Australians at War Film Archive

Well, I was born on 2 July 1924 and I have three sisters, twins in the family and the eldest girl was the eldest, of course, and we lived in Hobart

and it was during the Depression time and we lived in Hobart and things were pretty bad . Everybody was hungry and there were no jobs and just one of those things, one of those times and my Father was a man of all trades. A bit of a mechanic and turn his hand to do anything.

My Mum had three children to look after and along I came of course so there were four and life went on as usual, just very poor. So the family became divided from the, what’s the word I’m looking for? ‘The Depression’, and one of the girls went to live with my grandparents at Battery Point.

They were, my grandfather was a marine engineer so they had money to look after an extra person and the other girl went to South Arm to live with the Cowards because they wanted her, loved her and wanted her, and so that helped my Mum and Dad; and my other sister and I were always together so we were always good friends and after a period of time,

my Father was inclined to be a little bit of a drinker and he liked the girls as well which made things difficult for my Mum and after a period of time it all got too much for her and for us and she eventually…we packed her case as it got to be terrible, the whole situation was terrible, so when I was about 10, we packed Mum’s cases and sent her off because it was just too much

to handle. Of course, we were broken hearted and men in those days had all the say. It wasn’t a woman’s world anymore as it is today, and so off, we sent her away. She went to work at other places and we were left with my Father because he was the bread winner, he earned the money to keep the family going

and at that time, the bread winner got the family and then it happened that the authorities wouldn’t allow, even at that time, wouldn’t allow a house without a woman in it so we moved into a place called Alice Maud Terrace up north Hobart with my aunt and uncle and

we got into all sorts of mischief, not harmful mischief but, , and we lived there for quite a while and I hated it. We went to school, Elizabeth Street Practising School. We were all sports mad, all the girls. My Mum was a champion swimmer and…but prior to that, I got a little bit ahead of

of myself… because of the Depression, my uncle who lived in Sydney asked my Father would he like to go to Sydney and he had a removalist business and so away we all went to Sydney. It was like going to the moon then, .

I would have been only about 4, 3½ or 4 and

off we went to Sydney and we lived in Sydney for 3½ years until Father got run over by a taxi and we had to, Mum and we girls, had to come home as there was no money to pay the rent or for food and things so we went to live with my paternal grandfather up West Hobart at a place called The Glen which we all decided

was better than Sydney because there were caves, bush, ponds and all those kinds of things. So we had a lovely time there until Father arrived and decided… well, he was in hospital for 2½ years, for two years because in those days there wasn’t any, what’s the word I’m looking for? There wasn’t any blood transfusions

or bone things that they do now. Isn’t that awful saying that, what do they call it when you have bones…? Anyway, doesn’t matter. Anyway, he was in hospital till his legs mended and he came home and he decided that the cottage we lived in at Grandpa Saunders’ place was too small, so we moved and that was when all the trouble started so, cause

he was used to being a freelance. When he was in hospital he could go out at different times, I expect, but he was very sick just the same and his tibia and fibula was on show because that’s where the taxi hit him, in the leg. Anyway we went to live up, after my Mum left, we went to live up North Hobart at a place called Alice Maud Terrace, which is a great big three storey place and Peg and I, that was my sister—the sister

that lived with me—Peg and I were always together and I went to school at Elizabeth Street State Practising School and she’d left school and was looking after the house, if you could call it that. We did all sorts of naughty things to Dad because we didn’t like him anymore.

It was strange from the time

he came back from Sydney. Actually, he had four sisters who absolutely ruined him. It was, “Do this, do that”, and Mum was a little bit independent see and she wasn’t going to go doing this and doing that like the four girls used to do for Dad. “Do this for me, Ida.” “Do this for me, Elli” or “You do that, Elli” and all this sort of thing so Mum wasn’t used to that. She was an independent lady, she was,

she was a stenographer and she was a swimmer and she was a very independent lady, see. So she objected to it and he thought she should do it, see. It all ended up in a ruckus of some proportion and then when he came back we moved down from the little cottage into a bigger cottage and all the trouble started worse than ever, so in the end, when I was about 10,

we could see it was going nowhere. Peg and I said, “You’ve got to go, it’s getting worse and worse”, so we helped her pack the cases and broken hearted she left, broken hearted and then we were left there broken hearted and that’s when we went to live up in Alice Maud Terrace. I got that a bit back to front didn’t I, anyway.

Peg was about 12 or 13 and she was another independent,

another independent person and poor old Peg used to get a few thumps across the head cause she didn’t do as she was told. , all those sort of weird and wonderful things from… but men ruled the world in those days. Anyway we went to Alice Maud Terrace and eventually he sent her away down to Uncle Percy Coward’s at a place called Green Island down south,

a little bit down south and she stayed there for a while and I stayed at school at Elizabeth Street State School and I loved school and I loved all the fun and I hated mathematics which I couldn’t do. So sports mad. Anything to do with sport as we were all sports mad and I used to be captain of the hockey team and I had dreadful upper teeth,

so on a Friday in the winter we had geometry to do at half past two till 3 o’clock and at 3 o’clock we went to sport you see. The only way I could get to sport was, without having to stop behind and do geometry till it was finished, so I went up to see the school dentist. I made a pact with him. I said “Would you take one of my teeth out every

Friday, please” so I could go at 3 o’clock and then school went till half past three, you see, and then if you didn’t do your geometry, you had to stop behind and do it. So I thought, “I’m never ever going to do geometry”. I wouldn’t have a clue so off I went to the dentist and made this pact with the dentist after a little bit of girlish skulduggery and battering of the eyelids. So every Friday after that I went up to have a tooth removed, so I could go and play hockey.

Anyway that was all right and then I went to work at Christmas time.

All the top teeth. They all came out one by one and it was all through the winter season , because that’s when we played hockey. Anyway, I used to go to work and after that I had dentures and all that sought of thingo.

So I’ve had dentures since I was 14. All the top lot. So then I went to work at a place called Cummings which was a draper in school holidays and at Christmas time, and then by this time I was about 14 or 15 and I went back to school till I was 16. My sister worked at Kodak and

I was talking to her because she lived with grandma and grandpa at Battery Point and she said, “Look, if you want to go and live with Mum, , you are old enough now to support yourself”. See you had to be able to support yourself in those days before you were allowed to leave home sought of business. “Oh,” I thought, “I could go and live with Mum.” Mum and I were very, very close and we saw her and she’d come and visit us.

Here I go again, I’ve missed the point again. She’d come and visit us and if Dad was home where we lived… we’d hang out a red cloth out the window to say he was home and all that sort of nonsense and if he wasn’t home, we’d hang out a white cloth so she’d come and visit us you see or we’d go and visit her. So anyway, she had a little flat and anyway, she eventually moved down to

Queen Street in Sandy Bay and that was when Phyl said to me, my elder sister, “You can go and live with Mum now if you can support yourself”, and she said, “we need a printer at Kodak. I was 16 by then, nearly 16. She said, “I could get you a job at Kodak as a printer”, and so that sounded all right. I packed my gear up. Four times I went from Northhope down to

Sandy Bay to live with Mum. I packed my gear and by the time I’d moved it all, it took four trips from Elizabeth Street right down to Sandy Bay, down to Queen Street. Oh, it was lovely to live with my Mum. We were so close, we’d always been close and it broke my heart… but anyhow, that was in the past.

Oh, I don’t know what happened to him. We sought of, it hurt us so much that we’d lost interest you

know and it was sad and I always had the feeling when I was home and all the trouble was going on, I used to think that it was my fault. That’s how kids think. What can I do to help her? Anyway, that was in the past. I was living with her now so that was all right. So, at 16 I was working at Kodak and then in 1941 when I was

15, they were talking about the war was just about to start, or it had started. I’ll just get my facts right. Anyway, 14, 15, 16. The military people started talking, the government started talking recruiting women for the army, for the forces. It was mainly the air

force they were speaking about it at that time and “Oh, I thought, “I’d just love to do that”. So I kept it in my mind and then that talk went away. The government ceased talking about it and then in 1941 it became more serious that they were in need of men. They were desperately in need of men to go away and fight so eventually they decided to

have women in the army (that’s not the word I should be using but never mind) and it was talked of and I thought, “Oh, I’ll do it, I will, I’ll do it”. I said to Mum, “When I turn 18 I’m going to join the forces if they have it, if they do it”. So in 1941 they decided that they would have women in the army to release the men to go because we didn’t have enough

men to fight a war really, that’s basically what it meant. So when I turned 18, I was sitting there printing away at the printer and I thought, “I’ll go up there at lunchtime and get some papers to sign up”. So I was 18 and oh, prior to that I can remember we were standing, Mum and I were

standing on the verandah down at Queens Street, that was where we lived… I’m wandering a bit aren’t I?

And we saw a little plane fly over, this was in 1942 and the fellow had a pair of binoculars and he was looking up at the sky and he was following this flying plane and Mum and I were standing watching him and he said, “That was a jet plane”. Well I nearly said, I won’t say what I was going to say.

I was going to say I nearly wet myself. And Mum and I were sort of stunned. He just said it as though he was having a cup of tea and I nearly wet myself and I thought to myself, “What’s going to happen if they get here, I’ll sit in a bucket of cement”, cause I had my mind on the other business and Mum said, “I’m too old to pull a rickshaw”, so we both had a giggle about that. I didn’t want to be raped, that was what the thing was about

that, and anyway we had a bit of a giggle and that’s when I said to her, “I will, I’ll join up as soon as turn 18”, so …I’ll go back to where I was. So I was sitting in the dark room about 11 o’clock and I thought 11 o’clock, 12 o’clock, 1 o’clock before I go to lunch, so I suddenly thought, “Oh blow that, I’m not going to wait all that time”, so I raced out of the dark room and it was all different then. They took photos,

you printed the negatives in the dark room under a light, you see, and it was all dark and they did all those sort of things because the negatives were always done in a dark room, even the spools they sent up from the shop and anyway I decided, “I’m not going to wait any longer”, so I said to my sister who was head woman, I said, “I’m off, I’m going to join up, I’m going to get the papers”.

She said, “You can’t do that!” I said, “Yes, I can!” I wasn’t in a hold. Very naughty I was and as I went through the outer room where they were printing the negatives, like the photos, like the photos from the negatives… my friend was a colourist and they used to colour the photos, like an artist, they’d colour the photos and I said to her, “I’m going, Bossy, I’m going to join up. Coming?” and she said “Yes”, and we

flew into this little old creaking lift and down we went and the boss was standing behind the door and he said, “Where are you going?” “We’re going to join up”. “Oh,” he said “you lucky things”, because he was an older man of course and he said, “Good Luck!” as we raced out the door. So we went and joined up. We went and got our papers to join up. So when we were going through the gates up at the Anglesey Barracks

the fellow on the gates said, “Are you going to join up?” We said, “Yes, of course we are”, and he said “Oh well,” he said “you’ll be sorry”, and that was the cry, “You’ll be sorry” during the war. So we had a little chat to him and as we walked away, he said, “Anyway Blondie, you’ll have to get your hair cut”. “Oh no!” “You’ll have to get your golden locks cut”, that’s what he said and Bossy had auburny coloured hair and she was rather pretty and he said, “And you too!” and we raced

off and just had a fiddle with our hair, thinking we’re going to lose our hair, . Anyway, that didn’t matter and we went up and we eventually got to signing our papers and I was…the chappie who was filling in my papers, we got talking because I was just 18, at that age where everything was everything, so anyway, I was talking away to this

chappie and he filled in the papers and as I was about to leave he said, “How about a date?” and at that particular time I was going with somebody, you see. I had been going with a… I’d met this boy when I was 16 when we were all swimmers and I thought he was the ant’s pants which he was and, “Oh,” I said, “no, I’m sorry, I’m spoken for”. He said, “I can’t take you to the pictures then?” and I said, “No, I’m spoken for”, silly, he was going on with a lot of rot but I remembered

that boy, his name, I’ll call him… I won’t give you his name but I remembered him. I could give him a false name, couldn’t I, to make it sound better.

He wasn’t as nice as… he wasn’t quite as nice looking as Errol Flynn but he nearly got there. Anyway, I remembered his name, oh, what was his name, I can’t think now. Anyway, that’s on the side.

I’ve written it down a hundred times and it’s just escaped me. I’ll think about it in a minute. I can’t think; I’ll tell you later. So I thought to myself, “Oh he was nice”. He had beautiful blue eyes and a lovely young man to talk to and he wanted to take me to the pictures and I said I was spoken for so that was that. So off we went and

went back to work and nobody said anything that we were naughty about going and racing off. So about, how old, 18. On August 13 I joined up, on August 13, 1943. Went through a medical and that was a strange experience, went through a medical with a whole lot of other women up at Lindfield up at…that was the AWAS [Australian Women’s Army Service]

Hostel and…

Bossy, yeah and I had another friend called… when we went through the barracks gates, you walk… Have you been to the…? No, you wouldn’t. Of course, you wouldn’t. Anyway we were walking up towards this place and a lot of other girls were walking up and there was one girl walking on her own and we caught up

with her and I said, “Are you going to join up?” She said, “Yes, are you?” and then we introduced ourselves. “I’m June, called Blondie”, we had a lot of nicknames and, “This is my friend, Bossy”; her name was June also, so she was Bossy, and Blondie and Molly, her name was. So we became friends all through the war and we all signed up and we all went to have our medical together and then we went, after that we

had to wait for a little while before we had our medical. Then once we had our medical, I was A1 [excellent] thank goodness for that and so were the other two. We were pretty fit. We had to walk everywhere, there were no cars and it was a really different time to what it is now. I mean the kids don’t know they’re alive now but we took it all for granted. We walked everywhere. We used to walk up to the mountain and not think… and nearly every weekend

we’d walk up the mountain in the winter because there was nothing much else to do. There wasn’t anything else much to do so we’d always be going and doing something, . We were all sports people and that anyway…where was I at?

So anyway…

Well, somehow I stuck on the army and I don’t know

why. I just, I suppose… no, there was no particular reason. It was just that the army seemed to be the place for me, . You get a certain mind set and you think, “Well, that’s what I want to do and that’s what I…” Anyway, that’s what we did. We went, after we had our medical, we went out to the barracks at Broadmarsh, there’s a women’s barracks at Broadmarsh. We didn’t go out,

directly out to Brighton, which was the place to go as they’d put these barracks up for the women for some unknown reason, the reason being I don’t think they wanted the women in with the men where the big Brighton camp was used and that was out past Bridgewater. You’ll pass Bridgewater when you go out, when you go north and Brighton was about two or three

mile, three or four miles from Bridgewater and it was a huge camp and it was full of men and of course, they were still treating us like we were back in the Victorian era and actually we were the tale enders of the Victorian era. We didn’t go out without our gloves and you didn’t go out without your hats and all that sort of business. That’s when we were in Civvy Street [civilian life] and the same thing applied when we joined the army. You were regimentally naked if you didn’t wear your hat.

Doesn’t it sound strange, doesn’t it. Gloves always on. Anyway that’s on the littler side as well. Anyway we went to the barracks at Broadmarsh which was about a mile before you got to the main barracks at Brighton so we did our rookie school and we learned to do all sorts of naughty things at rookie school like smoking and having a drink. Mind you, I wasn’t too keen on the grog but

I did try it and got drunk.

Yes, that was amongst the …but a wonderful lot it was really. Entirely different. They talked about the ablution blocks, having a shower or a bath became the ablution blocks not the bathroom you were used to in Civvy Street , they became the ablution blocks. The toilets… no doors, no doors on anything.

The toilets didn’t have any doors on them. You sat there like shaggy Maggie May, without any door everybody would be swishing past, . No, it was an entirely different life. Entirely different. We had palliasses filled with straw, that was our… oh, you’ve heard this before, I guess, have you?

They had the palliasses filled with straw. That was our

mattress. We had grey blankets, we had no sheets, no pillow slips. This was at Broadmarsh, but we didn’t seem to care. Here we were, suddenly we became more than mothers and babysitters and housewives and suddenly the whole thing burst wide open and suddenly women became more…more

than just being that and we were so proud of it. We were so proud to be part of this big machine, this big war machine and we didn’t care and we all got together and it was all really good, really good. There’s no word for that companionship you have. I suppose it’s the same with any

group that are in some kind of a bad bind together, like the war was, and I think there was just no word for the comradeship that we had because 61 years later we still, what’s remaining of us, is still together and we have meetings and all that sort of thing. But anyway back to Broadmarsh,

so I, yes well, the toilets and things were the funniest of all things. We learned to cope with it all. We’d been very private people and I always felt sorry for the older women. It was from 18 to 45. Well, near the 45ers had probably never ever had any body see their bodies before and I used to feel sorry for them because they’d sought of

cringe and think it was… but we didn’t care, we got used to it. That’s what was happening. That’s what you did and you made the most of it. I learned to smoke in the army. One of the girls there was a smoker and I said to her, “Teach me how to smoke?” and she said, “Oh all right”. She was a bit of a Roman this girl… oh, but in the meantime my sister joined up. No she didn’t, no she didn’t, not till later. That was a bit later

I’m sorry. Anyhow, I said to this girl, “Teach me how to smoke?” So we were all sitting on the bed and it wasn’t a thing you did really. The army didn’t like the women smoking but they didn’t have any choice because once one started, everybody started and the army couldn’t really do anything about that. So we were sitting on the bed one night and I said, “Teach me how to smoke”, and she said, “Oh all right”, and the gang of us all said… Bossy was there and Molly and we were all sitting on

this bed talking, we had time off you see. And she said, “All right, what you do is you put your cigarette in your mouth and you light it and you go like this”. So silly June, went WHOOO with the cigarette… well the bed went OOH and I thought, “When you gonna stop it?” and I went to grab somebody’s hair and the girl we called Charlie, her name was Charlotte so we called

her Charlie, and she said, “Let my hair go you silly cow!” The bed was still going round and anyway, we got over that and I felt sick and I thought, “Oh!” and I went outside and was sick and I came back in and I thought, “I won’t do that again”, but I did, of course I did. Bossy said, “You’re mad!” She said to me, “If that’s how it affects you then I’m not going to smoke!” Most of the girls did. Thousands before us and thousands after us, so anyway that

was all part and parcel of that little deal and eventually we went, we finished the course. It was quite an interesting course. , we were very, very innocent. We knew it was painful having babies but we didn’t quite know how it got there and we were 18 , we didn’t know anything about the social diseases. We

didn’t know anything about… we didn’t know anything. We didn’t, we didn’t know anything about having your periods until you were…unless you had sisters or… it was never discussed. Not, parents didn’t discuss anything to do with sex. Nothing at all. We were very ignorant young people really. The most ignorant of all the generations I think we were. We’d have

lectures on all sorts of things when we were doing our rookie school and eye openers but not eye openers because half the time we didn’t know what they were talking about anyway,

Like I just said, round about what they told us about the social diseases… “Don’t hold hands affectionately”, we were told and we thought, “Well, we’ve always held hands in those

days, but why affectionately”. Of course, we were all friends. Well, what that was! We didn’t know anything about gay people as they call them now. We didn’t know anything about having babies.

So in a round about way they were warning us about everything. About everything that had to do with sex. We learned, we learned… the boys,

the boys would say funny things to us and we’d think, “Oh yes, that’s what they were talking about” but anyway,

Yeah

Oh terrible.

The only thing we knew about was, well I knew… Mum lived in a flat and the woman had a daughter

and the daughter got herself pregnant and the Mother tossed her out and she killed herself and when I asked Mum, “Why did the…?” because the Mother was against it, you see, and she didn’t know anything about sex either and that’s how she got herself pregnant, the poor thing. The Mother chucked her out, threw her out and she ended up taking her own life. But Mum didn’t say how she got to be pregnant. See, it just wasn’t

discussed. We sought of put two and two together, Peg and I, and that’s more or less how we got to thinking about how babies were born but we still weren’t quite sure when we joined the army, I might add.

I had a boyfriend .

Yes, he was a perfect gentleman and I loved him dearly at 16.

If you love somebody very, very much… but it was more serious about that for me so I’m not going to talk about that anymore. We didn’t have a relationship, such as sex or anything, but it was one of those things when you’re 16 and it either stops with you or… anyway, best kept aside. So where was I, out at Brighton?

Oh yes, right yes.

Yes, I do. I’ll tell you what I did. Dad had brought home a bottle of beer and he left a little bit in the bottom of the bottle and I thought to myself, “I’ll have a taste of that. He seems to like it. It must be nice”. So I thought, “I’m going to taste that”, so I tipped the bottle up and well, I thought I’d never ever tasted anything so horrible in all my life and however he liked it so much, I couldn’t understand.

I thought I’ll never ever taste that; I’d rather drink cordial. That’s when I was young, a lot younger but when we were down… I won’t get ahead of myself. So anyway we went to Brighton. We were then allotted our postings so off we all went. I went to, Molly and I and Bossy, went to the pay office in Hobart and

the office was huge. No, you wouldn’t remember. It was almost as big as the blinkin’ City Hall and all these thousands of people tapping away at typewriters and adding machines and doing all sorts of things. Office work I’m talking about. So, they put me to sorting out people’s papers. I hated it. I thought, “I hate this, I hate being in this place”, but

I didn’t sort of take it out on anybody. We had a lot of fun. We went… they had Clubs, like army Clubs where, particularly one called the ‘Chins-Up Club’, where the girls and I always went dancing and the blinkin’ Yanks came down. Anyway I better get back to where I was.

Anyway we went to the pay office so I hated it. I hated every minute

of sorting out other people’s papers. I thought, “Oh, I don’t like it”. Anyway the girl who was on the switchboard was leaving and they gave me her job. Well, well, I’ve never seen anything, heard anything ‘click’ and ‘clack’ so much. The switchboard, have you ever seen the old fashioned switchboard?

Well, it was like a big cupboard and it had a lot of little ‘clicky clacky’ things

like shutters right along the front of it, a couple of, two or three rows of shutters and it had lights that came on if somebody wanted to get in contact with anybody in the office at the barracks and then there were rows of leads that had coppertops and rows of holes that you push these little coppertop leads into, not little they were quite long and you had one lead

that had picked up the speaker, the person wanting to contact somebody in the barracks and you had another lead that you plugged into one part of the board where you got the office, the person they were ringing. So I loved this job and it was a great big long fronted thing and all these dozens of leads and dozens of lines and all this ‘clicking’ and ‘clacking’ and carrying on and when they were finished

the light would come on, or the light would come on when they wanted somebody, and then the little clacky things would drop anyway… badly described them, sorry, but anyway, I loved it. I was communicating with people. I discovered I was a good communicator and I loved that job. I was on it for about… oh, it must have been about 12 or 18 months and in the meantime we were going out and dancing

and going to the clubs and the Yanks would come down on holidays… oh they didn’t call it holidays, they called it ‘Rest and Recreation’ and they’d come down and we thought they were marvellous, the Yanks. All done up and our poor old boys in serge coloured khaki uniforms but we still loved our boys best and the boys hated the Yanks.

