Australians at War Film Archive

Okay, I was born in Box Hill, suburb of Melbourne in November 1930, so I was born in the early years of the Depression and, that obviously had quite an effect on me and I grew up pretty well within the confines of Box Hill. It was even a big deal to go

into the city in those days.

Yeah, well I guess probably the next big thing that really I can remember was the declaration of war in September ’39. We were all sent home from school as I remember it, to huddle around the radio and listen to Bob Menzies tell us that we were in to the big stoush, and that had quite an effect on me.

Then I guess through the war years, as I grew up and when Japan came into the war, we had a feverish round of digging air raid shelters in people’s backyards. Got to be pretty brave I guess to do that sort of thing. And then it passed. We were the end of the war of course, went into Melbourne, that night it was probably more frightening being in Melbourne at the end of the war than at any other stage

because you were just totally controlled by the crowds. They just took you wherever they wanted to go and you didn’t argue, so that was quite a frightening experience in itself, even though it was a very joyous occasion. After that I finished my schooling, I went into the building trade, I did an apprenticeship, in the building trade, worked in the building for roughly nine years around Melbourne. Then I’d always been interested in youth work, and particularly

at that stage in the church youth club and I heard the YMCA [Young Men’s Christian Association] had a college in Homebush and I went up there in the beginning of 1955 and did a two year course in youth leadership. I had intended to go back to the church, but I felt that, well it was obvious that it had cost a lot more than what I had put into it to for me to go through college, so I sort of felt that I had some kind of a debt to the YMCA, and my future father in law, although I didn’t know that

at the time, was the national general secretary of the YMCA, which is why I’d gone to the college. So I went into youth work, I went to Tasmania after I graduated, went to the 1956 games which was a tremendous experience, and had five generally very happy years in Tasmania with the YMCA. Went from there up to Newcastle for two years.

From there across to Broken Hill for just on five years and that was an interesting experience, very different place to most other places in Australia and from there I went down to Puckapunyal, with the army, and I had just over three years with the army in total. Then went to Melbourne YMCA, went down to Melbourne, partly for family reasons, still mainly the kids education I guess,

but my father was also diagnosed with prostate cancer at about that time. And so we went down to Melbourne for five years and ran out of a job there, Melbourne YMCA ran into, well, virtually became bankrupt and came up to Darwin for three years, I didn’t think I would ever come up because of family circumstances and the like, but everybody sort of said, “If you want to go, go.”

So I brought the family up here, initially it was only to be for three years but we fell in love with the lifestyle basically and when we had the opportunity to shift after five years, we decided we didn’t want to, and at that stage it looked as though most of our family, we’ve got four children, were going to stay here, and so it was a very easy decision to put our roots down pretty well permanently. Things have changed and at the moment we’ve only got one

daughter and her family in Darwin, and one currently in Wollongong, but will come back here in a year or twos time. And we’ve got one son in Brisbane and one son sort of in Canberra, he’s with CARE Australia [Aid Organisation]. And that’s about where we are.

Well I went up there; I did 13 months in total. When I got the

sort of the bug of being the philanthropic representative, our national people were adamant that because I had family that I would not be allowed to go to Vietnam. But they eventually relented and let me go to Puckapunyal and then couldn’t get anyone else to go up and it was important that to keep the work going so they relented and let me go up there and I went up there in July ’69 and, I had, I actually did 13 months

and technically that qualifies me for being a two tour man which is a source of great pride to Vietnam Vets if you have pride in that sort of thing and I came home in August ’70, late August in ’70.

Well, philanthropic work with the army is as near as I can recall it, to do social and welfare work with the troops.

And that really means doing anything which is good for morale, and so, you know, that’s the basis you operate on, anything that comes up that seems to be a good thing for the troops you give it a go. Unless the army decides that they can do it better, which they often did. Whether they did it better was another matter but they often felt that they could. And in Vietnam and it was fairly similar at Puckapunyal. We had a basic unit of the hut,

and in the hut we had, lots of tables, where fellows could sit down. We sold soft drinks, we didn’t sell beer there at all, we sold cigarettes in our unenlightened state. And we used to get papers, I think we had almost every paper in Australia; little country town papers and everything used to come up to us every week and we’d put those out and the fellows would come in, and with great pleasure go through

what was going on at home. It was a very good way of them finding out what was going on and we had a lot of recreational activity. We had a small gym, and we used to have, I arranged for a Korean Sergeant to come across who taught Ju Jitsu, and that was very popular and after a while, while I was there, we also managed to acquire a library, I think it was two, two and a half thousand books from the Americans. We only took it on condition that we accepted

air conditioning along with it, which as you can imagine was quite a sacrifice up there, to have to sit in air conditioned comfort and it was amazing how the interest in reading went up, the place was always full. I don’t know whether the fellows were coming into read. And we had a TV set in there and mostly watch the American channel stuff. So, you know, anything. And I used to also, I think my predecessor had started it, but it grew a lot under me, I used to buy a lot

of souvenirs for the fellows because if the bought them in Vung Tau they used to get ripped off. You know, there was no question of that, whereas I used to go to Nui Dat, the township of Nui Dat which was a few Ks from the main taskforce and we had, one particular trader there, and I became identified as a business man and on that basis the prices dropped by two thirds. Anyhow, and then we bargained

after that and I could buy things for 10 percent of what they’d have paid for it in town. So I used to spend anything up to probably 15 hundred US dollars a week buying stuff for the fellows and just turning it over, no profit involved but just simply to help them get better quality stuff and at a reasonable price. We did a lot of audio taping of music; we built up a fairly big library of audio tapes right across the whole range of music classics to pop stuff

and fellows would come in and pick what they wanted. And we had that tape until the army decided they could do it better or it was pretty humdrum so I didn’t mind I guess. But it was virtually a matter of doing anything and I also used to, I developed a routine. I’d go up to Nui Dat a couple of times a week, and serve with some of the smaller units up there that weren’t being looked after by anyone and I also then started servicing the MAT [Military Assistance Team] training teams, they were a group

of, I think about half a dozen, maybe ten Australian fellows who were assigned to work with the South Vietnamese, either a militia or army company. And they were almost pariahs, the army, I would have to say, really didn’t want to know them, and it would sound ludicrous, but at one point I was on the base using the strength of my contacts to get ammunition for one of the groups out in the jungle, that’s how ridiculous the situation was.

But I used to supply, I used to get all sorts things for them. I used to get books and sort of run a lending library kind of thing, and I would buy films and all the stuff, just what they wanted. I would get it and take it back the next time that I went. And I also used to get clothes and things for their family because the South Vietnamese soldiers had their families with them. And their pay system was almost non existent so they were literally on the verge of starving

and very poorly clothed as well. And I used to organise for stuff to come up from down south and then I used to take that around and take it to the companies. So you know, there was a lot of that sort of thing.

Oh Dad was a very quiet, self effacing kind of a guy and as you don’t appreciate until it’s too late, one who made tremendous sacrifices for us, for his family. He was a clerk in a trustees firm. We were three, I had two brothers I was in the middle, an older brother who went into the railways for some years and a young brother who’s mad keen movie buff and has worked around movie theatres,

and the like all his life and growing up. Because it was during the depression things were fairly tight. Probably one of my strongest memories is having Weetbix for tea on Saturday night because we could not afford to have meat. We would buy one leg of lamb a week at three bob and if I, and I used to often get it, if I went over the three bob I was in real trouble because we couldn’t afford to spend the money we just didn’t have.

And I believe that my Dad used to, even though he had a job, it was very poorly paid, he used to go around selling sponge cakes which my mother made, to flog them around the district, so life was, it was tough. And we, but we always had enough, our family, our parents made sure that we did. And I wore, being in the middle, everything that brother had grown out of,

and if you look at my toes, you’ll see there are a few deformed ones there because I was being jammed into shoes that really I shouldn’t be wearing, but otherwise it was a matter of no shoes. And so that was sort of all my childhood. And left a fair impression on me, and I guess, and as I say, things in ‘39 when war was declared, things obviously changed. There was a lot of work and my mother started working part time and Dad was better

paid so we were a lot better off actually during the war years than when we had been before then. And even though there was rationing, there was certainly enough, but I know in my Dad’s case, ate dripping so we three boys could have butter and in no small measure that is probably due, a fairly important reason for him dying with prostate cancer, some years later, but that was the kind of guy that he was.

Well, a good middle class, I guess, good middle class area. We were fairly fortunate we lived well, about 10 minutes from the station and two or three minutes walk from what was known as Surrey Park and it was a big park with lots of playing areas on it, two or three sports ovals, and one of the very early outdoor swimming pools in Melbourne. There was also a disused quarry which had flooded and was known as the diver,

and that was a test of your manhood, was to go into the diver and swim out to the pontoon. I very nearly paid the supreme sacrifice, I overrated my ability, which was pretty non existent for swimming. And there was also another quarry, which closed down during the war, because I think it was owned by a German firm or something, it had swastikas on the chimney as I remember it, and that was a forbidden but a very attractive source of recreation. We often used to go in there and

put our lives on the line going up the side walls and going into the plant and being in places we shouldn’t have been, so we had a lot of fun. And, I guess it shaped us a fair bit, that kind of, it was a good area to live in.

I would say without wanting to sound priggish about it I guess the basic Christian values, both my parents were regular

church people and we grew up going to the church and to the church youth club as I mentioned earlier, which is probably what sort of started me on the line that I followed later on and so, you know, we had good basic Christian background to work off.

I don’t know. I guess we all got on very well

and actually some years later it was where I met my wife. But there was a group of half a dozen mates, and we did all the stupid things that mates do, we all got on very well and did all sorts of things together, which in those days was something rather unusual, people tended to stay at home. And yeah, we just got on very well and did a lot of things together.

Well it was very dramatic, certainly for an eight year old as I was at the time, because you know, radios were pretty old and fairly hairy and it was something to have a radio. We’d not all that long time ago, gone from the old whisker, wire and whisker jobs and yeah, it was sort of a big thing to huddle around the radio and listen to Bob Menzies’ sepulchral

tones telling us that we were going to defend the mother country and so forth, so yeah, it was pretty dramatic.

Totally unrealistic, I mean war’s exciting and we were right, because Bob Menzies told us, we were right. I didn’t know as much about politicians then as I do now. But yeah, and it was just a big adventure, I mean even, as I said, when the Japanese came into it we dug

the ground trying to dig air raid shelters in the pure clay, it was all an adventure. And really there was no hint of the seriousness of it. To my knowledge I only had one close relative went in - I had the uncle, who had rang before, who went in as a pilot, into the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force], my brother go in, my elder brother, but I only learnt a year or so ago

that in point of fact that he’d gone to the enrolment, whatever you call them, centres and was all set to go and my mother heard about it and pulled on a motherly act and told them that he was working in a protected industry, which he was, he was with the railways, so she stopped him. He was going to go into the navy as I recall. So I didn’t lose anyone, so the awfulness of it, didn’t really and I don’t believe there was anyone in our street,

which was very much my world in those days, lost anybody either. So really the war, apart from the inconvenience of rationing, didn’t hurt us terribly much at all.

It was all pretty unreal. And of course everything we got was

filtered and behind, it wasn’t like instant replays on TV as it is now, so you got sanitised versions of what was going on, and it was all out of date, so it was a bit unreal. And so really, life was sort of, went on pretty much as normal. I guess one of the highlights was, and it would have been when the Japanese came into it, the local rag decided they wanted a high action shot and somehow or other I just finished being carried by a fireman

in a fireman’s lift over his shoulder, over the front of the swimming pool which was just up the road, and my second hand baggy old shorts were displayed for the world to see. It was pretty exciting stuff, that you know, I was featuring on the front page of the local rag, so it was not real and it didn’t impinge you know, the harmful sense, at all.

Oh, it was something to do with, you know, showing how people could be rescued from burning buildings.

I mean it was a fairly poor apology for a burning building, but it was the best that Box Hill could do at the time.

Oh, kids play games with… Anyhow, my grandson in Brisbane, was allowed to get his first gun yesterday at the age of six. And, because his father decided that it was better for him to have a gun and under controlled circumstances, and decided it was hidden, forbidden contraband and something

that he really had to have, and kids play with guns and it doesn’t mean a thing. You go around shooting people and I’m sure we played Japs and Aussies and I probably got several VCs [Victoria Cross] and I can’t remember.

Pretty austere. At the state school, I went to Surrey Hills State School, most of the staff were of World War I vintage. The men certainly were

World War I veterans and, some of them would have been suffering what we now call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. In those days it was shell shock and they acted like people who had a problem like that, and they’re weren’t too many good looking female teachers either as I remember. I had a bit of an eye for the girls I guess, and there was nothing to attract me at all in state school. And at high school, again they were mostly

war… and I was at Box Hill High School, was I think, the seventh high school in Melbourne at the time. And a high school education was something that a lot of people didn’t get, and it’s a pretty austere working…. you know, where our motto was ‘Work’, as we heard every morning, but most of the staff would have been either World War I people or men who for other reasons couldn’t go into

army service. Yeah, so it was all sort of, it wasn’t supposed to be fun and I managed to make it be fun and I guess it’s where my rebel streak started to show itself. I had a clash with my history teacher who was also our music teacher and he was the creator of the Australian Boys Choir, which you may have heard of and he was a very good choirmaster,

even right from the start. But I missed some history homework one day and he was our history teacher and I decided, because I wasn’t there I didn’t need to do it, and he decided that because I hadn’t done it, he didn’t need me in his choir. So that the world lost a glorious voice before it ever really got anywhere, and I was thrown out of, I was doing ‘HMAS Pinafore’ at the time, we were rehearsing for that and they lost one of their most talented crew.

Always been important but often for the wrong reasons, I mean I’m a, I guess I like jazz more than anything else. I like classical music particularly if it’s got a bit of soul in it, I hate technical proficiency. But this history teacher in question, we got to the end of the year, and he decided we’d have a debate to fill in time, we were, papers were being marked and so forth, and one of the kids suggested we should have a

debate on jazz versus classics. This was just after I’d been dis-crewed as it were and so there was only one side for me to go on and that was the side of the jazz people, and so I went from overnight from knowing absolutely nothing about it to being a know-all, and you know, jazz was really I guess, my main love for quite some time, but, as I grew a bit older and matured a bit I realised that classical music did have

a lot to offer, and I hate the term but I like world music, I like ethnic music very much, and music’s always been very important to me.

Oh, temper tantrums, I guess, ability to cope with awkward situations, it’s all pretty foggy to me now but I can remember we all thought they were ratty. I think the expression we used then, they were just

psychologically unstable and with good reason.

Oh no, well, I mean, cuts were used as a matter of course anyhow, but the only time I can really remember getting it, was, was at the tech school because I decided after three years of high school that I really couldn’t be bothered studying, it was too much like hard work, it was interfering with having a good time,

so I went across to the tech so that I could sort of get ready for an apprenticeship. And we had a teacher there who really should have been doing military service, it would have been good for him, no actually it was after the war, and I don’t know what he’d been but he had a strap which he was not afraid to use and I think I was picked on really but I managed to suffer the consequences fairly painfully, a couple of times.

Well I left school as quickly as I could, as soon as I turned 15, because I eschewed all things academic, and I don’t know, it’s a funny thing I guess, it’s always been an attraction for me, in carpentry because Christ was a carpenter, and you know, I sort of grew up with some romantic notion, I guess, without ever really thinking about it, but the idea of making things appealed to me.

So I went with one bloke who wasn’t really keen to apprentice me but said that he might, but had a fairly large crew and after a couple months I came across another builder who was prepared to apprentice me, so I went with him and did my time with him, the five years.

I enjoyed carpentry, work was creative for the most part, I mean there were the hum drum tasks, which the

boy always got, but basically it was a very satisfying thing to be able to, look at, go back at the end of the day and say, “Well I made that today.” And after two or three weeks, well you had a house, standing up where there was nothing standing before and that was satisfying.

I guess it was important, but I wasn’t obsessed with it, I mean my god is a god who enjoys life, and puts up with idiots like me and I can’t help being a clown, and that comes out in all sorts of ways, so if I’m, the deeper the trouble I’m in the more I laugh about it, normally, unless I go mad. But yeah, so it was there as a very strong underpinning thing

and it gave me my sense of values, but I didn’t, sort of wear it on my sleeve, and it wasn’t a Sunday only thing, it was just there, it was part of my life.

It was, well initially it was a boy’s group, known as the Church of England Boys Society and I went right through the ranks starting with the bottom and eventually became the leader of the group and

it was voluntary of course. I mean I was doing the a carpentry job at the same time, but I got to the point where I believed that I needed more knowledge and expertise if I really was to do the job. And in point of fact I think I was offered the position of youth work person of the church group I went to. Training options were pretty limited and point of fact at that stage, as far as I know, the YMCA college which at that point was up in Homebush in Sydney, was the only

youth leadership training institution in Australia. And I heard about that through my father-in-law to be, although I don’t even think I knew his daughter, my wife, at that stage and it seemed like the sensible thing to do to go up and get the training.

Oh, he certainly didn’t put the pressure on me to go in, he certainly told me about the down side

and the lousy pay and the long hours, because in those days, I mean people worked 40, 48 hours a week anyhow. But it was sort of traditionally that, in doing good things, like the church and the YMCA that a clock meant nothing, and, if you knocked off after 48 hours, you really weren’t doing your job, you know, you were supposed to put in and sacrifice, put in extra time. So he certainly warned me about all of those things, but yeah.

In response to my questioning, he also told me about, I guess a fair bit about, I guess a fair bit of the rewarding side of it and I was never a particularly administrative beast. I mean I could administrate but I have always preferred to be a hands on or face to face person, and that attracted me, and for many years that was my work.

