on, because over at Tol Plantation, that was over in Bougainville, they lost a lot of troops over there. And Tommy, forgot his name, they took the ammunition in for 2/8th

Field Artillery to do the raid on Tol Plantation. And three barges went in, one of them got stranded on a reef, and that was riddled with shellfire. And the other one got stranded and the other one got through and came back again. And they lost a lot of men in the (UNCLEAR) Sea was it? And they were just washed away with the

tide. One bloke was shot right through the eyes and another bloke dived overboard to get his rifle and didn’t come back again. He was a native. He was up in the bow. I actually was just a base wallah. Although I was away from home, I was just a base wallah. But while I was up at Seymour they had officers’ training schools

there, and the officers were training for higher rank and they’d bring out a précis on whatever the subject was for the day. And I read this précis about ‘that thick’ on logistics. And the one part stated in there, for every one man that served in the front line, it took ten to keep him there. So not everybody, they can brag all they like, but a lot of them never fired a shot in their life.

In fact one bloke that I used to be with up at Sir William Hostel with, he was up in Darwin and he was going round, coming around from their camp to Darwin to collect the mail in a launch, and he saw this white paper floating down and it was the bombers, dive-bombing Darwin. So they just pulled round and went back to camp again. And he finished up driving,

working a hatch on a ship, and he was in an ASL , and I couldn’t make out what this ASL was. And it was aShip’s Landing Craft or something, I forget. But he was this hatch driver on one of the winches. He was telling me about he got into strife, because he interfered

with the rorting, or the black market that was going on between the lieutenant and the sergeant down at this unit. And they put one over him, they put a shoe under his bed and he got charged with stealing this pair of shoes that went missing. His name was Kenneth Maxwell but he always went under the name of Tony. But his daughters one of

was one of these neuro cases. She works for that, what’s that foundation, something to do with the nerves?

Multiple Sclerosis.

Oh it’s nothing to write home about, love.

Well you had to take your own bottle of beer down, and

your own rations. So that was a celebration.

Oh no that was another menu. There was two menus there. We had on the Marella [SS Marella] when we were coming back, no I think it was on the Taroona [MV Taroona]. No it was the Marella because we had Indian crew on,

deck hands and stewards and all that. And that was [UNCLEAR] pie. But the other one was they had a Christmas dinner and I think it had a boong on it didn’t it? A native boy? And the menu was the MC [Master of Ceremonies] I think was the sig sergeant that come from Geelong…Impy, Sergeant Impy, Stan Impy, that’s right.

I didn’t even have his initial in the book.

Well that’s all in there.

I had a high number of points and that’s why I got out of the [army].

I was that long in the army, I’d been away from home that long that I’d built up that many points and having a wife and child, they all counted. And you went out before the ordinary soldier.

No, no. I’ll tell you when I got out to the LTD [?] at Lae we were on parade and the

sergeant-major came down, and of course I’m standing at the rear, and he said, “We’ve got a routine order from Australia that every soldier that goes back to the mainland has got to carry his own rifle, because they haven’t got shipping to carry them.” So I went straight back to camp and drew me Smith and Wesson pistol. And I came on parade the next morning. “Ahh” he says. “Where’s your rifle,

your side-arms?” I said, “Are you blind?” He said, “What do you mean?” I’m the same rank as him, and he said, “What do you mean?” and I said, “Well can’t you see my bloody side- arms?” I said, “There are they” and I carried this Smith and Wesson and by God they looked after it. Never left my kitbag or my person, because they were a pretty valuable items.

Only that gun. I didn’t want anything to bring back with. That was given to me by the boys when I left there, and they wanted me to bring them back to Australia with me. Oh they cried, they put their arms around me and cried. They were lovely boys.

Oh yeah, I had a tear in me eye to tell you the truth.

Yeah, yeah they were good boys. Desaris, although he was a mission trained boy, he was shrewd, he knew all the tricks of the trade. And he managed to bring his meri back with him.

Oh the Yanks’d do anything. See they took them up there to get food and

vegetables from the farms and they bought the meri back with them. When we were going up to Kaiapit, there weren’t any native young girls around anywhere. They got rid of them also, the troops didn’t get any of them. And I see this old, what do you call it, gin [indigenous woman]. She’s got a pig on

one breast and a baby on the other and this red betel nut juice, she’s chewing betel nut and its running down her lips and onto her belly, oh horrible old bag.

No they weren’t allowed to leave New Guinea.

Even the equipment the Yanks impressed, they had to return, but a lot of it, this ketch, the Harold you were asking me about, they found out that that was damaged and condemned and it was burnt up in Brisbane. A lot of it was resaleable, a lot of the stuff but what wasn’t resold was condemned and burnt.