We thought they were a bit of fun, , but we mainly stuck to our own boys when we went dancing, if we could and if you went dancing with somebody else, like the United States people, you’d dance because that was the way it went but anyway that was all right. I was on the switchboard for about 12 or 18 months,

I don’t remember how long it was now. Fourteen months probably. Our family always couldn’t stand tarantulas. We had this horror of tarantulas and I can remember one day sitting at the switchboard and we had a…one of the majors was a real pig and if he couldn’t get his number straight away, he’d get nasty and because I was

new and I didn’t know very much about the switchboard and I’m sitting there one day… I learnt very quickly because I liked it, because it was something I really liked… communicating and I was talking to this major on the phone one day and he said, “Get me Dowsing Point”, and I thought “Yes, okay, I’ll get you Dowsing Point”. So while he’s saying that I could see this leg coming up over the side of, this big hairy leg coming over the side of the switchboard and I was watching it and it was a blinkin’ tarantula

and I shot up off the chair and I don’t know what happened to him. I just left him and the blinkin’ tarantula is… how they run! Oh, horrible things and I leapt up from the chair and the chair went flying all over the place and everybody stopped. The whole of the pay office stopped, this huge pay office stopped and there was me saying, “Oh, the bloody tarantula”, I yelled out. Oh dear, and anyway the major came

up in the finish and…

The major came up, “It’s all right, it’s all right. It’s only a spider”, and I said, “I don’t care, I don’t like ‘em”. So anyway, he eventually caught it and he put it in an ink bottle. They had transparent ink bottles and

he caught it and put it in a bottle and brought it over and I said, “No, I don’t want to see it. Take it outside”. So he went outside and it was all clumped up in this little ink bottle and I said to him, “Take it outside”. So anyway, he took it outside and that was the end of the tarantula but we always had a horror of tarantulas and I still do. I hate tarantulas. Anyway, where was I before?

How it affected me?

At the time you mean? Oh, it was horrible.

You become withdrawn and because you’re young you don’t have any idea how to handle situations and I used to think to myself, “Why is he doing it? What does he gain from it?” So of course I closed in and I didn’t talk to anybody. I talked to people but I became secretive and I thought it was my fault

and he was always giving Peg a bit of a thump and I couldn’t cope with it. I coped with it because I had to, let’s put it that way but that’s how it left me. I didn’t realise there was somebody else inside me that needed to come out because I was all closed in and this is how it was and was my life going to be like this or was I going to be like this because I didn’t know anything else

but as I got older, and when I went to live with Mum, a whole new world opened up and I suddenly began to grow a little bit, bit by bit I began to grow and I didn’t realise I had a really good sense of humour. All sorts of things; like opening a little Pandora’s Box. It was full of good things, not bad things. Yeah, that’s how it happened and that’s…

and I suppose the kids of today feel exactly the same…where they are in situations where… and it would be a lot worse now when I was a kid, when I was a child I mean. We didn’t call ourselves kids in those days but anyway, I got over that and then I realised a long, long time after when I was driving, I can remember one day. I’ve got ahead of myself

again but I’ll say this while I’m, while we’re talking about that… we were walking, my friend and I were walking across to the canteen and I suddenly realised after all that time, I had something to offer. Whatever it was, I suddenly realised I was a person in my own right. It took me all that time. Right up until I’d gone through Drivers and Maintenance Course and I suddenly stopped … and she said, “Why did

you stop?” and I said “Nothing. It’s okay”. And I suddenly realised there was something more. There was something more inside me that needed to come out and that I was quite willing to give out. That was that sense of humour and sense of fun and oh, the feeling of loving people. It’s important that you… I mean I love Mum but Dad was a… he should have been somebody that I

could have loved, but I didn’t. I hated the sight of him and it wasn’t right because I’d seen other children with their dads and they were all happy and I knew it wasn’t right but I couldn’t do anything about it. So you just live and learn as you go along under those conditions but we never ever spoke about it to anybody. We never ever told anybody about what went on in the house and the dreadful disruptions and things that went on and so

you learn. I learnt to live with that but, with that feeling of not being complete, and “Why wasn’t I like other people? And why couldn’t I join in and laugh and have a bit of fun?” but anyhow that’s all over and done with. You learn to, you learn all sorts of things as you go, don’t you? Anyway, where was I before?

Oh okay. If that’s what you want to do then that’s what you want to do. She was a lovely pianist. Of course grandma taught piano see, so she was lucky. She had home tuition, didn’t she? Anyway just a little aside, but she was a lovely… and she used to play the ‘Destiny Waltz’ to us and it was absolutely gorgeous. Anyway, that was a little aside. Now, what else? How did

did Mum react? Did you ask me that?

Oh, she was free. She was free and she went back to her old job and… during the time Dad was in and out of work, there wasn’t enough money so she used to go charring for people, especially during the Depression and she’d lost her

self confidence and before the war she worked with Walshes, she was a stenographer with Walshes, and they weren’t taking on other people and so she used to keep the money supply going. She used to go out and do other people’s work. That was in the Depression. scrub floors, do their washing. Wonderful lady she was, just absolute peach. Lovely sense of humour, full of fun.

, young, play chasings with us when we were little. Lovely lady she was. Yes, well once she was free, she was free of all that dreadful depression and suppression and yeah, she was lovely. Anyway…

Oh, it was worldwide, even in little Hobart I can remember, we

had relations who had a little bit of money. See, grandpa was a very… deaf as a post! If you wanted to talk to Grandpa Johnson you had to write it down. But a wonderful engineer, marine engineer and they’d send… they had money. That’s what I’m trying to say and so they’d, that’s why they took Phyllis because they had the money to look after one of the girls and the Calbots looked after Betty

because they loved her; but we were divided and do the funny thing about the two girls at the… Peg and I were with Mum all that time, all through all that business, and Betty and Phyllis, we all had nicknames I might add. Phyllis was Pids, Betty was Bobbins, I was Polly and Peg was Meg. I wouldn’t be able to… I must give you one of those books to read.

They were always; I can’t quite explain it. It was as if they’d missed out on something not being with Mum, that’s how they always appeared to be to me. They were just a little bit different to Peggy and I because we had Mum and we loved her and she loved us and I think they missed out a little bit and it was always just a little bit different for them but they had wonderful homes, they had...

grandpa and grandma had a lovely home, all mod cons where we had the bath in little tin baths. Those tin baths this size; where they had showers and lavender soap and bath and all the things that we didn’t have, well they had all those things. Except being so in the country, they had to conserve water but yeah, so

they had all the good things and we had all the bad things but we had most of the good things. Now where were we from there?

Yes.

‘42. 13 August 1942 I joined up.

Yes it had, yes.

Yes we did, yes.

No, no, no. I think we thought we were safe until that plane came over. Well, there must have been an aircraft carrier in the vicinity here and we didn’t think… I think the war was a little bit away

from us , it was somewhere else and when the plane came over, we realised that it wasn’t and then we heard that Darwin had been bombed and not once, we heard Darwin had been bombed… Down here censorship was that strict that we heard that Darwin had been bombed once and we thought that was terrible but it had been bombed 64 or 69 times up the top end.

We found that out after the war, we were absolutely isolated down here really, we didn’t know anything. We didn’t know what had happened to our boys as far as prisoners of war camps were concerned. It was just as if we were cut off from the world altogether and I didn’t really know anything about anything until I started driving ambulances and then you didn’t know very

much at all. It was a closed book down here. We knew that the submarines had been into Sydney because I think it got out that quickly the censors couldn’t stop it. So they came into Sydney and they wrecked boats and killed people, see we heard about that and that was the only… we didn’t know about the Coral Sea battle. There was 101 things we never ever heard about till after

the war down here so, just as well eh? We lived in this euphoria where we were having a good old time in the army and doing our thing. We were very, very aware of the boys when they came home, when they used to come home… I’m getting ahead of myself; I won’t get ahead of myself, anyway. Then I was at the pay office wasn’t I? Oh and then I heard they were going to do a

Drivers, consider doing a Drivers and Maintenance Course and it took them 12 months to decide they had to have a Drivers and Maintenance Course for women because there weren’t enough men. Again, there weren’t enough men.

Oh yes they were.

Eventually, yeah. I joined up before he did and

yes, and anyway, yes we had a funny, funny time . Now where was I?

Promise? You ask the questions.

Oh crikey, we scrubbed floors and had lectures, went on parades and all the things that the army toss at you. Don’t go out without your

gloves on and your hat and all that sort of nonsense. Well, it wasn’t nonsense and you look after your army equipment. You had to do that. It was special that you took particular care. Then we went through the gas chamber and one of the girls suffered from, come on what’s the word?

I nearly had it then—when you can’t stand something.

Claustrophobia. She suffered from claustrophobia and she told the sergeant that was taking us through, there was a sergeant and a corporal taking us through the gas chambers that… we had those big old gas masks

on and she said she suffered from claustrophobia and he said, “Well, try and we’ll keep our eye on you”. So she was in front of me going through the gas chamber. No she wasn’t, she was behind me and I could hear this noise , this scriffly and scruffly noise and I look behind me and she was trying to tear the mask off and so the corporal was in front of me so I tugged on his coat

and said, “Have a look at the…” I think it was Clare that was doing this and she was trying to pull the mask off. So he just very gently took hold of her and took her out… she panicked, she panicked. Of course, well if you’ve got claustrophobia it’s terrible and anyway they took her out. Just quietly and gently took her out and the sergeant apologised and actually he was a

First World War man and he was just young enough to get in the forces at that time and he pleaded with her to go through the Chamber and experience what it was like and that’s what happened anyway. She got over that. You get over things, you’ve got to. You don’t have any choices do you. You can’t walk out of the army and say “They were nasty to me” and all that. Other things?

What else did we do? Oh, we did all sorts of naughty things. When we finished our rookie school they had a, we had a bit of a drinking up party. Where you go all cross-eyed and all that sort of thingo but I will tell you one of the funniest things that happened to us, when we went to the Queue Store to get out clothes, our uniforms

from Broadmarsh, the corporal decided that we were going to have a, once we got our uniforms on we went into Brighton in our civvy’s and all the boys whistled and thought all these girls in high heeled shoes and frocks was just beautiful and all the boys are whistling, not saying “You’ll be sorry” and then we came out we were all dressed in army uniform and nobody took a blind bit of notice of us. Oh,

we laughed! So, the sergeant said we had to get the truck down at the bottom, at the gates at Brighton so she said “We’ll march down”. Well, none of us had had any drill and we had to go past the Italian prison of war camp at Brighton. It was right on the main road opposite the hospital and she said “We’re going to

march down, you’ve all had marching things at school, you’ve all done marching at school, left, right, left, right”. Oh yes, that was lovely. It sounded really easy didn’t it? So, she lined us up. We were all in our uniforms looking like rookies. We’re marching along and the girl in front of me was marching like this and half of them didn’t know their left

hand from their right hand and the girl, one of the girls when the sergeant said, “By the left, quick march” the girl turned right and was walking towards us like this and I said to her, “Turn around you silly fool”, me and my lovely manners and anyway then this girl was going like this… oh, it was hilarious! Then we were going past the prisoner of war camp, of course Italian, all dressed up. They had maroon

uniforms, some funny things happen to me. They were in maroon uniforms and wasn’t us dumbfounded of course. None of us there had drill, as such, with the army, we had school drill but not … and everybody’s out of step and somebody didn’t know their left hand from their right hand or their right foot from their left foot. Oh, and didn’t we make a muck of it and as we went past, this prisoner of war yelled out, “Oh Mama

Mia!” and we were all walking past thinking, “That’s the enemy; don’t take any notice”. So anyway we eventually got past the truck and went back to camp. We got to be home in the finish. The army got to be home. There’s something else funny happened, just passed through my head and I’ve just forgotten what it was. Anyway, we marched back to camp. Oh, and another girl, when we were doing our rookies, we all had to take turn at taking

a squad and one of the girls got stage fright. She couldn’t remember the command, ‘Stop Halt! Halt!’ and the girls are walking towards the ablution blocks on and on and on they went and they ran into the ablution blocks wall. The poor girl got stage fright and couldn’t say, “Halt!” and we all screamed laughing. I wasn’t in that squad but we were watching. They were all walking and they were all

tumbling on top of each other in the end, and the sergeant nearly had hysterics laughing. Anyway, that was another funny thing that happened. They all come back in bits and pieces . This is why this story is a little bit, bits and pieces and of course it all comes back, suddenly it all comes back. Anyway, that was just another aside. I did all sorts of weird and wonderful things. Anyway, we finally left, we finally did our rookie school and as I say,

we went there to the barracks and I was a private.

No. We were all privates, everybody was a private, everybody unless you were a corporal or a sergeant or a sar major [Sergeant Major] or WO [Warrant Officer] whatever, unless you earned your stripes. For some reason, some of the girls, a couple of girls in the rookie school went to NCO [Non Commissioned Officers] school over in Melbourne [Non

Commissioned Officers School] and they were chosen. I was still in that stage where I was unsure and trying to find my way. I enjoyed every minute of that rookie school.

We didn’t, we weren’t, that was, the six weeks was a Drivers and Maintenance Course. It was a three weeks course and, how well drilled?

Well, I knew my left hand from my right hand and when they’d say, “Form forms,” or “Form lanes,” or “Do this”, you just did it because you followed everybody else unless you had some fool in front of you that didn’t know their left hand from their right; but I loved every minute of it I did. It was good and we had a party before we left, we left Brighton and then from then on in… they had dances, and they

had, we used to have dances down at the hall and they had entertainers. People like John Sidney who came to the camp in short pants, a civilian boy, and played the violin to us and we had concert parties and all sorts of entertainment. But I think the biggest entertainment of the whole bang lot was the camp itself. There was always some fun going on. There was always something going

on but we did have a lot of entertainers and that John Sidney that I’ve just mentioned died just recently and I could always see him standing up on the stage at Brighton camp playing the violin. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful musician he was! Yes, so rookie school was good and during that course, my dearly beloved as I’ll call him, I won’t say his name because I

don’t want it mentioned, he went from… he was called up and that was the last time I saw him. He went away, but he came back again, for the rest of the war. That was a very, very sad time for me anyway, so that happened while we were at Brighton. I

was just trying to think what else happened. There were so many things. I’ll be lying in bed tonight thinking, “Why didn’t I remember that? And why didn’t I remember that?” Anyway, but there were so many things, we were all friends. It was just wonderful friendship, it didn’t matter who it was. The cook, we were friends with the cook, friends with everybody. Friends with, even with the Italian prisoners of war. I had this Italian prisoner of war that used to serenade me.

I’ll tell you about that later, remind me.

No, that happened when I was a driver so I’ll leave that.

I’ll show you a photo after; I’ve got a lot of photos. No good me trying to explain it. You can take a photo of it if you like.

It was a jacket and shirt and tie and

oh, we thought we were made. I’ll tell you, you think I’m cranky… when we went to get our uniforms at the time, I’m going to say something a bit queer but I don’t care, we were supplied with Modess sanitary pads and that was the most wonderful thing. Just before the war they came out, sanitary pads and we thought it was

wonderful because I won’t tell you what we had to do beforehand and the army supplied us with sanitary pads. We thought we were home and hosed. It had to be because you couldn’t have had a whole lot of women, well. Anyway, that’s what happened and that was one of the real wonderful things we thought was marvellous. You didn’t have to mess around with other things. It was really something for us girls.

There are dozens of little things I could tell you that I can’t recall that will come back when I’m not… I’m slightly a bit on the nervous side. I’m just trying to think…

And then as I said we had

our postings and I went to Hobart and then went to the pay office and thoroughly enjoyed myself at the pay office.

Yes, that was the main switchboard for the camp, for the barracks and we had, the major there was very rude to me on the phone and I said to him “I’m new,” and he said, “I don’t care who you are, get me onto to Dowser’s Point,” and I thought, “You ignorant pig”.

Anyway, I got my own back on him once and frightened the life out of him when I was driving. What else was there? I just can’t remember it all. We’d just go dancing of a night time and, it was like, in Hobart it was like being at home on an ordinary job except that you were in your uniform and under the jurisdiction of the army. Nothing, just like another job it

was, but good pay. See, I think I was earning 7 and 6 a week when I was at Kodak and then I think it went up to 10 shillings. Well, that’s 7 [shillings] and 6 [pence] (75 cents). Wow!

It doesn’t sound much does it? That’s what it was and then I got 10 shillings which was $1.00 when I left roundabout that time

but that was considered good money in those days. I can remember when my Father was earning 5 Pounds a week, that’s $5.00 in today’s money. It bought… it was good money.

I used to buy clothes, a pair of shoes. Of course shoes were, you could buy a pair of shoes for 10 shillings, that’s $1.00 in our money now, or 12

and 6, what was that? Oh, I can’t be bothered working it out.

But a pound of butter would have been about a shilling, I suppose, 1 and sixpence. Sugar, everything. Everything was relevant to the time and the money, whereas now nothing’s relevant anymore. Not really.

I mean if you want to go and get your hair done, it will cost you $100 if you wanted to have a rinse and a blinking perm and everything, whereas when I had my hair first permed, it cost me 6 and 6 so... That’s a lot of money to get, $100, isn’t it. But I never ever had to have my hair done because I was a blonde anyway. We were all blondes except for Peggy’s twin.

And she was dark like the Saunders side of the family, where we were all like the Johnson side of the family, fair like the Johnson side of the family, the other three of us. It was a terrible, terrible time in many ways. People starving during the Depression and kids going to school in the middle of winter without shoes and socks on and I can remember we all took a halfpenny or a

penny, if you could afford it, to school to buy this girl a pair of shoes. The class did that. Took a halfpenny or a penny, whatever you could afford and we bought this girl a pair of shoes because she didn’t have any shoes. Terrible time but, we lived didn’t we? We lived to tell the tale didn’t we? But yeah, so then…

Yes, she had gone back to Walshes by then. She was, like I said, she was a stenographer at Walshes before she was married and then of course the Depression came along and she went back and she became head lady at Walshes in the office and it used to be funny. All the guys would be standing around at the counters and you’d walk in and they’d all bristle up, “How ya’ goin’? What are ya doin’?” They were so

interested in everything that you did, all the older guys who were just that much too old to join the army or that much too young and they were always so pleased to see us. “What are you doing?”, so interested in everything we were doing and of course we were a phenomenon of our time. Women, you stayed home, had the babies, put up with what Dad liked to handle and I mean my Father

wasn’t the only one that did that sort of thing in those days. You did what Dad said and if you didn’t do what Dad said and if he was inclined to be a bit aggressive, he might get a bit mad at you but different altogether after the war.

Yes.

Well, we did have… there were a few conscientious objectors but in the main, they were eager to join. I can remember walking down the street when the war first started and they had recruiting depots throughout the city where a young man could go up and join up providing he was old enough. You could join up at 18 providing,

but you couldn’t go away, you just had to be in the army. You couldn’t go overseas. You had to have a note from your parents, permission from your parents to say that you could go away overseas and if you didn’t have that… if you were 21 you didn’t have to have that but if you were 18 and you were a man and you wanted to go away, you had to have permission from your parents. So I can remember once walking through one of,

walking through Hobart where there was a depot and this kid about 16 went to join up and I could have smacked the sergeant’s face. He said to him, the boy was young and there were other boys waiting to join up, they wanted to be in it and this sergeant roared out at him, “Go home and get your nappies changed and when you’re old enough we’ll take you”, and I could have smacked his face

and the poor kid was that embarrassed and all the other kids that were with him all trotted off fairly quickly and the poor kid. I thought, “The ignorant pig”, anyway somebody sang out, one of the other recruit people yelled out, “Never mind son, they’ll want you, you’ll be old enough, they’ll want you one day”, and I thought that was lovely, the way he sought of smoothed it over and made it feel all right. I thought I could have smacked that fellow’s face… “Go home and get your nappies

changed”, he said and, “Come back a bit later, when you’re older”. Well there were all sorts of things happening at that time. There were a lot of things… we didn’t learn anything about Australia at school. We didn’t know there was anything beyond Cape York except we knew New Guinea was there. We didn’t know anything about the islands

beyond New Guinea we didn’t know anything, hardly any Australian History, not that we had that much because we were still with England. England was home and people didn’t say, “I’m going to England for a holiday”. “I’m going home for a holiday”, and home was England and at school we learnt all about the Kings and Queens of England, all the wars, all the dates of the wars, all the

dates of the Kings and Queens when they came… but we never ever knew anything about our own country and so when we began to find out there were other places beyond, I mean I was lucky. I went, when I was four till I was about 7 or 8, I knew there was somewhere else beyond Tasmania but most people of that era, young people like we were, there wasn’t any money to go anywhere. They didn’t know anything about Australia.

They didn’t know there was such a place as top end. I mean they knew Australia but they didn’t know our history. They didn’t know who our first Prime Minister was. We didn’t know anything about Australia and then when I heard them talking about they were, “Going home and there’s sheep to pack”, the old mind boggles , what are they talking about “there’s sheep to pack” and I said to Mum “What do they mean by that?” “Oh,” she said “because we have such a lot of sheep and that’s our export”

not like they’ve done now, I might add. A terrible thing they’ve done. I didn’t realise that’s what they meant. When you go home, “I’ll be home on a sheep’s back”. Well we were…that was the only thing we had to come home, to earn money from really. We were a very, very backward sought of country in a way because we were only very, very new weren’t we? I can remember I used to, can I deviate a little bit?

I saw, when I was, years and years after the war and I’d had a family… can I digress like that?