Well, it was a live-in college it was a big old house in Homebush, and, there would have been, I think about 15 people, students there, all mature aged, there were a couple of women there they were mostly guys, not all aiming to be YMCA people, some came from, well from churches and other things like that. And it was a pretty

full on course, we did religious studies around the bible and things like that, life of Christ and so forth. But we did psychology, with a fairly important subject YMCA history, administration, public speaking, actual practical skills, activities and things like that, so you know, it was a pretty varied thing, and our, we used to in our holidays, we always did field work, would go to a YMCA

normally, although for my standard I was sent to a Presbyterian church to be their youth man for 12 months, so I had to listen to the same sermon three times a day which was penance. Yeah, but you know, that’s the kind of thing we did.

I’m, Anglican, it used to be Church of England but it moved onto being Anglican now.

Well you just met… I was, being in Sydney of course most of my…I worked in the boy’s department of the Sydney YMCA. One of mates was also going through the college, was sitting as the head of that and so I worked this out, I also worked there

and I went to Adelaide, one holiday, and worked in the camping situation in Adelaide. I came down to Melbourne on two or three occasions, and, the YMCA had going then what was probably in my view one of the most significant programs they had, they called it the Young Men’s Easter Tournament. And it was in the days when not many people had cars, and could go off and do their own things, so young men literally came from YMCAs all over the Australia, different venue every year and they had a

wide ranging, absolutely frenetic Easter. It would start Thursday night and it would go through until Monday and they would have physical activities and recreational activities, cultural activities, spiritual activities, and you would play a game of basketball and go off the court and give a sermon and you know, it was just, but it was an absolutely magnificent wonderful program and that sort of was the kind of thing I guess, that really fired me up as to the potential, and I enjoyed camping.

I’d done camping with the church group in Victoria, but I got a much broader vision of things I guess, when I was with the YMCA.

Well mostly, yeah.

Oh mostly middle class I guess. There would have been a percentage who would have been under privileged I guess, and were probably helped to be there in some

sense by the association, or perhaps by a church or something like that, you know, there would normally be a few people who would come in on a sponsored basis, were able to get sponsorship. And there were certainly starting to be girls in activities, in some of the areas at that stage. Not at camps, that was free in those days.

Oh just a general understanding of what made people act the way that they did. Not how to manipulate people but to understand the workings of the human mind as far as it was understood then, and the current in-vogue psychological trends most of which have probably been discredited now, we got past Freud thank heaven. We got a little bit more advanced than that but yeah, just to give you an understanding about what made people

tick so that you could work with them effectively.

Well, apart from stick dancing, which was a traumatic experience and a couple of other things, it was generally very good, I thought the general content was very good.

Oh god, we had this stupid business, where you had a wand, actually I think it was, stick’s a bit common isn’t it, and you had this wand

and you had to do movements with it, which was all very well when you’re all doing it together but when it came to exam time we were put into two groups, and my group went first and we had to face outwards in a circle. I drew the position that was facing the other group, and they were practicing and they weren’t doing the same things as my group were supposed to be doing, so I was doing what both groups were doing and my failure sort of mirrored the calibre of my performance, it was most embarrassing.

And we also had to do folk dancing, with Methodist Deaconesses and I can tell you, they weren’t the most attractive deaconesses in the world, and I drew the chap who became the physical Sydney Director of Sydney YMCA, and he was about as graceful as a bull in a china shop and we failed that one too, surprisingly. Had a lot of fun mind you but we didn’t do terribly good in those skills.

At the college?

I guess probably one of the funniest was, it was a two story building and it had a front entrance and a back entrance and it had what used to be stables out the back and there was a second storey on top of that, which my wife and I, we got married half way through the course, and we lived in the annex above the stables in our second year. But in the first year there were, there was a couple, a married couple also living out there,

and there was a vet student from New Zealand out here. His only reason for being there was his brother was the general secretary of the YMCA in Auckland, and Roy came to have accommodation and he and I became very good friends and it was a constant battle as to who could do the most outlandish and outrageous things. But Roy decided to settle a score with the male of the married couple living out the back, so he got some three ply place

mats and balanced them over the fly screen of both the front door and the back door, so that when the bloke came through, he would wear them on his head. But the wrong person came through, I forget who it was, but it was someone that shouldn’t have been subjected to that kind of treatment. But after everyone sort of very assiduously calmed them down, and the bloke said, the person said he’d forgive us, he went out the front door and wore them again,

which was not a good idea at all. On one occasion Roy was driving me mad so I took after him, and he set it up, he was deliberately bating. And scattered around the garden they had, fixed sprays on the taps, a nozzle so you could water, you just set, they didn’t rotate but you could move them around and set them and Roy had all of these set up and when you took after him in high dudgeon as he’d go past these taps,

he’d turn it on so you wore this jet of high pressured water about 15 times. And it became a bit uncomfortable after a while so he finally took refuge in an outdoor toilet and, we got half a dozen buckets of water and, he also became fairly damp before it was all finished. And he had a fiancée from New Zealand who was a very talented pianist, and

Roy, to try and impress her, he was a strumming playboy, a jazz pianist, but he aspired to play ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’. And I had a fairly advanced, for those days, a tape recorder, so he practiced the ‘Flight of the Bumble Bee’ as much as he could and got it as good as he was ever going to get it, and we recorded it at the slow speed, knowing it would be played at the fast speed, and when you played it at the fast speed it was quite impressive and Roy really thought he was going to make a hit. He wasn’t engaged to her

at this stage, but he thought that this would let him in if anything. So he sent the tape across - who the hell was playing that? That couldn’t be you, you couldn’t do it, which hurt Roy tremendously, anyhow he, with a little bit of help we got on the extension and we helped him a little bit to propose to her and she saw the wisdom of her ways and accepted him and came across for a holiday. And Roy lived in a funny little garret and he took her up there for a bit of a

kiss and a cuddle I guess, so we’d set up , what did we have, we had cotton waste but it was soaked in oil, and we put them down at the bottom of the thing and lit them when they sort of, we thought it was about the right time, and it certainly broke things up. And then I’d set up my recorder so that we had the speaker just outside the window of his garret and again when we thought it was time,

I said, “Come on Roy, steady down.” And the timing was absolutely perfect I believe, he was just starting to make progress as it were, and he had this helpful voice coming in and he got a bit upset about it, but we felt pretty good. It settled a few scores and we had plenty to settle, so you know, we had a lot of fun, we got on very well and it was a good time.

Well, the YMCA started actually in London by,

I claim him as my great uncle for people I want to impress, great grand uncle, by George Williams. And it hasn’t won me any brainy tickets I can tell you, but it started in London and nine years later in 1844, they, no sorry it started in 1844, and 11 years later in ’55 they had a world, first world gathering in France and they had people from nine countries,

which was a pretty remarkable achievement in those days. And it spread as people migrated and particularly Australia, the first YMCA in Australia started in, I think 1851, which is only seven years after it started in London, in Adelaide. Melbourne YMCA I think was the next, in 1853 and Sydney YMCA was also in 1853. And in those days it was essentially a religious organisation,

run by lay people and they had a lot of essentially religious activities, bible studies, educational things, but gradually broadened as people said, “Well look, you know, why can’t we do so and so.” And they got into education and debating and public speaking, and all that kind of thing, recreational activities. And then, in (UNCLEAR) , well someone said, “You know, why can’t we do something a bit more active.” And so they gradually broadened their base.

See basketball was invented by the YMCA in America, some time in the 19th century and you know how big that’s become and the YMCA is probably also responsible for various other sporting activities. So that for many years it then had that mix of a… and they have the triangle represents body, mind and spirit and it stands on it’s point, which is normally the apex so that, the three have equal emphasis and equal balance.

And I mean it’s gone away from that on occasions, sometimes it’s had to. Sometimes it’s the people that have been involved, who for various reasons perhaps weren’t particularly religious minded and the easiest pass was often to go in a more non religious direction. But broadly speaking that has always been the philosophy that, had underlined the YMCA and where it’s been, it’s motto is that ‘They all may be one’, which comes from John 17 20, verse 21.

And that was the genius of the YMCA that people are treated as equals irrespective of colour, creed, whatever, and the YMCA has never restricted itself as it’s spread, to only having at least nominally, Christians, it’s very strong, throughout Asia and many of the associations there would have a strong Buddhist or

you know, whatever, belief underpinning them. But still essentially, a Christian organisation and that gives point to the activities that they do. In Australia some years back, it went through a very tough period, and Victoria’s probably the best example of the most successful where they went almost entirely commercial for some years, in order to survive and went very heavily into,

you know, managing recreational areas, sporting areas, swimming pools and things like that. And I think the figures somewhere around about 150 mark of centres that they run in Victoria, and I was in November last year, at Melbourne’s YMCA 150th celebrations and they had people from various centres throughout Victoria, and most complimentary about the work that the YMCA was doing in their community.

And as they’ve established that and done a good job and they’ve had this basic Christian philosophy underlying it, not that all the staff would have been committed Christians, probably almost certainly, but they’re now, gradually starting to go back to what I’d have called more traditional activities, the ones that were in vogue when I was involved. General purpose clubs, where people came to enjoy other people’s company to be able to do things that were enjoyable and perhaps

educational in some sense of them. And in my time we had very strong voice work groups and they would have a rounded program of physical activities, spiritual activities, and other educational recreational things. And then, oh, coming through in the ’60’s or thereabouts I guess, we started more and more to have girls and women into YMCA activities,

where it’s got to the point these days where I suspect that in Victoria at least, that women are slightly the majority of members, slight majority of volunteer leader and administrative board level and even very heavily represented in staff in (UNCLEAR). In Victoria, the YMCA has two and a half thousand staff, paid staff, which is a fairly impressive figure, but I mean it doesn’t mean anything if they’re not doing a good job, but it’s still a fairly impressive figure that that’s how active and how

accepted and valued they are in the communities they work in.

Oh, that would have certainly have been the case in the, you know, some areas would have been more country YMCA’s for argument’s sake, probably would have taken longer to have got around to it because they tend to be more conservative communities. I don’t know who had them first, whether it was

Melbourne or Sydney, which would have considered themselves to be the two leading YMCAs. It would have depended on the staff and the community they worked in, but yeah there would have been areas of resistance I guess. It was also for many years, and I can remember that Roman Catholic people were not allowed by the church to belong to the YMCA, and I can remember one, one of my leaders in Tasmania who was an

active Roman Catholic who got himself in all sorts of strife when his friends found out he was a member of the YMCA. He was delivered an ultimatum, and he said, “Well, stuff you, the YMCA means more to me than that.” So you know, there have been these traditional things which rain for a long time, but I’ve gradually been broken down.

I say it with a lot of pride that the YMCA was the first philanthropic group to be involved from the Boer War. We actually had representatives in South Africa in the Boer War. We’ve also been involved very heavily in the First World War and the Second World War, Korea and again, in Vietnam. There are two other

groups doing it right now. The Salvation Army came into it I think in the Second World War, I might be doing them injustice, they might have been First World War. ‘Everyman’ is a non denominational group and I think they will be coming back, given the Second World War. They’ve currently got a person working well and truly in Darwin. It was an extra arm, if you like, of the YMCA and the funding for it was only coming through appeals during the Second World War. And

in fact mine was funded, my work. And on the residue, scum, with the leftovers from the Second World War, not that I’m an expensive liver, but in my time of ten years practically, I think there’s one bloke after me, well I know there was, and I think we’ve probably just about run the fund into exhaustion. And the Salvation, of course, Army, they’re funded differently and I think they’ve probably got people active in some of the camps down south.

Yeah, well we are still, we are still civilians. I was paid by the YMCA, oh I was the only person in Vietnam and the (UNCLEAR) who was still paying tax and that irked me very considerably. And so we were still

identifiable and we made sure that we could be identified by civilians, because it’s very important that people in the army and the… It’s only in the army that there are philanthropic reps. I was talking to a middle ranking naval officer only a couple of weeks ago and I said, “You don’t have philanthropic reps do you ?” And he said, “No we do it ourselves.” And so do the airforce, and I believe that’s a huge mistake because my experiences would tell me without any doubt at all,

that having somebody who was outside the system was terribly important to a huge number of people. And I had padre’s say to me, because they were fully within the system, they were what’s known as attested, we were affiliated, and they were paid by the army, they had genuine rank and because both the air force and the navy also have chaplains, or padres. But

for somebody to go and see them means they’re going and seeing an officer, if they came to see me or my other philanthropic reps, they were coming to see a person, and a huge difference in the armed service system to know that you’re talking to somebody outside the system. There are various devices that I employed, and I presume other philanthropic reps did to make it easy for people

if they wanted to come and talk to you. But it never had that official connotation of going to a chaplain or to a company. I mean the army had a genius still has as far as I know, for trying to fit square pegs into round holes and they would appoint the most unsuitable people very often to be the company welfare officer, and I had two or three come to me, rather irate, because nobody was going to see them and they knew that people were coming to see me.

“What’s wrong with me?” Well I could have told them but it probably wasn’t terribly politic, but the biggest obstacle was that they were in the system and I wasn’t, and that was tremendously important. I can’t emphasise that too much.

Oh, the only real control, and then they’ve got to establish it, is on the basis of security. For instance when I was in Vietnam, the army spent

12 months trying to make me travel up to Nui Dat in army convoys, which I considered was an invitation, not just to frustration but to disaster so I was equally employed in not travelling with the convoys. And I could have got into trouble if anybody had really bothered to press the point, but I was probably doing enough to sort of let them tolerate the fact that I was an idiot and going off on my own, but I felt much safer travelling on my own. Not that there was much risk there during the day

but I thought that if anybody was going to get hurt it was going to be in a convoy and so that was the only reason. They tried to make me carry a side arm, but I knew damn well I would lose it if I took one so I refused to take it. I wasn’t going to use it anyhow, so there was no point in carrying it. And when I travelled I was supposed to, apart from the fact I was supposed to have a driver, which I generally got around by telling the driver to bring his camera, I was also supposed to have someone who rode shotgun, and I was

absolutely shattered one day to talk to one of my shotguns and find out that nobody ever carried ammunition, because it was too heavy. Yeah, that it was too heavy to carry the ammo, so they had a rifle, which looked nice and they had a camera which might have got a shot of the ambush, but we were sitting ducks, so you know, they were the only controls really

that they had. And I mean if you’re doing a job anyhow, they were prepared to tolerate idiosyncrasies, which I certainly have several.

Well, I went to the YMCA against my church,

because I felt it had obviously cost a lot more to put me through than I’d put in and I felt some sort of a debt, a moral obligation if nothing else with that, and I must confess that having gone into it I found YMCA work to be very satisfying. I went to Hobart and I was the boys work director there for five years. Made lots of friendships, and in point of fact through the marvels of emailing, in the last three or

four months, I’ve been reunited with some of my ‘boys’ from 40 years ago that I haven’t had contact with since. And one of them’s coming up here in March to go fishing and they’ve been very complimentary about the impact the YMCA had on their lives, and it was tremendously satisfying work. And without any question you could be very influential in character building and I was and still am a bit of a bush freak,

and I used to take selected groups bushwalking as against permanent camp-sitting and I believe they were tremendously valuable character building exercises so I got a lot of satisfaction out of the work. I was the Acting Gen Sec in the executive in Hobart for a while, but I didn’t really want that. I was much more interested in face to face work so I went up to Newcastle and I had two years up there where I was working mostly with young adults, mixed groups.

Male groups, and mixed groups, but all, still doing camping for boys and then I went from there to Broken Hill, which is a fascinating place to work in because to this day they will talk of the big strike in 1923, and how the workers beat the bosses. And if you ran foul of the unions you had a problem on your hands and I did on one occasion, inadvertently, I know. It’s a fascinating business but generally speaking, again, I found

the work up there, working with people was very, very satisfying. And I also ran across the entrenched local attitudes, Broken Hill has a three tier system of citizenry. A groupers were born and bred there, B groupers were transients who had been there for up to seven years, and C groupers, no sorry B groupers were people who had been there longer than seven years and C groupers were the nought to seven years. I didn’t quite make the

B groupers, so I was only ever a fly-by-nighter in Broken Hill. But it’s a lot of negative attitudes, but fascinating to encounter them and find out ways to work around them and I enjoyed the work there tremendously. And then from there I went down to Puckapunyal with the army where, the Vietnam War was on by then and….

Well my basic work was with boys, up to leaving school age, high school students. And we had a very big Saturday morning program, probably 150, 200 kids would come in on a Saturday morning and they would have a three point program, the physical, the social and the spiritual. I mean the spiritual, we didn’t lay it on with a trowel, but our,

their general activities would start off with a devotional and you’d have something like that, but then they would have educational, recreational activities and specifically time on the gym, would have their physical activities. And we also, during the week, we ran the high school groups, they would come in virtually straight from school, have a gym program, we would have tea together, and

and then have a general program after that. On one occasion, I, they were very high spirited group and I was also into using spoonerisms, at that stage. A spoonerism is, you know, alternating changing letters on the first word, the first letter on words. And I was getting a bit fed up with the horsing on that was going around and I thought I told them to

stop their fooling and mucking around, but the shocked silence that followed would indicate that in point of fact I said something else and I said, “Well you know what I mean.” And they said, “Yes we do,” and they did. But it was, it was good, you know a lot of gain, and I did a lot of bushwalking. Tasmania, of course, is a bushwalkers paradise, and apart from, we had a month of five, week long permanent campsites. Over the Christmas

period and during the school holidays we always ran school camps for, I think about 60 or 70 kids at a time and they were some single sex groups and some mixed groups. And in addition to that I would generally, at least once a year, take a group away bushwalking down into the mountains and one of them graduated into being a world rated mountaineer, and still is in New Zealand. And others have done very well for themselves.