No didn’t want a send off. I was too glad to get home.

No they just presented me with that gun. ‘Grass bilong sergeant-major’ that was me moustache. No the little boy from Salamaua, and I still can’t think of his name,

but he was the one that Sig Mooney trained to connect his batteries up in series while he went back and had a sleep, he was a lovely boy. The original boss boy I had before Aras, because I had to pick up so many a day and Aras was the boss boy, but the original one was the one that was trying to get this ring off his finger, he was an old bloke, a lot older than Argus, but they were all good

boys. Get the original larrikin like Fergus. But in that photo there’s a lot of kanakas were in there and the kanakas they didn’t like the native police. They used to wear a lap lap that was blue and a red band around it and carry a baton. And these boong boys had their hair all stained with ochre and feathers in it and that. And they’d be coming

down the track going to a sing sing, which was a concert where they did all their dancing and that, and they’d see these native boys and they’d dive off into the bush, the jungle. They didn’t like, oh they were good the native police.

On the Marella.

Oh we were supposed to be coming straight back to Sydney. But when we got to Cairns, we were told we didn’t have enough coal to go to Sydney, so we were to go to some other place, back this way. So eventually we got off at Cairns and went out to Redlynch Camp, well some of the boys went to, what was the name of the falls up there?

Barren Falls, they went out there and we went out to the open air theatre. They’d have a rail there and a rail there and another one there and canvas in between it and you’d sit and look at this pictures. Others went in and bought paw paws, God you used to live on them. When we got back to Redlynch that night

I was told to be ready to march out next morning. We were going back by train. But Redlynch was a real black market place, you could bet on any race in Australia. And the sergeant and the officers were in with them and the officers got a tip off. They got paid for everything the bookies [bookmakers] took. But I went back there later and it was all painted a pretty pink colour, the

barracks and all that.

No. I went to Royal Park and that’s where I was discharged, Royal Park was out Broadmeadows way. No sorry I turned the corner out of O’Farrell Street into Hamilton Street and I said, “God I didn’t live in this bloody dump, did I?”

It was strange, everything was so different. Because it took five trains to bring us down from Cairns, and one was like a seat along each side and the luggage rack up the top, and the toilet in the corner and the door there. And I had to see everybody had a bed to lie on. Some laid up in the luggage rack, some laid on the seat and some on the floor. I finished

up, me legs up here and me head around the corner, and two blokes slept out on the observation platform. They woke up the next morning covered in soot and cinders, they were black. When the train used to pull in and get water we’d have a shower under the six inch hose that pumped the water. But then we got into the one at

Brisbane, that wasn’t much better. Then we got into one at Sydney that had a little seat there and I was sleeping on that with me head against the window and me feet over the seat. Oh they were bad, railways. The only train that was any good was when we changed into the train at, what’s the name? On the water?

The Spirit of Progress? That wasn’t there till long after the war. There’s Lavington on one side, what’s the main town…..Albury. And we changed into the new train onto the Melbourne gauge railway. And I was made OC car which meant I had to count, see if all the troops are on it. I’ve gone through this car and I’m opening the door to go through

and ‘eeeek.’

Everything.

Well when we camped at Mount Martha, our huts had been occupied by the marines and on the wooden ply wall there was magnificent charcoal

drawings of the corps badge they had, what was the marines badge? And the Battle of Bourke Street and a few other things. And Bill Bartlett was the sergeant-major, as I was saying before and he was president of the mess and I was vice president. We were in NCOs’ mess with the water transport, because we were

engineers. All others were sergeants’ messes and officers’ messes. And Bill would get drunk, as the old saying goes, drunk as a fart, and he always wanted to be last out the bar, so each NCO had to take a turn to serve behind the bar. And we had a bloke called Shepherd, was the actual barmaid. But we had to take an account, put a mark on the bottle and take account of how much was left

after the show was over. The bloke next one along, he went like that and put his mark under there. And this Shepherd, he asked him for a drink and Shepherd was pretty slow in getting it and next thing, bang, these horse carrots[?], about that big and that size round, he threw that and it went right through the ply wall. He was a bad tempered old bugger. He heard him arguing the point with a bull one night.

That was my store and the office, and I slept in the end of the office, and that was the officers’ mess, and there was a bell tent there and this bull was behind a electrified fence in a house next door. And I heard this roaring going on and I went out to see what it was, about 2 o’clock in the morning. Here’s Bill in his undies [underwear] roaring with the bull. That’s one battle he’d lost.

He’d drink till he got drunk and he went on parade the next morning as steady as a rock. He was a magnificent soldier. But if you made one move, back there. You’d have to get in full marching order, that was a sergeant or other rank and you’d double it round the parading ground.