I always had a feeling for art. I always wanted to do arty things and one morning I was watching a programme, when TV came on, I was watching a programme about this woman doing a bark painting, what they call a bark painting and it was all done with

bark, different coloured barks because we’ve got beautiful bark in Australia and Tasmania. “Oh,” I thought, “I’d like to do that”, so of course I did, didn’t I. I went out down at the beach, started picking up bits and pieces, bark and lichens and mosses and all the different kinds of bark and people started bringing me in logs of wood. Anyway, I eventually

made a career of it really and I was with Adult Ed [Education] for 21 years tutoring at bark painting and we used to have exhibitions and this Englishman came up to me and he said…we were fond of doing little old cottages because that was our heritage. As strange as it sounds, that was our heritage and it really was because that was all out in the bush

and that belonged to the country heritage and ours as well, and this Englishman said to me, “You people are very fond of doing little old cottages, aren’t you?” and I said, “Yes, they’re our castles. Our little cottages are like your castles back home; well those little cottages are our castles”. I wrote a poem about, what did I call it? Something ‘cottages’. Now what did I call it? Isn’t it terrible

when I want to think about things, it’s not fair. Anyway, what did I call it? Anyhow, I’d written about it and had it published and I said, “That’s our heritage. We’re not an old country like you are and the little cottages are our castles”. That’s what I called ‘em, our castles. “Oh,” he said “I didn’t think about it like that”. I said

“You’re a very, very old country”. I said, “We’re a very, very young…” and “Oh,” he said “I think that’s lovely,” so I put him back in his place. I thought, “Well we’ve got our castles and that’s what they are, little wooden cottages,” and everybody did little wooden cottages because we thought it would be a bit of fun but we did other things besides. I did Truganini [the last full-blood Tasmanian aborigine, who died in 1876] in bark, a portrait of Truganini in bark. I did hundreds of bark paintings and we used to

have exhibitions and anyway that’s on the side. I got too far ahead of myself.

Yes.

No, I was doing it for Australia. I’d never been to England although my forbearers were English and Scottish.

That doesn’t mean anything when you’ve been reared in your own country. I mean they come out here as immigrants, they don’t forget their own country and I couldn’t forget my country. I loved Australia. I just think it was the most… except going to Sydney, I’d never ever sought of been out of Tasmania but I still loved it. It was home, home. They always say home

according to the phrase ‘is where the heart is’. No, I loved Australia and Australia was home, not England. I was the second generation Australian and that’s what I was, I was Australian and I’ll always be Australian, won’t I? Especially Tasmanian, yeah.

That’s how everybody felt. That’s how everybody in the forces, girls as far as… and the boys, Australia was

it. England was somewhere else. We knew England was out there somewhere but that wasn’t home and when the boys did go in the First World War and the Second World War they were considered a rebel. They were free. They weren’t tied down to the English traditions, they were free. They did what they liked,

not crazy like.

A fellow in the navy got on the phone and said, “Can I take you out?” and I said, “I beg your pardon”, I said, “I don’t know you,” and he said, “My name’s,” oh something, something. I can’t think of the fellow’s name now and he said, “I’ll meet you outside the barracks tonight,” and I said, “No, you won’t. I’m not used to going out with strange…” Anyway he turned up outside the barracks. Oh, his name was Eric, Eric. I won’t go any

farther than that and he was quite a nice young man. We went out a few times and he became a bit attached and I wasn’t all that attached to him so I had to get rid of him but that was one of the things that happened. It was exceptional to get a strange sailor asking you to go out, on site. Not on site, you don’t, I didn’t even know who… and he was waiting outside the gate and I thought, “Oh, he looks all right,” he was a nice young man so I said, “Hello, I’m the switchboard

operator”. So we became friends and went out a few times and he got a bit serious so I had to break it all off. I wasn’t ready for a serious, another serious thing. Anyway relationships, that was the end of that…

No, no. It was just that, he was a nice young man but no,

my heart was elsewhere.

Yeah. But that was just another thing I suddenly thought about, what happened on the switchboard. Oh, we were beyond that weren’t we?

There were always romances going on when there’s a war going,

always. I went out with a lot of guys but nothing serious, like the rest of us. I was young; when you’re young you don’t sit down and knit baby clothes or do anything like that. You get out and make the most of it, but not foolish things. We never ever had it off with each other; well, that’s what I never ever did. I don’t know what the others did. Mind you, there was a few funny things that went on I might add but on the same token that’s

life. I mean, men and women together, the place confined, it happens. But no, not me. I was too frightened. I didn’t want to be somebody’s mole so I remained pure.

No, not that I remember. You wouldn’t know anyway because they,

you wouldn’t have known because when you went into hospital, especially at Campbell Town or anywhere in the services, if you did anything that was not quite right, it was marked down on your chart as ‘X’ and nobody knew who or what was the matter with you. It was the army’s way of not embarrassing people and really, they were a very good institution, the army, I thought.

All for the service people; a very interesting, very interesting place the army. All full of variations, had a lot of rules to observe but you did it automatically in the finish because it was the army way and I thought it was rather good for discipline,

.

Drivers and Maintenance Course?

My sister could already drive. My Father taught my sister to drive because she lived down at South Arm with Aunty Elsie Coward, and Aunty Elsie Coward only had one arm and she was the most wonderful housekeeper

that I’ve ever, ever met in all my life. She could do pettipoint [needlework] and how, you know what pettipoint’s like don’t you? One arm. Oh, she was the most marvellous lady and Betty lived with her and they got a car just before the war. Aunty Elsie bought a car just before the war and Dad taught Betty, Helen, ‘Bobbins’, whatever you like to call her, to drive and she could already drive so when the Drivers and Maintenance

Course was merged and it came into being, I rang her up and I said, “Why don’t you join up? Come and join up, because I’m going to join the…” I didn’t know one end of a car from the other. I said, “I’m going to join the Drivers and Maintenance Course so come and join up”, so she joined up. On the day she was supposed to start her rookies’ school, the Drivers and Maintenance Course started so she did her Drivers and Maintenance Course before

she did her rookies school and she did that after the Drivers and Maintenance Course. Well, there you go. That was the funniest time of my life. I didn’t know one end of a car from another and I’ve never ever been any … however I managed to scrape through the written work; you had to write, they’d put a pamphlet on your table every morning when the rookie school started and it had engines on it and I’d look at this thing and I’d think,

“Oh, my God, I don’t know the first thing about what they’re talking about” . Outlets and inlets and batteries and everything to do with cars. I’ve forgotten half of it now and how I managed to scrape through all that technology as it was then, I’ll never ever know but it was very, very interesting with time.

I think there were, oh…

I’ve got the course over here, a photo of the course over here. I think there were about 15 girls in that course and we had included in the Drivers and Maintenance Course, there were

four or five mainlanders. Well, they were different from us. We were real, compared to them, we were real shy little mice and they were all outgoing and “bloody this” and “bloody that” and all the swear words you could have imagined and we wondered what we’d struck because we were too frightened to even look sideways. We all got on very, very well. We were

all… we all had fun and we had to learn about all the engines of the cars and what made the cars go. Spark plugs, I’ve forgotten it all now but the engines were different then to what they are now. They were just engines. Not computerised like cars are now. I wouldn’t know where to start on a car now but no, once I learned all about the engine I could almost pull the thing down and put it together again but that took us

about… firstly most of us who had to learn to drive like myself and quite a few others, they took us out, by this time we were at Brighton, and they took us out into this big paddock and there was a blitz buggy and a 1500 weight and a 1200 weight utility and a staff car and a couple of other things and we all had to learn to drive these vehicles.

We’d go out of a morning after we had our little session on the paperwork and we were learning to drive the cars, weren’t we? So my sister could already drive and her friend whose name was Mary Gee and whom we called Gee Gee because we all had nicknames. Every one of us had nicknames. They were sent over to the corner of the paddock because

they were disrupting everything. They could drive; they didn’t have to learn anything. They knew it, except the engine part and so, well Mary could pull an engine down and put it back together like that because she’d been driving before the war. “Get in, get in”. We weren’t Drivers then. We were called privates until we got our licence. “Get in the truck; it’s your turn on the truck”. “Yes okay”, get in the truck, boom, boom.

Oh dear, the first driving lesson I ever had was the funniest thing that I can ever remember as far as driving was concerned because what it’s like. You have the clutch and a brake and an accelerator and you don’t know which foot to put on which first and anyway, “Get in,” he said. I think he was more frightened than I was. Anyway, I got in and we did a jog-a-log, like this,

not knowing how to use the accelerator and a real learner’s thing it was, and I think he was terrified out of his life. Anyway in the end I got the hang of it and I learned to drive the vehicle and learned to drive nearly all the other vehicles but funny… a really good time it was. I loved driving the

staff car because it was real swish . The staff drove that. I don’t know, I did a few hockey turns around the paddock at one stage or another where I was letting the clutch out too fast and everything would stall or not putting my foot on the accelerator and foot on the clutch and it would be jumping and all those funny things. “What are you doing?” They treated you like men . We learnt to drive like men. “What do you bloody well think you are

doing? Get your foot off the brake.” “Oh, shut up. I’m only learning.” “Yes, well you won’t learn that way,” and all this sort of thing. We were told off well and… but it was fun though …

Yes, so we learned to drive all the vehicles.

That was a utility, how could I express… it would be smaller than

the 4-wheel drives that are on the road now, a lot smaller and they had a utility again that was lighter than that vehicle, that 1500 weight ute and we had to learn to drive them all and the blitz buggy, when you got in the blitz buggy it was… I don’t think you’d ever see a blitz buggy now. On the farms, a big, great big lumbering machine and it had the 4-wheel drive in a console

sort of thing, in the middle of, in between the seats. Your seat and the passenger seat and there was a gear on its own and if you got stuck in the mud or anything, that gear was the 4-wheel drive. It would pull you out of anything. Big old bastards they were but fun to drive, huge. Oh, I can remember… when we were going on, we used to go all on the roads

everywhere, so they decided we were fit enough to go into town and drive in Hobart you see, to learn the ‘stop’ streets and all that sort of thing. So I was driving with one of the mainland girls and she was a big blustery red head and didn’t give a bumper for anything, swear like a trooper, “Get in,” she said. I said, “All right, I’ll get in,” always having fun. So she’s driving this thing to town. She was going to

drive it to town and I was going to drive it back you see, so we get to the corner of, in the city on the main road. On the main road? Of course we were on the main road, anyway we stopped at Liverpool Street and Elizabeth Street and on the opposite side, I forget what was on the corner on the opposite side but anyway, this old lady was standing, she had a walking stick and in those days we didn’t have lights, ‘flickers’, like we’ve got now and we used to use hand

signals, and when you wanted to slow down, you used to do this…to warn the vehicles behind you that you’re going to slow down. So we approached the corner of Liverpool and Elizabeth Street and this old lady was standing on the corner leaning her head and ‘big Red’ as we called her, waved to slow down and the old lady standing on the opposite corner thought we were waving to her and big Red yelled out, “Oh, you silly old bastard,”

at the top of her voice and I felt I didn’t know what to do so I got down underneath the dashboard, if you could call it a dashboard, and that poor old thing must have been deaf because she waved back happily. Oh, and I said, “You’re terrible, you ought to be ashamed”. I was terribly peeved. “You ought to be ashamed.” “Oh, don’t be such a silly fool.” Actually, I think that was the day we were going on bigger work anyway; we were in town and I was that ashamed and

I thought, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, talking to a poor old thing…” “Oh, it didn’t hurt her,” she said bold as brass. Anyway, we got through that one and then we did lots of trips up in the hills and we were trained on all sorts of surfaces and the only thing they never ever taught us to do was to tow anything. I don’t think they ever taught us to tow a vehicle of any kind and then after

about 4 or 5 weeks doing that school, for six weeks went on to bivouac down at Marion Bay which is right on the east coast, almost in line with here but right over on the east coast. Beautiful place the east coast and it was a place called Marion Bay and we had a bit of that area.

They must have reconnoitred it before when the other schools, before even when the other schools went. They went down there and you had to learn to drive in all sorts of circumstances; so we went down to Marion Bay and we had a good bit of fun down there. Learnt how to do

all sorts of things. Drive in the scrub and do all sorts of things and each year we’d do a refresher course. I’ll keep on this thing at the moment. We had to do refresher courses, so back down we went the following year to Marion Bay to do the refresher course and it was a boiling hot day, it was in the middle of summer. In February it was and we didn’t all do the refresher course at

once. We went one, one year or one, six months or whatever , but you went with two, a couple of other girls and this was when we were… I’m getting ahead of myself a little bit.

We were in Campbell Town driving ambulances but we had to do refresher courses so it was my turn to go, so we went down to Marion Bay again and we decided it was boiling hot, we’d toured all the way down to Marion Bay and we were all hot so we said,

“Can we borrow the ute and go for a swim?” None of us had bathing costumes. We’d gotten used to… I can’t say, exposure, see I was gonna… but we got used to having showers without doors at Brighton and toilets without doors and the army had cured you with all that nonsense about being shy about your body and everything except the poor older ones. Anyway, we decided we’d go for a swim so we said to the WO [Warrant Officer] “Can we,

can we go for a swim, borrow the ute and go for a swim?” because it was quite a way from the beach, the camping area was. “Oh yes,” he said, “You can go and do that”, so off we went. About six of us went down in the ute and we’re having a lovely time in the water, oh, it was lovely and we came back and we were hungry so I said to the cook, “Where’s some of that damper you made, cookie?” and he said “Okay,” so he brought some back and

the WO came past with a pair of binoculars around his neck, didn’t he? We’re young and innocent, aren’t we? So I thought, I didn’t take any notice of the binoculars, I was too busy having a bit of the damper he’d made. The next day, we stayed overnight and then we had an air raid warning right in the middle of the night because that was part and parcel of the training thing

and it was freezing, it was cold of a night time down on the coast and there we were, hopped out of our bed and the lights, we didn’t have any lights and some people had nightie gowns on and others had pyjamas on, and my sister had a nightie gown on and she got caught up in something and she was swearing and cursing, “The bastard,” she said, “I can’t get… something’s holding me back and I’m hooked up on this stick. I’ll never wear this bloody night dress again”. Oh dear, so anyway that went off all right and we

had that, did that and then the next day we went to Rabin which is up the coast a little bit and I was driving the blitz buggy and we used to have to drive through a dam when we did that, it was part of the course. They must have had some kind of thing with the farmers where they use their properties you see and you’d have to open gates and all that sort of thing and they had this dam so,

I had one of the instructors with me and the blitz buggy had a trap door up the top in the cabin, in the driver’s cabin. You could get up like and look out and see what was coming so he was inclined to be a little bit fidgety, Gordon was and a bit shy, he was sitting next to me and we were driving along and he said, “We’ve got to go through the dam you

know, again, Blondie,” and I said, “Okay”, so we get to the dam and between the time they’d reconnoitred the place again before we went, the area before we went, it had rained and the dam was pretty full of water and he couldn’t swim; this is what he’s telling me you see, “I can’t swim”, and I said, “Oh, don’t be so ridiculous, it won’t be that deep”. “How do…?” “Common sense, Gordon. Don’t be silly”, and we were going on like this and he was real agitated and he said, “ I can’t swim”,

he said, “It’s all right for you, you can swim”. I said, “How do you know I can swim?” and it suddenly clicked. The binoculars yesterday. Well, I said to him, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself” so we’re having this great conversation. He’s sitting down, “Oh, I don’t care about that” and I said, “Well, I do. You sneak, you and your cobbers, you ought to be damn well ashamed of yourself Gordon”, and he said, “Anyway, I can’t”, and he kept on this thing

about he couldn’t swim. Well I said, “Get up in the manhole and sit on the cabinet thing, I don’t want to talk to you. You’re too rude and nasty.” I wasn’t dead serious I was having a bit of a go at him see and of course, they looked at us and all three or four instructors looking at us while we were having a bathe. No clothes on, we didn’t have any bathers did we? Anyway he said, “But I can’t swim”, and I said “No, serves you right. I hope you drown”.

I said, “I hope you fall in the dam and drown”, and he’s sitting up there with his hat sitting on the end of his nose and he’s mumbling something to himself so I deliberately took my foot off the accelerator right in the middle of the dam and it had rained and it was reasonably full but nothing to worry about and he’s sitting up there moaning about, “I can’t swim”, and I didn’t care. I said, “I don’t care. Serves you right, I hope you fall in and drown”, and the WO came along. So, he hasn’t got his binoculars on

today so I stuck my foot on the accelerator, “Oh,” he said, the WO said, “you’ll get out of there easily enough, June”, because we were in the middle of the dam you see. He said, “You’ve got to stick your foot on the accelerator”, so I did and, oh, I had a lovely time and he was standing there and I put my foot on the accelerator and mud and slime and muck flew everywhere. The WO was covered in all the slime and muck and I said to him when I got it all done, he said, “That

was a good job, Blondie”, and I said, “Where’s your binoculars today? Wasn’t there anything worth looking at today out that way?” And he said, “No, not really,” and I thought, “you cheeky bugger”, the cheek I thought. Anyway, we had a bit of fun about that and eventually we drove home. So on the way home, we changed, we’d been to Rabin and we came back again to go to Hobart, back to Hobart. So we came

back to Hobart and I’d changed vehicles by now, someone else was driving the blitz and I was driving the utility and we were always in convoy, yes we were always in convoy and when we got to Hobart, the trams… I don’t know whether they did in Melbourne because I didn’t know anything about Melbourne in those days, used to run up the middle of the road. Did they do that in Melbourne? Yeah and

if you got stuck behind a tram, you had to wait till the people got off and you started and followed the tram until you could pass it, so going north along the main highway before you get to, before… it’s no good me trying to explain where it is because you don’t know very much about the place but anyway, you’re driving towards Brighton and you have to pass through three or four different suburbs and the road was straight, reasonably

straight and the convoy got past the tram except for me and I got left behind and I was following the tram and following the tram and I thought, “I wish they’d hurry and I can get past”. The tram stopped at one place and it went on and the next stop came up and the tram slowed down and there didn’t appear to be anybody getting off so it picked up a little bit of speed and I picked up a little bit of speed and suddenly this kid jumped off the

tram with a… I can see his face. He had a school hat on and a brown coat and a case in his hand and he’d have been about 11 and he jumped off the tram and of course I’d started to speed up and I could see this kid looking up at me, these big eyes and the case and everything, you take it all in. I thought “My God, I’m going to run over him”. Well, I stuck my foot on the brake and threw the

clutch out into, threw the clutch in and put the gearstick into neutral… all done in a matter of, without even thinking and I missed a lamp post by about that much and ran up onto the footpath and there was a fence with an overhanging tree and I pulled the car, pulled the utility up and, I had another girl with me, a friend of mine called Pat and we sat and looked at each other and I thought, “My God, I’ve run over that kid”

and I jumped out. I didn’t hit anything and I didn’t panic. I thought, your mind works at the speed of light actually when anything like that happens but I didn’t panic. All I had to do was I didn’t have to hit that kid. When I stopped, the first thing I did was leapt, we both leapt out of the car and when we got around the ute, when I got around the other side of the ute the blinkin’ kid had gone. He was nowhere to

be seen and somebody yelled out, “Good on ya’ Blondie” and a little old lady toddled up to me and she said, “Here, have a sniff…”, it was ‘smelling salts’, “Have a sniff of this love”, and what it was funny but it didn’t occur to me to panic. I felt a bit shaken and the next thing back came the staff car with the three instructors and they leapt out of the car and

all they did was come over and pat the car, pat the utility . It’s as if I’ve damaged, “‘Government property’, dear” and by this time Pat and I were back in the ute and I think Pat… “Huh,” I said, “never mind about me.” “Oh, you’re all right,” they said and took off and I was all right. There was nothing to disturb me but when,

we used to have to, of a night time, we used to have to check the water, check the petrol, check the tyres, check the oil, check the mileage. That all had to be done so that when the next person took over the cars were full of what they should be, full of petrol, oil and all that sort of thing and the mileage was all ready and they took the mileage. It all had to be written down on a work sheet and that lasted all through the war when you took

vehicles out and I was filling my vehicle up and the WO came up and said, “Well done, well done,” and I’m looking around to see what he was talking about because I’d forgotten about it, in a way I’d forgotten it had happened. “Oh,” I thought, “that was pretty…”; anyway I got my licence to drive.

Absolutely, yes. Every day for about three weeks, I think. We learnt to drive

in paddocks which was the most sensible thing and then we learnt to drive on the roads up in the hills, all around Brighton and then we went into the city and then we went on bivouacs, on a bivouac and wonderful way to… put ‘em in a paddock. Don’t let ‘em go on the roads first up, it’s not right. Put them in a paddock and let them learn in a paddock and teach them to be… they don’t do it anymore you

know, they don’t teach them road manners or, we were taught all sorts of things that they don’t do now and I’ve been driving for 61 years and a girl ran into me up, in the first accident I’ve ever been involved in for 60 odd years and a girl ran into me up at South Hobart and that was the first accident I’d ever had since driving but I’d been taught so well and you had to,

you really had to think of other people and there weren’t very many cars on the road in those days, there were very few cars and yeah well,

Yes, in the paddock that’s where you learnt to drive the vehicle itself before they put you on the road and said, “Well, you’re competent enough to go on the road”, and then you were competent enough to drive long distances

and

Yes, you had to drive around, they had big drums and you had to learn to drive around the drums and back into the drums or hit the drums, but, yeah, they had obstacles. So that was the beginning of my army career as a driver and then we had a

going out , a ‘Driving Out Parade’ and one thing or another and I got my licence. So I was okay to drive.

Yes, we did all our own maintenance. We had to grease our own vehicles and check the engines out, check the spark plugs and the points and oh, I can’t

remember them all now, all the different things that we did that we had to, because if you were on a vehicle, in a vehicle on your own with only a medical especially, I’m talking about medical, what it is now. If he didn’t know anything about a car you had to know because you had to know how to fix a vehicle. Firstly they taught you about the fuel

lines in a vehicle, check out the fuel lines first and then check out the electrical parts and that way you knew it was either fuel or something the matter with your electrical part of your vehicle or your tyres. They taught you how to do tyres. I’ve forgotten now how to do that but they taught us how to do, change tyres… if you didn’t have a jack by using a piece of wood and I’ve forgotten how, I’ve forgotten now how

we did that. A big piece, any kind of wood that would lift a vehicle. I just can’t remember now how they did that, but they did it. We were taught how to do that and we did everything pertaining to a vehicle’s health, if I can put it that way. Check the water, check the tyres, change tyre. We learnt to change tyres.

We partly dismantled an engine thus far

and then we had a workshop when we were at Campbell Town. When the really big maintenance jobs came along, like new parts for the engine that had to be replaced well, they went into the workshop but otherwise we did a 500 mile maintenance and a 1000 mile maintenance and a 5000 mile maintenance and a 10000 mile maintenance went into the workshops

to be checked out. I just thought of something else I was going to tell you. It nearly slipped my mind. It was something quite interesting; anyhow it will come back. Yeah, so we learnt to do all those things and at the end of the course, we were all choofed up because most of us passed except

for one girl and then we had a booze up night didn’t we? And well, they did. I didn’t drink much. I didn’t like it. That little drink I had back all those years ago turned me off. I learnt to have a drink and then we were posted, we were all called up to the lecture room and

we were posted to our different places and I think the main body of the girls, apart from the girls from the mainland... the Tasmanian girls I think nearly all of us went, look would you just take this off and just close down for a minute…

Oh, how dreadful.