Well it was, I guess, just a matter of being a with a group of reasonably normal people, by and large, and being occupied in enjoyable activities, which had

at least some degree of benefit if not a lot of benefit, and quite often… I always remember one case, in point of fact, one of the boys involved is the one coming up here in March, where a couple brought their two boys in, the eldest one was just old enough, eight I think was our minimum age, and the older boy was a couple of years older and the mother was a, they were both very nice people, both very intelligent people but the youngest boy had an intolerance for milk.

I forget what you call it and he’d had a rather spoilt upbringing, and he’d had his mother, in particular, round his little finger, he could twist her and she knew it, they all knew it. He was a world class manipulator and they desperately wanted him, school obviously wasn’t doing the job well enough, they wanted him to sort of fall into line a bit. So we talked away for a while and the mother said, “Look,” and it wouldn’t happen today. His mother said, “Look we took you,

we believe we got a fair assessment and we would trust you with anything you had to do. If you think that Chris needs a kick up the bum, you have our permission to give him a kick up the bum. And there will be no repercussions from us.” As I said, it wouldn’t happen today, and so I looked at the kid and so I said, “Well what do you reckon Chris, do you reckon I’ll do it?” And he looked at, looked back at me and said, “Yes.” I said, “Well you got me right mate.” And I never had

to do it once to him, but that was the kind of thing, and the elder brother, when we finally linked up, was very, very complimentary on the effect that the YMCA had had on him. And he said the critical thing was when I asked him to be a voluntary leader and he suddenly thought, “God he must reckon I’ve got something, not a complete fool.” And because he was a bit of an idiot, a nice one but an idiot, and he said, you know, that really turned me

around and gave me a focus and he’s gone on to be a very good teacher and to do very well in the educational field since.

Well, I think basically, I probably have

always had an ability to listen, once you get married of course that skill develops remarkably, until you learn to turn off. But I’ve always liked people I guess, and I’ve always felt, and I guess it’s a sum total of my upbringing that I felt that we weren’t put on this earth just to go through it and take everything for ourselves. That we owed it to life to put something back in it and to help people if you could without being

a totally obnoxious do-gooder. And I was able to do that and I guess I’m a fairly down to earth sort of a character I probably swear far too much but that’s my way of keeping in touch with the common folk. And I leant that when I was working. I always remember I took great pride in going home and saying to my mother, “Well I had to buy a bastard file today Mum.” And I got chastised for swearing, and I said, “Mother, you really ought to learn your carpentering terms, there is a bastard file.”

Which there is, but it was the only one I was every allowed to get away with. But I still, but people know that’s me and I mean most Australians swear and it’s part of conversation so that wasn’t a problem in that. And I certainly didn’t swear when I was doing boys work, normally. If I got terribly worked up I might, but when I got angry they knew that they’d done something wrong and I didn’t get angry terribly often, but when I did they knew that, you know, it was time to pull their horns in a bit for whatever it was.

Yeah and I just, yeah, I believed it, you know, it was a sensible way to be using the talents that I had. If I’d been proved to not have talents, then I’d have got out, but I’m still 40 years later, to say that what I was doing was of value and a lot of people don’t get that, and I count myself very privileged to have got that kind of feed back.

And I got it from Vietnam, it took me 30 years, but I was relating an incident by another YMCA staff person to show the effect. On this particular occasion, it was something specific that I did for a bloke in Vietnam, I have absolutely no idea who the bloke was or what I did but it had a tremendous impact on him and he appreciated it and he did something for the Y as a result of that. So, you know, I’ve been very fortunate, you know, I’ve had, sometimes it’s taken a long time

but I’ve had feed back which has made me feel well, I didn’t waste my life after all, and that’s important.

Often it was fairly peripheral a lot of it, but I had one

particular case where a boy was brought in by his parents and his father had been a shift worker and working very long hours during the war, and I guess after the war, and had had very little contact with the eldest boy, they had three or four kids, in total. And I hate jargon, but Guy had not bonded with his father at all, but his father was a nice bloke and his mother was a nice, lovely

person, she was a teacher and very intelligent. But they realised that there was something really missing in Guy’s life, because he had no bonding with his father at all and I hoped, without knowing, what was going to happen that the YMCA might be able to help because of what they perceived the YMCA to be. And Guy virtually, I became a surrogate parent and I had

much more influence over him than his parents ever did have and that’s a bit frightening when you do that, but it ended tragically. When he became one of my leaders and when it, I was leaving Tasmania to go up to Newcastle, three of the boys came to me, including the lad who is the world class mountaineer, and they said, “Look, we’ve talked about going into the south west, we want you to take us before you go and our parents have said it’s fine.

We’ve already asked them and they said that if we’re going with you, it’s fine. Will you take us?” And I said, “Well it’s not really very convenient, I’m supposed to be packing up to leave.” And they said, “We want to go to the south west with you.” And I said, “Well talk to Pat about it,” my wife, because she knew them all very well and she said, “No, that’s fine.” I said, “Well look, on the understanding that we go as friends.” Because we were friends, apart from the 20 odd year age difference, we got on very, very well, and they were all very good in the bush.

And we went down into the south west and the longer we went on the trip, the more difficult this boy became. Until we were going to climb up a mountain, who’s name alludes me at the moment, the big one in the area. On this particular day Guy and I had an absolutely raging row, it really wasn’t very good counselling, on my part, but we weren’t, you know, we were friends and whatever, at this stage, and we had an appalling row over things.

And anyhow, eventually, because he was just totally obnoxious, and uncooperative so we decided we would climb up this mountain and I said to the other three, I said, “Look,” or two in particular, one bloke, there were three and there was Geoff the mountaineer, and he and I always had this idiot tradition of seeing who could run up the top of a mountain first. And I said to the other one who’s also a Guy, I said, “Look,

watch Guy will you.” I said, “The frame of mind he’s in he could do anything.” So off we went and we kept in touch and it was very thick scrub and very easy to get separated and eventually one boy, Geoff and myself broke through the scrub and it was just a rock hopping exercise, up to the top and I looked back and the other two were together, and so Geoff and I concentrated on being idiots and we raced up the top and we got up the top and we could see this huge storm coming in. And

in Tasmania, at least, I mean you don’t do it in other parts, you don’t sit on the top of a mountain when a storm is coming in. So I yelled out, I said, “Come on hurry up, we got to go.” And a couple of minutes later the other Guy came in and I said, “Where’s Guy?” and he said, “Oh he’s here,” he said, “he was only yards behind me.” And he never came, he just… it still gets me.

Anyhow, we yelled out, and somebody answered us and we thought he’d gone back to the camp, and that was, tragically wrong. We got back to the camp and we had two tents and one tent was laced up which hadn’t been and we thought oh Guy’s gone in and he’s just having a sulk. So the other three of us played cards for about an hour and eventually, oh this is stupid, so we went to the other tent, yelled out, no answer, opened it up,

empty, and there was a note and there had been a group of bushwalkers gone through and they were the one’s who had answered back. Now if they hadn’t have answered back, we may well have found the kid, we’ll never know. So we tried to get up onto the mountain, but it was covered in mist and we’d have lost ourselves, so we eventually had to make a decision and I took the other Guy and myself and I said, “Look we’ll have to go out and get the police.” And left this young Geoff behind,15 year old.

Pretty tough experience, and he was literally spread eagled inside the tent holding it down, he told us afterwards. Anyhow, we waited overnight, there was no point going at night and then we had a huge problem getting out because some idiot had turned the signs around, at the beginning of the track, we kept on going down we knew it was the wrong track but that’s where the sign…. Anyhow, we eventually ran and walked 30 Ks and caught up with this other party, got to the police station and went back in with a

police party and they had I think, 200 people in there, in the end looking for this kid. And cave people came in and they were huge, the place was dotted with these huge holes and they reckon if he’d gone down one of those he’d never have been found, they couldn’t get down and they had a helicopter in and everything. Then eventually the police said to me, “You are going out.” I mean I was leaving Tasmania in two or three days time. So, as I went

down to get on the chopper the boys father came in and he said, “Look, we want you to understand that whatever has happened, it’s not your fault.” And so, I hadn’t realised just how important I had become to that kid, that was the frightening thing about it I guess. So you know, it was a pretty tough way to end things but.

Never found. Never found. The police had a theory that he’d just gone off, but they couldn’t prove that

and he was never sighted, there was never any suggestion that he’d been sighted and, he just disappeared, he probably went down one of the holes. And if he did, it would have had to have been, I would have thought, deliberate because he was so shattered at our impending break as it were. You know, that’s the only interpretation that I can put on it.

Well, that was the one that really woke me up, I mean I just hadn’t… I knew I was important to the kid and I knew I had more influence with him than his family did, but I never realised, it just never occurred to me that it was that important. Now, I don’t know whether that was a shortfall in my attitudes or understanding, it probably was. Certainly I made, very carefully after that, that

the extent of any relationship that I formed with members, and many became friends, that it was perfectly clear where there was a line. That this was where you went under those circumstances and this was permissible under other circumstances. I certainly went to great pains to point that out and to make sure that that was established. I also was at great pains to make sure that when I went, that the house didn’t fall down, because the main building

block had been taken away and a lot of recreational youth workers make that mistake. They build things around themselves and I believe that’s very poor youth work if you do, that what you should do is establish the structure which will survive and prosper, change after you go, but that what you leave is solid enough and while you were important, that you weren’t critical.

Only with experience I guess. I mean in the Tasmanian situation, I didn’t know the bloke who was coming in after me, he didn’t come until after I’d left, but I really worked very, very hard on, on particularly the leaders to say, “Look, you know, I don’t know this bloke. I don’t know what he’s like.” “But,” I said, “he is not the YMCA. I am not the YMCA. You’ve got to give him a chance and work with him.” He proved, unfortunately, to be very difficult and he also proved that everything that Keith Williams was, had

done, was out. But he doesn’t have that on his own. The army has a genius for, I saw that when I was at Puckapunyal, that every time a new OC [Officer Commanding] came into a company he would reinvent the wheel. You can only do that so many times and then the wheel comes back again in its original shape. But yeah, I don’t think enough people realise the problems you create in building a thing around yourself.

You’re just a catalyst and a worker but certainly, if it all falls down when you leave then you haven’t done a good job. Doesn’t matter what else you’ve done, you failed in doing the most important job.

Not really, I suppose the socio demographics of Newcastle would be different to Tasmania, they hated the rest of Australia for different reasons than Tasmanians did, because Tasmanians were always being left off the map, and felt that Australia didn’t love them. But they were, broadly speaking of course, most people in Newcastle at

that stage were BHP [Broken Hill Proprietary] people. That was the future of the town, there was that kind of thing, there was, well there was much more of a mining thing in Broken Hill. So you know, you had a different kind of attitude from that point of view, but they were reasonably worldly. I mean they were only a couple of hours drive from Sydney so they weren’t exactly out of the big smoke. And I was working with a different age range, I went from working with boys, teenage boys, to young adults,

was my main job. I mean I worked with boys in camping. I ran the camping program but my main butter and bread line was working with young adults in Newcastle.

Oh their interests, their attitudes, what they wanted to do, what they were happy in doing, what they didn’t want to do. But you know, not all that different, the same basic program, we still had

a four tiered program based on physical, mental, spiritual stuff, it was basically the same. I mean the way you did it was different and specific tools or whatever you used, could be different but the basic platform was still there to work on.

I went there in, ’62. And I was there for just over two years.

Oh yes, it was a little bit hard because the two demographic groups were so different, but oh there was. People were becoming more mobile. In Newcastle it was not uncommon

for young men to have their own car, and that created all sorts of problems and challenges in programming to get them interested and keep them interested. Yeah, and things were freeing up. I mean, I don’t remember, for arguments sake, the Roman Catholic issue coming up in Newcastle as it had in Tasmania. I mean Tasmania in some respects, even though I love the place, is a little bit behind the rest of Australia.

Well, they had more money. That was still in the good times, they had more money, they had mobility, they were tending to move around more,

in terms of they didn’t feel that they had to stay with the same boss until they died. Nothing like now, but certainly there was that mobility and willingness to move, almost expectation, not quite but almost. Those sort of things were certainly starting to come through and things that you had to identify and find ways of working with.

Oh religion’s got an awful lot to answer for. I was in the church that we both went to. They were very keen on having pageants, every so often, Easter and Christmas and, it was coming up for Easter I think, and they decided to have an

Easter pageant, and for some reason of total miscasting, I was made King Herod, which I thought was most unfair and Pat also totally miscast as an angel, which I can tell you she’s not. So we sort of got to know one another a bit and I suspect that the lady who was controlling the pageant wasn’t terribly impressed with my attitude. I think she didn’t, thought I didn’t apply myself quite seriously enough. And anyhow, I said to Pat,

“Well, you know, if you behave yourself and do a good job in the pageant, I’ll take you out,” being very noble and generous and that sort of thing. So I took her out and it just sort of went on from there as these things do.

Well, it was three years before we got engaged and that was almost an anti climax. It was brought on by the fact that I was going up to Sydney to

the college, and I was set up, I have no doubt about it at all, because her father and mother were still away and I’m quite sure it was all organised so that I would be put in a position where I had to ask for her hand, which we were old fashioned enough to do and then go and see her father and get his blessing. But it’s turned out pretty well. We got married, half way through the college course, two year course.

Well, that was a culture shock, they still fight the big fight of 1923 and the unions are totally dominating and repressive. The Barrier Industrial Council is an amalgamation of all the unions in the town, and what they say goes, and, if they say it doesn’t go

it doesn’t go. And I know of one surveyor who was forced out of town within a week, because he picked up a shovel to shift a pile of dirt because none of his co-workers could because none of them belonged to the right union and they said, “You pick up that shovel, you’re out mate.” And he picked up the shovel and mate was out, and I can give you many, many instances of the negativeness of the thing and they’re all still rooted in this 1923 fight. Having said that, we made many good friends

up there, but for the first time, I think we came across the phenomenon where local people had reservations about making friends with incoming people, because they probably weren’t going to stay. And when we left after five years, some very good friends said to us, “Well, stuff it, that’s it, we’re not going to bother to make good friends with any more visiting people.” And having lived in Darwin for 27 years,

I can understand why you would get to that because Darwin would have the most mobile population, I believe, in Australia. But people were very good to us, we had lots of very good friends. The YMCA was a very important part of the social fabric there. They had a reasonably strong YWCA, they had church groups but the YMCA would easily have been the strongest. And we catered for a very strong physical program.

We ran the Basketball Association until they eventually went out on their own. We ran a major, we had our own squash courts and we ran a very strong squash competition. And we did all sorts of other things. I ran foul of the unions, we had a secretary of the BIC [Barrier Industrial Council] on the board and he used to have about three hats to wear and I used to say to him, “Jack, what hat are you wearing when you say this?” And he says, “I’m the BIC

Secretary.” And he could say things that were totally defamatory about the YMCA if he had to speak, you know, on occasion about something like that, or he could speak as a YMCA board member or he could speak as the other, which I can’t remember. But we were eventually offered a cellar in what had been an old pub, on the outskirts of Broken Hill, and it had been bought by a syndicate who were going to make it into a private hotel and they had no use for the cellar. So for some reason or other they came to us and said,

“Would it be any good to you?” And I had a look at it and decided it could be, with a lot of work, it could be an ideal thing for a dungeon coffee lounge, for young adults. And that was the problem end of the program range, were the young adults, all they used to do, the young fellas, was burn, do laps around town in their cars and pick up their birds and try and impress the birds. And so I thought that a coffee lounge which was away from the Y so it took away that YMCA image to a degree,

could be the answer. And we got the boys working on it, they were, most of my young men’s membership were apprentices on all the mines, over the three or four mines and we got to the point where they were doing some electrical work and they came to me and said, “Look we got a bit of a problem. Do you mind if we bring our instructor down?” Who of course turned out to be the father of a member, so he was very onside right from the start. And he had a look at things and

he said, “You know this is crazy,” he said, “these blokes could do all their prac work down here and when it’s finished it would be here forever. They do it back at the tech, it gets pulled to pieces and done by the next mob.” He said, “Would you mind if they did do it?” I said, “Go ahead.” He said, “I’d better check with the principal” who unfortunately was a new boy in town but who had heard that you don’t do anything without checking with the BIC. So he did, and a couple of blokes on the BIC thought, wrongly, that they knew who the members of the private syndicate were.

And they thought they had a chance to settle a grudge. So while I was down in Melbourne at a YMCA conference, they pulled a black ban on the work, to settle this score, I mean regardless of what they were doing, it was supposed to be good. So when I got back I went around and saw the BIC secretary and he said, “Look Keith,” he said, “I am just so embarrassed.” He said, “This is absolutely ridiculous and I’m embarrassed as hell, but,” he said, “there is nothing we can do.