Oh they didn’t worry

much about it. No well I say that my wife took in this old lady, Mrs, oh I forget her name, but she lived there. I When I came home I said, “Get rid of that bloody cat.” She used to feed the cat that came over the fence from next door. Every night on the ramp it would be outside, because we were that high of the ground, and I built a ramp so the wife could come down with the pram. And she’d feed it on the ramp. So the first thing I

saw when I got home and opened the fly wire door and here’s this cat. I just got the boot behind it . I got, “Oh no don’t do that to my cat.” And I said, “You were supposed to be out of here before I got home, now I don’t care what you put over the wife, you’re putting nothing over me, you be out of here by tomorrow morning.” And they went and lived round in Gamon Street. But when we turned up at court (they took a couple of

saucepans and that, they shouldn’t have taken) so I took them to the Magistrate’s Court down in Napier Street Footscray. And when I got down there a bloke came up to meet my solicitor and he said, “You representing so and so?” and the bloke said. “Yeah.” He said, “Well they moved out and they’d be gone when you get home.” I didn’t care a damn.

Of course it did. They had so much money around here that the Yanks had left behind them. People could buy things. But I got a suit of clothes, and you remember denim or something, and they had no cuffs on the bottom and the sleeves were just straight down. You got a suit with coupons,

and you got deferred pay and you got deferred leave and you got your allotment and all that sort of thing.

I used to give the wife my allotment.

No this the allotment of my pay went to the wife. But when I got home she didn’t have a penny, she used to spend money like water. And I said to her,

“Where’s your bank book, how much you got in the bank?” She said, “Nothing.” And she used to get money by letting rooms to people. So when I got to warrant officer I was getting 15 bob a day. Ordinary bloke would get 5 bob a day, so as his rank went up he’d get more. So I used to make a bigger allotment, but she had nothing. But still, that was just she had a

champagne taste on a ginger beer pocket.

Oh yeah. She’d buy me lovely clothes and that. All good brands you know, her taste but my money.

Of course it was, I got a big smooch [kiss].

No we went back to normal life again. I didn’t start work until the 4th January 1946. I had leave built up and of course you didn’t get much leave when you were up New Guinea. You might’ve got a bit of leave in Seymour and might’ve got a bit of leave when you’re down at Geelong, Queenscliff.

Oh just took it in her stride. That’s her there at our golden wedding anniversary, and when I had to put her into the old hostel that’s here, she was very popular, and they said she used to get round singing all day. I said, “I never knew she could sing.” She’d sing ‘How much is that doggie in the window’ and ‘All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth.’

Oh every wedding anniversary we had we’d go to Her Majesty’s Theatre and see the Ice Follies and all those things. [To] the Apollo when that used to be up the top end of Bourke Street. Oh we’d go out for dinner at the Atheneum Café in Collins Street.

Oh quite the same as I managed in my pre-war life.

Oh well I can adapt meself to anything. I had to because I had to learn when I was eight years of age to take charge of the family and earn money to keep a family. I’d ring the auction bells when they used to have auction sales

from, not Les, the son he was in the bowling club with me. And his wife went home one day and found him dead on the bed, he blew his brains out. And Walter Law was the estate agent, and he give Mum work scrubbing floor in those days. When the tenant moved out they’d scrub the old wooden floors and I’d ring this bell when there was an auction sale up and down the street.

Oh had to turn your hand to anything.

After the war?

Well I didn’t start again until 1946. And I was working over at Port Melbourne. Well there was only three of us over there. There was a foreman wharf carpenter, I was the joiner and then there was a

wharf carpenter labourer. And I remember one day he said to me “Well Henry, you’ll have to water your garden again tonight.” And we were in a very dry area in Yarraville with cracks in the ground that wide, because its basalt country. And I said, “How do you make that out, Alf?” He said, “Well you look down the bay.” I looked down the bay. I said, “All I can see is a broad band or something.” He said, “Now just watch it for a while.” So I watched it and then all of a sudden it formed into a ‘Y’

and he said, “Do you know what that is? That’s rain. That’s going up the Caulfield valley and I live at Carnegie and that’s going round the back of the You Yangs” [low range of hills between Melbourne and Geelong]. And I had to water my garden the next morning, Alf didn’t.

Oh well you didn’t have time to be

close, there was always something to be done. I was on speaking terms with them, except for the day they pulled me bloody steps down.

I told you about it.

Yeah I went to come out one morning and I stood there to see what the sky was, and I went to move down the steps and they weren’t there and I was that high off the ground.