They just treated us like men, you do this, you do that, you do… and there was no “you do this, you do that” no it was, “What did you bloody well do that for? It won’t go right there”, and that sort of thing and we didn’t take objection to it, . They’d swear at us when we were learning to drive and we thought it was hilarious really.

No, they expected us to do it so we did it, didn’t we? There was no gentle persuasion. It was “you do this and you do that” and you did it. Mainly common sense really. Once you got to know what the pedals were for and what the gearstick was for and what the brakes were and the foot and the hand brakes were,

it was all common sense, well it was to me. Hopeless, hopeless trying to write it down. However I got through the exam part of it I’ll never ever know but I did and there was no difference. They started off trying to be gentlemen for the first 10 minutes and then suddenly, “What did you bloody well do that for?” I used to get the giggles

and no, there was no problems with that.

Yes. Well when you went to your unit there was always a woman, a

woman who had gone through the course. Your OC [Officer Commanding] of the unit had to know something about vehicles and therein lies a story and I’ll tell you about it later, remind me but they had to be drivers as well and so did the corporals and the sergeants. They all had to know how to drive so that was part and parcel of the course and the first course in Hobart were at Farns School

which is a private school and… once the government said, “Women, we need women”, women took over Australia. I’m not talking about just the forces; I’m talking about the civilian women. They took over everything because they didn’t have

enough men to go away and fight so the women had to take… they did all the jobs, civilians I’m talking about, conductresses, doctors, tram drivers, what’s the name, factories. Oh isn’t that stupid, anyway the factories, I’ll think about it…

Thank you yeah, ammunition factories and everything and they were never ever recognised

for it and that’s why I’ve written that book because those women needed to be recognised. They were only part of the recognition because I had the story to tell, what I’m telling you now and I just felt so sorry that they were never recognised. They were never, I mean there were jobs that women had never ever done in their lives before. I mean, they went away as spies and things and flew aeroplanes and made aeroplane parts and

wonderful women , that had never ever… possibly young people who were ready for that kind of thing. Whereas the older generation was still the older generation and you did what Dad said and that was the end of that and goodbye Oh, I was going to say, “Goodbye and bugger your whiskers”, but I don’t… and that is what happened. The young people of my time were ready for something more and the war did that for those people and not only the

young ones, the older ones as well, like say my Mum’s age. She would have been about 40 odd, 42 perhaps, 43. See they were also ready for a change, so the war did something for the women in a different sort of way.

Yes, well I’ll have to tell you about our OC and I’m not going to mention any names and I shouldn’t mention

the company, the unit either really because, anyway I won’t mention any names. We had a lovely OC the first one, she was Tasmanian and she knew what we were all about. Just quiet, funny girls with funny senses of humour and always on for a bit of fun and she had to go and leave us because of family problems and she had to go home and she left the army and she’d only been with us then for about six months,

so we were waiting patiently for the new OC to come, this was when we were at Campbell Town, waiting for the new OC to come. So, it got to the point where the girls would be doing maintenance under the, we had a ramp you see, a big ramp and you’d get underneath with a grease gun and grease all the nipples on the cars and do all that you had to do underneath it and somebody would say “Oh, how, what are you doing this morning, driver?” acting

the fool, making out we were the new OC because we’d waited that long and, “What are you doing this morning, driver?” “Oh, mind your own business”, and all this sort of thing and it got to be like that with everybody, so Heli, that’s my sister, is under the car doing the grease gun and a voice says to her “What are you doing, driver” and the driver said “Oh go and mind your own bloody

business…” or something silly; we got to the swearing stage, you see. And the voice said “I beg your pardon?” and we’re all standing around petrified because it was the new OC you see, she’d come into the unit to see what we were doing. We’re all standing around saying, “Oh Heli, shut up, don’t say anything else”, and, “I beg your pardon?” the voice said, a real posh voice and Heli poked her head up and there was the OC, the new OC so the new

OC never liked Heli after that but we didn’t know, we tried to explain but she wouldn’t listen. She was a Queenslander so she was a foreigner wasn’t she? Our new OC, she was a foreigner. So poor old Heli was always being made to do all the dirty jobs after that but in the finish, our wonderful OC from Queensland did something very, very naughty in the duty room and we had a separate duty room up there.

I’m not sure what she did but she did something very, very naughty and Heli caught her.

I just think Bass Strait was a road that you didn’t travel and because Melbourne and Sydney is so much bigger than us, the girls seem to be so much different. More experienced sought of; more I suppose outgoing you’d say, we were inclined to be quieter and we all had a funny sense of humour, all of us had a funny sense of humour but they were all, they didn’t give a

bugger what they said and that’s how that was, it was “bloody this” and… we learnt to swear from them. We learnt to swear from the mainland girls because we never did swear very much and we thought it was good fun, swearing, because we never did swear. I can’t ever remember my Mum, the only swear word my Mum would say was “damn” but not like the girls from the mainland. They were just so different,

but that’s the way it was. That’s why it was and I think it was because Bass Strait was the road to the world in those days and because there wasn’t very much money around, nobody went anywhere from Tasmania except those people who had a lot of money. We were very, very poor way back then before the war and I mean, in one sense, the war opened up the world for us.

And Bass Strait was mined. Yes, it was considered a war area, Bass Strait, because they had sown mines all through Bass Strait and if you crossed Bass Strait during the war and after the war, you were entitled to a pension because it was a war zone, considered a war zone.

But by the same token, that was the road to the mainland. You may as well have been away in England as far as that went because nobody had any money to travel anywhere so that opened up a whole new world to us, those girls.

Because it was terribly expensive to put a school on and it was cheaper for them to send

four girls over here, four or five girls over here than it was to put on a school just for four or five girls. If they had a number of girls, which they did in the finish, and they went thousands of miles those mainland girls because it’s so much bigger than Tasmania. So, when we had a school it was cheap to send them here and then wait till they got enough women for a big school over on the mainland than to just put on a school

for four or five girls so that’s why they came here.

By I think it was the Taroona that was on then, a boat called the Taroona, I’m not quite sure about that. Don’t quote me, I think it was the Taroona. Anyway, that’s how they came across, by boat and they came down from Launceston to Campbell Town, so all in the middle of everywhere or nowhere.

Yeah.

That was, we did go on the bivouac.

Nearing the end of the course…

No, that was secret. All that was secret. All that

was secret. They didn’t tell you; you didn’t ask. You just didn’t ask because it wasn’t your business and they told you so. “It’s nothing to do with you, you drive the car and we’ll do the rest”.

It happened to me once

and there was a man I knew very, very well. I’d known the family very, very well. You never ever were cheeky to any of the officers, you had to salute them. That’s what you were supposed to do; you saluted the uniform not the man. Of course, it was the King’s uniform you see and that was protocol. That’s what you did but I had a fellow in my staff car, a major in my staff car,

and I was driving along the Brighton road and he said, “How about it?” I knew this man very well I might add and I never ever liked him apart from anything else and we were driving along and he said, “How about it?” “What?” and he said, “”. “Oh” I thought, “What?” “I beg your pardon!” it suddenly dawned on me

what he was talking about and I thought, “You bloody cheek”. I said to him, “You get out of this car”, I was real young and innocent but wise enough to understand what he was on about because you didn’t think about sex or anything like that in those days, well, I didn’t. I suppose other people did. I said to him, “You get out of my car”. We were about a mile away from Brighton where he was stationed.

He said, “You can’t talk to me like that”. I said, “Yes, I can, This is my car”, and I said, “You can’t approach me like that because if you do and if you think you can speak to me like that … and I’m going to do what you want, then you get out of my car”, and I said, “As far as you’re concerned you’ll never get another woman driver to drive you anywhere, because I’ll report you”. He looked at me as much to say the cheek, he knew who I was

and I knew who he was. He thought I was going to be easy meat you see and I said “Get out” so he got out and he was as wild as a ….he got out of the car and he had to walk a mile home and he never ever spoke to me after and I never ever spoke to him either and when my husband was dying at the repat hospital, he was in the bed opposite Peter with the same thing. And I never ever spoke to him and he never ever spoke to me. I thought

you got your ‘just desserts’ now, serve you right. Well, I shouldn’t say that but it was just the one and only time but I had reason for that and for all the years that I was in the army, I never ever had one, they all, I never had anybody approach me like that. I mean there were always second meanings to what the boys would be saying and we got to the stage where we’d have a bit of a fling back. We’d counter what they were

saying and it was all fun but this was dead serious and I didn’t like it. I thought I’m not everybody’s, bits of everyone, leaping into bed with a, even if you do know them, that was the thought that went through my head, that’s what it was all about.

Oh, my word it would have and he would never ever got another staff car, especially a woman driver. No way,

would he, he might have got one with a man but he would never ever with a woman driver and one of the other girls when I was at Campbell Town, she had to drive one of the doctors back to Campbell Town. I’m not quite sure if it was one of our girls, I think it was one of the Red Cross girls. And this doctor was dead drunk so when she got him up to the men’s ward at the hospital,

instead of opening the door and saluting him, she opened the door and pushed him out, pushed him out onto the ground and then he laid there drunk. I don’t know how long he stayed there for but she pushed him out.

Well the officers wouldn’t, I mean the hierarchy wouldn’t have allowed it. They just wouldn’t have allowed it because of all the

years that I was in the army, I never ever had a man say… like I just said, everything, not everything but most things would have double meanings and we’d laugh away and not take any notice but it wasn’t serious like this was so we never ever really took any notice of the boys. They were always fun and I’ve never ever been insulted ever like I was that day. I thought fancy knowing somebody and being that

stupid.

Yes, we had leave. I

think we had about a week’s leave. I know it wasn’t long because they were desperately short of drivers, and they were desperately short of men and they wanted the men off and away to the war so, we had about a week, I think, and then we just went back to our unit but what a kick it was.

When we finally got out of the hospital, it was a huge complex, you felt as though you were doing something. When I was at the pay office I loved the work, I loved the switchboard work but then again it was a different feeling altogether to get out to the hospital and be a part of this great big complex and part of the staff and it was very rewarding in a funny sort of way. It was very,

very rewarding because you were helping people who couldn’t help themselves . Well, that’s how I felt about it and I think we were all more or less the same.

Yes. Helen came with us, all those girls that I pointed out came with us and you had to be not patting myself on the back or anything but you had to be a very good driver to take on ambulance

work because it’s not like driving staff cars or utes. You were committed to bodies, bodies that weren’t yours and mostly people who couldn’t help themselves. We’d go all over Tasmania picking up patients that had come home on leave with malaria. Mainly with malaria, sometimes with an injury that had

broken out or something that happened but we never ever had any medical experience, we were just the drivers, that’s all we were. Wherever we went we took medical orderlies with us so, we weren’t without… I mean we just didn’t fly out and bring in a patient because some of them were so ill they needed attention. The same as it is now with the ambulances when they go out to get somebody that’s very sick; you’d have to be sick.

They had all sorts of emergency things in like, they had two tiers of stretchers on top, a proper ambulance. I don’t know what you call them. What would you call them? Bunks. Upper and lower bunks and there was a medical box in the middle, I can’t remember what was in the box but there was

a urinal [?] thing in there and I can’t quite remember now but it was, it had different kinds of medicines in it and of course we only ever cleaned those out when we were doing ambulance duty you see, when we were cleaning our ambulances out but they did have, at Brighton when

Mary Gee was there and my sister, they had an accident not far from Brighton, a train accident, and Mary had to go, take her ambulance, oh, I can’t think of the name of that blinkin’ place, I can never think of the name. It makes me that wild I could spit chips [makes me cross]. Anyway, they had a train coming, it would have been about a mile away, a mile and a half

away, and they had this crossing and I think a cow or something on the road, on the train lines and it caused a terrible, terrible accident and Mary had her first sight of charred bodies and where they’d had this stretch where the train had been derailed, terrible, and she had to go and … a very, very bad accident. I forget how many people, soldiers. Oh, they’d come back from the

shooting range and they’d had this accident and it was the first time that Mary had ever seen a really bad accident, terrible accident it was, and for weeks and weeks after there was a terrible smell in the ambulance, where they’d collected all the bits and pieces. For girls, we saw some funny, awful things , girls who’d never ever sought of had this experience with accidents,

it was a bit of a shock and there were no counsellors for Mary because she’d seen all these dreadful things and she’d pick up bodies and bits and pieces and for weeks and weeks after the accident, there was a terrible smell coming out of the ambulance and they couldn’t find it and they smelt it out and they did all sorts of things and in the end they discovered the blood had somehow got underneath the runners of where you pushed the stretcher along and

somehow blood had got underneath one of the runners and that was the smell that was in there for weeks and weeks until one day Heli said to Mary, “It’s got to be somewhere”, and they pulled the stretcher off and Helen got her head up underneath it and she said, “It’s here Mary, there’s blood as thick as ice cream underneath here”, and that’s what the smell was but that was the most

dreadful accident that had happened, I think, in Tasmania at that time.

The engine part you mean or…?

There was proper suspension and they were vehicles that you could drive

today quite easily. They were just different that was all. They were ambulances driven by women, that was the difference and of course we’d never ever done anything like it, ever. None of us had ever driven, Betty and Mary had driven an ambulance but women didn’t do those sort of things and if they did, “They couldn’t drive”. The men said “They couldn’t drive”. Men were all a bit jealous see before

the war, if a woman took the bit. When the army took over, the army girls took over, we’d get funny remarks. “Did you ever drive this thing?” “No, no we’ve never had any training at all”, “Can your legs reach the pedals?” “Yes”. All funny little remarks that nobody took any notice

of, we took it all with a grain of salt but they were wonderful fellows.

No. The vehicles we drove were equal to the weight of an ambulance. That’s how we got, and some of the ambulances were different to others. We had a blitz buggy ambulance and therein lies another story,

anyway we had all sorts of, no we had four or five ambulances the same, I’m just trying to think how many we had. We had about six or seven ambulances and they were driven sometimes, if we went out of a night time they were driven by, we went out in pairs with the orderly because if one girl broke down or anything

happened of a night time, we always had a spare driver and naturally the orderly came along because he was the medic and he knew what to do for different things. No, they were round about the same weight but not ambulances as such. Of course all the vehicles you drove in those days were the same mechanical wise, the engines were just engines and the gearstick and clutches and brakes and whatever and they were all the same things to drive

really except for the staff car, it had a column drive but otherwise it was just the same as driving an ordinary car.

The first one I told Colin about Big Red calling that poor old lady, “A silly bastard”.

Let me see, what was I thinking then about the vet? I can’t remember.

Well, it was huge, it was, that picture that I’ve shown you, the big wheel well, they were huge wheels. You can tell by the size of me against that wheel, it had four of those and the body was, the body

of the ambulance would have been say from there to the wall easily. Easily. Wide, where Colin is, oh not quite that wide perhaps but nearly as wide as that and heavy, big heavy vehicles because they were for towing things or getting people, towing vehicles or pulling people out, pulling other vehicles out of

mud holes and things. That’s what their function was but we had one as an ambulance.

Well, we didn’t know. Wherever we went we never ever knew what the terrain was going to be like so it wasn’t necessarily for that reason we had a blitz buggy because we never ever knew where we were going or what was going to happen.

Oh dear, let me think. After the war, after the war, after

the war had been declared over, we had to leave the hospital and the blitz buggy had to have a run. Nobody wanted to drive, everybody loved it but nobody wanted to drive it so we were all detailed to drive it at one stage or another and the hospital used to send sheets and things down to Mt Stuart [?] which was down in Hobart at the posh end of Sandy

Bay which is up this way and to get up there you have to go up a great big steep hill. When war was declared over, it was my turn to take the blitz buggy down to Hobart which was 50 odd miles away then so I had an orderly with me and we drove down to Sandy Bay and we were coming through town and you could hear,

coming through all the little townships… you’ll go through, you’ll bypass Ross, you’ll bypass all the little townships that we had to pass through. Of course there wasn’t a main road then, there was a main road but not cutting off like it is now and of course you’d have to pass through all the little townships. Well, when war was declared over, the day after the war I had to take the laundry down so we passed through Ross and everybody was cheering and chasing around and patting and running

and throwing kisses. I don’t know what they thought, that we’d fought the war and that was the end of it, and then the next little township the same thing happened and then the next little township it happened because people got to know us. We had to pass through all these little townships, Oaklands and I can’t remember them all, Tunbridge and Ross. Ross, Oaklands, Tunbridge anyway so all the way we through we were getting all these accolades. We’d won the war, sort of thing and then we get to Hobart and

we could hear everybody cheering from the time we hit Hobart’s suburbs and there were people chasing the ambulance, real crazy thingo. All we were going to do was take the laundry down to the blinkin’ place. So we get into Hobart, well, the crowd was that thick that they stopped the ambulance from getting through and they started climbing all over the ambulance and trying to get… and we didn’t have a windscreen as such, it was perspex sort of,

and that got broken and there were people trying to get into the ambulance, were sitting all over it and goodness knows what and in the finish the military police came along and cleared it away for us so that was all right. So we got through there and we were going down to Mt St Canes and you had to go up this big steep hill and we turned from Sandy Bay Road, turned right to go up the hill and sitting in the gutter was this air force fellow and he was sitting there as full

as a boot and I pipped the horn as I went past and he went V for Victory sign and he was as full as a boot and we got the… I had a car driver with me I think that day anyway but what made us laugh was the way he put his finger up, he lifted his fingers like this, as full as anything.

Well Helen and I were on night duty and we’d been in bed a couple of hours and the phone ran, it was about 12 o’clock. I got up and answered it and it was freezing cold and it was pouring with rain, dreadful storm going on outside and George, the chappie down at the R&D [?] Administration

Block said, “You’ve go to a place called Ghoul’s country, straight away, come down and I’ll give you all the relative information”. We always had to know about the patient and what was going on “Pick up the orderly and you’ll have to go straight away”. So we got out of bed and got dressed and ripped off down to the – I drove down, she drove out. I drove out to Ghoul’s country, that’s where we went, Ghoul’s country’s a place

on the east coast, a long way from where we were. Anyway we got down to the D&N Block and he gave us that information that we needed, where to go and where to find the patient, and it was a dreadful night. So we got on the road, and you could hardly see where you were going the rain was that thick. And we got as far as Conara and you turned off at Conara and went out

to the east coast. And we had to go, oh it was a long long way, dreadful rain, dreadful night it was. And we got to St Helen’s Pass and we drove down the Pass and there were rivulets of rain and big drops on the left hand side of the road and rocks falling everywhere and sticks flying everywhere. On the way we had a concert, nothing else to do so we sang all the

tunes of the day, the hit tunes of the day on the way and we quieten down a bit when we hit the Pass cause it was so dangerous. And so very carefully I drove down the Pass and finally came to the bottom of it and at the bottom on the Pass turned left and went through St Helen’s, which is one of the lovely little towns on the east coast. And we went, we had to go through St Helen’s and then we went – when we got through St Helen’s we had to turn left

to go inland for about half an hour. Oh there we were in this dreadful storm still and we eventually found the Pass, the road into Ghoul’s country. There was a bit of a sign hanging up, sort of creaking in the wind, making it all very mysterious and everything. So we got to the, we drove quite a good way until we came to a foot bridge, just a foot pass,

was a bridge but it was under water, and there was a chap there standing with a hurricane lamp to guide us through. And we weren’t quite sure how deep it was so Helen got out and took her shoes and socks off and walked through, it was fast flowing, and walked through just in case there was snags or anything, he didn’t know he was only using the lamp. Anyway we went over the little foot bridge thing and we climbed up and

up this big steep hill and we eventually came to the Post Office. And the Post Office, they’d already moved the patient from further up the hill down into the Post Office so that it would be easier for us. So when we got up, almost level with the Post Office, the chappie, there was another chap waving a hurricane lamp and he said, “Go up the top and turn around, it will be easier than trying to turn in that narrow path”. So we

went up the top and came back and when we climbed up the steps into the Post Office and there was this poor fellow lying there with—we had the orderly with us, by name Vic—and he was shaking. He had a very, very bad case of malaria, so we rang up, he went to the patient and we rang up to let them know at the hospital that we were safe cause it was so – we did it all the time but because the night was so bad

he was very, very worried when we left cause we were going down the Pass. Cause he’d been told by the people at the Post Office that Ghoul’s country was very, very dangerous. So they gave us a lovely cup of tea and a great big piece of cream cake like you had today, only better than mine and we eventually left and made our way back. So we got as far as St Helen’s and it was still

this dreadful storm and the sea was roaring and carrying on and a piece of iron sailed past the window and a tree fell in the footpath, and all those little things that make up a story. You write about things like this but it doesn’t happen to ya, but it happen to us. So we got to the foot of the Pass, and it was terrible so up the Pass we started. This story’s a bit, I don’t think people ever believe us when we tell it. So driving

up and there’s things hitting the window screens and there was stones and things going all over the place and water racing down the Pass and little bit farther and I saw something, I saw something moving and going up the road. And I’m looking and what in the dickens is that and Heli’s leaning over the steering wheel watching it and it was dangerous, it wasn’t the sort of thing we should be doing, she shouldn’t be doing. And I said “Can you see, can you see what I can see?”

and she said, “What can you see?” “No,” I said, “you tell me what you can see”, cause I’d seen a few flights of fancies at time you see, and she said “There’s a fellow walking up the middle of the road”. I mean there was rain coming down like nobody’s business and he was walking up there with his head down like that. And I said, “What’s the bloody fool doing out on a night like this?” and he’s walking – all in about 10 to 12 seconds, no longer, and he suddenly

disappeared, and I said, “Where’s he gone?” I said to Heli, “Where’s he gone?” and she said, “I don’t know”, and cause we were moving all the time towards him, and as we moved, we were going faster than he was walking but he was ahead of us all the time. And he blinking well disappeared into the bank, and the bank was, would be half as high, oh, a bit higher than that curtain there

and a rabbit couldn’t have taken a foot high on that bank. And I thought, before he disappeared she was going to stop and pick him up, you see and I said, “Don’t you stop, don’t stop”, and after I said that he just disappeared into the bank. And I looked at her and she looked at me, well, she stuck her foot – and Vic’s in the back of the car with the patient, back of the ambulance with the patient, well she stuck her foot on

that – we were terrified cause we’d seen an apparition, and that’s what it was, couldn’t have been anything else cause we didn’t see him after and all we saw, he wasn’t there anymore he’d disappeared into the bank. So up we went this Pass and debris flying everywhere and the rain and we got to the top of the Pass and she pulled up. And Vic was banging on the back of the ambulance, cause there was no connect you see- we had… that big

photo you see there… was any connection there except for a window. So we stopped and got out and it’s pouring with rain and he got out of the ambulance and he said, “Why did you go that fast, what did you do that for?” and I looked at Helen and she looked at me and she said, “Oh the accelerator got stuck”, because who would believe that that happened and on that particular night. So we

eventually got home, got back to camp and when we got out of the ambulance he said, “Now tell me, what did you do that for?” We said, “Oh no, the accelerator got stuck”, and he looked at us as much as to say you pair of liars. But we could, who would have believed us, two young girls out on a stormy night; nobody would believe you. So we never ever said anything to anybody for years and years and years. And I went round to Swansea which is

not far from the Pass to a friend of mine who also saw an apparition as well and she said…..and I mentioned that to her about that apparition or ghost, whatever we saw, “Oh,” she said “He’s well known on the coast, that apparition’s well known on the coast”, mostly when there’s trouble about. But I must tell you there was a land fall

after we went up that Pass, so we reckon he was a good one in the finish because if we’d have picked our way up the Pass—cause it was so dangerous and we had that big drop on the left hand side of us and banging rocks on the left hand side of us, drop on the right hand side of us—we would have torn up that Pass without even considering any safety because we were frightened of what we’d saw. So we reckon our apparition was a good

one. But when I asked my friend, she said, “Yes, that’s what happens, it has happened before up there”. And she had also had a ghost; do you want me to talk about this?