The wheels just have to roll, you’ll have to put up with us.” He said, “It’ll take two or three months but,” he said, “we will find a way around this. But,” he said, “please,” he said, “don’t, leave me alone.” He said, “I really am terribly embarrassed.” So the wheels rolled around and eventually the President of the Y who was a local boy, and myself were invited to go to a meeting of the BIC and we got there and sat in a circle looking at all these other blokes and they told us what a wonderful job we were doing and

we told them what a wonderful job they were doing, and we discovered 5000 different ways of saying the same thing and eventually we just ran out. I mean there was, it was absolutely ridiculous, so the President who, the local boy, said, “Look, you fellows are busy, you’ve got other things to discuss, we’ll leave you to it, but,” he said, “we’ll go back to the Y and,” he said, “if you’ve got any more queries, give us a buzz.” And as we walked in the door the phone rang and the secretary said, “Oh Jack, here Keith,” he said, “look,” he said, “fine,” he said, “go ahead.” He said,

“All the boys have to do is register with the union that they’re working on site,” and he said, “not a problem.” Now that was the bloody-mindedness of a negative union system, and so, yeah, that was the kind of attitude. I had a 14 year old kid tell me that I didn’t know what the Depression was like, now I’d been born and grown up in the Depression but he said, “You don’t know what it was like.” And I said “Neither do you mate.” I said, “You’re only 15, I said it’s a damn sight longer, years away from the Depression.” Oh my god, and all the attitudes of their parents had infiltrated,

and terribly negative stuff. And that’s the tragedy of Broken Hill really, that they have these tremendously negative mindsets that are still there, probably still there today. I haven’t been back for a long, for many years but you know, it’s really sad to see it, but I think we probably did something to help overcome it a bit, hopefully, through YMCA activities.

Um, well yes in part.

The thing that finally brought me to leaving Broken Hill was the fact that, this three tier system of citizen ship and on the board most of them were locals, there were two or three B groupers, and I’m not sure whether there were any C groupers at all. And it came up after about the third or fourth year for my annual salary review that was done at the end of the year, and they’d normally have a quick meeting and it’d be a basic item to go through. But

one of these, the locals, was the kind of person, you’ve probably met them, where if it’s possible for them to turn up at the wrong time, they will, and if I was in the gym and the office was unattended, this bloke would walk in and he’d criticise me because the office was unattended. If I was in the office and the gym was in the hands of a voluntary leader, then I was criticised because I wasn’t in the gym, you know, that kind of person. And he really had it in for me and anyhow when it came to this annual salary review,

he raised questions as to my fitness for a review and they spent an inordinate amount of time which went over three meetings and at the end of, or in the middle of the last meeting the treasurer came out and he said, “Keith,” and he was a B grouper, he said, “Keith you’re not going to win this.” He said, “It’s embarrassing, it’s stupid, and everybody on the board bar two people want this thing to go through.” “But,” he said, “The A group people will stick together,

and you will lose. They’ll outvote the B groupers.” He said, “You will lose.” And he said, “I’m sorry but that’s the reality of it.” And then the President came out and said, “Look go away and have a happy holiday and enjoy yourself, and we’ll sort this out when you come back.” And I said, “That’s a hell of a Christmas present, Tom.” So I was down in Melbourne and I talked to the National executive bloke and he said, “Oh,” he said, “You’d be better off out of it.” So that’s sort of what started me looking for, I’d have moved wherever

it was, I’d have moved from Broken Hill in another 12 months.

Well, my father-in-law, who’s responsible for an awful lot, was a philanthropic rep in both the First and Second World Wars and he went, I think he was in France, I don’t know. I think he was in the Middle East during the Second World War. He didn’t get to New Guinea, he got very close.

I think he might have had some time in Darwin and without knowing a lot about it, there was a bit of a romantic aura I guess about it. And then the Vietnam stoush came along and of course, that was a fairly strong topic in all sorts of things and I thought, well you know, it sounds like it could be pretty interesting work to do, excuse me. So I talked to the national people and they said, “Look you have a family, you are not going to

Vietnam, forget Vietnam, but you could go into Puckapunyal.” And I think they were hoping that the army would straighten me out a bit and iron some of my idiosyncrasies. And so I moved down to Puckapunyal and that was to be it, but then they needed a replacement for Vietnam and couldn’t get anyone else at the time. So, necessity is the mother of invention, and they decided that I could go.

That was a culture shock, I mean even… I came from an era where you did what you were told and you respected your parents and people in authority. And even though I am a bit of a maverick, perhaps quite a big one in some ways, I still had that basic respect for authority, inculcated into me, but the army is another thing again. I mean I can understand why they have to have

discipline. You can’t have an argument about the ethics of a situation when there are bullets flying all around your head. So it was quite a culture shock to me. I went down three months ahead of the family. We decided the kids would finish school, in Broken Hill so I lived in the officers mess for three months. That was probably a good thing in a way because I got to know the CO [Commanding Officer] who was a half colonel, an ex para man, and we got on

very well. And again because I was outside the system, he could talk to me in a way that he could not talk to anyone else and I could talk to him and he knew I wasn’t trying to get something. Whereas most of the other people in the mess, it was a brown nosing job, you know, you were never nice to the CO unless you wanted something, I mean you were respectful, but you buttered up because you wanted things. That’s a fairly dangerous generalisation, but it

was true enough to be mentionable, and so I had, that early period, probably was very good that I was able to sort of develop those sort of relationships. In those days the system was that while I was in Australia, the YMCA had to pay for, we got it through the normal channels but we had to pay for my uniforms, and I had to have you know, the appropriate range of uniforms from jungle greens up to dress uniforms, for mess functions and things like that,

and that cost us quite a bit. But when I went over to Vietnam, the army kitted me out, they provided everything and they fed me up there. And when I was, I went in about a week after the beginning of an intake I guess, and I was in civvies for a few days and then I got my uniform together and on the first day that I really had my uniform was the weekend when the intake

had their first visitors, after, I think it was three weeks, and they obviously had been taught to salute and they were taught to salute anything on the shoulder, anything on the shoulder, you know, you salute it, you know, no questions asked. So these blithering idiots kept on saluting me because they were with their mum and dad and brothers and sisters and girlfriends and you know, “show us how you salute,” so they were looking for people to salute, and they had me reduced to a dithering mess, and I’d get behind a building I’d run to, I’d want to go somewhere, I’d run up the back of a building, and peek around to make sure no one was coming

and scurry across the open space and try and get behind the next building, because these idiots were insisting on saluting me. I then made it very painfully clear that I was a civilian, that what I had were bars, which meant nothing except I had honorary captain’s rank, and that they didn’t have to salute me. And the nashos were okay but there were several members of staff regulars who insisted all the time. And we became very good personal friends in

several cases. They said, “You got stuff on the shoulder and I salute it, sir.” And you know, that’s the way it was, always that barrier between me having supposed commissioned rank and there was non commissioned rank. I mean I got around it with most people but, it was always, but it was interesting. I had to get used to all that and dressing up somewhere near appropriately. If I was going to get caught out it was always the CO who came along and

caught me wearing shoes when I should have had boots on or doing something that wasn’t quite right or.

Oh, I ignored most. I mean they really couldn’t do much for me, I would dare to say that I probably worked longer hours, because I worked seven days a week and from eight o’clock in the morning until half past 10 or 11 at night, even when my family came down I went home

for meals and that was about it, which wasn’t a particularly good set up. And I could ignore most things. I had the provo, army provo major, and he, up to that point would have been a reasonably good friend and he pulled me up one day outside area headquarters, in my car. And he walked over and had his pacing stick and he shoved it in through the window and I had sideburns, and I grew sideburns as my gesture of sympathy one

has with the nashos, who of course couldn’t have sideburns, and Jack stuck his pacing stick in and said, “Keith, they go.” And I removed the stick fairly gently and I said, “Jack, army pays, army says, army pays. YMCA pays, YMCA says.” And I said, “The YMCA says I can have them, good morning Jack.” And I drove off, but it did mean that I had to be very careful to observe the speed limits and all the other regulations around the camp,

because all the provos [Provosts - Military Police] were out to get me because the boss had told them you know, “Get this bloke if you can.” I mean they probably winked the odd eye but they were certainly under instructions to get me for a while. But by and large I, you know, I didn’t have to. They had compulsory training nights one night a week and I didn’t go to those, and I said to the CO, “Look I’m working.” I said, “If it’s something really worthwhile you tell me and I’ll come. But,” I said, “I can’t

take off a night and potentially have to close the place down because I’m coming here learning something that is not relevant to me.” And you know, so the good CO’s were not a problem, in fact they were very appreciative. And the second CO said to me, “Look, you know, you’re my eyes and ears and if you come across any bastardry I want to know. No names, no pack drill, just the company.” And he said, “I’ll sort it out.” And I did it once or twice where I suspected that things weren’t

and I’d just say, “Oh, B company.” And it would get sorted out. So I wasn’t dobbing people in but I was certainly acting in the interests of the nashos and that’s what I was there for.

Oh, silly punishments for doing silly things or not doing things. Oh you know, whatever your imagination says, carting sandbags around

drill areas or whatever, you know. Just cleaning the parade ground with a toothbrush, you know, silly sort of things.

Well it was summed up as to do social and welfare work with the servicemen. And it was a bit different in Pucka because we had four intakes a year, but after the first one I made very sure that my hut was part of the induction

process. And they used to come in there and they’d be, you know, get their name there, take the blood there, or give the blood there and so on. And I would just wander around and I’d talk to the fellows and say you know, “Just register with this place come up and see us soon.” And I then used to go up and they could get a drink, I’d give them drinks if they wanted tea, coffee, water whatever. And then I would go around to all the companies within a couple of days and just a five minute spiel, “I’m Keith Williams, I’m with the YMCA, you’ve been in my hut, remember,

first place you went to, come down there it’s off limits. You can come down there relax, you can do whatever you like, we got all sorts of activities, blah, blah, blah. You want to talk to me, you can do that, you know, but, let’s be clear I’m a civilian and you can come in there and let off steam.” And so they would, I’d encourage that. And then I would, I used to service all the range practices, rifle, sub machine guns, whatever.

Few funny stories about those. I’d go out on all the route marches, or their bivouacs. I used to go to the messes. I really had no bargaining power except that people accepted the fact that I was doing a good job. I think it was a case of if your deeds proved what you were supposed to be on about. So I could get anything. I could go into the messes and they’d give me bread and all the spreads to go on it, they would give me, make up urns of tea and coffee and that sort of thing and eventually,

it sort of, I could have gone into business. I should have been an entrepreneur because I eventually started getting asked for cigarettes of course, and for hot pies, oh, god, mate, you know, I’d kill for a hot pie. So I used to get pies from Seymour. And I used buy stuff through the army system and I’d turn it over for a cost, I wasn’t making anything out of it, but I had, you know, I used set up like a gipsy traveller, you know, all my stuff I’d go out to a range and they’d come down to get their stuff and the staff, whatever, it’d be breakfast for a lot of them,

I think. But, you know, it was that, and then, and the hut was always open and I got assistance from, I didn’t run it on my own, I got an assistant. I’d have fellows assigned to me from the staff and I had a bloke who claimed to be the longest serving nasho. He went in, in ’54 as a nasho for Korea and stayed in and he was the greatest rogue unsung. You left nothing out with Arthur, except that, in

the perverse way that people are, he appreciated what the YMCA was doing and I could leave anything out - money, the works with Arthur and nothing would happen. But if as, might prove the point, I got low on teaspoons, he was in charge of the hygiene squad I’d say, “Arthur I’m a bit low on teaspoons.” “Not a problem Keith.” And half an hour later he’d come back and undo his puttees and 30 or 40 teaspoons would fall out. And so it went. And

he used to have some outrageous fundraising schemes for the YMCA, all his own idea, but so you know, because I had that respect of people I could get that. And you know, fellows, the staff, off duty staff would come in and say, “Look, whiz off for the…” they’d come in for meals, cover me for meals, so that the place would stay open. They would say, “Look, take the bloody afternoon off. I’ll look after the place and they did.” And so you know, you get the response

that you deserve I guess. But people valued the potential of the place sufficiently that they were prepared to put in.

It was very clearly understood, in fact it was articulated by both CO’s that I had. They both said, “Look you know, we know that this place is not army, now do you want the staff to come in, or do you want the staff kept out?” And I said, “I don’t care if the staff comes in, in fact,” I said, “I’m happy about it

from my point of view as long as they don’t pull rank or try anything.” And I said or they said, “They do that, you let us know.” But I never had to. I never had a problem, they were obviously told, that if they went into the YMCA, they were just one of the mob. And if they couldn’t hack it they didn’t come in, if they could hack it then they came in and they enjoyed themselves too.

Well it was, it was a safety valve, it really was a safety valve, particularly in those first few weeks when they undoubtedly had a prime case of culture shock, because a surprising number of them, absolutely hopeless, being obviously brought up by doting females and never, never ever did anything to look after themselves, not even to help to look after themselves. They’d get out of their dirty clothes and

they’d leave them on the floor and mum or aunty or sis would pick them up. You know, they were the, they were the male around the place, and those sort of fellows did it incredibly tough. There were illiterate people, you know, it was surprising, the number of people who were illiterate. I don’t know how they got through the intake procedures, except I know that in one case there was a new Aussie bloke came in and he didn’t, he couldn’t speak English but his brother could, and his

brother did the intake procedure. And then he came in and did, well he started to do the service, it took about two days to realise, and they had to discharge him. So you had all those sorts of people and going the other way to people who were totally with it, independent, mature, so forth and so on and so independent that they had trouble coping with the system because they had been independent thinkers. So you had all those sort of things, but they could come into the hut and they could relax.

They could play, they had books to read, they had games to play, they had table tennis all that sort of thing. They had tea, coffee, toast making facilities, and that was about where I used to operate and they were a very good avenue for people if they really wanted to talk to me, then they could come in and under the guise of making a cup of tea or coffee which they had to do themselves, they could sort of establish communications and then they could sort of, “Oh look while I’m here.”

And when people, we had all the intake except New South Wales and Queensland, and so we had Western Australians and Tasmanians and a lot of them, and the Western Australian blokes in particular, the three or four day leave that they had was really too short for them to go home so we had a very good set up with Melbourne YMCA, who I have to pay tribute to because they were very good. They accommodated blokes who wanted to stay at the Y,

and really looked after them, gave them a good go, and we also had a number of families who would take blokes. So if a fellow particularly wanted to be with a family we could generally accommodate him and he would go down to the Y and he would be picked up and he would spend their three or four days with ordinary people. And that was tremendously valuable stuff for blokes who were struggling. So you know, those were the kinds of things that we did.

Oh, women problems, work you know, army problems, problems they were having coping with certain aspects or difficulties they were having. You know, all the normal range of human problems I guess.

Oh the wife and kids. Oh Pat found, it was interesting, she found the wives

were much more, we lived in an officers street, and in an army village such as Puckapunyal, it’s all very carefully sorted out so that the riff raff don’t mix with the elite, and we were in an officers street and that was pointed out to us, when we went into it. We committed the cardinal sin one day of inviting a lance jack up and not only having a lance jack up but a half colonel arrived at the same time and that was pointed out to us, that really wasn’t

done. but Pat found it much more so, the wives, they were incredibly rank conscious and she found that a real pain in the backside. She had people on either side of us who were very good friends, one couple in particular, and so she went, she went back to work. She had worked up in Broken Hill part time, with the YMCA, but she went back to nursing, got a job at the Seymour Hospital, that was about the time I left she got

serious about that.

To go to Vietnam? Well it became clear I guess, with a few months to go that the chances of the YMCA getting someone else to go to Vietnam was a bit grim and particularly as it meant they would have gone absolutely cold with no

background, you know, no familiarisation at all, and that would have been a pretty big ask. And so fairly reluctantly I talked to Pat and the kids about it, and the kids had loved Pucka by the way, they had huge areas to play on and as long as they kept off the ranges, the rifle range and that. But they all said, “Well you know, if you really want to go, go.” So it was all approved and off I went.

God, I suppose, really probably a romantic notion as much as anything. I mean, war is romantic almost until you come face to face with the appalling horror of it and the absolute waste and everything else of it and, you know, I could see myself as a shining knight in shining khaki armour, going up there and doing good with the

the army people, the army personnel. But the reality of it of course would be, I was in a pretty sheltered environment when I got up there. I was in Vung Tau. I wasn’t up at the Dat and I wasn’t out in one of the MAT training teams although I visited them, but I was sort of, I was exposed to friendly rifle fire at Puckapunyal where, at Vung Tau, when all

the people on the outside decided that they’d shoot out the cross which people had put up for Christmas. They’d made neon light tubes and stuck it up on the mast for the sigs. And the Yanks and Aussies and everyone else on the outside who had a weapon, and most of them did, decided they’d shoot it out for a bit of sport. And it was sort of dangerous, I don’t, they weren’t shooting at us, but I mean most of them were drunk and their aim probably wasn’t particularly good.

So they, the CO, after not particularly long, suggested that they turn it off before somebody did get shot. So those sort of things were a bit interesting for a while.

Well the bullets were going right over our head and I suppose that would have been a matter of, I don’t know, five, ten metres something. I hope so, I never measured it. I got down as low as I could. But probably the most frightening thing was the night when

one of the battalions was due to come up. They’d come up on the aircraft carrier, the Sydney and the Yanks, the B-52’s bombed the hell out of the Long Hai mountains where the VC [Viet Cong] were ensconced in their incredible tunnel system. And I believe there was a three second margin for error, that if they’d been three seconds too soon, they’d have wiped us out. I mean it was 12 Ks I think, in distance, but three seconds in terms of safe and that’s not a huge margin.

And my hut was literally shaking and it was, and I thought this is not a good place to be, but I couldn’t think of a better one. And fortunately they were all on the job and never dropped anything on us. And that really was, you know, they were the most dangerous things I faced, knowingly.

Well I didn’t really

think about the danger side of it. I tend not to worry too much about that kind of thing and problems like that, that I’ve got. I thought I’d sort all that out when I got up there, but I assumed, and fairly correctly that I would do basically the same. I mean you know, slightly more dramatic manifestations if you like, perhaps, but basically I ran a hut and I had a range of facilities which were a bit better and a bit different.