I’d have broken me neck if I’d have gone down. And they’d taken them away, and of course the boys were upset when they did ’cause they’d built these steps when they built the new hut. They built a new hut for the boss too, the major. When Backhouse went up to Borneo, Major Gulley took over and then a bloke called Nobby Clark. All Clarks got called Nobby and he’d been a plantation owner up in New Guinea.

I never marched for ten years.

Because I’d had enough of it. No I went there and we marched from up near the Cecil Hotel, right up the top end of Lonsdale Street and by the time we took off, the

navy was coming back and going to the pub, the Cecil. And they had this bannerette, with Major Bridgeman who was OC 13 Small Ships Company and he worked for the Adelaide Steamship Company and I used to deliver mail when I was a boy up there. And he’s kneeling in front of this

banneret and a bloke had just died, Harry White. He said, “Now you look after this bannerette.” He said, “Harry had that until the day he died and Frosty took it over out at Boronia, they were mates. And the bloke was standing behind me, had a peaked cap on and khaki uniform and he was working on the thing that they built down the Williamstown dockyards. It had

6 rudders and 5 propellers. What was the name of it… oh it was a designed by Brigadier General Steel. I don’t know whether there’s a photo in there but I saw it on our slipways down the dockyard when I went back to work.

Daughter’s birthday.

Oh I thought about them, but none of them had died in our unit. We never had anyone die in 3 Group like the headquarters. And there were one or two strafed by machine guns, but they were only wounded. But I’m in contact with them now. I belong to that

Certificate of Appreciation there, and they came out to see me one day here. Five of them walked in and the president was here, Nugget White, he’s dead now. He was a WO1 when he was with us, not our unit. And they presented me with this certificate. Tears followed, I get very emotional.

And oh no I still write to them, send them out photos. We’ve got the Association. They met up at Legacy House now and that’s changed. It’s got pavement and parking area. They go in what they call Facey House, their clubroom. But I don’t like their dinners, they have a lecture after given by some of the

Legatees, that have come up in the world. And the day I went to the first dinner there, this bloke, he was talking all about the law and what he done and what he didn’t do, and they’re clapping him, and I’m bored stupid. I never went back to the next one.

No. My relatives were in the army.

Wait there was, I’m sorry. Jack Jacobson was up at Wagga Wagga, and then they came down to Melbourne. That was my Auntie, she married Stan Jacobson. And his daughter married this bloke that was in the signals unit and the day the war was finished, he went down to the stream to get water and a bloody Jap

sniper got him, killed him. He was the only bloke who was family, not family, but family’s husband.

No, she was an afterthought. The next brother to her was 10 years older and the other brother was 15 years older than her. She was an afterthought.

Of course I’m proud.

I done me bit for me country. And that’s what I always wanted to do. Once they brought me in compulsory, I said bugger you, I’m going to stay here now and earn money. No

I don’t look back with any joy on it because I was working all the time, I didn’t have time to get sweet about anything. It was hard yakka, believe you me.

They weren’t, they had nothing.

Well because of the Australians

aptitude for making things, improvising and that’s all that it was that kept us going in provision. Until they built these other craft. And we got some of the new crafts, they were built in Western Australia. A tug that we bought down at Newport workshops, they were built over in Tasmania and built up down at Geelong.

What I’ve seen of it, and I’ve been round the east coast, north coast, south coast, west coast up to Alice Springs. That was me first trip. I always said one day I’ll get up to the Red Centre. I’d

heard a lot about it at school and of course when Dad died that was kaput, no way. So that was my first trip. Went up by coach, Australian Pacific and came back by plane. While we were waiting to take off, there was a fighter aircraft waiting to take off too.

It’s a hell of a bloody mess, the same as the rest of the world is. See I look on this SBS [television network], the news from 8 o’clock in the morning till I got to bed at night, 9 o’clock. There’s nothing on the other programmes, its all advertising, con men, con artists. And this, they only want 50,000

people, it will only cost you $35 so you multiply 50,000 by $35 and these conmen are ready to take your money away. If you won’t pay, you can’t get it in shops. You’ve got to send your credit card to a certain number while you do that they copy it and print it and they’re taking your money out of the bank.

In a hell of a mess politically, religiously, multiculturally. What I can see it’s getting down to Armageddon, and that will be the Muslims versus the Christians, and that’s all the religions they reckon there are. There are Buddhists but they’ve got that many gods they don’t know which one to worship. And you’ve seen the 4 Buddhists have you?

Oh there are a lot of people coming out here, and there are some good people, but there’s a lot of the bad element come out here to. The crime element. And I see here on TV last night that they’re growing these poppies in Afghanistan and that’s the biggest market they’ve got for poppies.

Opium

no way.