She lived in the old bakery and the bakery had all been done up, like for their use as a home, and the baker was Cleter so she told me,

the baker’s name way back was called Cleter. And I don’t, she didn’t tell me how he died but there was a ghost there that was Cleter. So she said, “He haunts the room you’re going to sleep in” cause I was going to stay overnight you see. So I thought oh crikey, so I went to bed and I said, “Good night Cleter, don’t bother visiting”. I said, “How did you know there’s a ghost there?” “He’d been

quite well known”, she said. She had had a high school girl staying with her and she went up stairs to the bedroom that I was in and she said this fellow with a cook’s hat on and all in white said, “Hello”, and she said, “Hello” and didn’t take any notice. And when she went downstairs, she said to Joyce, “Who was that man up there in the bedroom?” and she said, “Oh that’s our ghost”. Now, I mean, you either believe things like that or you don’t,

but we believed our apparition and I believe it to this day that that is what happened to us, cause there was nowhere for that thing, or whatever it was, to go. But we never ever spoke about it for years and years and years. Oh, so that was one of the funny things. Then what happened after that.

Yes, we went out to get the patient from Ghoul’s country and that’s

when that happened, that particular – I mean he was too ill to care, he didn’t care what was going on.

He was on holiday, he was – they used to come home. See they come down from New Guinea or up in the islands and they get stung by the malaria mosquito, they’d get malaria wouldn’t they? They’d be carrying the malaria germ

and they’d come home on leave, forget to take their atabrin, that was the medicine that used to turn them more yellow than your shirt is fawn. And they’d been yellow and when they’d come home they’d either run out of atabrin or they’d just get an attack of malaria. And that happened quite, quite frequently when they were home on leave. And this business, shaking all over, temperature, wet themselves, all sorts of things,

and they were very ill, it was a killer, if left to itself. Terrible temperatures and so we went – that is what – but there’d be other injured , is that somebody knocking….

Yes, yes.

Just the 111th AGH Military Hospital.

They still had, the army numbered everything from the paper clip to the blitz buggy, or the aeroplanes, it was numbers, never names, very rarely names. It was if they were going to put up routine orders, routine orders was probably O26 or O2… always numbers, cars everything, down to paper clips.

Mine was TF

16399, we don’t forget our army numbers.

Tasmanian Female, that’s what I was. Now where else were we?

Well, when we first went up there

our sleeping quarters weren’t finished so we had to stay in Campbell Town and that’s when we had the little talk about who was going to be called Blondie and who was going to be called what, they didn’t know what….

We’ve got that before.

Didn’t we.

So when we got, we eventually got to

Campbell Town…

Okay so we, we all traipsed into this little cottage in Campbell Town, were all sitting round a pot belly stove in the very cold morning and this big girl who hadn’t been in our school, who’d been in the school before, the Driver’s School before, was a society girl from Launceston. We had a couple of society girls, we had

Blondie who’s Father was goodness knows what in Launceston, I can’t remember, and Silly Davies who was the (UNCLEAR) Brothers at Hobart Mercury [Tasmanian newspaper] and they were the loveliest people you’d ever met. We were the snobs, they weren’t. And we sort of expected all sorts of things, “Look at these two society girls”, whatever. Spoke beautifully, not like our Australian style. And anyway we’re

all sitting around this black pot bellied stove trying to keep warm, cause it’s very, very cold in Campbell Town right in the middle of Tasmania see, and she said to me, “Look here,” we’d sort of had these - we’d been talking and laughing altogether and we’d been together a couple of days and she suddenly decided, “Look here,” she always used to call me this and it sounds silly and awful but this is how she was. “Look here, little bastard,” she said, “you can’t be called Blondie,” she said, “because I’ve always

been known as Blondie so you’ll have to find another name.” “Oh, all right, Blondie”, nobody took - we never ever rowed ever not any of us all the time we were together, which was three years and a bit, there was never ever a row amongst those girls. Anyway I said, “All right, Blondie, I don’t care”, it didn’t worry me what they called me, they called me Blondie in Hobart so that was good enough. So anyway were all sitting round, what will we call her, call her this, call her that. And one of the girls said, “What say we call her Fluffy?”

“Oh that’s a good name for ya, we’ll call her Fluffy”, so I was Fluffy up at Campbell Town. Patients, drivers even the officers called me Fluffy, and all the staff, so I was known as ‘Fluffy you little bastard’. Oh, it’s a funny story about Blondie. When we’d been up there a couple of years she said to me one night, she had

this funny way of talking, when she wanted something done she’d wheedle like a little girl, “Do this for me, do that for me”, she said to me one day, “Will you clean my shoes, Blondie?” I said, “You clean your own shoes, you’re big enough”, “Oh you nasty little bitch,” she said, “You’re not nice like your…”, “Heli, Heli”, wheedle, wheedle, “Would you clean my shoes?” “Yes Blond,” “Oh, you’re nicer than your nasty little sister”, that was me.

But nobody took any notice of her. So anyway one day she said, “Fluffy”, and I thought, “Oh, here it comes”. “My daddy,” she called him daddy and she’s 28, “Daddy wants a couple of plovers,” and I said, “Whatever for Blond?” and she said, “Oh, he thinks they’d look nice on the lawn”. Society see. “And eat the grubs.” I said, “Your too late to get (any)” cause it was going

what January, February, I said, “It’s too late, Blond”. “I don’t care we can go and get…” – she’s a big girl, “We can go and get them and I’ll take a bag and we’ll go to the Rec,” cause that’s where they were, that’s where she saw the plovers. “And I’ll hold the bag open and you can run”, “Oh,” I said, “I can’t go”. So I tell her, Heli see, I said, “Come with us Heli for a bit of fun, we’ll have a bit of a good”, cause we were down in the dumps,

we’d had a few bad pieces of news about our boys and one thing and another and we were all kind of down in the dumps. And I said, “Heli, come with us for a bit of fun”, so we inveigled the OC to lend us a staff car. They were both society girls so they sort of knew each other, each other whatever they got you see. “Oh yes you can take the car”, Blond had saved up a bit of petrol. So down the Rec we go and so Blond said, “Now you

stop down here” that was at the bottom of the thing and the two plovers were trotting around doing their things, and she said, “I’ll make a pincer movement”. Heli and I looked at each other, pincer movement? She’d been listening to the boys, see, on the radio. So she makes this pincer movement and she walking up and up, she’s a big girl plodding along and she’s getting closer and closer and the plovers are just standing there, then they suddenly decided she got too close and they flew off, “Bastards,” she yelled out.

“Bastards,” she yelled out and up she went, up the paddock chasing these blinking plovers. So she got up a little way and we said, “Don’t go too close”, we knew she wouldn’t get them because they were half grown you see. And Heli and I are having a bit of fun about this cause we knew she’d never get them. So she got up a bit close and the plovers were standing there and she said, “Go up now, run up now”, and she had the bag open you see

and Heli and I are making the pincer movement, up we go, just for a bit of fun, we knew she wouldn’t get them, and they just flew off, “Oh, bloody bastards,” she said and we said, “No we’re not going to do it again, Blond, it’s too late, you’ve got to get them when they’re chicks”. “Oh bastards”—I’ve never heard people but worse than that. “Bastards,” she said. I said, “Well try again next year when they’re chicks”. “Oh daddy will be

disappointed.” I said, “Well, why did you try and get them; why didn’t you get them earlier?” She said “We’d tried,” she said, “the bastards, daddy and I tried and the bastards come down and scooped a piece out of his head”. I can remember all these things cause there hilarious, to me there really funny. So anyway we gave up, eventually she said, “Let’s try again” and Helen said, “No,” she said, “There’s no use Blond,” she said, “because you’ll never ever catch them at this stage”

which we knew. “Oh,” she said, “I suppose, we’ll try next year.” “Yes Blond we’ll try next year.” So we went back without the plovers. But, oh gee, that was a funny one that one. And then Sissy who had been bought up in the lap of luxury, I might add, she’s a little thing. Older than us, Blond was 20, I was only 20 or something or 18, 19 or something and Helen was

a bit older and Sissy was about 30. And Sissy came out of the lap of luxury from the Mercury people and I don’t know that you ought to mention that name, but anyway Sissy had a bit of a limp, she had one of those hips. So she too could swear like a trooper, so we had a primus stove that we used to heat things up on. So old Sissy’s in this little room with the primus

cooking something, can’t remember what it was, I wasn’t there at the time but I heard the story. And it blew up in her face and took all her eyebrows off and burnt all her face, she was a real mess. So Blond races out to the car, to one of the ambulances to get one of those army bandage packs and puts on her forehead. And I walked in and I thought she was acting the fool, and I said, “What happened to you, Blond” and she said, “The bloody primus burnt me bloody face,” and

I won’t tell, I won’t use that awful F work, and she said, “I chucked it through the window onto the parade ground”, and how I ever stopped laughing I’ll never ever know, and this big bandage and little, tiny little Sissy, and she’s like, “I chucked it through the window onto the parade ground”. And so that was poor Sissy and it was absolutely hilarious and we laughed and laughed over that, cause she was, oh they were a strange couple

those two. Anyway that was the end of that story, couple of stories. But we had, you right, this is what happens see…

Oh do I, I’ve been saying it for a long time.

You’ve got to remember cause I can’t.

Oh she had this big army pack that they used at war, when they were in the field, when they’re fighting. So Sissy had this big pack across her forehead, oh I nearly died laughing, I thought what else is going to happen in this place. But there was always something on the go. And then not long after, not long after that

we went to church, I still go to church by the way, even thought I say ‘bastard’ and all those nasty things. We had church parade and one Sunday morning Padre Giles couldn’t get to church parade so myself, Ruthie May and GG, that’s Mary Gee, and Heli decided we’d all go to church in

Campbell Town. So we started out and it was a very frosty morning and it was very, very cold and we thought it would take us a long time to walk across the pipeline. Now the pipeline was the short cut into Campbell Town; the pipeline came from the River Elizabeth which is way, way back near the road, right back into the camp, which was practically two mile. So that meant it

would have been, would have taken quite a long time, but the pipeline was the short cut to Campbell Town, to the pub or the church, wherever you wanted to go. So we decided we’d walk the pipeline, so we walked the pipeline, freezing cold morning and we knew we were going to be too early, so the Catholic church was open. Now none of us were Catholics but we decided we’d have to fill in time cause the Church of England up the street didn’t open until 10, or I think it was 10 o’clock

in those days. And the Catholic church opened at 9 or half past or some time. So what we did we all decided we’d go to the Catholic church, never ever been in a Catholic church in our lives, not that it mattered, we didn’t care, we just wanted to get in out of the cold. They pushed me in first, “You go first, Fluff”, so Fluff goes in and they all followed and everybody’s going and we didn’t know they genuflected before they entered the pew. So I’m not taking any notice and I’m

was walking behind two little girls and the Mum and the little girls genuflected and I nearly fell over the top of the little girls, and we got the giggles. And Ruthie May and I got in one seat and the other two got in the seat behind us and all we wanted to do was giggle, but we didn’t know anything about the Service. But we weren’t being rude it was just that we were tickled by this happening in the church. But anyway we got through the service all right and quite

enjoyed it. So by the time we got out it was almost time to go to St Andrews up the road, so we walked up to St Andrews and walked in and everybody was seated and the service had just about started. And on the pews they had long red elongated cushions, not bright red

but red, and were sitting there and suddenly I saw GG; I’ll call her GG that was her nickname. She went like this, started to scratch, and I’m looking at her and then I started scratching and then Helen started and then Ruthie May started and there we were all scratching. The new blood, there were fleas in the red cushions, they’d

gotten used to the rest of the congregation cause they were all farmers and been going there for years, we were new blood. And there we all were trying to concentrate on this service and there we were scratch, scratch and then suddenly we realised what it was. GG looked down and said, “Fleas,” and she went whoof like that and flicked a flea off her, off her lapel and that sent us into pools of laughter. And how they ever asked us to come back again, I’ll never ever know.

Cause all we did was laugh and scratch and the others shut along the seat to get away from each other and find a place where there wasn’t any red cushion, cause that’s where all the fleas were. But when we were leaving the church, and I’ve never ever said it before, but honestly the minister had a face just like a sheep, it was all sheep country up there, isn’t that terrible. And I thought he just looks like one of the sheep. Anyway as we were going out

he shook hands and said, “Please come again, it was lovely to have somebody from the hospital come, from the service people”. And he was very nice and I thought if we ever get asked again it will be a big miracle, after what we’d put up with. Anyway that was all right, that passed off all right. Then we were constantly going backwards and forwards collecting patients and we came, and I came down here to Allens Rivulet one

day from Campbell Town. Oh I’ve had some funny trips. Fellow came, Alan’s Rivulet is down there and back through the hills a little bit and we had to go up this blinking great big hill to where we were supposed to go. We were directed by some fellow on the road and we were to pick up this patient, he also had malaria. And when we got up to the front door there’s a great big black bull standing in the front of the

house, and the orderly said to me, “It won’t hurt you, it’s got a ring through it’s nose”, they won’t hurt you if they’ve got a ring. I said “I’m not going, you can go I’m not going to knock on the door with a bull standing there 25 times the size I am”. He said, “Oh go on”. I said, “You go”. And so we got a rock and threw on the – and the old chappie came round, and what did he call the bull……not Angus. Anyway he had a special name for the bull and it just

took the bull by the ring and took it round and I was nearly having a fit, even outside I was terrified of this great big blinking black bull. Anyway they took us inside and he also had – the serviceman on the loo also had malaria and she thought I was the nurse, cause she didn’t see us arrive of course. The aunty thought I was,

yes, it was her aunty, no grandma, they’d taken the boy when he was a little kid cause the Mother and Father had both died, and when I got in the ambulance to drive off, we had him all safely stacked in the car, she said, “You’re not going to drive that are ya?” I said “Yes I am”. “Oh,” she said, “I thought you were the nurse” I said, “No, no it’s all different now; all the women are doing the ambulance

driving, there’s not men at all”. “Oh,” she said, “Will he be safe?” I said “Of course he’ll be safe, I’ve been doing this for years”, boast boast boast. Well, I’d been doing it for a couple of years. Anyway we drove off but she was real… it happened all the time and the women would say, “Oh, everything’s changed”, when we’d arrive because, and people, some people were very, very rude.

They’d say “Oh, is it true that you’re ground sheets for the officers?” And Ruthie May and I were standing on the post office steps one day and this women came fluttering up the steps of the post office and said – a nice looking women, well dressed and well spoken – “Is it true,” she said, “that you’re in the service for the officers?” and I looked at Ruthie

and Ruthie looked at me and I didn’t know what to say. Ruthie just nodded her head very, very slowly and I said, “Yes it is”. “Oh, oh” she said, “I’ll have to go home and tell my sister, my sister’s daughters are in the WAAAF [Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force]”, and she ran down the steps crying. And serve her right cause that’s what she wanted to hear so that’s what she was told. And then another funny thing to tell ya. Ruthie May and I were very good friends we always

sort of got on well together, we all got on well together but you had particular friends, people that you had a lot of rapport with for different reasons. She said, “Come round to Queenstown, on leave” she said, “And I’ve asked if you can come and Mum said of course we can come”. So we started, it took

four days of our leave, we had 10 days leave between us, no each, so we had four days travelling. It took, then, from Campbell Town to Hobart over night at my Mum’s place, catch the bus the next morning out to Queenstown. Well, I’d heard about Queenstown, have you heard about Queenstown? Mining place, well, we had this long, long drive into Queenstown in this bus and we got to the top of

Queenstown and I looked down and it was looking down, oh below sea level, I looked down out of the bus and it seemed to go on for – and these big bare hills where all the sulphur and stuff had burnt all the grass and stuff. And it had been like it for years of course. So I thought, “Oh, don’t tell me I’m going to enjoy this somehow. Anyway down you went, 99 bends, little narrow road in those days it

was, in the bus and we got out of the bus and met the family and went home. And do you know what I had, depression, all the time I was in Queenstown, but we did – some funny things happened to us in Queenstown. They used to play football—the ground was made from metal, it wasn’t like grass and they just fell over and took skins off their knees, no problem at all.

So we went to see the football match, and then one of Ruthie’s friends, I’ll call her Jen, I can’t remember her name was, she said, “Did you hear what happened to the girls?”, “No”, said Ruth. Well, we used to get child endowment in those days, they used to get child endowment, and

they all went to the pub after they got child endowment and they put their babies, little babies in prams and left them in the foyer, in a corner of the foyer. So they had this afternoon, they used to do this when they collected their child endowment. So it went on and the party went on, so one of the barman got hold of all the babies and changed them all over in their pram, so that when they

went home, nobody knew until they got home that their baby wasn’t their baby, it was somebody else’s and one of the husbands said, she went to feed this little baby, and he said, “That’s not ours, love”. So everybody had everybody else’s babies, so we thought that was real funny when she told us that. When I arrived there it poured with rain, it snowed and snowed before we got there and

the day I and Ruthie May got there it was fine for six days, which was unheard of, still snow everywhere but it was fine , and I thought that was lovely, thought that was a bit of a bonus. And then we’d decided we’d go to the dance on Saturday night. So we got all, we weren’t allowed to take our uniform off or anything, so we went to the dance and having a bit of a dance and then this young fellow about 18, this is true

and a young fellow came up to me and said, “Can I have a dance?”, about 18 he was. And I said “Okay”. Just dance, wasn’t anything more, and so we were dancing around and as I walked off the floor he grabbed me by the arm and said, “And don’t you look at any of those others,” he said. This is true and I said, “What are you talking about?” and he put his hand in his pocket and drew out a knife and he said, “They’ll get this if they – if they come to you, I’ll give them this”. And he had this knife, this is true. And he had hold of my arm and I thought,

I didn’t know what to think, it was like cowboys and Indians, talk about the wild west. And I wrenched my arm away and said, “You’re mad,” and Ruth could see that I was having problems so we both took off through the back door. And in those days they used to have a supper room and toilets and everything out the back of the dance, so we both, I was terrified, and we both rushed out to the toilet and hid in the

toilet for about five minutes and I said “Look we can’t stop in here” and the toilet was only as big as a matchbox. So we went out into the supper room and the door from the dance room lead into the supper room and we could hear this terrible row going on. And the people running it must, somebody must have said something, and “Don’t you come back in here again,” he was yelling out. Well Ruth and I didn’t know what to do because he made them go because of the incident that had happened

to me and so we took to our scrapers and she fell over puddles and I fell over rocks and we tore home; we were that petrified. Anyway that happened to me; and anyway we had a lovely stay. And then we went on the Apt Railway Station to, you’ve heard of the Apt Railway haven’t you?

Yes from Queenstown to Strahan, you’ve heard of the Apt Railway?

That was back in 1943,

‘44 and we had this wonderful trip on a train, it was just magic. Like (UNCLEAR) just magic it was. And it took about four hours I think in those days, and what do they call it?…. It’s a traction sort of thing that pulls the train up, there’s a special name for it, I’ll think about it in a minute. It pulls the trains up hills like this,

and they’d stop it….while they were going up the incline and they started to go down the other side, and they’d run a little way to get up the next one, people would get up and pick wildflowers and then hurry along to the next incline and they’d all hop back on the train again. And when we got into Strahan we walked to Strahan

and we had a run round there and had something to eat and talked to a lady whose daughter was at Port Huon and that was then the naval base. And then we came home, walked back to Regatta Point where the trained stopped and went back to Queenstown. And then it was almost time to go home by the time we’d done all these things, so when

the, that was on D Day, so it must have been late in 1944, ‘44, ‘45, anyway when we got to Derwent Bridge which was half way between Hobart and Queenstown, the manger or whatever you call him had flags flying all over the place because it had been the day, was it, I can’t remember, I’ve got it written down

somewhere and everybody was celebrating. And when we got to Hobart, D Day [allied invasion of Europe] was well and truly on. When we came home from Queenstown, the OC called us in to the office…

So when we got back into Hobart, we had lunch and then we met the bus going to Queenstown so we all stopped and danced around in the snow, because it was such a day, a day to remember. And when we got back into town, the town had gone

crazy, everybody was that happy. And a couple of days after we got home I was due to go back to Hobart to pick – we had a doctor called Doctor Parker and he was a bone specialist, what do you call them, there’s a special name for them? What do you call a bone specialist?

Orthopaedic Surgeon and we used to collect him every Thursday and take him up to Campbell Town

to see to the soldiers, the wounded soldiers in the hospital. – lovely man, little rotund, clever, but a lovely little man. And he wouldn’t have a staff car, he was entitled to a staff car. “There’s a war on,” he used to say, and I think he used to enjoy the trip up with us, with us girls.

And he wouldn’t have a staff car regardless, so he’d come on the Thursday and on Friday he’d go round all the patients and say, “I’ll do you tomorrow, and I’ll do you tomorrow and I’ll do you tomorrow”. So it got to be one of those sentences, so the boys would say when they were feeling a bit frisky or being a bit naughty or trying to be smart, “I’ll do you tomorrow”. And we used to get, we used to say, “Yeh, we’ll

do you tomorrow”, and all naughty things we used to say, but no harm in it. But he was a lovely man and a wonderful surgeon and he built a big hospital after the war; it was called Doctor Parker Centre. But we loved him, he was lovely. The things that come to you mind, anyway what else was I going to tell ya, something else I was going to tell ya.

Oh, as soon as I landed down at the bottom and I looked up at all the hills it was as if cowboys and Indians were about to come over hill . And that was all right, that took all my sense of proportion or whatever. But as soon as I got down onto the bottom of the basin, as I called it, I got, became depressed.