I didn’t do any rifle range or bivouac type work as such because they didn’t do that out of Vung Tau. But after a while, well I was going up to Nui Dat to service some of the smaller units and I went up there a couple of days a week and I would go up there and run around them and try and organise things that they wanted or needed. A lot of humdrum stuff,

you know, books to read, photos to get printed, things like that. Letters to get posted and so forth and then I started doing the MAT, and don’t ask me what MAT stands for. MAT training teams, which were a group of about half a dozen Australian servicemen who were with a company of Vietnamese, either militia or army, regular army people. But they had their families with them. They were almost never paid, certainly not on time

and the family suffered a great deal of privation. And I arranged for clothing and things like that to come up from Australia and I would take them around for the training teams and give them to the blokes and they would hand them out and I did all sorts of little things for the fellows in the training team. It sounds ludicrous, and it turned out to not be necessary, but I was seriously discussing using my network to get ammunition for one of the training teams because they couldn’t get it,

and they were running out. For some reason or another the hierarchy didn’t want to know about them and they treated them abominably and they just didn’t look after them at all.

Didn’t worry

about it particularly I guess. I assumed, before we went there, or I went there that we’d gone there for the right reasons. I came to the decision after I got there that we’d gone there for the wrong reasons, but had done the right thing, when we were there, if that’s not a too much of a complication or a contradiction.

Well I am totally satisfied and

I’m not the only one who came to the belief that we only went there to take out insurance with the Americans, and I’m not sure that you ever do. I’m a bit cynical about Americans I must confess, and George Bush would be right at the top of my suspect list. But yeah, we, politically it was deemed expedient for us to go up there, at whatever cost and ensure that Uncle Sam would look after us when things got tight. Now I have no faith at all that the Americans would do that if it didn’t

suit them to do it. I believe they would dump us as quickly as they could. But having gone up there for the wrong reasons, I believe that our, the troops did a lot of good work. They did a lot in terms of democratising the area and giving people the chance to see at least what democracy could be like. The Vietnamese form of democracy as practised by Air Marshall Kee was pretty corrupt but at least it was a step better

than total despotism. And I believe that we gave them some glimpse of the way things could be. So from that point of view our presence was justified.

Well the sort of news about going, sort of, it became inevitable. It sort of developed; it wasn’t a nothing one day and a just complete change the next.

So you know, it came to a stage where a vague chance I might go, to looks as though I probably would go, to the fact that I was going to go. And then I sort of had to gallop around and do the extra things, inoculations and get kitted out and so forth and so on. Make arrangements about pay and things like that, for the family. I was very fortunate, the CO we had at that stage, because of the time I spent in the mess with him, became a personal

friend and if ever a family was looked after and I have to say the army system is very good, but my family was looked after very well, they lacked for nothing. They had fuel delivered and they, Pat only had to ring up and say, “Look,” they would assign a second lieuie [lieutenant] but he didn’t have much to do because the CO was visiting quite often and just made sure the things were done. So they really were very well looked after. I had no qualms, no problems about that at all.

Well I left Puckapunyal quite willingly, because it was raining and cold as only Puckapunyal can be, and got driven down to the airport, Essendon. I flew up to Sydney and it was raining and miserable, comparatively warmer, but it was still raining and miserable and I had, I don’t know, about 12 hours, the plane was leaving after one o’clock, outside the curfew hours,

I had to fill in, and then we finally took off. And we landed in Darwin, my first introduction to Darwin, and it was in July and it should have been cool and pleasant, but my feeling to this day was, when I got out of the plane my god how do people live up here. It was hot and stinking and steamy and I said, “Oh, who’d ever want to live in a place like this?” Little realising that I was going to come back to it. And then went on to Singapore.

We had to put on non army shirts there because we were not allowed to be at war and visiting Singapore and then flew on to Vietnam and, got into, flew into Tan Son Nhut [Saigon], where the airstrip was at Vung Tau. And it was daylight by the time we got there and I got out of the bus, got to the terminal and I got out and I thought oh god, what have I done. It was stinking

hot and a hot wind was blowing and I though oh, I’m never going to survive this and if I’d have thought quicker, I would have grabbed my bags and got back on the bus and said take me home, but I was too slow.

I’m old enough, I guess, and in case you’re wondering I’m 73. I was in my late 30s when

I went up to Vietnam. I’m old enough to still have the notion that wars can be justified and I still believe that. Certainly not on the basis, and I’m appalled at the American stance where they believe they have the right to be pre-emptive. That absolutely appals me. But I believe there were justifiable wars fought. I believe it is justifiable

for people to defend themselves and their families and their way of life, if it is threatened. And I can see that justification. I don’t believe I’m a pacifist in the sense that I could stand around with my hands by my side and say to the enemy, “Come in and take what you like.” I could probably do it because I was scared witless, but not because I believed that was the right way to go. And I believe there may well have been justification for the First World War.

There was probably justification, though a lot less, for Australian troops to go to the Second World War. We were only fighting for the Old Country, and the Old Country wasn’t too keen on doing anything for us, and wanted to expose us, at the cost of protecting themselves. As I’ve said, I believe Vietnam was for the wrong reasons and we shouldn’t have gone.

But the reality of it was that we went. And the reality of it was that people needed help and I believed that I could give them some form of that help. And I believed it also gave me the opportunity to get to know and to work with Vietnamese people, to a very limited degree, and I did that. So yes, that’s sort of where I come from.

When I went it hadn’t got to the anti-war rally stage, by any means. I don’t think anybody really liked it. I believe that the system they brought in was probably as fair as it will get. Any system that puts somebody’s life at risk is not totally fair, but if lives have to be lost,

then I think probably the system that they brought in was as fair as it could be. Some people suffered very badly because of it, some people got out very lightly because of it. So when I went, it wasn’t too bad. The postal system generally was remarkable. When you’re away from home like that, particularly in the first few months, communication with your family really

is very important. And you can post a letter on Tuesday night, anywhere in Australia, and Thursday afternoon it would be delivered in Vietnam. Absolutely incredible. Just totally efficient. So when the postal union decided that they would ban mail to and from Vietnam because they didn’t like the Vietnam War, within half an hour of it being known,

in advance, there were half a dozen stamps made, puncture posting, and every letter that went out, front and back, had puncture posting. And somebody would have been killed…Bare in mind that there was a planeload of fellows who had done their time going back every week. They would have killed somebody. They really would have. But wise heads in the postal union prevailed, and it was called off within two or three days. Because there would have been hell

to pay back here. I thought the fellows that went up there were treated abominably by people back here. In the army, out of the army, some of the rigs treated them like absolute dirt. Appalling stuff. It was possible for a bloke to be in action, not common but it was possible, for a bloke to be in action one day and in Australia the next. No debriefing, turned loose on the street.

A recipe for disaster. And they were treated appalling by a lot of people. Just to illustrate it if I can. As a result of my trip to Vietnam two years ago, I went back with the wife, I started looking for an Australian bloke who befriended a Vietnamese woman, who I met in Vietnam. And it’s all quite a story. When I started looking for him, I said, “Well, if he wants to be found, he can be.”

And I had quite a job to track him down. It was interesting story. This bloke finally surfaced and I was able to put the two of them…

She didn’t want to marry him, or anything like that, but it was interesting that she wanted to get back and know the bloke was okay. And the Vietnamese Vets network was a very good one, for doing that kind of thing.

Going up? Oh, nervous anticipation, I would guess. I mean even the regs,

even if you’ve been in action before, the next time is still an anxious occasion. I mean, anybody who says they’re not anxious or petrified is a liar, or a maniac. One of the three, and we had all of them up in Vietnam. It was nervous anticipation I would guess.

No, no. Not really. I think we all knew, basically, that Vung Tau was pretty safe. Vung Tau was recognised as the R & R [Rest and Recreation] area for the Viet Cong. And there was no doubt that hundreds of Viet Cong would come into Vung Tau. But they had their R & R and left us alone. And we knew they were there, and we were on R & R or whatever and we left them alone. I had the end room in the officers’ line, and there was a knothole there, which faced out of the camp.

And I told my mother, with great pride and with total disregard for the truth, that the Viet Cong had the co-ordinates on that knothole, and if they ever decided to belt the living daylights out of Vung Tau, that’s what they focused on, that knothole. My mother thought I was a real hero, and I never disabused her of that notion. But there was really no threat in Vung Tau. And I think that generally accepted. Even Nui Dat was generally pretty safe.

It was big. Huge, and yet it was quite small by American standards and much smaller than up in Saigon. But it was a major base for the Americans. And there were just runways all over the place, and planes coming and going, and buses transporting people here and there.

It was just like a busy airport, but all Service personnel.

I guess I was getting pretty blasé by that time. I had been around Pucka for the best part of twelve months. But my reaction was to…The sudden realisation hit me, and hit me with terrible clarity, that I had burnt all my bridges and I was stuck

in this hellhole. Hot, uncomfortable, hot winds blowing. And nobody liked me, let alone loved me. And what the hell was I doing there. And if I could have got on the bus quick enough, I would have come back home straight away. I’m no hero.

No, I suppose there was the anticipation of fitting into a new situation. I had realised

from Puckapunyal, even though it had been all pretty good there, that being a philanthropic rep marked you out as being a little different. And being a YMCA rep, it was a bit like the Sallies [Salvation Army] I suppose. You were marked down as being churchy, and churchy people did these things, but didn’t do those things, and you were very much stereotyped by certain people. For instance, the secretary of the area mess didn’t put me on the

invitation list to one of the high points when I was up there, which was a show put on by two strippers, specially imported from Saigon. I went up to him about a week before and I said, “I want to make sure my name is down on that thing.” He said, “It’s not on.” And I said, “What do you mean?” And he said, “You wouldn’t want to go?” I said, “How do you know?” And this all comes from the fact that when he arrived, a few weeks earlier,

and I met him at the mess at the happy hour, he offered to shout me a drink. “Can I buy you a beer?” I said, “I don’t drink. But I’ll have a squash, if you like.” That was one of the biggest challenges was being a teetotaller. He said, “What sort of animal are you?” And I said, “Well, I’m the kind of animal that doesn’t need to drink grog, mate. And if you’ve got a problem, you’ve got a problem.” I said, “I haven’t.” And anyhow, he didn’t buy me the drink, and decided on the basis of

being this weird individual that I wouldn’t…I only wanted to go for educational purposes. They reckoned they were going to go all the way. So then I was barred. And then I ran into the president of the mess, I knew him pretty well, which wasn’t hard. And he said, “How you going, Keith?” I said, “I’m all right, I suppose.” I said, “I’m a bit narked.” He said, “What’s wrong?” I said, “Your bloody secretary dropped me off the list for the big do.” He said, “What do you mean?”

I said, “He decided I didn’t want to go.” He said, “Do you want to go?” I said, “I do now.” He said, “I’ll ring you back in five minutes.” He rang me back in two minutes and he said, “You’re in.” In the end it would have been better if I hadn’t gone, because it was a complete and utter farce and letdown. But that was the kind of attitudes that as a churchy person you had to battle with, and they were the biggest challenges very often. Sometimes it was there out of respect,

and sometimes it was there out of contempt or derision, if you like. I think most people respected what I was doing, but being churchy obviously made me a bit suss.

I had been a total lifelong teetotaller, which was a result of my childhood. My mother’s parents lived in an inner suburb of Melbourne,

all part of the Depression era, of course, and being the dutiful grandson I had to go and spend time with my grandparents. Which was a real challenge, because we didn’t play cards, we didn’t do anything on Sunday. Not that I was really into cards, but we did nothing. Sunday was for sitting around and imagining how good you were, or something. But to go for a walk, you had to go past a pub at least every two corners.

(UNCLEAR), all the derros who were passed out in the gutter, on the footpath, propped up against the pub and I just said to myself, “My God, if that’s what beer does to you. It’s not for me.” So I’ve never had the slightest inclination to drink. I can be stupid enough without it.

The bloke I was replacing came and picked me up and took me back. So he filled me in and gave me a quick intro on the way back.

Mainly what a good job he had been doing. Just the relevant things that I needed to know. That’s where this is and that’s where that is.

Most of which went in one year and out the other, and I then had to learn for myself, which is the way most of us learn, anyhow. It was useful. I had a week with him.

Rather suss, it would have to be said. He was an interesting individual. He had no YMCA background. He was reputed to have had a revolver and lost it, and talked his way out of it. The army weren’t terribly keen on him.

They were very glad to get rid of him. They might have been glad to get rid of me, but I think for slightly different reasons. He was a bit of a wild cannon, and I’m not saying he didn’t do some good work. Things were up and running when I got there. But I did have the background of being a professional recreation officer. So I had a wider range of skills and knowledge and so forth to fall back on. But

he did a lot of good work. I would not take that at all away from him. But he certainly was a loose cannon and at times one was inclined to think the risks outweighed the benefits.

I would expect that his own church background was fairly minimal. And he probably didn’t have any problems disabusing

people of the notion. An awful lot of people, anyhow, carry that notion that if you’re YMCA, then you’re churchy.

The town itself, fairly dramatic, actually. The first one I remember was when I drove in on my own. Up to when I went there, my predecessor, the YMCA had had to supply him with a vehicle.

For some reason or another that wasn’t available. It was going back. And the army said, “Well, you’ll have to get another one.” I said, “That’s absolutely ridiculous. We don’t know how long this is going on. We haven’t got the money. I’m sure if you’re anything like Puckapunyal, you’ve got vehicles which you can lend me when I need them.” So they fairly reluctantly agreed to provide me with a vehicle, insisting that I have a driver. It wasn’t hard to get around that. And a bloke riding shotgun. It wasn’t hard around to get around that, either.

I’d ring up and I would say I need to get a vehicle out of the pool. (UNCLEAR) I always used to go in on my own. If we were going up to the Dato, round the jungle, I would take the requisite driver and shotgun, but I would say, “Bring your cameras, and take some photographs. I will do the driving.” And it worked out pretty well. But I drove in this afternoon, and it was still in the wet season, which is the opposite time to ours, and I drove up to this corner and they had a civilian policeman.

They were called ‘white mice’ because they had white helmets and big white straps across them. In the middle, and they had one on each corner. The bloke in the middle controlled all the traffic by blowing a whistle and pointing. And if he said, “Stop!” you were meant to stop, so I discovered. Because the bloke in front of me thought he would keep going, and the bloke on one of the corners just pulled out a revolver and shot him. And they said,

“Keith, remember. When you get to a corner and they say ‘Stop!’ Stop.” So it was a fairly dramatic introduction, done by your friends. And they would have shot anybody up there. We had another incident with this Korean bloke, who would have shot me had I not, on the third occasion, obeyed what he was telling me to do. So life was pretty cheap. And for the Vietnamese, generally, I think that life was pretty cheap, except that if somebody from the free world forces knocked over somebody and hurt them or killed them,

they knew to the dollar how much they could extract from the Americans in reparation. They were fairly commercial. I saw it, a body lying on the side of the road, and all they were haggling about was how much they were going to get paid for it. But Vung Tau was then a reasonable size, had been a tourist resort, holiday resort. There was a Presidential Summer Palace on the outskirts, which was one of the things I used to take people to.

And which was still there two years ago. A bit like any comparatively small Asian town. Fairly narrow streets. Not particularly pre-possessing, not terribly rundown. In the middle, somewhere between decay and whatever.

Appalling standards of hygiene. Fanatical standards of

cleanliness, and how they managed to keep the two quite as separate as they did, I don’t know. But I’ve seen Vietnamese people pull up at a roadside puddle and have a wash, because they were dusty from riding their bikes, or their two stroke motorbikes, and yet I’ve seen kids walking around with no backside in their pants so they just defecated while they were walking around. And nobody thought anything about it. I’ve seen them defecate and urinate in

what I presume is their water supply in front of their houses. Very small damn type thing. They must have had incredible resistance and immunity to germs. I was told never to eat Vietnamese food, until you’ve seen it being boiled to the point where all the germs must have been killed. I think on only two occasion in Saigon did I go to a public restaurant because people said,

“These are okay.” Their meat, their fish, hung in the markets, out in the open, covered in flies. You would have said they were living in the Dark Ages. Just a total disregard for health and hygiene. It really was an appalling business. And they used to make, from the French era,

delightful looking white rolls. But they were called…essentially eat one of these and you will get dysentery because

of the lack of hygiene in the preparation. People wouldn’t wash their hands. So if you had any sense…Except for two occasions. I ate no Vietnamese food. I ate American food. Which is killed the other way. They have a complete obsession with killing anything natural, and maltreating it. It used to come out…There was a slab of turkey lying on a plate which would defy you to eat it, and generally won. So there were all those sort of things.

All the normal ones, for typhoid, whatever. At one stage we were taking fifteen tablets a day to control various forms of malaria, and other things. You used to rattle. You’d take these damn things and you would rattle. Until, incredibly, a bloke died from a form

of malaria and the incidence of getting it was one in fifteen thousand, and some brain in the system said, “Well, okay, that bloke died. So people won’t need to take it for so long.” So we reduced our intake by a couple of tablets a day, which is just incredible. They were pretty good. The health system we had was generally pretty good. We used to have to take, they called them Happy Pills.

You started taking them a week before you came home. That’s why they were Happy Pills, you’re on the rundown to coming home. But you weren’t supposed to drink. And of course most of the blokes did. It made them very uncomfortable to say the least. It made a lot of them quite ill, they weren’t compatible. The system generally was pretty good. They had a vested interest in keeping people active.