I was that depressed honestly but I never ever said anything to the family cause they were so good and so kind. And it was all very interesting and I loved it but I was so depressed, I couldn’t get rid of this feeling of depression. And immediately I came up and out of the basin as I always call it, it went like that. I suppose it was being like being underground in away, cause all the mines were around I suppose, that’s what it was. I mean I never ever, I mean I had done

all sorts of things but never ever been depressed, and I never ever wanted to be after that either. Yeh, but that was a real experience, and the trip on the Apt railway was just wonderful.

Well I told you about Allens Rivulet, didn’t I? Oh, oh I have to tell you about the prisoner of war. They used to let the Italians onto farms and things, they weren’t’ nasty to them or anything, they were just prisoners of war. Like the Huon Valley experience, similar. But this fellow was working with this farmer round at George Town, that’s right round on the

north west coast, and he went funny. He loved all the cows, he’d named all the cows, he gave all the cows Italian names and he went funny. And one day the farmer went round and knocked on his door and he didn’t answer, he had a little house of his own. And he didn’t answer the farmer, and he liked the farmer, they got on well, but he wouldn’t eat with the family. He was invited but he wouldn’t do that, he wanted to eat on his own. So the farmer

went and knocked on the door to call him up, Romaldo his name was, and he came out and the farmer said, “You haven’t milked your cows this morning, Romaldo” and he looked a bit strange and he went strange. And so they called the army, called the army hospital and Heli and I went round to get him, so that was a long trip round there. So when we got round there we picked Romaldo up because

he had to go to hospital, you see. But in the meantime as we were driving back he kept throwing his trousers, it was a hot day and he kept throwing his trousers out the back of the ambulance, he was queer you see, he’d gone funny. And we’d stop and pick up the trousers and I’d race back and get the trousers and race back and chuck them in the back of the ambulance and the orderly put them back on again. We’d go a few more miles and out they’d go again. So I said to Betty

“I think you should just throw your clutch in pretty suddenly and throw you foot on the accelerator and he might sit down quickly and stay”. So we get along the road and she did and he went bang down on the floor. Well it went on for 3 and 4 times and I was getting worn out racing out to pick his trousers up. I drove into George Town, see we’d change drivers, so when we got to Campbell Town they said to us “Well,

look you’re going to have to take him straight down to New Norfolk”, which was just a few miles outside Hobart, only up the river a bit, about, be about 20 miles I suppose from Hobart. So we had to come from George Town which was way round on the North West coast and drive the ambulance right down, we didn’t get down there till about, must

have been about then 3 o’clock, oh no, not 3 o’clock, it would have been about half past two, 2 o’clock in the morning by the time we got to the asylum. That’s where we had to go. The orderly got out and we all got out and they said, “Come in”, and I was petrified, I was always petrified of strange people. I never had, I could never, although I was sorry

for them and everything, it just seemed awful and wrong to me and I hated it. So anyway we crept into the asylum, the whole lot of us, and the wardens took us in and they took us into where this man was to stay in the hospital. Well, he went out, the orderly went out to get the Italian’s clothes. The warden said, “I’ll be back in a minute”, and left us in this little

office room. And there all these funny men, oh it was pitiful, some on high beds, some on low beds, glaring at ya. One man was running round making his bed from one side, then he’d go back round the other and make his bed. And I was petrified and Romaldo had gone out with the orderly. And Betty and I, Helen and I stuck in this. Well I was petrified, made me feel sick, honestly.

And I thought how I’m going to get out of here, and I couldn’t; I was stuck. I just it was beyond me, it was terrible, I couldn’t cope with the poor—it wasn’t so much that they were crazy, it was the terrible way that they were. No teeth and looking anyhow and mad as hatters. And

I just thought it was awful. So the warden finally came back and I took off out through the door; I went and I got out in the light and I’m looking up at the sky and said, “Thank god I’m not mad, thank god I’ve got a good body”. I was absolutely petrified. It’s an awful thing to say, I suppose, but it’s hard to contend with things; I mean I felt so sorry for them

all, anyway that’s aside. Anyway we got back, I think we got back to the hospital around about, oh, it must have been about 4 o’clock in the morning, so we were left to lie in and sleep it off, which we did. And then not long after that it was the cadets’ camp, so I’m telling this story from what happened to me, everybody had experiences.

Then it was cadets were coming down to Milford which was along Fingal Road, that was the road that went out to Ghouls’ country. Anyway we went to this boys’ camp. Well, they came in, the supply truck came in and I romanced with one of the boys in the supply

truck, and we were there for a week. And we had a women with us, a corporal, who was supposed to be our guardian, look after the girls, don’t let them doing anything, cause it was all military. And she was one of those strict people that didn’t suit me at all. Anyway we were under canvas for that period of time and the cook that took us to Merriam Bay was the cook, he was the army cook

and he was there so we had a friendly face. But the supply boys were lovely, there were two or three WOs [Warrant Officer] and a Captain White, he was the boss. Anyway those boys. The cadets came in on the Friday afternoon and there was one kid, I’ve written about that kid, well, he was the

funniest, he was another poor sole that didn’t have much education I don’t think. Anyway he was in the cadets and oh, I’ve written about it, you bastard, so I’ll tell ya what he did. They were having this mock battle of course and they had to have an ambulance in attendance, and

one of the young WOs who was a very nice young man showed me where the battle field was. It was altogether but in one place the battle field was away from the camping area. So going into battle we had to have two medical orderlies; only kids, it was all practice, two in my ambulance and two for the field, you

see. So somebody was supposed to be wounded. So my two orderlies went to get the wounded ones and this kid said, he hadn’t been shot or anything, and they bundled him onto this plank and I could hear him right across the paddock, “Oh, you bastard, I’d been wounded”, he hadn’t been wounded at all. “Oh, you bastard, you don’t know what it’s like to be wounded”, and they were telling him to shut up and don’t be so stupid “Oh yes,

your not the ones that have been shot, I’m the one that’s been shot” and all this carry on, and they locked him in the ambulance and wouldn’t let him out. Anyway when they eventually let him out, he leapt out of the car, “Oh, you lot of bastards”, and he took off into the bush and the boys said, “Well, serve you right”, they yelled out at him, “That’s what you get for swearing in front of the lady solider”. It was really strange. And then I had a little romance with one of the boys

but my heart was elsewhere. And I went with him for a little while, this particular fellow, and very nice young man he was. But it was no good, my heart was elsewhere and that was the end of that, so we had to end that little romance. It was very cute, very particular about the romances I had because I hated the look on their faces when I said they had to go. I didn’t tell them in that way but that’s what happened. But anyway that was another funny thing that happened to us.

One of the supply boys, yes.

I did yes because it wasn’t fair. And no good of trying to fool yourself; you realise that you can’t fool yourself about certain things. So anyway we used to go round to Devonport and Bernie and pick up, oh, I had another romance, didn’t I. But that’s what we used to do; we used to go round to

Bernie and meet the hospital ships as they came in; oh, lots of times we went round to Bernie and Devonport and picked up patients. They’d come in from say New Guinea, or wherever they’d been wounded, and they’d go to a hospital until they were well enough to travel. And as soon as they were well enough to travel they were sent back to Tasmania, their home base, but they’d come by boat,

and we’d quite often go up there and see them, terrible things. I had one fellow that was a patient in one of my ambulances, only a bit of a kid, I said to him, “How old are you? Ten?” cause he was that young. “No,” he said, “I’m old as you are.” I said, “Darl, you’re not as old as I am”. I said, “I’m 19 and you’re younger than I am”. “No,” he said, “I’m as old as you are”. But he wasn’t, he must have been about 16 when he joined up.

And I said, “Yep”. “Give us a cigarette,” he said, cause we all smoked in those days. So I lit him a cigarette and I could see underneath, it was a hot day and I could see underneath the sheet he only had one and a half legs, to put it in a funny way. I said, “What are you going to do when you get out?” not because I was worried about his leg but just wondered what his thoughts were. He said, “I’m going to learn to fly”. And he was in the back of the ambulance with a couple of other

boys and nobody said a word, and I said, “Good on ya”. I said, “You could do that.” He said, “Yes, I can. Douglas Bader flew without any legs,” he said. “If he can fly without any legs, I can fly with one and a half legs”. And so when he got out of hospital, he learnt to fly. He was with us for quite a while. And then I had a friend of mine, a male friend of mine, very particular male friend of mine I might add, had a cobber.

We were all great swimmers our family, and this chappie that I just thought was lovely was a champion swimmer and all the things that go with 16 years old and that, and for a lifetime I might add, but I didn’t marry him. He had a cobber who, they all had cobbers in those days and oh, we were at the pictures on night, they had pictures and dances

in the hall at camp. And I saw this fellow, his nickname was Butch, and I thought he doesn’t look right that fellow and I went up to him and I said, “How are you, Butch?” and he looked at me and he was trying to work out who I was, he’d gone queer, very strange. So I said to him, “Would you like to sit with me?” and he sort of knew me but he didn’t know me. So I was trying to get to him, I was trying to work him out, but he’d gone,

it was hopeless. Anyway he left Campbell Town and they sent him across to Melbourne for treatment, but he died in Melbourne. It’s sad, sort of a little sad heart breaking things that you that happened. But we were always on top, we always had to be laughing about something or rather otherwise you’d go cranky , seeing all these fellows coming maimed and goodness knows what. But it was part of the job and so you got used to it all. Yeh, very sad

but we managed, we thought we were marvellous. And I suppose we were for our time. And you look at today’s kids and I feel sorry for today’s kids. Well, they’ve got drugs and I mean, okay, a drink all right and I suppose a bit of marijuana wouldn’t hurt anybody, but when they get on the hard drugs and loose themselves that terrible. What have they got before them, nothing much. See we didn’t

have cars, we had to walk everywhere we wanted to go. I can remember when we were little kids we walked from, oh, we walked for miles to go down to the baths to swim, but we didn’t care it was all part of what your life was. But to me there’s no challenges anymore, nothings a challenge. They’re not taught manners anymore, we had all sorts of little disciplines, take your arms off the table, you don’t eat bread and butter,

you have either bread and jam or bread and butter, that was grandpa. And sort of, cleaned your shoes, go to the shop, you didn’t say no, you just went, all sorts of little disciplines, but it’s not anymore. Is it, there’s kids having babies at 12, and they’re only babies themselves and they’ve got no life. Anyway that’s how I feel about life today.

No, when we went out of a night time, there was always two girls. Of a day time there was always myself or whoever, and a male orderly, a medical orderly who looked after the sick. And our job was to… if somebody would have taken sick I wouldn’t have know what was the matter

unless he had a migraine and then I’ll know. No, we were just drivers, just drivers but we worked very hard.

If he needed a lift, we used to, the only thing we used to do with the orderly really, we’d

have to lift the stretchers from the ground with the orderly, unless there were any men around that would do it for us. But I ended up with a bad back just lifting the men up on the stretchers and pushing them into the back of the ambulance. Well, see it was high, they were big high ambulances as you saw in that photo; we had to lift them from the ground up into those

top bunks, but it didn’t matter, it was all part of the job. But as I started to get older I started to get sore backs; anyway I’ve still got a sore back so it didn’t make any difference, just took it all in your stride. But yeh, it was a time of great sorrow; somebody would say, “I’ve lost me brother”, and we’d all try not to cry and then you’d hear

the POWs, all such wonderful people. The Australian solider in my opinion was a warrior, not just a man that went to battle and fought well and did all the right things, they were warriors. They fought like mad, they came home wounded never moaned, always happy and telling you funny things or saying funny things to you. And

running us down cause we were women drivers, but all in fun. They were the most wonderful people I’d ever met in my life, and there’s still no word for the camaraderie that was amongst the service people and I don’t think there is a word to cover that particular circumstance, I just think that there is no word. And then I used to hate Anzac Day and then I started marching after the war. When I was de-mobbed I came home

and I kept thinking to me self, “I want to go home”, but I was home, wasn’t I? But home over the last three and a bit years was Campbell Town where all the girls were, where we were like a big family. And we never had any rows and bit by bit we’ve lost, naturally everybody’s going to pass on some time, I hope I don’t pass on just yet, I’ve got to get me book finished. And it all happens,

you hear this one’s gone and that one’s gone and you think, well, that’s the way it is and it’s going to happen to us all so let’s get used to the idea. You’ve got to get used to all sorts of things as you move on . And I think to myself, crikey, I can’t believe I’m nearly 80, I’m looking around to see who the 80 year old is. And it’s just a very strange feeling; I’ve never been old and I’ll never be old, I don’t think.

I mean life can alter you and it doesn’t matter how many problems you have, you either sink or you swim. And depending what your nature is too, I mean – but that’s practically my story. There’s more things that happened but I can’t remember them all. If you’ve got any questions, ask.

Yes I did. And he came home, that was, I know his name, don’t it make me riled, I nearly married the fella………anyway he came home…..

oh, where’s the book. Anyway he came home, by plane, they started towards the end of the war, it was more convenient to bring the wounded home by plane. So we went, oh…..doesn’t make me riled, this happens to me and I want to scream. Anyway

we went up to the Launceston airport, what’s the name of it, see there’s another thing, anyway went up to the Launceston airport, I’ll think of it in a minute. And we were putting patients in the ambulance and a voice behind me said, “Are you still…” what was the term, “spoken for?” – oh his name was Rex Daton, that’s the name, it’s a fictitious name, but that’s the name

I’ve given him because he has relatives and I don’t want to upset the apple cart. And he said, “Are you still spoken for?” because that’s what I said when I joined up and he was the one that signed my papers, oh, filled my papers out and asked me for a date and I said, “No I’m spoken for”. And I thought, “I know that voice”, and I looked at the eyes and I thought, “I know” – well, there’s a great reunion. There was two or three ambulances

went up to collect patients from Western Junction, that was the name of the Launceston airport, and I thought, “I know that voice”, I’d only spoken to him when I’d joined up and I thought he was nice but I was spoken for, wasn’t I and my heart was in somebody else. So I turned around and I said, “Rex Daton”. Oh, and we had this reunion

this big reunion in Western Junction and everybody was whistling and clapping and the air force boys thought it was lovely and there we were, so that was all right. So he came down, he was going into hospital. He was a very, very sick boy, man he was then, he wasn’t a boy any longer, and he was in the hospital for some time and we sort of cobbered up again and, “Please marry

me?” after about six weeks of going out, “No, I’ll think about that”, cause I really didn’t, my heart wasn’t in it, just wasn’t in it. But I liked him, I thought he was lovely and I felt mean. I met his parents, his parents came down to Campbell Town, we all had lunch together. I could have married him and been happy, let’s put it that way. And anyway he had

to go, come down to Hobart to be discharged, we came down to Hobart. And the doctor that examined him for his discharge told him he had a bad heart. He was a country boy and they lived on a big farm right up north, and the doctor said he had this heart complaint. Well, that didn’t make any difference, he still wanted to get married. So I was putting off the evil hour all the time, and he

went home and had a massive heart attack and died. And he was in Changi; he was a big, great big tall fella, nicely built man but he came home looking like a stick. And he came home and, yes, he went home one night chucked a six and away he went, that was the end of that, so I didn’t have to make up me mind about that anyway. But sad,

come home, go all the way through Changi which was the most terrible prisoner of war camp wasn’t it? Well, poor man, so that was the end of that. So when I was discharged I just came out of the army, and then I didn’t marry the man I loved most of all. Because he wrote down, and I don’t know whatever happened, this is between you me and the gatepost; he came home, he wrote for some reason I don’t know why he did it

because we were very, very compatible, we enjoyed the both things, loved each other dearly and I don’t know what happened. When he went up to Queensland I got a letter to say when I come home you’re not going to be the only girl I’m going out with. Now I don’t know why he did that because he wasn’t that sort of a fella. So I always reckon somebody, because I always used to go dancing and, I mean it didn’t mean a thing, but because you used to go dancing

and have a bit of fun and laughter I think somebody, always think somebody in the family said, “She goes out with this one, and goes out with that one”. And I think he, naturally, families are funny with their boys, being a boy you should know, and I think he thought, “Oh well, she doesn’t care anymore”. And so he wrote that down and I thought, “Blow you”, I’d had enough, it hurt I might add, I’d had enough of Dad fiddling

and faddling and carrying on with his silly drinking and nonsense with Mum and all that and I thought, “I can’t go through that again”. So I never answered that letter, so to this day I don’t know what it was, but I’ll find out before he dies, don’t you worry, I’ve still got me little brain ticking over. But anyway I was discharged and I came home and I’d only been home a week, and I thought, “I can’t hang around the place like this”, cause

Mum was at work. So the shop that is now called Myers, in Hobart, it’s called Myers, it was, oh, it was what Myers is? Well, it was the same sort of shop and I thought I’d like a job. So I answered an ad to man the switch board, and I loved switch board work so I did that. Because all the boys were coming home and they were doing all the driving and the women suddenly

fell back into nothing. We’d done our job and it wasn’t considered, well, I suppose it was considered worthwhile cause we let all the men go to the war. Anyway that doesn’t matter that’s all over and done with. Anyway I took on this job and the blinking secretary was an old man, 65, called me into the room one day, he was the secretary of Brownalls, it was known

as Brownalls at that time and he stuck his hand up me dress. Well, I’ll tell ya. And I was so dumbfounded I said, “You ignorant pig”. I said, “How dare you”, and he was a tall thin, he was about 65 he was, and I thought I was the only one he’d done that to, but he had done it to other people, other girls. And so I left the switch board because he was

getting nasty and nasty because I wouldn’t play the game. He was an old man, I wasn’t going to play the game, I was going to play it with somebody younger, with a bit of spunk. Aren’t I awful, no I never ever did though, not until I got married anyway. And I just asked for a transfer, so I went downstairs and acted the fool all the time downstairs.

And that’s the end of my story really.

I’ve had three boys and then I got sick of being a Mother. I said. “Don’t call me Mum anymore. Call me June”. Now that they’ve grown up. And then I found I had an arty side to my nature. I discovered I could do things.

I started off by doing those tapestries and then I did about three or four more big ones like those and gave them to the family. And then I thought one day, “Oh well, I could do something else; now what will I do?” So I thought, “Oh, I’ll try doing water colours”. So I had a go at water colours and although not a good water colourist, I enjoyed it

Then I saw that woman doing a bark painting on the breakfast show, I thought “I could do that” and that’s how I started doing bark painting, and I ended up with Adult Ed for twenty-one years and taught goodness knows how many people how to bark paint. And we had over eighty-one, we had an association and had over eighty-one people in it. And then I’d always written poetry and I decided

that it was time I told my childhood story, and my family, and my sisters and that, so got to work and did that; that was in later years as I got older. So then I did that and I thought, “I must write my army experiences, because it was all so unique. It’s worth having like you people are doing, it’s worth having the stories. It’s worth knowing

that we did things and it opened doors for women. Like driving wasn’t a women’s game before the war. When we did driving, as I said before, we were laughed at, women drivers ha, ha, ha, cause it was a man’s world then. And we’d started to, bit like the suffragettes; we’d started to take over the men’s jobs. But when the war came along it was necessary

because we were short of men and we were released, the army, navy and the air force and land army girls released thousands and thousands of men to go to war. Not that we enjoyed releasing them to go because it’s a terrible thing isn’t it, war’s awful. And so would have been under the Japs, oh I could never have lived under the Japs. It would have been awful, I couldn’t pull a rickshaw, I’d be too old;

like Blond said, “I’m too old to pull a rickshaw” and she was only…But gradually you slid in. We had an association, wonderful association that had functions—I wasn’t part of this but I was later—that had functions to buy a

home for ex servicewomen when we got old and had no where else to go. Or for sick people who couldn’t afford lots and lots of money for hospitals. And those girls that are, the combined girls it was, they brought this beautiful place out New Town, where people could go and ex servicewomen could go as they got older and didn’t have families or husbands; they were units. So then

we all got on with our lives and the war greatly faded into the background and the new breed took over.

Oh yes, yes.

The men come home.

That's stopped, yeh. But we were different, we became different women; as the newer generations came along, we’d

opened up doors that have never been opened before to them, all sorts of jobs. I mean all the jobs that the men did the women started to be able to do, like for instance going into government and all sorts of things; it opened up doors. Like, just like the suffragettes did, different era altogether and different ways of doing things, I mean it

just happened that way.

To a point it did until the women of the forces started driving cars. Like the thousands and thousands of women all over Australia doing what I did, some of them had a licence for fourteen vehicles over on the mainland. That was driving tanks and jeeps and ambulance and blitz buggies, all kinds of vehicles

some they had fourteen, some of them. I only had three licence cause that’s all we needed here. We were only driving ambulances and staff cars and utilities, four I had, and blitz buggies. But we didn’t need anymore but over on the mainland they drove for thousands and thousands of miles. And so that door was opened for future generations, and now look at what the girls are doing, their driving busses.

Well, they drive busses here, I don’t know about on the mainland, but they drive busses all around Hobart. In fact the girl next door drives busses. So we’ve come along way in one sense and gone back in another.

Yes, I would have loved to have driven for a job after the war. When I got a car, I got a little Ford 10

car and I’ve been driving ever since, that’s 61 years ago. I was 18 when I joined up and I’m 79 now, oh…and but I look round and I think, “Where’s that 79 year old lady?” I don’t care, I don’t care about it and death doesn’t worry me either, that’s the natural

progression for the human race. But you might live longer than I will because all the new things that are coming along. I’ve lived longer than my grandparents and they lived longer than their grandparents, so it’s a progression all the time as far as medical and wonderful things they do just now. Doctor Parker used to mend bones, now they mend everything. But as yet they still

haven’t found anything, I don’t think to stop people having migraines which have been the bane of my life. And strangely enough I think I can remember only ever having no migraines when I was in the army. And yet I started having them when I was about eight. Terrible migraines put me to bed for a couple of days. But it’s go along with it, there’s not good saying you can’t go on anymore, life’s this and life’s that, life’s what you make it.

Okay we were in a situation where we were in the middle of Tasmania. We had to have, like all the services, had to have leave if we wanted to go; when we went on leave we didn’t mix with the others because we were busy

with families and things. But had we been in Hobart, we’d have possibly mixed more with the other services. And besides there weren’t that many WAAAFs here during the war. The army girls were always…the land army girls were always out in the field anyway and we didn’t know, they came later. The navy girls all went across to Melbourne so, except for Port Huon, that was the Naval Base here.

And they kept to themselves, so we didn’t mix very much with the other girls, with the other troops, no. Just one of those things. And anyway we never ever, I don’t, we never ever went on a parade anywhere, we never ever saw a parade in Hobart, and there used to be parades when the men were going away.

Yes we did.

Yes it was. It became home for the simple reason we were all compatible.

And we were like a big family. The nurses were a bit suspect at first about we girls, they’d had Sigs [signals] up there when the hospital first opened doing line work, and they’d been very rude to the nurses. And when we arrived up there they expected us to be the same, so it took a lot of, what’s the word I’m looking for?......

No

not audacity not the word, to get friends. We weren’t like the Sigs were, we were more educated, that’s an awful thing to say, I’m going to say something else. We weren’t highly educated but we were more educated, knew how to speak. All the girls were people who had come from good families, what we considered then were good families, who knew how to treat their children to a point, not like my Dad

but we’ll forgive him for that. But my Mum came from a very good family and so did Dad, and so did most of the girls; their parents were all middle class people, but knew how to speak correctly and no ‘seein’ and ‘do’in’ and all that sort of thing; there was none of that. So we were more on the same level more or less, except for Sissy and Blond

who we thought were terrible; when they’d swear we’d nearly faint . Oh, fancy saying that, oh, we weren’t allowed to swear, I won’t tell you the words they used but they were all those funny naughty words, and we thought it was terrible, but we never ever said anything and there was never any row over it. It wasn’t our place to say you can’t do this and you can’t do that, they were what they were and we were what we were. And so we all got on so well, even

although our OC was… she was a stranger in a strange land, let me put it that way to cover her. Very toffy. The first OC we had she was lovely, she was Tasmanian and she understood our funny little ways and everything, but poor, oh, the second one we got…she was all right I suppose. She was a bit naughty though just the same,

not going to say anymore, I’ve said it all. But no, we all got on so well, it was just wonderful. And I think that was, more than being discharged and going out, I think, was losing the girls the company, the girls we’d been with for three years, bit over three years we’d all been together.

Yes we discussed things. Somebody would say, “Oh I’m not well today”, we’d say, “Oh never mind, you’ll get over that”, all said in fun no harm. It was just like a family, a very, very good family. And there’s not a word for the camaraderie that was there. I said to Colin before, “There’s no word to cover that relationship that we had,

and every service person has had”. People in dire straights that share the same bad experience will bond together, like the Bali thing [terrorist bombing in 2002]. It’s something unexplainable that happens to people that are like that, you won’t find it in civilian groups, or very rarely. But it was just because we were all so happy

together and shared everything. Families would send cakes up at Christmas time, everything was shared. We always went out; if somebody couldn’t go anywhere we were always sorry that they couldn’t come. It was really a shared experience of, oh, I can’t explain it. But we used to go swimming; up in Campbell Town

it’s either freezing cold in the winter and boiling hot in the summer. Cause it’s inland and you don’t get any breezes. Well, we used to race down, across the pipeline we’d all go, just as hot when we got back, but, perhaps if we had a day off, that’s the first place in the summer we’d make for. And that bound us together cause quite a lot of us went swimming and we’d have, oh, this wonderful camaraderie and fun and go to the pub and have a drink.

I learnt to drink cherry brandy and lemonade and got drunk on it once. That was the first and last time I’d ever got drunk, in the middle of winter that was. But no, I can’t explain, I can’t tell you what it is, it’s just something people in that situation or that kind of situation that happens, that you can’t explain. And in the end the nurses, we became very, very good friends with a lot of the nurses.

And we still, we still meet and we have an association, of course, we did have a full association. The Launceston people dropped out and there’s only a few of us left now cause we’re all dying off like flies, we’re all getting old you see. But no, we still have a little association going in Hobart and everybody turns up and has a chat and a talk.

Rarely talk about old times but, cause we’ve moved in, it’s so far away now you see. But in your heart it’s still there.

It looked like a sprawl of large building out in a big space in the middle of nowhere.

Does that answer your question? Spread out for, I can’t tell you how big the camp was, it would have been, it would be no good trying to tell ya, it was huge. It had quarters for sisters, nurses, army girls, cooks, lot of administration, lot of men, there was three or four men’s wards, dispensaries,

dentists, women’s wards, it was quite big . Oh, which reminds me to tell ya, talk about the men’s wards. Mary Gee and I decided one day, can I, is this going to be boring to you?

Decided we’d leave camp early, our lines were there say and the

canteen was down there. And to get to the canteen you had to go past the men’s wards and the women got, what do they call people that have that awful diseases? Had VD and all that sort of thing, the men I’m talking about, oh come on….when they’ve got to be on their own, come on what’s the word?

Yeah, more or less, yeh.

Not quite, that’s not quite the word what I mean….

That’s it. They were in the isolation ward and they were up a bit from us, this is before the women’s ward moved down. So Mary and I decided we’d leave and go to the canteen. So it was blowing a gale, and you had to have your hats on and everything, so Mary’s hat blew over the fence. And it was just at stand down time, when they were going to play the bugle, as they do.

So Mary’s hat flew over the fence, a barb wire fence, so she cocked her leg over to get her hat and got the crutch of her pants caught. So she’s standing there trying to unhook herself and there was a fellow up on the…there was our big army hall, Salvation Army hall was on that side and the isolation side was on that side, on the right hand side. So there’s a fellow up on the roof doing something to the roof, bang bang on the roof and all the patients in the isolation wing were

standing out, waiting for stand down, the bugle for stand down or whatever they call it, retreat. And there’s Mary with her foot cocked over this thing trying to get the crutch of her pants loose. She said to me, “Oh Fluffy, help me”. “I’m not going to stand there, there’s a fellow on the roof”, the fellow started banging the roof and there’s Mary trying to unhook, and all these fellows whistling and saying all sorts of rude things .

And she said, “Oh come on, help, I can’t unhook it” and I thought, “Oh, I’d better help her, she’s me friend. So I’m standing there, trying to unhook the pants and that started the fellow on the roof, nearly fell off, and all the boys went mad up there, they were screaming out, “Ah, look at them, look” and all this sort of thing. I said to Mary, “I can’t do this anymore, you’ll have to get yourself unhooked the best way you can”, so I walked off

and left her. And I thought, “Oh I can’t do that to her”, and as I turned round to go back, the sun was setting in the west, and there was poor Mary wetting herself. Well, we laughed and laughed so much, she wet herself and there was a little golden stream falling down onto the ground. And I don’t know whether it was because she’d wet herself or it loosened something in it, then she suddenly came unstuck. And I

can remember seeing Mary with her hand down sort of trying to walk normally going back to our unit, which was up a bit, back a bit, to try and get herself cleaned up. I’ll never forget that as long as I live. I’ve written about it, I said to her, “I’m going to write about it, Mary”, cause I’m still in touch with Mary, that’s Gee. She said, “I don’t care”, so we’ve always had a laugh about Mary wetting herself and all the guys watching. And the fellow on the roof went crazy; nearly fell off the roof,

I don’t know what he thought we were going to do, just one of those things. We knew all about what we were supposed to know about at that time, so yeh another funny thing. And those sort of things binds you together, cause we can still laugh about that after 61 years, and were still friends. She lives right round on the north east coast at a place

called, I can’t remember, I’ll tell you what it is in a minute. And we meet, my sister and I and Mary and her friend, we meet occasionally up at Campbell Town and have a meal and keep it going cause she’s at Beauty Point, she’s at, you’ll hear about Beauty Point. Which is way round on the north west coast. And so we meet sometimes

and have a bit of a giggle, it’s still there, the friendship’s still there, so it’s lasted a long time hasn’t it, the whole thing has really.

No, no we had a room for two about from that curtain

to where Colin’s sitting with two beds in it and across there, if it was as big as that. It would have been as big as that, it held two beds, two little wardrobes and two soldier’s boxes and the soldier’s boxes were green and that’s where you kept all your hair brushes and makeup and everything, but that’s all, you didn’t have anything else. But at least we had mattresses and sheets and pillow slips which was more than we had at Brighton,

because we only had stuff, straw stuff, palliasses that we slept on. I was never so surprised in all me life, I expected when I was going to go to bed I was going to have sheets and everything, no we never ever did but, because it was what it was, because of the time and what it was. We got used to the idea that you don’t get luxuries in war time so it didn’t matter, but when we went to the hospital of course we had sheets and things. They gave us sheets

and pillow slips and mattresses. And we had wire beds, they looked like mummified grasshoppers but they were comfortable and all that sort of thing; we had those sort of beds all the time through the army, but we didn’t have the luxuries. Beautiful meals, as far as meals are concerned in the army at the hospital. If I come to think about it, it was always the real poor kids who quailed about the food,

all the uneducated girls. They’d say, “Oh, this food’s terrible”. It was beautiful food we had; we didn’t have that at the hospital we had that down mainly at Brighton where they had a mish mash of different types of people, and during our rookie school. We had beautiful food at the hospital, considering.

We had a mess, what they call a mess, you’ve heard of the army mess. Well, we were like the men we had an army mess and we all ate together.

Yeh, it was a wonderful experience really. And that’s how we got to know the nurses so well is because at meal time we were altogether and so we’d all talk, and that’s how we tamed the nurses to stop thinking we were like the Sigs. That we weren’t like the Sigs, that’s how they got to know us, and that’s how we all became good friends. Yes, it was just a wonderful time.

No we never ever did. No you were strictly army really. You could have photos of people, but you didn’t bother with ornaments because they wouldn’t have lasted five minutes because if anyone was light fingered they’d be gone. But we had a room each like, side by side, army style, like a one long barrack

and it was portioned off into separate rooms. And my sister and I were always together in the room because we were sisters and it happened that way with other people, with sisters, they always slept in the same room. Somebody, but we were all such good friends it didn’t make any difference who slept where and how, it was all, it just didn’t make any difference. But it was just nice having somebody of your own.

But no, it was just a wonderful time. Just a wonderful time….go on.

No, we were never out of uniform until the war finished. We weren’t allowed out of uniform at all because if, it sounds stupid I know, but had the enemy arrived on our door step

we would have been protected by our uniforms. Because of the, hold on there’s a special reason why and I can’t think of it now, but anyway, people listening to this will know, oh there was Convention.

Thank you, Geneva Convention. But if we’d have been in civilian clothes, we wouldn’t have had any.

I mean now it doesn’t matter whether you’re in the Convention or not cause it doesn’t matter anymore, just go around killing anybody that they like, but we were covered by that Convention. And had we been out of uniform if we’d, I mean there was no reason why we shouldn’t have been, if they could have flown a Jap plane over from an aircraft carrier, that’s how close. I mean it wasn’t a whole army it was just an aircraft carrier, but they could have bombed us. We could

have become victims of a bombing attack, who knows. So that’s why we were always in uniform, never, you were frightened if you were out of uniform, you’d be given a fine, you’d be put, what do they call it, you’d be put into camp and you stayed there for so many days. Like if you went off without leave you’d be camp bound, you weren’t allowed out of camp.

There’s a special word for that but I can’t think of it now. I’ll think of it in a minute. But no, no….

All of our clothes, beautiful clothes, I mean they were all the same but they were beautiful underwear. We hated the knickers, they were sort of material called celanese, I don’t think you remember that. It was like nothing like

nylon, oh, I can’t tell you what it was, and it was soft material anyway and thick. And we all hated it, we didn’t mind the knickers, they were all right, it was the colour that we objected to, it was a pinkie colour. We wore stockings which were thick material, thicker, different world altogether, isn’t it? They were nylon thick stockings but very nice. If you turned them inside out and had the seam running up the back of your leg,

they looked all right. And beautiful shoes. And they supplied us with underclothes, uniforms, shirts, jumpers, khaki, everything khaki of course. Beautiful uniforms, we wore trousers, and I don’t know if I’ve got a photo of it here, we wore trousers. And our Driver uniform was a bomber jacket, trousers, boots, gloves and a cap.

And because of our unit, we had a unit patch and we were supposed to have a wheel to show we were drivers, but we never ever got our wheel so – I’ll go around the shops one of these days and find a little shop that sells all these sort of things and get a wheel, yep. But yeh, and your clothes had to last so long, and you could have a replacement of shoes and all your clothes once

the wearing out process happened. But we were very well clothed. Greatcoats, we had what they call a greatcoat, big heavy greatcoat, which kept us nice and warm. Used to wear them to bed when we were, when we got real cold, especially when we went on bivouac in the middle of winter. But they tried not to do winter bivouacs [camping] ‘cause of the weather

down here. But yes they were lovely coats, and ordinary hats, like pork pie hatty things. But we were very well clothed, really very well looked after.

Hm, oh yeh, definitely makeup, they didn’t object to makeup so we wore makeup. And had our hair permed,

and did all that sort of thing. And your hair had to be above your collar, you couldn’t wear your hair any longer than up above your collar. The war did snip a little bit of hair.

I used to get my hair done at a little place up North Hobart. They used to have girls that would come around and set your hair. There were hairdressers in the army that would come round and set your hair

if you wanted it set. But I always used to have my hair done at a little place up at North Hobart that used to charge me 6 and 6 to have me hair permed, that was 66 cents now in today’s money. And always used to be kind of frizzy ‘cause they didn’t have the techniques they’ve got now where they can make it look anything. It was all new you see, perming hair was reasonably new in those days, and it was the fashion. And it’s taken me 60 years

to learn to wear my hair straight. And that’s only just recently, a few years ago. But I used to think to me self, “I can’t be bothered going and sitting there and all that fiddling and twiddling around with me hair”. So I thought, “I’ll try wearing it straight”, that was a few years ago, and my sister said “Oh June, go and get your hair permed I don’t like it straight”, and I used to think, “Oh I’ve got to sit there, pushing and pulling at me head”. I hated it.

Anyway gradually bit by bit I thought, “Oh blow it, I don’t care”. And I don’t care, and who cares anyway. So yes, we did have hairdressers that would come and do our hair if wanted it. So we weren’t without everything, we weren’t just pushed into the army and made look like old hags; we had our cosmetics and our hair done. And we were very particular about our hair and about our cosmetics. Oh everybody,

nearly everybody used to use cosmetics. Bit of perfume and somebody would say, “Oh, oh, who’s got perfume on?” and nobody would say anything. But it was a really good time; learn such a lot of things about people. The people that were nasty to you, and there were a few that were, I never ever, I don’t think any of us took it to

heart. You just got on with, we were having enough problems out there without having them in the camps. No, it was a wonderful experience and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. I’m so glad that I didn’t ever miss it. There’s so much more to learn about people and about being together. Although I had

three sisters, oh we scraped a bit I suppose when we were kids as all kids. But as we grew older and when we joined up, it never ever happened. I suppose we regarded as nice human beings and treated each other that way. So it was a really good time.

Yeh, it was all part of the hospital. The ambulance line,

it was called the 6th Australian Ambulance Car company. So we had one car, a couple of utes, and the rest were ambulances, and that’s what it was called, the 6th Australian Ambulance Car company. At the hospital there were 1, 2, I can’t remember how many wards there were, there were, 1, 2, 3, 4, big long wards, twice the length of this room, three times. Women’s ward,

dispensary, isolation wards, they all went down to another place later on, the isolation people. Oh and it was funny, we’d be in there, pick up guys that had the disease, what’s the disease?......Isn’t it terrible the brain’s going slowly now, that had syphilis and gonorrhoea and those type of things, and I’d come home and the first thing I’d do, get out and scrub the ambulance out.

Then the next thing I would do, when that was over, I’d race over and have about 25 baths, cause I used to think to me self, I might get their disease; see again, ignorance is bliss dear, I can tell ya. We didn’t know how, we’d learnt how they got it, but we were still a little bit tentative about them being in our ambulances.

We were all the same, we’d race home and scrub the ambulances out and terrified the disease would leap onto us. Anyway, we learnt to live with that, that was another thing we had to learn. That was a very big thing we had to learn to live with because we were so frightened of it. And we actually didn’t know how you caught it either.

At the beginning we didn’t know.

In the beginning when we started to bring them back, we’d heard about social diseases but we were never in a position to question about it, before we joined up. And when we joined up here, we got it fair in our faces because we were driving them about. And so we had a chap in the AIB [Allied Intelligence Bureau], where the Royal Hobart Hospital is now in Argyle Street , and I forget his name now and I said, “How do you get it,

how do they get syphilis and gonorrhoea and that?” and he told me. Who’d take the chance, what a fool. I mean the women, if the men had it, whether they wore protection, there was protection in those days, the usual sort of thing, but the women sort of, I don’t know if any women ever had it, but I suppose they went out, ordinarily civilian women, they didn’t seem to care if they got it. God,

it was an awful disease. Well, it wasn’t curable in those days; now you can cure it with a pill. So we were terrified how to get pregnant, fancy getting pregnant. Fancy doing this, I know a couple who did actually. Oh, that’s another story I should have told you but it’s too far away now.

Well when I was down in Hobart, I was told I had to go right up the Derwent Valley, with the Military Police woman to pick up this girl who wouldn’t come home. She got herself pregnant and she wouldn’t come back to the army to be discharged. So this Military

Police woman, had a face like a rock and was real stern and I was a bit shy, I used to think, “Oh, I don’t like her much”. But anyway, had her in there, in the staff car we went up. And it was a real winter’s day and in those days we used to have, I suppose we still get them but I don’t see them here, what they called ‘bridgewater jerries’. From right up in the highlands this fog on a winter morning would come down like a blanket and cover the whole of the Derwent Valley and right

down as far as the pond down here at the mouth of the river. You could hardly see anything in front of you. So this day we had to go up to Westaway, I’ll say Westaway cause that will throw the scent away a bit, to pick this girl up and bring her back to Hobart to be discharged and to talk about deferred pay. So ‘old hard face’ gets in the car with me and away we go. So all the way up we could hear the trains,

trains used to take goods up right into the valley in those days, and it must have been about 50 miles away, cause that was a long way at that time. And you could hear the trains blowing in the mist and I could see her jump every time the train, because I have to explain why. The crossings were all across the main road, the train crossing and every time a train blew, she’d jump and “Do you know where you’re going?” “Yeh I’ve been up here hundreds of time”.

Never been up there in me life, but to keep her quite I said to her, “Oh I’ve been up here dozens of times” and I’d never been up. I’d been up as far as New Norfolk but I hadn’t been any farther, that’s up the line again, up that way. So we finally susses out this place, we’ll say Westaway, and knocked on the door and found the Mother. Asked the Mother where the daughter was, she said, “She’s not here, she’s with her sister and she’s not coming back” she said. She took us in and

gave us a meal and all that, was very, very nice and lovely fire and mist outside was still hanging around outside like a blanket. And this Military Police woman decided it was time to go after we’d had something to eat, and the girl wouldn’t come back so we left, we had to leave her, we couldn’t force her back. So on the way home the fog thickened, it kept getting thicker. So I said at one stage, “You’ve got to get out and direct me along the verge

of the road cause I can’t see” and the train was going whoo, whoo. All the time you could hear this noise, every time it went she jumped and she said, “You sure you’ve been…?” “Yes I’ve been up here dozens, don’t worry, I know what I’m doing”. Anyway she hopped out and walked along the verge of the road and directed me, cause there were other cars coming, not many. Anyway it cleared a little bit so she got back in the car again and we were just

heading towards, we were about 10 miles out of New Norfolk and we heard the train go really close, whoo whoo and she suddenly grabbed hold the steering wheel and we went up the bank and come - and I was that stunned, and I’m hanging onto the wheel and she’s going like this and we went up the hill, up a bit of a hill and came back down on the road, and I sat there stunned. I said, “How dare you” ‘cause Military Police, you didn’t talk to them like that, I said, “How dare you

do that” and I was only a bit of a kid but I was so angry. Anyway I said, “How dare you do that, you ought to be ashamed of yourself”. “Oh,” she’s crying by now, she said, “Oh, I didn’t mean to do that,” she said, “I could hear that train and I thought you didn’t know where the crossing was”. I said, “You didn’t make it any better by grabbing the wheel. Anyway the crossing’s a long way ahead yet”. So anyway that frightened me. I said, “That was a terrible thing to do. You could have killed both of us”, and she could have done quite easily. The road was slippery, the bank was slippery

everything. But thank god the car went up and then came back on all four’s again. So when we got back to Hobart and we were entering the gate, entering the Barrack gates, she said, “I’ll suppose you’ll report me?” and I said, “No I won’t report you, I wouldn’t do that to you. But don’t ever do it again, because that’s silly, it’s a silly thing to do because you could have killed us both”. Oh, and she sat there and the tears rolling down and I felt sorry for her. And I suppose to be that

frightened, it must have been awful. But I was so angry; that was a nasty experience, that was. But that’s just another one but they keep on coming back.

No, she was at her sister’s place and her Mum said, “No I’m not going to force her down”. And I don’t think she ever got there, I think they just discharged her; they wouldn’t have made it public, there would be

nobody would have known that she’d got herself pregnant. Nobody ever would have known cause marked on the chart was always an “X” if you had anything the matter with you that wasn’t very nice, or if you got pregnant. So it got marked with an “X” so nobody ever knew what the “X” was about, on your papers. So nobody would have ever known.

No.

I knew one of the girls from our rookie school was from a foster home, terrible they were, still terrible, foster homes are. And the Father, she’s the same age as I was – it’s a very long story. The Father of the foster home tried to, got her into the wood shed and tried

to molest her you see. And the woman in the home was a real old bitch and she came out and accused her and said, “Your just like your Mother, nothing but a slut. You’re enticing men”, and all this sort of thing to this poor girl. She told me the whole story. And she ended up running away from this home because this fellow kept on. Well, a couple of days after it happened,

and she was what they then call a ward of the state, and the woman that came to see her, the ward of the state woman, had given her two shillings cause it was her birthday and she said, “Hide it,” cause she said “That woman will take your money”. So two shillings was a lot of money in those days, so while she was still in the home she put the money underneath a piece of split lino in the bedroom, where she slept. And she ran away and took the two shillings with her, and the two shillings

bought her a can, at that time there were soup kitchens and she bought a little billy can and some soup from the Salvation Army. And, it’s complicated story, and she went, ran away to a cow shed that she knew was a little way away. And she lived in the cow shed and the woman on the paddock

on this paddock, and the woman that lived on this paddock lower down knew she was there, found out she was there and she took her in. And then the woman took her to the authorities and she told the story, whole complicated thing, and the people sent her to a Salvation Army home. Cause she didn’t have a home, and that

lady that lived in that house, down on the paddock, took her in until she died. And then the girl joined the army and that’s how I got to know her story. And she lived, and the women was wonderful to her, she lived in the home, in the Salvation Army home until she was 14 and then this lady, that’s when they put them out, and then this lady that befriended her took her in until she died and the girl

joined the army just after the woman died and that was her home. And then she met a man in the army, she was in our rookie school and we became friends and I was always sorry for her. We became friends and then she met a fella and we were always friends and we were always going too meet and we were always going to be friends. And she went away to a cooking school and from the cooking school I don’t know where she went. She married, she either married her fiancée

or she went up to Darwin and they were both killed in an air raid up there from what I can gather, cause we could never ever find out what really happened to her. And she would have contacted me if she, if she’d have lived through Darwin, and her husband, cause she eventually got married and he was a very very nice man. But I never ever heard from her and I never made any enquiries cause I thought, “Well what’s the point”.