It covered a fair area, with all those things in an army camp - a signals area, an ordnance area, a maintenance area, and whatever else. I was loosely attached to the headquarter transport company. The vehicle pool was near us.

The natural sand dunes there…Now having read about what the first blokes put up with, life was pretty good by the time I got there because the roads were sealed and there was a lot of grass on the sand dunes. The sand problem was minimised. It didn’t go away. You used to have to sweep your bed out every night because of the sand that had blown in during the day, during the dry season. But in the early days it must have been rough,

when they were just on sand. And our lines, they had just pretty basic lines, half a dozen, ten rooms to a row, no windows, just open spaces. We didn’t have fly screens. We had wooden shutters to close down. You had to wear long sleeve shirts from sunset

until you got into buildings. I don’t know how they trained the mosquitoes, but the mosquitoes weren’t supposed to bite you once you got under cover. But you were fair game in between. So you had to go through this farce of putting on this long sleeve shirt to go up the mess, then roll your sleeves up when you got inside.

Yeah, that was three or four ks away, I guess.

They had a PX [Postal Exchange] there, an American canteen. And our own was fairly limited. So if you really wanted to get a broader range, you would go across and into the Yankee base and you could get stuff there. Although, it still didn’t get me out of trouble. My youngest daughter turned nine while I was away, and I scoured Vung Tau and those places for a nine year old’s birthday card. They didn’t have one.

They had a six year old card, so I spent a tremendous amount of ingenuity, in telling her why I brought a six year old card. Anybody can have a nine year old card. She wrote back and said, “Dad, it’s not right. I am nine.” I was put in my place. We started off writing letters, but it was obvious that the kids, they were twelve to six,

when I went away, and it was obvious that not even the oldest ones….The eldest daughter would have written reasonably. The eldest son used to say, “Hello Dad. Hope you’re well. Love Steve.” So we went onto voice tapes, so I would make a tape every week and send it home and they would tape over it and send it back. So I would have information coming in.

And that was really wonderful. It kept me up to where the kids were. And what we called that, I used to take the tape, the battery operated tape recorder, and I would sit that on the seat beside me, a bit like talking on a mobile phone these days. As I would drive along, if I saw something interesting, I would turn the thing on and I’d talk about it. And if you drove past the American base, between it and the ocean, when the wind was blowing away from the base, it was okay.

If you drove fast, when the wind was blowing in and the tide was out, then all the effluent was discharged into the thing, so it got a bit oddiferous to say the least. I was driving past and I mentioned it and went “Pffwwww!” mentioned it briefly and went on. And the youngest son who was six at the time, on the next tape, said to me, he said, “Dad, you don’t have to worry about those smells. Everybody does it. I find the best thing is to just

wave the door a few times.” He thought I’d let fly when I was in the toilet. It was magic. You could just keep up with where the kids were. We were sort of worried about filling out the tape, but with my youngest daughter, who’s now living in Darwin, talking has never been a problem. And Pat would find about five minutes at the end of it. Megan would bring her friends home and…oh, the rubbish I had to listen to. But it really kept me up with where the kids were.

I lost touch with the eldest girl. She became a teenager for whatever that’s worth, and she had matured to an extent that none of the others had. And it took me some hard work to get back…Because she had made a fairly dramatic change while I was away. The corresponding was good. It was great.

Much better than the Americans. When I was on R & R in Hong Kong, I spent some time with a group of Americans, and from what I learned from them, and other people….People said that up to ninety percent of the combat Americans were stoned, under the influence of drugs, when they went out on missions.

And there are these shots, if you can believe it. They would walk up the middle of a track with a ghetto blaster going and wonder why the hell they got shot up. And they accused our blokes of being careless, because they went through the jungle, on the sides. And they lived, by and large. The American morale was obviously very suss. They didn’t want to be there, and they were copping huge losses. They were poorly trained soldiers anyhow, as far as I can understand. It was a lot better with the Australians,

but very few of them wanted to be there. Fifty percent of them were nashos, who didn’t want to be there. The regs didn’t have an argument, but it was part of your duty. You joined the army, that’s the risk you took. The nashos had a much stronger argument. But politics said that exactly fifty percent, in country, were nashos. And I struck all sorts of attitude amongst them. From blokes who would never fire a shot.

Never fire a shot, because they weren’t going to take life, even if they ran the risk of losing their own. The people who fired shots, backwards at their officers, whom they didn’t like. I know of at least one incident, when I was there, where one bloke up at the Dat threw a fragmentary grenade into

his company lieuie’s tent, and it didn’t go off, fortunately. And I believe that happened more than once. (UNCLEAR) quite a few officers up there, up to major ranks, who had little regard for the lives of their blokes and made it quite well known that they were up there to advance their career, and get medals if they could, whatever the cost. And they would mount missions

and send people out when it wasn’t justified, and send them into situations which were risky and unnecessary for them to be sent into. So, you know, there were good officers, there were lousy officers. My general observation was that the best officers were the blokes who did what they called a ‘knife and fork’ course. They’d come up through the ranks and been non-commissioned officers

and did the knife and fork course and became officers. And they were good, because they came up through the ranks and they knew what it was like. The blokes that go through Canberra? Many of them were not good officers because they didn’t understand the psyche of their troops, and they could not identify with them. If they had any sense, they looked to the NCOs to run their unit for them. But a lot of them didn’t have that sense. And there were some very bad officers of up there.

Many of them, of all ranks, drank excessively, and would have become alcoholics. It was ten cents a can of beer up there, and they were well paid, so that they could buy an awful lot of grog, if they wanted to. And legend would have it that one of the brigadier generals who was in charge of the whole thing up there, the Task Force at Nui Dat, used to be drunk by ten thirty in the morning and would get on the radio

and tell the Viet Cong all they wanted to know about the missions for the day. I don’t know how true it was. But that was a pretty common talk, while I was up there.

Just to do what I could, which would be an attractive alternative to doing that.

And one of my predecessors had started it, but I think it built up a fair bit with me. My most glorious day was when I had three three ton trucks and two or three Landrovers, did a convoy up the road. And on Sunday afternoons, we used to have cultural tours. Being quite honest, my prime objective was to get fellows out of the boozer, because nobody worked. The army could have wiped us out on a Sunday afternoon.

To get them out of the boozer, to give them an alternative. And it really was just about as simple as that. I was talking to a fellow one day. We had been to a Buddhist temple. When he came out he said, “For the first time, I’m beginning to realise that these people aren’t second class nongs. That they’ve got a very rich culture.” So I started sussing around, and asking around a bit, and it was amazing how many peoples’ attitudes

towards those things changed. Mind you, the charm of the trips was also in the fact that I discovered towards the end that I was mostly off limits and that we shouldn’t have been there. On one occasion, I happened to have the hospital’s anaesthetist with me, and they had every provo on duty scouring Vung Tau looking for the anaesthetist and they couldn’t find him, because we were in the wrong place. I don’t think he told them, anybody where we were. And nobody ever said to me, “You’re a naughty boy.” On another notable occasion,

I’m pretty sure we drove into a Viet Cong sympathiser’s village and they were all these big tall fellows wanting a game of volleyball. I began to get a very uncomfortable feeling about it. I said to the fellows, “Look, I don’t care how you do it, but lose this and lose it quick and get onto the truck. Straightaway.” I said, “I don’t like this place. There’s something wrong.” So they got absolutely thrashed to hell and we jumped into the vehicles.

I think we had about three vehicles that day, and off we went. There was this other value. And it was highlighted only two years ago, when I went to a National Service Military Reunion and I met up with seven fellows who had been up there in ’68. I introduced myself and said, “I was the Y bloke here at Pucka, then up in Vietnam.” This bloke said,

“You used to run those photographic tours.” He said, “Geez, they were good. They weren’t just interesting places. I learned an awful lot about the Vietnamese people and their culture.” And they all said, “Yeah, that’s right.” So it turned out to be a much more valuable exercise than I thought. And quite valuable from the point of view of changing peoples’ attitudes. I also made an ill-fated attempt to teach Vietnamese people English and to learn Vietnamese from them.

I’m not sure who learned the least. But I didn’t learn a great deal of Vietnamese and I’m not sure their English improved a great deal. It was in an orphanage, and I did go, right throughout the whole time I was there, there was two or three orphanages scattered around the place. And you saw some appalling results of war. Napalm, grenades, mines. Just appalling stuff, what they’ve done to the kids.

I can’t normally stand drunks, and yet, funnily enough, I worked with substance abuse with Aboriginal people and grog was the main problem. I couldn’t tolerate

drunken behaviour in the mess, for arguments sake. When they started being as stupid as only officers can be…It’s probably unfair to say that, but they certainly can be stupid, I would walk out. There was an unwritten rule that people didn’t come into a hut, my hut, the Y hut, sufficiently the worse for wear to be the problem. I didn’t mind if they were coming in and they’d had a few drinks, if they were happy.

But they got drummed out by the other blokes. The other fellows wouldn’t stand it. I never had to come on heavy with anyone myself. It was recognised that in there you played up to certain standards. And that was good. That made life pretty easy for me.

We were given ranks. Philanthropic officers were given ranks so that the army could live with you. The army has got to have a rank structure. So people who knew what it was all about, it didn’t really mean anything. They had to do very little for you, except that when you were away on Service, like I was in Vietnam, they kitted you out and they fed you and they looked after you.

They did a lot less back on home soil. So they had to do very little with you, and I very quickly learnt that it was the NCOs [Non Commissioned Officer] that run the army, and if you wanted to get on and get anything, you got on well with the NCOs. And I could get anything, because I worked very hard. I wasn’t putting on an act. I found most of them easy to get on with. But the ones I didn’t like, I thought ‘Well, in the course I’ll get on with them anyhow.’

And because I did, because I treated them as individuals, I could get anything, because people knew that what I’d get I wasn’t getting for myself, it was going for the job. So, like I mentioned earlier about tucker for the messes, for my operation out on bivouac in the ranges. People gave it to me without question because they knew it was going to be used within the system. I belonged to the area officer’s mess, and as such, I was sort of expected to go to mess functions.

I did on occasion pull out, because I said to the mess president, “I’ve got to work, and I can’t get anyone to cover. And I don’t believe my operation should close down so I can come up here an enjoy myself.” If I could get someone to cover, then that was fine, and I generally could. If I didn’t want to go, and that was another matter, I could never get anyone to give me a hand, so I couldn’t go. And generally I was treated very well.

There was this little bit of reserve because I was obviously churchy. I’d have to be, if I was YMCA. There was the one extreme example of the fellow who couldn’t cope with me because I didn’t drink. But generally people treated me very well. On your farewell, it was traditional to scull, not a yard glass, but something else. And I said,

“Look, I have never drunk in my life, and I am not going to start. With all due respect, I’m not going to start now. I would be negating my principle.” They said, “Would you do it with Coke? It looks the same.” I said, “Fine.” And at these functions I used to have Coke. So generally we managed to find a way around it. It was not

known, really, for officers to be invited into other ranks’ messes. I was invited into the sergeants’ mess, and that was generally taboo to anyone, except sergeants. But I was invited in.

When I was in Vietnam, at one stage, a group of Servicemen came to me, from Headquarter Company. All nashos. And they asked me to check out the content and structure of a letter. And I was appalled when I started to read it, because

it was virtually declaring an act of mutiny. They were going to refuse to work under their OC any longer, with lots of good reasons. It just wasn’t on. They couldn’t do it. So I said to them, “Look, would you give me half an hour? And I’ll see if I can get around this.” So they said, “Fine.” So I got on the phone as soon as they’d gone, and I rang the CO and I said, “For reasons fairly urgent, sir, can I come up and see you about something?” He said, “It’s urgent, is it?” I said, “Yes, I think it is.

I’ve got half an hour to sort something out.” So he said, “Right.” So I went up. I didn’t give him the letter, but I told him the contents of the letter. I said, “I’ve got to protect these blokes.” And he said, “What company? I’m not interested in getting the blokes. I think I could guess.” So I told him and he got on the phone and he sorted it out in about ten seconds flat. So I was able to go back down and tell the fellows, “Look, there is absolutely no need to do anything. You’ll find it’s been sorted out.”

And so it was. So that was a fairly rare example, I would think. But it was the kind of thing that could happen because you were remote from things, you were outside them, but if you were accepted by people you were able to play a fairly important role.

Oh, they were just refusing, virtually, to work under that captain major any longer. Because he really was totally

incompetent. He never should have been allowed out of Russell Hill. He never should have got into Russell Hill, I guess. But he was totally incompetent and not coping with the situation. He was an absolute disaster. He could write routine orders of the gravity that henceforth it shall no longer be valid for ORs [Other Ranks] to clean their teeth while having a shower. He could trot those out a dozen a day, and they’d go around the camp and be the joke for the day. But if a refrigerator broke down, which was part of his responsibility,

it would take him a couple of days of dithering before finally getting onto the phone to the Yanks and telling them we need another fridge, which could have been done in the first five minutes. So he really was totally incompetent. And I think anybody would have found it impossible to work under him.

I honestly couldn’t tell you.

I would protect him of course, but I would have no idea. He was just that type of man who sort of registered with me, and I guess with most people. He was a non-entity, but a dangerously incompetent one. One would hope not too common in the army.

No. He had been a desk jockey at Russell Hill, in Canberra, probably for many years, because that was where he could do the least damage.

And somehow or the other, he got up to Vietnam, because that was a fairly important career move. But no, he only dealt with basic support structure. And his NCOs, his other officers would virtually do most of that. It was a transport company. That was his prime responsibility. But he also looked after things like refrigeration and things like that.

I guess the good old Peter principle. You get promoted until you get to the point of incompetence. I thought he got past it, actually. But I suppose he was a Duntroon graduate. He certainly couldn’t have worked his way up through the ranks at all, because he had no authority at all. A good officer will work because they’ve got something in them that will get people to respect them and obey them. He had absolutely nothing,

and the only authority he had was his three pips on his shoulder, and they didn’t do him a great deal of good.

Well, I couldn’t wait for my predecessor to go, actually, because I wanted to get into it, and get going,

and do things. We were only fiddling around while there were the two of us. He was only there for a few days, and that is not being disrespectful to him. But as soon as was gone, I got stuck into the routine. I just kept things going until I thought they could be done without, or done better, or replaced with something else that was more important. I didn’t make a lot of changes. Lost a few programs. The army seems to have a genius at times for letting you do something until they decide they can do it better, then they take it over.

And if I was being cynical, I would say that was when they stuff it up. But that’s not totally true. But there was always plenty to do, because our charter was pretty wide. I was always looking for ways, and people were always coming and suggesting, asking if we could do something. So that you always had any amount of work to do. I think on a fairly realistic assessment, I and people like me, would have worked probably the longest hours

of anyone up there. I was working from eight o’ clock in the morning until at least ten thirty, eleven at night. And after the troopies had gone to bed, about ten thirty I think lights out was, it was surprising how often some of the officers would come in. They would wait until the boys were out of the road and then they would come in. And I would be talking to them, anything up to half past twelve, one o’ clock, and then back

on deck at eight o’ clock the next morning, and that was seven days a week. So it was pretty tough going. I had three breaks, I guess. I had R & R [Rest and Recreation] in Hong Kong for five days. I decided on the basis of talking to other people that it was not a good thing to come home. Because the kids had unrealistic expectations. They hadn’t really realised when you left that you weren’t coming back tomorrow night. And when you came back, they hadn’t realised the fact that you were going to go back again in four days time.

So a lot of blokes said, “Look, it really was absolute hell. It’s just not worth it.” So I discussed it with my wife and decided I would go and see the world on the system. So I went to Hong Kong. And I had two trips to Malaysia, to Penang, courtesy of the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force]. And I went down and acquired a lot of stuff to use in my operation. Recreational stuff like paint by number kits and books and all sorts

of recreational stuff that I couldn’t get sent to me in reasonably good time from Australia. It was much quicker to go to Penang and get it back from there. So those were the only breaks I had. Apart from that, as I say, it was a seven days a week job.

I thought they were tremendous. I slept in. I was treated like a lord. Particularly down in Penang. I hired a becak, I think, tricycle things. And I’m sure it was all over

Penang in a couple of hours that Captain Williams was down from Vietnam to spend big money. So I was galloping around getting stuff. On the second trip down, the CO called me up into his office and he said, “Look, Keith. I’m going in about a month’s time. I would like to get a couple of port decanters for the mess. They haven’t got any. Do you reckon you could get me some when you go to Penang?” I said, “Yes.”

I had no idea what a port decanter was, but I thought I would find out. So off we went. I did all my other shopping and I said to Henry, “Henry, I want to buy these…” because I found out what they were, “I want to buy these bottles for putting wine in. They call them decanters.” So we went everywhere. Certainly all the places where Henry had a franchise. And it was grocery shops and it was cutlery, it was everything, but we just got absolutely nowhere. And we called into one girlie bar, and

we didn’t do any good there. Then he said, “I know, Captain.” And off he went, peddled out of town and disappeared down this street. All the houses had great high fences, and the fences were made out of quarter inch steel plate, and all the gates had those little mystery eyeholes in them. I thought ‘You could disappear here, Keith, and never come out of it and nobody would know where you were.’ So he knocked on the door, mumble mumble, we went inside. I said, “What are we doing

in here, Henry? This doesn’t look…” “Oh Captain, my friend coming. He be here in a minute.” And then after a bit, I said, “C’mon Henry….” He said, “Would Captain like a blue movie?” And I said, “No Captain doesn’t want a blue movie, he wants port decanters.” Ten minutes later. “C’mon Henry.” “No, Captain. Would you like a blue boy?” I said, “No, I don’t want a blue boy. I want two port decanters. If you can’t produce them, let’s go.” So we finally left without them. And then we called in at the girlie bar on the way back. I don’t know what had happened in the meantime,

but he went in and came out with the bloke. And the bloke said, “Is this what you are looking for?” Two crystal, good quality port decanters. And I said, “How much?” “Four American dollars.” For the two. Which I thought was an extremely good buy. So I went back to the CO and said, “The good news is I’ve got them, sir, but the bad news is they got cost a fair bit.” He said, “How much do they cost?” “Four US dollars to you.” So I didn’t do myself any harm at all, except that he was going home in a couple of week’s time. But that is all in the work of a philanthropic representative.