She told me her whole story.

We were detailed to go and do the ablutions blocks, that meant mops and buckets and things. So one day, on the day she told me that story…

Yes that’s right. The only time we ever wore slacks at that time, way back when we were 16 year olds, was if we were going to the beach or going to climb the mountain. You didn’t wear them like you wear… and I wear my

pants to church now whereas once upon a time you’d have been ostracised for ever, wouldn’t we?

I think it’s better in many, many respects now than it was then.

I mean we’ve no longer…

And it happens. It happens. As society moves on, it

happens and you either try and understand it or you close your mind down and you (say) “I don’t like it and I’m not going to have anything to do with it”, and you’re living in it so you may as well try and understand it and get on with it.

Yes, and I mean I can remember the older people saying about the music we had. It wasn’t right. I can

remember when all our music started and it was crazy and the older ones used to listen into a waltz, . I can remember, Bing Crosby and what was he doing singing all these funny songs and Fats Waller and all those guys, and Frankie Sinatra. My Mum loved it, she loved music and she used to play the piano

and I’d sing and all that sort of thing. I had a good singing voice in those days.

I’m sorry, do we go back all over it again, I forgotten what I’ve said now.

I told you she went up,

I think she must have gone up to the top end, up to Darwin or somewhere and I think I told you that…

I’ve always collected lame ducks. All my life I’ve collected lame ducks. I’ve got this silly heart that says, “Poor thing, I’m glad I’m not like her”, and all that

sort of thing and I’ve always collected lame ducks and of all my cars I’ve ever had, they’ve been all for carrying people somewhere. All my cars have always been full of people because I can remember the time when I didn’t have a car and how awkward it was and go from A to B and that’s another thing, but yes I always collected lame ducks all my life and I felt so sorry for her , she had…

my life compared to hers, cause I’d had a hard time you see and my life compared to hers was heaven. I mean I didn’t have to try and escape from a man trying to rape me or live in a home where the woman hated you. I had a lovely Mum who cared for us, so I always collected lame ducks because of that reason I think.

Oh yes, I was going to tell you how

I got to hear the story. She was so quiet and she used to cry all the time. Somebody would hurt themselves and she would cry. She was a very soft natured girl and we had the mops and buckets and things and I was walking in front of her and suddenly she heaved her mop up and pushed me in the back and said, “On guard!” so we had a fight with our mops. I nearly died and then we were sort of laughing and

talking and we sat down and she started to cry, and I said, “What’s the matter?” and then she told me that story that I’ve just told you and I felt so sorry for her so I took her home and when we went on leave, when the rookie school finished, she was howling, she always cried for any reason and when we were going home, like when we had finished rookie school, she said, “I won’t see you anymore”, and I said, “Of course you will, we’ll be coming backwards and forwards and anyway you can come home with me on leave,

Mum wouldn’t care”. So I took her home on leave for a few days and then she became a cook at Brighton and then, because she was there for quite a while and then they sent her to a special school in Melbourne. And then she came back to Brighton and was there for a while, and then she was transferred, then she met this fellow and then she went up to Darwin and I never ever heard from her since, so I can only presume

she was… because we were such good friends and I keep my friends, I’ve got friends from way, way, way back but anyway, she had a good life in the army. She did quite well.

It was the way they spoke.

Oh, they talked about all sorts of things. Men, I think we got to know about having sex with men from these girls and all sorts of things that we were riding along on the edge, about the diseases and what the diseases were all about and how you had babies, what the real score of having babies was. We knew that you had a lot of pain and we had gotten to know by this how they got to be there but

you go along with all sorts of weird and wonderful ideas that are impossible and they were so free and easy and didn’t care what they said and of course we weren’t brought up like that. They would say that awful word and our ears would tingle but it didn’t matter and when we went on bivouacs

we had in the winter, there was a girl called Connie. We used to laugh. We used to smoke, all of us smoked and we run-out, our whatsa name’s had run out, come on, you used to have to have a card to say… once your card ran out for cigarettes, that was it, you didn’t get any more till the next lot came and it wasn’t called a card but that’s all I can think of at the moment, and so you could buy,

buy tobacco, ‘rollies’ for a mere pittance and it was called ‘Lucky Strike’ this tobacco. Well, I don’t know why they called it ‘Lucky Strike’ because it wasn’t a lucky strike at all anyway, you’d get this tobacco, you didn’t have to pay much for it and you’d get the papers and you’d roll yourself a cigarette and you’d put it in your mouth and while you were trying to get alight, all the tobacco…

it wasn’t no wonder they sold it for nothing, all the tobacco would roll out the end of the cigarette and Connie said, we were sitting in the back of the truck and it was misty, like I just explained. “Oh, this bloody place,” she said, “Look at it,” she said, “Who’d live here? You’re all descendants of convicts, no wonder…” and all this sort of talk and anyway I can remember saying to her, “You

talk about us, what about Ned Kelly? You lot are all for Ned Kelly”, getting back at her and all the time she’s talking, the cigarette, the tobacco falling out of the… and she lit it up, she lit it up, she didn’t know. She was busy being naughty to me see and she lit it up and the whole thing flared up in her face because there was only about two grams of tobacco left in the thing and we hated this tobacco but we didn’t want to be without it so we used to buy it when our ration ran out. And poor Connie, she did nothing but

come in for a lot of conflict. Gee that was funny. We used to have some fun with her but they were real easy going sort of people as I said 155 times, different altogether to us, different altogether.

No, I didn’t know what a condom was, not till I was about 20, I think.

I was still in the army when I found out about condoms. No, I would have been about 20 before I knew anything about anything, you know, if there were other ways beside condoms from stopping babies and anyway, you never got yourself into that position unless you were a real naughty girl because you were too terrified. You were ostracised if you had a child out of wedlock, you

were ostracised. It was a crime. It was a crime to even listen to anything that had to do with babies, we lived in a funny society back then, we did, we were absolutely ignorant because we were never ever told anything.

The army started to enlighten us; I might say in a funny roundabout way, it was really the girls talking together

because we were all, all as ignorant as ‘Patty’s Pigs’ but when the girls… from overseas I was going to say, over from Melbourne came over they sought of took it all for granted that we knew it all, so we did in the finish, didn’t we? We did. We found out in the finish because they were the girls that were free and more free than we ever were, so we did find out a lot from them. They were really

good fun girls but just different from us.

Oh they were. That’s what Connie said, “You all come from …” whatever his name was. I said, “Don’t you be so rude about it”. “You all come from convict stock,” she said. “Well, is that right, Connie? And you all come from Ned Kelly stock.” I had to have my shot back and we

sat there laughing while the tobacco was running out of her cigarette but yes, they helped us in a lot of ways. We grew to understand about sex and all those kind of things because we were too frightened to talk about it. I mean even as a group of girls it was never spoken of. The only time I can ever remember getting anywhere close to, one of the girls said she was 32, Tupi she was, and she

was lovely, a little tiny thing she was and she said “I’m 32,” she said, “and I want to have a family.” And I thought to myself “Well why don’t you” but you didn’t just go out and have it off with someone and get a couple of kids and we went to this cadet camp and she met her husband at this cadet camp and he was an older man and they became friends at the camp and they

eventually got married and she had a family, I think two or three boys. I’m not quite sure now but she got her wish. When she said, “I’ve got to have a family”, I thought, “Yes, but you’ve got to have a man to do that, I think”. Ignorance is bliss, I can tell you. It doesn’t pay to be ignorant.

Yes they did, we knew that, we knew they were issued with condoms.

I didn’t really know that until I got married and Patrick, my husband told me that. All the services were issued with condoms. If I’d have known that, who knows what might have happened. Oh, aren’t I common? You are common, stop that at once.

No, no we weren’t supposed to do that, were we? You had to be married and have a husband to do that.

So we were never ever protected in anyway and we wouldn’t have known what to do with it anyway would we, because we were that ignorant. Well, we were.

Well, that was another mystery, wasn’t it? We knew that there was something strange going on because you don’t hold hands affectionately but we knew that there was something going on between a couple of

the girls, but our minds didn’t lead us on any farther than the known. Knowing that something was a little bit different. We never ostracised them or anything it was just a mystery until, I can’t remember when I found out about women doing that, I just can’t, somehow when I look back it just filtered through somehow but then that’s what they were doing

so I mean you can’t stop nature, can you? Well, you can’t and if that’s how it was and if that’s how it is then that’s how it is, so you’ve just got to learn to accept the facts and go along with it.

Oh, I think there were a couple that were a little bit strange but we didn’t know what the strangeness was, did we? Because we were still innocent but we knew something was…

she used to say, “They’re on together those two, Fluffy”, and I’d say, “Oh, are they?” and I’d think “Oh, I don’t care. Of course they’re on together, they’re only friends”, but I didn’t take it any farther than that. She knew something was going on, she knew more than I did but she never ever told me.

She’d lived away from home, in the country, she lived

and she knew how babies were born and all that because of the animals. She lived on a lovely farm with lovely people so she knew the bull and the cow had to get together to go and have a baby and all that sort of thing and she kind of knew, somehow she knew more about the woman’s side of it than I did or any of us for that matter but whether she thought we knew or I’m not quite sure and it wasn’t

the sort of thing you talked about anyway so we didn’t ask any questions until the mainland girls came into view and then it all came out in a funny sort of way but it was still a mystery. I know a little bit more about it all now than I did once upon a time but yeah, that’s the way it was.

Oh yeah, oh yeah. They were still back in the Victorian era where you didn’t swear, where you didn’t say anything out of place and you had to do everything that was right, there was a proper place… mind you by the same token, they all got married and had kids didn’t they? It used to amuse me

when old Queen Victoria had fourteen kids and then was playing the lady. And she used to puzzle me; I used to think, “Well, if she’s got fourteen kids, how did she get fourteen kids?” And all the Victorian society was playing the game of not knowing anything and not allowing their children to know anything anyway and that’s how we grew up you see, we were the tail enders of the Victorian era when it was still running like that. But later on it highly

amused me, old Queen Victoria was such a perfect lady and when I found out how they did it I used to think to myself, you couldn’t be a real perfect lady, that’s what I thought, and do that sort of thing because I didn’t know the whole thing . It didn’t enter my head. I mean when I had my first boyfriend, I had feelings that I’d never ever had before and I didn’t understand and it was all part

of being boyfriend and girlfriend like the rest I think but as far as leaping into bed with him to find out what it was all about, well, he wouldn’t have done that anyway because we were too young, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20. For four years I went with that fellow and as the years crept on I began to have all these feelings that I didn’t understand and I suppose, men knew more about sex than women ever did and

it’s always been the same. Men have got these instincts about everything about women but us poor silly old girls didn’t know anything. So I always thought the men had the best end of the stick really, knowing all these things that we didn’t know.

Well, I think they thought we should have been home having babies and looking after our husbands, if we had husbands or, it wasn’t right. They couldn’t see, the older ladies, I mean it wasn’t once or twice that women asked us were we officers groundsheets and all that sort of thing… not once,

in my experience it would have been 3, 4 or 5 times that women said that to me at different times, older ladies. We’d turned the world upside down. “Oh, the world’s changed”. “I heard that the whole world’s changed”. I’d go and collect patients from private homes and “Are you the nurse?” “No, I’m the ambulance driver”. “Oh! Hasn’t the world changed,

it’s all different now”, and it was to them, it was different because we were doing things that they’d never dreamt of doing. It wasn’t within their knowledge to do things but when your country calls you, suddenly we’ve got a new experience coming along and it’s the same with all the young people, even today. I mean you can’t blame the kids for what they’re doing today

because we led them into it in the first place, didn’t we? I mean we’re the grandmothers of what the children are today. So, they had their experiences because of our experiences and it’s been like that all through, all through everybody’s life you learn from other people, your

elders’ experiences. Well, they didn’t understand that we were on a learning curve, a big learning curve because we had to be. We had to take the place of the men because we didn’t have enough men to go to war. There were thousands of them over in the Middle East. The first lot of men that left Australia were England’s men. They went and fought for the English in the desert campaign

and there were thousands of them. 6th, 7th and 9th Divisions, I can remember. Divisions went over there and our Prime Minister at the time, Mr Curtin, had to call Britain and tell them that we were short of men and to send those divisions home and they came home and went straight up to Queensland for a couple of

months to learn jungle war fare and then they were sent up to New Guinea and look at the fellows on the Kokoda trail, half of them were infantry men and had hardly ever fired a shot and yet they sent them up on the Kokoda trail. Well, they had to come home and pack those kids up. It was pitiful really. They had a terrible time. Look at the camps, the dreadful camps.

Well, quite a lot of them had come mainly from up in the battles in New Guinea. Now I can’t name all the battles, you’d think I could name one but when Singapore fell, the British and the Australians were in control of Singapore and the British just said that they weren’t going to fight for Singapore and there were thousands and thousands of soldiers over in

Singapore waiting to fight for Singapore and they gave it away. The British gave it away. The Australians wanted to fight and that’s how we got so many people in the prisoners of war camp because the men couldn’t fight and the Japs came in, came down and took Singapore and what happened? All those poor fellows were chucked into those dreadful camps for three and a half years.

And so we were transport, I’m sorry yes, I got away from you. When they started to come home it was prisoners of war that were coming home on the planes and the boats and the men from the desert campaign had come back down because they were fighting the Japs and they ended up fighting the Japs as well. And all those people had been through a terrible

war over in the desert.

These were all, yes because they were Tasmanians. They’d leave say, wherever it was Singapore, New Guinea or wherever it was, or the camp, especially the POWs and they’d fatten them up over on the mainland before they got home and they were still like sticks when they got home and it used to break my heart you

know, I’d go up and get ‘em, they’d be cheery and happy and all that yet they’ve been through hell and I used to be thinking how brave they were. And (cry), that’s not what I wanted to do but I did it quite a few times. I tried not to, made out I had hayfever and all sorts of things but I used to feel sorry for those people, so glad to be home. So they went through a terrible time.

We only knew about all this, we only knew about the Jews (and) we didn’t know about the Jews until after the war was practically over. We didn’t know what was going on up in New Guinea and all the islands up in New Guinea. It was all censored, everything was censored. You write a letter and say “I’ve been so and so and I’ve been wounded”. That would be all cut out and the wounded would be cut out as well in the letter and the censors

opened the letters and if there was something in there that was giving their position away, even if it was heat or rain or what, they cut it all out and you’d get a letter back with pieces of stuff cut all out of your letters. You get your letter all right but you might only get “Dear June” and “Goodbye” on there because they weren’t allowed to mention ship movements, plane movements, troop movements. In their letters they weren’t allowed to, they could talk amongst themselves but never,

never to the people that were waiting at home.

Yes, but they never ever said anything either. They were the most wonderful people. They never ever said, “Oh, I’ve been here and I’ve done that and they’ve done this to me and they’ve done that”, never. It didn’t matter how badly wounded they were, they never ever moaned

about their wounds either. They were warriors. I don’t care about what anybody says to me, the men of the Second and the First World War were warriors. They were men who could stand up and be counted when it mattered and they weren’t moaners and they’d have a joke with everything and some of them were lying there dying. A young fellow with half a leg and I said, “What are you going to do when you get out?” “Oh, I’m going to go …” , nothing about half a leg.

It depended on the time they spent in the hospital. Sometimes we got to know some of them fairly well because they’d be there for 3 or 4 months depending on what was the matter and how many times Dr Parker wanted to see them and then they’d just go off and if they became well again, they’d be sent back up to the islands again and but a lot of them were discharged from the hospital

because their injuries were so bad but we really didn’t get… just that moment when we’d pick them up from the ships it would be all, “Bother me” and laughing and talking and, “Give us a fag” and “What are you doing driving this thing? You’re not big enough to drive a little kid’s motor car” and all that sort of, no they were just wonderful. I don’t think we’ll ever see that life again, ever. We

might do. I like to think the Australian spirit, in the men particularly, I think the women would go through it again quite happily but I don’t think the boys are men anymore like they used to be. I could be wrong.

Yes, it was in a way but in a way it was

what you did . That was my time and our time, all the young people’s time and the only movement was fantastic because suddenly we were somebodies. Suddenly the women stopped having babies and knitting clothes and looking after husbands and treated like dirt half the time, suddenly we’d come

into our own. We became people in our own right and we were doing something for our country, that’s how we thought about it. We never ever spoke about it like that but that’s how we felt about it. We came, we went into the army, how can I say it without sounding awful? We went into the army with great expectations, let me put it that way and they were

because it was something entirely different. Each generation has its time like you’re having your time now and you accept it as it is, as it’s normal for you and for Colin, and that was normal for us. We did what we did for our country and for ourselves as well.

Well, we just sought of took over where we left off more or less and I often think about… the nurses were fantastic. They went away, we had nurses killed away, they were killed doing their duty for their country. We all did our duty for our country and we just sank into oblivion like we were before

except we had a say in what went on with our lives, we had that chance and we’d taken it once so we had to keep it going so we became a little more aggressive in our way of thinking but, I often think about the women who, the civilian women who took over. They never ever had a chance to express how they

felt. They never ever have. So that book that I am writing is for those women as well. Most of that book that I am writing or have written, that I hope I can complete soon, is for the girls and particularly the civilian women who have never been recognised. I mean they did wonderful things. They did things that we didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to drive a tram or be a conductress. I didn’t want to

go to the ammunition factory. I didn’t want to do any of those things. I didn’t want to go out and toil the fields, it would be the worst thing I could think of and then the land army girls were recognised eventually, but it was a long time but they did wonderful things.

Well, I think in a way, servicemen recognised us. The servicemen recognised what it was to be in the army and to be under restrictions all that time and you do as you’re told and you didn’t have to think for yourself, the army thought for you and they understood because we were treated the same way. We were

treated, only because we were women, perhaps a little bit more gently but we were under the same conditions so we understood what happened to them, although we didn’t go to war but we were still in the same situation and we had to do as we were told. When I had to start thinking for myself I nearly died, I thought I’d forgotten how to think for myself but I soon learned, don’t you worry. Yes, I think it was mainly that

the men understood and that they recognised the fact that we’d done something more than we were doing before the war. That we’d gone out and taken the country over and I think they appreciated that and so we started, we had a little grip on ourselves and on our country and we just gradually pushed on, but never the army and air

force girls, navy girls were never recognised but like everything, it passes and those of us that were in the army, navy, air force and land army still hang on to the old traditions of the army . Just one of those things that you’re proud to have done for your country; that sounds a bit

funny but we were, we were proud to be helping our country but we didn’t think about England, it wasn’t our country, Australia was.

No, I didn’t worry about it after the war; it was too late wasn’t it? They’d done all the damage. All the old fogies beforehand had done all the damage. It didn’t matter anymore.

You could, no use you going through your life saying, “Oh, they said this and oh, they said that and weren’t they terrible?” We never said that. We just got on with our life, got married and had kids and the farther we got away from the war and the older the kids grew the more you had to find something to do. It was imperative to keep going.

I’ve forgotten now, 15 January 19.. I can’t remember now. I’ll tell you what it did do though. We had the worst storm in 21 years on the day I got married. I think the Gods were angry with me, I think that was what the problem was. The place where we held our reception, we were downstairs but the level, I don’t know how we missed getting

flooded out but one lot of people who were married on the same night were flooded out. Their reception room was flooded out. I don’t know what happened to them but ours wasn’t so we were lucky. It poured with rain for Saturday, Sunday and on Monday it was the most beautiful day you could have ever imagined. We didn’t care. I mean I’d got to the stage where what

happened, happened and you just coped with it and went on with life. I got married, what difference does it make? I was a bit disappointed. I wanted to show off my wedding dress and everything. I was a bit disappointed but…

Well, Paddy worked with my Mother at Walsh & Sons and I’d known him before the war, just slightly because they lived on the point where I lived

and we just got together somehow and my heart was still elsewhere I might say, but I thought, “No, I’m not going, that’s no good. You can’t live in the past, move on, move on”, and I did from the time I got the letter. I thought, “I’m not going to…” like I said, you’ve got to move on and so then

Paddy asked me to go somewhere with him and I said, “Okay”, because he was working with Mum and they were great friends and so we did and that’s what happened. So I married Paddy in the finish.

Yes, I think I was roundabout 19, now how old was I? 24, 25 when I got married I think. Yes I was about 24

I think. Time is irrelevant sometimes and I think I had young Paddy when I was about 28 and then I had Gregory 21 months later and seven years later, I had Chris.

Then I realised that once the boys had started to grow up… we put them through school, they went to St Virgil’s, I started, I’ve never not been able to do anything do you understand? I’ve never been able to sit there and watch that silly rot or sit there and fold my hands, I’ve always wanted to do something. The first thing I did was the bark painting thing

and then I saw that and I thought, “Oh I’d love to do that, that’s clever”. So I started and had a couple of exhibitions and then Adult Ed approached me (to ask) would I take classes, and I said, “Okay, I’ll take classes”. I didn’t know how long for, I think I said before I did that for 21 years and all the time I was doing that, I was doing water colours and all those other kind of things. I used to make little tiny button

broaches and pendants and teach the girls how to do that and then I thought about my childhood and I thought, “Well, my childhood’s been very, very different to most people’s and my era at that time”. See with the Depression still on, people didn’t have money, there was nowhere to go, people lost hope, went to the soup kitchens,

men left their wives to go and work around Australia. We’d had enough negativity and I thought, “Well, I can’t not do anything”. Both sides of my family were artists and musicians and all that sort of thing and always doing things so I thought I’d have a go at the bark painting, and did that. Did that for 21 years and all the time

I was doing that I thought, “Oh, I’ll learn how to…” and then I did ‘whatsaname’ painting. Plate painting , there’s one back there somewhere. They don’t call it plate painting, there’s a special name for it. Learning to paint on crockery, so I did that and I did dozens of different things. I’ve got a little bit of everything floating around somewhere but I,

Not really, no. My husband took to that and there wasn’t that much money left over. I was never short of money for the children or for food and stuff or rent or anything. He never ever kept me short that way but a lot went in another direction I might add. Even

apart from that, I wanted to do things. I did, what did they call it? I don’t know how many things I did and then I became interested in… I’d always written poetry and I joined people called ‘The Eight Pens’ and wrote short stories and then I decided I’d write a book, didn’t I? About my childhood and I went on with

that, this was after the boys had grown up.

TAPE ENDS