I was right on the limit. I would find if I went past about half past twelve, I think it was, I was absolutely shot the next day. If I could turn the light out by half past twelve, I could cope. But if I went that five minutes past, I just collapsed in a heap. I really was

working on the edge. But it was worth it. I believed what I was doing was worthwhile, so I made it.

With some difficulty. I can’t remember now, but I guess you do. You try and minimise your important contacts and just get on and get things done, keep going until you can go to bed again and catch up.

Well, they came to me at that time because I was outside the system, and they knew it. And I was obviously trusted by the majority of the people, at least. They came to me after lights out for the troops, which meant they could come to me without being seen and identified and having all sorts of stupid rumours being made, started. They could

come around and talk and just let their hair down. And they knew it was safe with me.

It wasn’t officers in particular. It was officers in particular at that hour of the night. I used to have people coming in all day and everyday. There wouldn’t be a day but someone would come in from either Vung Tau or either up at the ‘Dat

who had been through Puckapunyal when I was there. And we’d have a great reunion and they’d say just how valuable the Y had been to them there, and they were absolutely over the moon to find out there was another one up in Vietnam. I had a set-up where it was easy for blokes to start talking, and they would. At times it created problems….never with the chaplains, they were envious, but

sometimes with the army company welfare officers. It put a few noses out of joint. Because they were supposed to do it, and it was a bit of an irritant to say the least that people were coming to me. I often had to go back to companies to sort things out. Not always, but quite often it would happen.

Tell me straight out, they didn’t think I should be doing it. And I said,

“Well, if you were providing what they wanted, they would come to you and not to me. And I can’t do anything about that. If they come to me, I am going to help them. If I can steer them in your direction and I believe you will do the job, then I will do that.” I’m not looking for work, but if people come to me I’m not going to turn them away.

I had a sort of an office off to one side of the hut that I was in, but that was wide open. It had to be, because if I was on my own, I had to see if people came in. and see what they wanted and try to attend to their needs. So I was very accessible. I could be seen. And I didn’t have barriers that people couldn’t come behind. There was none of that. And in any case, if there were people floating around, I spent a lot of my time just going out there, talking to them.

If it seemed that kind of session I would. It wouldn’t have been totally private, even then. If I felt it needed it, I would do that.

All the issues that people bring up. There’s one that I can tell you in reverse,

because it affected me when I was at Puckapunyal, but my successor up there, got in touch with me through the signals people, and said to me he was seeing a fellow up there who’s wife who was at Puckapunyal, was coping very badly. She had psychological problems and she, I think, had threatened suicide. And he was really worried about her. And he was in the process of getting permission to come back

to Australia, because she just couldn’t cope. It was going to happen. Typical army wise and that sort of thing, it took some time to organise. And he asked me to call around and see her. So I worked out that the house was on the way to my home, between my home and the hut, and I sort of drove past it on my way home for tea, and said, “Oh yeah, that’s where it is.” And when I was talking about going back after tea….I pulled up, and for some reason, which I have no idea of, I didn’t pull up

right in front of the house, so I had to walk across the lawn. And I stepped up onto the veranda, and just as I stepped up onto the veranda, the veranda light popped and flashed and went out, and I kicked the milk bottles over. Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, crashing glass everywhere. So it was a hell of an introduction. So I knocked on the door and there was no answer. And this went on for two or three

minutes. So I thought ‘She’s obviously not going to open the door at night.’ So I said, “Look, I will come back tomorrow at half past one.” So when I walked off the veranda I kicked the remaining milk bottles over. I did a really good job. If you’re going to do a job, you might as well do it properly. So I got off the thing, and disappeared around the corner to the car. So that was all right. The next day after lunch, I was going back down to my hut, and I called in

to see the provos, the military police, for some reason or another. I was talking to them for a few minutes and some bloke looked at his watch and said, “Oh, we’ll have to go. We’re just going up to nab a pervert.” For some reason or another, I twigged, I said, “Don’t bother. I surrender.” He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “I’ll bet it’s such and such an address.” He said, “Yeah. What’s the story?” And I told him. And she had been on the other side of the door with a

loaded double barrel shotgun. And had I not moved when I did, I would not be telling you this story now. But that’s the kind of thing, the reverse part of it. The husband had tremendous personal problems with his wife. He needed something done. The fact that there was a Y rep here and a Y rep there, made it a lot easier for it to happen. But you can get all those sort of things. They’re people, they have people problems.

I think probably the main one was boredom. They were bored. Particularly the fellows at Vung Tau. I have one fellow in particular who comes to mind. He was obviously a very clever fellow. And he had gone as far as university in England. He was a petroleum oil expert, and he said that he had been at a posting

at Vic Barracks in Melbourne, and he heard that he was going up. He said that he was bored out of his brain back in Australia and thought ‘Oh great, I’m going up to the war zone. Up to the sharp end. This will justify all my training.’ “Honest to God,” he said, “I could do what I do up here, from an office, half a day a week in Melbourne.” He said, “I am just so bored.” And he was a slightly extreme case, but over and over the officers would

be bored. The highlight of one bloke’s day was to get the stock exchange figures morning and night for the CO. They all played the shares. Everyone. Every officer I knew up there played the share market. And their prime matter of interest of the day, at the start and finish of the day, the position of the stock market at those times. That’s how occupied, or unoccupied, they were.

Just a terrible waste of manpower. And yet, I suppose, it has to happen. I’ve had it to me, and in my observation it’s largely true, that the armed services are ninety percent waiting and ten percent action. And the ninety percent waiting can be terribly monotonous and depressing.

Well, what you can try and do is to find him some interesting, meaningful if possible, alternatives.

Recreational pursuits, educational challenges or whatever. Just try and find something that will occupy them and fill those gaps. And also be flexible enough to fit in when their real commitments come along.

I suppose their issues were generally simpler, but I think additional problem was

the troops during the Vietnam War would have had the highest level of education, taken across the average, of any conflict Australia has been involved in. Because of the system, there were a very high number of university graduates involved, as diggers. And they were bored stiff. They were the ones that came to me, talking mutiny.

Because they were so bored. It was obviously made worse by their OC’s incompetence. But they were just bored, and the stupid, meaningless things, to them, that they were given to do to fill in their time, were just soul-destroying, for them. And that is just a huge problem that the army has. I think there are probably ways they could alleviate…and to some extent they already do, but I think

they could be involved in civilian projects, doing roads servicing outlying communities. Where they are practising their skills and they’re utilising their skills, and they’re not just polishing the OC’s car up for the twentieth time that week. If you give people meaningful things to do, they’re not bored.

Oh yes. Quite often.

Blokes who would have just a couple of days R & R would come down from Nui Dat. There was the Peter Badcoe Club they could stay in. If they had any connection, and a tremendous number of them had had any connection with the YMCA back at Pucka, the first thing they would look for was to come into my hut when they came down. And they often would talk to me about their fears, their frustrations,

the problems that they had. I had at least one fellow tell me that if his platoon commander got in front of him, that he would not walk away, because he treated his men so badly. And he was looking for an opportunity to take this bloke out. They didn’t all do that, and very few of them said it. But certainly some said it, and I would have little doubt that some tried to do it, and perhaps possibly got away with it.

I would just try and talk them through it, and try and get them to see the fact that it was a pretty drastic thing to do, and it could have very bad consequences for them. Apart from the other bloke involved. Just try and get down to a common sense level. While appreciating the fact that they’ve probably got fairly good grounds for where they’ve been taken.

But that still doesn’t excuse them doing anything like that.

Oh, I had very little of that. Very little of that. They wouldn’t talk about it very much. They hadn’t come down to Vung Tau to talk about that. And it was often taken as a sign of weakness if you

whinged about things like that, particularly with SAS, the Special Air Service blokes. They were rather rugged. You would have fellows almost literally going around with a broken arm or a broken arm, and they wouldn’t say anything, because if you complained of being injured, you were a wimp. Totally and utterly stupid. But that’s the kind of ethos they had. Mind you, they were top class soldiers.

One of my trips to Penang I flew down with a squadron of SAS blokes. And I was able to help their lieuie do some shopping at better prices then he’d have got. And he talked quite a bit and talked about the debt they owed the RAAF crews and the choppers because of the risks they took to get them. He told me about conditions that I wouldn’t have liked to have been in.

But I wasn’t a professional soldier, they were.

Not a lot that comes to mind, at the moment. I guess they probably would tend to keep that sort of thing to themselves,

particularly if they hadn’t done anything. And even if they were thinking of it, it was probably better kept to themselves. Unless they saw some hope of being talked out of it. And that didn’t happen to me a great deal.

Basically, just very relaxed. Listen, while they got out what they needed to get out,

and then just to talk around it. It wasn’t a matter of talking people out of things so much as just getting them to look at the possibilities of the situation, and decide what way, or the alternative way that they could do things, rather than perhaps the way they had in mind when they came. Perhaps they had no outlook in mind, they were just faced with a problem they couldn’t see a way out of.

Not very much. I tended to use my personality and the kind of person that I am as my main weapon, so that I would do things and say things that, strictly speaking, were not good things to do or say. But because it was me, my personality coming out, they were acceptable and I would hope, useful.

That’s the way I’ve always operated.

By saying what you meant, and meaning what you say. Being honest. Pretty simple, really.

You wouldn’t know with many of

them. But I had a classic instance, only last year. I was down in Melbourne, and I met with some ex-YMCA staff. One of whom had relieved for me for two or three weeks while I went up to Indonesia for a conference up there. Every couple of days a tray about this size of goodies, you know, the works, cakes, scones,

all nice stuff, was being delivered from the sergeant’s mess. And John thought ‘God, what racket has Williams got set up here? What have I got myself in for? When is the crunch going to come?’ So he thought he better find out and put an end to it as quickly as it could, if it was bad. And knowing me, it was bound to be bad, he thought. So he went over to the sergeant’s mess and saw the head chef, sergeant. And he said,

“What’s the go with this tray of stuff coming over?” And the bloke said, “Well, I was in Vietnam, a year or two back.” And he said, “The bloke that was up there, Keith Williams, did something for me. He helped me out about what was to me a very serious problem.” He said, “He just saved me. And this is my way of showing appreciation.” And I only heard that thirty years later. So don’t ask me who the bloke was and don’t ask me what I did, because I have no idea.

And I would have done nothing more for him than I’d have done for anyone. Or anyone in my position would have done. I have absolutely no idea. But it helped that bloke, at that time, that point of need, when he had a crisis on his hands, and that was his way of showing his appreciation. I guess the fact that I could go into messes anywhere, particularly at Pucka, and I could get anything. If they had it, they would give it to me. Because they knew that it was not being ripped off.

They knew that it was going back to the blokes who were entitled to have it.

I might have been a father figure, ay? It worked to my advantage, certainly rather than my disadvantage. Although I’m told I look a lot younger than I am, and in those days I didn’t have a beard, and my family tells me if I didn’t have a beard I would look about fifty now, so I probably looked not that much

older than them, really. I probably looked like, perhaps, very early 30s. I looked a little bit older, which would have given me a bit of rank, if you like. And perhaps an expectation that perhaps I had been around and that I would be able to help them. So it was never a disadvantage. I wasn’t required to do the physical work they did. Having said that, I was probably as fit as anyone else up there because I used to go running everyday.

I had a dampner put on it one day when I went to go running up the beach, and I wanted to go past the Korean camp, and one little man with his rifle sort of pointed out the fact that it was not a good place to go. I ignored him twice and the third time he looked really serious about pulling the trigger, so I thought I really didn’t want to go up there anyhow. So I turned around and ran back. But I was fit and I would still be fitter at my age now, than most people half my age. I’ve been very lucky, I’ve got a

very good constitution and that helps. But I was sort of outside the normal rigmarole of things. I guess, as I say, my age and so forth probably would have given me a bit of standing that helped people to have confidence. And I guess I’m a fairly good listener, mostly, and people would sense that. I think they’d find out pretty quickly whether you’re going to listen or not. And they would take it from there.

Not as much as you might have thought. I certainly had people who told me, some, not many, that they could not kill people, and that they were not going to kill people. And that they would go into action with their rifles loaded, and everything, but they never aimed at people.

I don’t know how I would be in that kind... I don’t think people, at that stage, talked about it. Unless it’s really getting to them, and I guess at that stage, you’re encouraged to do it, it’s legal, so to a fair extent that you could accept it and take it on board and go ahead and do it. It was a job that you had to do. The problems with those sort of things, I think very much tended to come afterwards,

when people would come home. And particularly because the Vietnam War more than all others that we’ve been involved with, became a very unpopular war, and everyone, regardless of whether they wanted to be there or not, were treated very badly. By the army, by civilians, when they got back here. That’s when a lot of fellows unravelled and developed all sorts of tremendous psychological, psychiatric problems.

I used to go down to the field hospital, this was at Vung Tau, and some of the fellows down there. They really would have been better off dead. It was an ironic tragedy, if that’s not a tautology, that they could rescue people that had been badly wounded and have them on the operating theatre within twenty minutes of being hit. Now

most of those blokes would have died, in any other conflict. They wouldn’t have survived and they wouldn’t have come back less than half a person, with half their insides gone, or legs, arms….There were some terribly wounded blokes. They were mangled by booby traps. I went back to Vietnam, a couple of years ago, to see if anybody was still after me. And we went to a place near the Cu Chi

Tunnels. And they had a whole lot of booby traps that the Vietnamese troops had made up. And it was explained that the whole purpose of them was not to kill people. It was to injure people, sufficiently badly to require two people to take them out of the action. So that they then effectively disabled three people. Now the mere fact that the people they injured were horribly injured…just absolutely macabre

contraptions that they made up, was beside the point the point. They were pretty terrible things.

It’s not the most pleasant thing. It depends, I guess, upon him. I suppose Vietnam was where I learned most of it, but I mean up there seeing people standing on street corners

with rifles and revolvers. And carrying weapons with them and being injured, in the hospital and that sort of thing. It almost became a daily thing, and part of the routine, so you tended to accept it as such. And even death was something that you knew….I didn’t know too many people up there that were killed. I wasn’t up the sharp end, I didn’t see a lot of that. There was one incident at Vung Tau, a bloke was shot accidentally.

And that shattered everybody, because it should never have happened. Had it happened when it should have happened, it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as bad. It sounds callous, I suppose, to say it. But because it was part of the job, you tend to accept it at the time and by and large get on with living. Because that’s what you have to do. The tragedy of it with those blokes, so many lined up with the treatment that they received when they came back, there was no debriefing or anything when they came back.

In World War I, World War II, I’m not so sure about Korea, but those blokes sat around in camps, for months, after the war ended. And they debriefed themselves. They sat around and talked, and got a lot of out it out of their system. We didn’t recognise what war did to people then. We called the really bad cases shell-shock, which was only post-traumatic stress under another name.

The chaplain if there was one good enough.

I didn’t much really, no. It didn’t affect me as much as most other people. For one, I tend to skate through life, I think, on the surface. But I wasn’t immersed in it. What I was doing….I was doing positive stuff. There was nothing negative

about what I was doing and that was a pretty good blanket, if you like, security blanket that protected me from an awful lot of the other stuff. And my life was probably never seriously at risk. There were a few occasions when it was to a slight degree. But I was too stupid to see that, and I just carried on doing things.

Just to see the blokes. It seemed like a reasonable thing to do.

Very occasionally I would know of somebody, but I would just go down anyhow. If I had a free half hour, I’d wander around the wards and talk to the fellows. And again, I had the beauty of being outside the system. A link with the outside world, if you like.

Anything and everything. Same old thing. They’re only people.

To be honest, I can’t remember with any great clarity, but certainly, many of them, particularly the badly maimed ones who, as I said before, probably would have died in any other conflict. They’d have been, I would have thought, fairly much obsessed with what was waiting for them when they got back. What quality of life they were going to have. Or how much a lack of quality of life there was, in what lay ahead for them. For some of them the future would have been pretty bleak.

I do some voluntary pensions work for veterans here. And I had one SAS bloke, who hardly left the house. He had been very badly disfigured. It was probably a petrol bomb or something, and he was very disfigured. And he was very conscious of how ugly he was. Not at all pleasant to look at. And I used to go to

his place, and I finally helped him to get a TPI [Totally and Permanently Incapacitated] pension. He talked to me a fair bit about how he felt, and how he felt about going out, and it was tremendously important to him that I could go and talk to him as though he was a normal person. And talked about normal things. We talked about the football and the cricket and all the rest of it.

And that was really important to him. Because people like to feel normal, by and large.

First and foremost, just a place to relax and get away from the army as much as you possibly could.

The army stopped outside. And inside there was no rank, there was no coercion. People did what they wanted to do, providing it was within my limits and they weren’t too many. And that was it. And you tried to provide as wide a range of stuff as you could, with as much positive value as you could. But if all they wanted to do was to sit and have a soft drink, well that was fine.

I might have said earlier, I think we had every local newspaper in Australia. We certainly had the vast majority. We had every tin pot, two page bush weekly we got. And there’d be a stack of them. They would come in all the time. And the fellows would come in,

and away they’d go, and they’d catch up. They’d be a week old or something by the time we got them. They’d catch up on all the gear. The problem then became what to do with this huge mountain of paper that was building up. I had a little Vietnamese girl working for me, and people laugh when I say it, but she really was as ugly as sin. She’d had chicken pox or measles or something, and her face was badly pocked. I think most Asian women are very attractive.

Nothing to look at, at all. But she was very loyal to me. A bit of a character. I don’t know what came up, but I must have said, “I wish I could find out what to do with all these jolly papers.” And she said, “Can you take them to my house? We can do something with them.” Fortunately her house was on the road between Vung Tau and Nui Dat, and we weren’t supposed to do it, but

that sort of thing has never stopped me from doing what I wanted to do. So I’d get a huge pile, fill up the back of the Landrover and make sure I didn’t have any diggers on board that I didn’t know, or try and do it on my own. She used to ask me for an occasional slab of beer, which was very much not on, but there again, I couldn't see the harm in it, so I did it. She was very good to me, she was very loyal. Particularly with the beer, I was in a great hurry. And I’d pull up and I’d wait until there was no traffic,

then out with a carton of beer and race it into the house. They were always preparing hospitality on me. But they would offer me a glass that you couldn’t see through. I’m still appalled at the absolute lack of hygiene. They would give you this glass, and you couldn’t see through it. It was absolutely filthy. And I told them I didn’t drink alcohol at all. So they’d race off down the street to the nearest local store, which was probably only two doors down,

and come back with a warm bottle of cordial. And warm cordial isn’t particularly attractive to drink. So I was always in a hurry. “Oh, look. I must go.” As much as they could understand me, and I’d dive into the car and shoot off. So I would get rid of stuff that way.

I have absolutely no idea. They would have got an awful lot of toilet paper out of it. I have no idea what it was for. I never asked.

She said she could get rid of it and that was all I was after. I’m a very simple soul.

She was primarily there as the cleaner, so she was always dashing around with her Asian broom and pan and clean things up. But she could serve behind the counter, and she knew it was ten cents for a can of soft drink, and that it was so much for a packet of cigarettes. She could handle all that stuff. And she was as honest

as the day is long. There was one occasion she didn’t turn up for work and the rumour went around in about ten minutes flat that she was a Viet Cong member. Which made life interesting for a while, but she wasn’t. She turned up for work the day after. She was home being sick. It was interesting, when I went on the trip with my wife, we actually went to go to Laos, and we wanted also to go to Cambodia

and see the ruins the ruins at Angkor Wat. And we had a period in between, so we booked on a ten day guided tour and we had one spare day before we could go to Cambodia. So after we left of course, I suddenly thought that I might be able to track down Mon, this girl that had worked for me. I had no photo. I had photos at home, but I hadn’t thought to take them with me. It seemed a pretty long hope. But I wanted to get down to Vung Tau

and Nui Dat again, and see what things were like. So when I got on the trip I casually mentioned it to the tour leader, who was an American, who was living in Vietnam. I said, “It will never happen.” He said, “You never know. Give me what you can.” So I gave him the details that I could, and he had a friend in Saigon, who rode his motorbike an hour, an hour and half’s trip, who spent eleven hours driving around the district. Because I

told him roughly, as near as I could. I had no map, I had nothing. I told him roughly where I thought she lived. And this bloke went to the first place and someone said, “No, that village was relocated years ago. There are people here, people there.” So he went all over the district. He actually spoke to the girl’s parents, but for some reason he couldn’t get any information out of them. He eventually finished up at another woman’s house, and the woman had the phone on there. And she said, “Yes, I know a girl, a woman, who worked with Australians.”

And she said she knew another girl who worked with Australians at Vung Tau. And she said, “I will get her.” So she sent someone across, because they lived a few Ks away. And the woman came over and she said, “I knew her.” But she knew her by a different name. It wasn’t Mon, it was somebody else. But that could be explained in a variety of ways. But she said she had been married to a Vietnamese, but she had a child by an Australian Servicemen, who I hasten to add wasn’t me.

And her husband couldn’t hack it, and he threw her out and she committed suicide in 1972. Which was very sad. Then this woman who told the story said, “Do you think your friend could help me?” She said, “I’ve got an Australian friend that I worked with and I lost all the details when the war ended.” So he got a few details and I saw him in Saigon. Pat and I hired a car with an English speaking driver, and drove down the next day.

We worked off a road map but we couldn’t find anything. We pulled up two or three times and asked blokes and they said, “Go to the police station. It’s just down here. If anybody knows that woman, they will know her.” So we pulled up outside the police station and it was looking terribly shut. It was about lunchtime. So I was just wondering what to do and a woman walked across the road…and we had a photo of this woman. She’d given it the bloke, beside the driver. And she looked in and

she said, “That’s me.” And it was. She had come here and she was waiting. Now the odds of us pulling up and her coming and contacting us, was bordering on the miraculous, I reckon. So anyhow, the other woman came up then, and we went back to her place and we got a few more details. And I eventually found the bloke. He’s the bloke I started to tell you about before. And managed to link them up, which was good.

So, Mon was very good to me. I trusted her. She was very loyal.

They treated her all right. If they didn’t, they would have gone out again. It never raised to that. They just accepted her. She was a real sparky little thing. And she would give you as much sauce back as you gave her. And she probably did a few times when I wasn’t around. But no,

I never sensed any derogatory, down-putting behaviour. I would have jumped on it very smartly if I had, but I can’t remember any incident like that, at all.

Oh, there was no doubt, I think, in anyone’s mind, that a lot of them were VC sympathisers.

An awful lot of pilfering went on. For arguments sake, one lock down uncovered that a lot of crockery seemed to be going missing. And they discovered that women working around the kitchens…They had got permission to take the fat, the dripping, off the base, and they were squashing half a dozen knives and forks and spoons and filling it up with dripping. Then it would set. Then they were walking out with a tin of dripping plus x number of…

They finally sprang that. But there was that sort of pilfering went on. On one occasion I had a couple of handsaws, carpentry tools, disappear out of my hut. So I got onto one of the Vietnamese who spoke English and said, “Look, I’m not interested in catching the person. I don’t want to embarrass anybody. But, if those saws aren’t back here in an hour, I am

going to the military police.” The saws came back. I said, “If the saws are back when I look where they went from, in an hour’s time, finish. Nothing more said.” So they came back. And that was a matter of (UNCLEAR) because I knew enough not to make them lose face. If I had set out to embarrass people, I would have never have got them back.

Well, I’d be there by eight. Usually get up about six thirty, I guess, and have breakfast, and mosey on down to the hut. Open it up. Depending on what major thing I had on that day….As I say, I used to go up to Nui Dat twice a week to service some of the units up there. And I would go up

there about middish morning and get back during lunchtime. If I came back during lunchtime they had no MPs [Military Police] on the road, so I could travel a bit faster. And I used to go into Vung Tau at least two or three times a week. I used to get films developed in Vung Tau, at a Vietnamese place. I used to go across to the South Korean camp

quite a bit. I got to know quite a few people over there pretty well. I would be around the hut. I would be arranging for…we used to do a lot of taping, off tapes, for people, and the sigs actually used to do the taping for me. So there was the organising work for that. A lot of the time I would just be around the hut, and that’s when people would talk, particularly after hours. The main time

when you sat down and talked to people was after they knocked off, in the afternoon.

The one that still comes to mind, because it was played every Thursday, was Mary, Paul and Peter, was it? ‘I’m Leaving On A Jet Plane’. Because that was the thing to say when the Reo [Reinforcement] was coming in, and the ex-pats plane was going home.

So it was played every Wednesday night, without fail. That was the song. One of the things that always stuck in my mind about Vietnam was the pre-occupation that people had with time. Because you were up there for a finite time. You did a twelve months tour. And I take total and mature exorbitant pride in being a two tour man, because I stayed for thirteen months.

That wasn’t one tour and a month. That was two tours. Anyhow, you could get what they called a Julian Calendar, and you could start it wherever you liked, and there are as many different ways of filling that in, as there were people there. Some blokes would get up in the morning and slash, today was gone. Other blokes would get it out at night….The mere fact that there were eighteen hours in between was totally irrelevant. Some blokes would get them out once a week and go whack, whack, whack, whack, and a whole week would disappear. And they had

this fiendish look of glee on their face. “Just got rid of another week,” they’d say. This fellow came in one day. He had come down from the Dat, I think, or I thought he had, and he remembered me from Pucka. And of course it was much easier for them to remember me than for me to remember them. Because I handled fifteen hundred before I went up. And he came up and we went through all the salutations and greetings…The question you always asked, because it immediately established your credentials, “How long have you been here?

How long have you got to go?” Because under six months you were Reo, and you were green. Six months and over, you were a Veteran with increasing respect for every day that you stayed there. And this bloke said, “I’ve only got twelve seconds to go.” And I said, “What? Twelve seconds? What do you mean twelve seconds?” He said, “Second of May, second of June, second of July, second of August.” He only got there the day before. He had an awfully long way to go.

Anyone else I talked to, short of the CO, had their calendar and filled it in everyday. I just didn’t have time to worry about it. The time was going fast enough as it was. It was interesting that when you first went there, and I guess always, the mail was very important. And I used to go down and help the posties when the plane came in on a Thursday. I’d go down and help the posties sort it out. It did have the added benefit that I got my mail quicker. Which is not why I went down, of course.

It was purely philanthropic, to help the boys. That was just a side benefit. But I would help them sort the stuff out. And for the first eight or nine months, the mail really was tremendously important. Particularly the voice tapes with the kids were absolutely wonderful. I regret the fact that I haven’t saved any. I don’t seem to have any around. They would have been priceless. But after that eight or nine months, you had been there so long

that you were becoming a celebrity and that’s where life was. All the people you knew, were in Vung Tau and around that area. And that’s where life was. And home, back down south, was home back down south. It was nice to hear about it, and it was nice to get things and that, but life was really was where you were, up there. I said after nine months, “It’s about time you thought about going home, mate.” Because

there really was that diminution of pull to home, and I say that having not gone home when I could have, for R & R. But I still think my reasons were valid, and Pat was quite happy about it, too, that I didn’t go home.

Well, I just made a room available for them. About two and a half thousand books, which the Americans…

Some Yank popped up from somewhere, I was over at the air base, and I got into some conversation with some Yank and he said, “Could you use a library?” And I said, “Well…” And he said, “We can only give it to you on one condition.” And I said, “What’s that?” He said, “You’ve got to have air-conditioning put in.” I said, “We can’t afford…” He said, “We will supply the air-conditioning.” I said, “Well, I think we might just force ourselves.” So they came over and they did the lot, and by gee, the number of fellows that took up reading…Mind you, most

of their books were never opened. That library used to be crowded. Fellows coming in from everywhere to sit in the air-conditioning for a while. They thought it was great.

I wouldn’t know to be honest. I never opened one myself. I think I had a reasonable excuse. I didn’t need to go browsing. There would have been a general selection of books. Nothing too heavy, probably, but I don’t know. They were books and they were in an air-conditioned room and that was all that mattered.

Well, my predecessor actually started them. But I think I applied myself a bit more assiduously to working them up into something because, I think in both our minds, our prime object initially was to give people a pleasant alternative to spending Sunday arvo in the boozer.

And we used to take off about half past one and get back about half past five, I think, most days. We did tours. There were two or three landmarks. We used to go around Vung Tau and there were a few landmarks there. There was the President’s Summer Residential Palace. There was a most ingenious production line where they had a three tier arrangement. There were pigs on top, and

what the pigs didn’t eat or what they defecated, dropped onto the second layer which is where the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s were. And what the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s finished with, one way or the other, dropped down into the water where the fish ate it. So it was a very efficient system. They only fed the pigs, up on the top layer, but this was worth taking people around to because I hadn’t seen it anywhere else. And there were a couple of landmarks. There was a place called Radar Hill. It was full of (UNCLEAR), up behind the camp. And there was another hill where there was, and it’s still there, two years ago,

a larger than life statue of Christ, on a very prominent outlook. And there were various other things. There were tunnels. And I used to look out various Buddhist temples and things like that. Some days I’d say, “Oh look, go down here, for the heck of it. I haven’t been down here.” Which is how we found the village which I suspected to be

of at least Viet Cong sympathisers, if not active Viet Cong. They wanted a game of volleyball….They were sort of the more dramatic ones that we had. But if a place looked interesting, and a lot of places we were very warmly welcomed by people. They were delighted to think that ‘uc da loi’ would come down and mix them with them a bit. The Australian image in general, I don’t think, was good up there.

The majority of troops, the macho thing was to regard all Vietnamese as second class nongs. And call them such and treat them as such. And there were some deplorable instances where the Civilian Liaison Teams would go into villages and build a school or something like that, and on more than one occasion, a company of troops, from Nui Dat, would be out on

a mission and quarter overnight in the school, and the next day when they moved on they had totally vandalised it. That was appallingly bad behaviour. But you acted mean and tough, and nobody was not going to be mean and tough with all the other mean and toughies. Which is why I became so interested when a fellow said to me one day he was really getting something and learning something about the Vietnamese culture, out of the trips.

So that was a real bonus. I worked on that one as much as I could after that.

I used to get up there a couple of times a week, and service the smaller units. There was an artillery battery and a few small units, that were too small for anybody to worry about. There were a couple of reps up there. There was a Sally Army bloke up there

with the tankies. And I think there was an Everyman’s rep up there, I never met him, doing something. He might have been one of the Italians. So I used to go up, deliberately seeking out the small units that nobody cared about. And I used to do what I could for them. On one rather unforgettable occasion, I wanted to catch up with some major in the headquarter building. And I went around the damn thing about three

times and I couldn’t find a way in. And eventually I saw this kindly looking old bloke out in the garden. And I thought he was some old derro digger who was filling in his days doing up the garden. So I bowled up to him. He was in his jungle greens, and I didn’t look at his shoulders, which was a terrible mistake. And I said, “Oh, excuse me, mate. Can you tell me how to get into this dump?” I said, “I can’t get in. I want to find Majors so and so.” And he said, in a fairly cultured voice, which surprised me,

“Oh well, if you do so and so, you will get the way in.” As I said this, I looked at his shoulders, and he was a brigadier general, and I got just a tad embarrassed. And in those days when I was embarrassed I used to scratch my head. And I raised my hand to scratch my head, and he thought I was going to salute him. So he saluted, and I’m scratching my head. I said, “Thank you very much.” And didn’t let on I realised, and got out of there as quick as I could.

I was lucky I wasn’t arrested on the spot, I think. I was never good at being in the army, I wasn’t. But I used to go up there a fair bit.

What was it like? It was in a rubber plantation, and all their tents were in rows, in amongst the rubber trees. There was an area cleared where they had the other buildings. A big barbed wire perimeter fence,

with very big minefields outside. Which turned out to be more of a liability than an asset, because the Viet Cong got to them at night. They were always laid out with mathematical precision, which made them very easy to find. Once they found the first one, even if they found it in a way they didn’t want to, then they knew where the rest were. And they got in and re-organised them, so that nobody knew where they were. Which wasn’t funny, because there was no way you could get through it,

with any degree of certainty. And I think, they may have well exploded them now, one or the other, but there are still a lot of mines, as there are in many other parts…I think they are an abomination of a thing. They’re pretty bad news. It was not an unpleasant place in itself. I had hoped to get there when I went back.

We went to the town of Nui Dat, trying to find this woman. Then the fellow misunderstood my pronunciation. I also wanted to go to Long Tan, as a matter of respect. It meant nothing to me personally, except that it meant a lot to people who had been in Vietnam. And as a mark of respect I just wanted to go there. And I said to the fellow, in Vietnamese,

I want to go to Nui Dat, where the camp was, and I want to go through Long Tan. He said, “Oh, we will go to Long Tan first.” I said, “We’ll go to Vung Tau first, then we’ll go to Long Tan.” Then I realised far too late we were heading back to Saigon, and we pulled up at a big milk processing plant. Which was spelt T A N H, and the place I was after was just T A N. And I wasn’t up to the difference in pronunciation and didn’t know there was one.

So rather unfortunately we got to neither Nui Dat or to Long Tan, which was a pity. But Vung Tau itself was totally unrecognisable. The camp was gone, I’m sure. It was totally gone. It was three or four times bigger, traffic lights all over the place. That’s the mark of civilisation, and hundreds of cars and people everywhere. And I was pleased to be able to find Radar Hill and

the statue place and the President’s Palace. They were three things I’d remembered, so that part of it was good.

Well, getting the vehicle wasn’t too bad. They knew they could never convince me they didn’t have a vehicle to spare,

because I knew the system too well. And the goodwill basically was there. Their main problem was that, typically army, they spend their life trying to justify getting more of things, so they had to prove that they haven’t got enough of things, even if, in point of fact, they have got too many. But in point of fact, while they might have vehicles, they have to say….Well, they wouldn’t say it to me. So I could get a vehicle. The general policy was that they would provide a driver.

I had an army licence, and always had to take a bloke riding shotgun. So I would say to the driver, “Look, I’m driving, because I know where I’m going and I know what I want to do and I know how I want to do it, you bring your camera.” And I’d say to the shotgun, “You bring your camera, too. You can take all the photographs you like.” So I would drive. I would never let anyone drive me for a whole host of reasons. But safety was…

I could cope with the situation better if I was doing it myself. They were very narrow roads. And the one group you never tried to pass was a South Korean convoy, because they would not let you in. They would close ranks. If you went alongside a South Korean convoy and there was somebody coming the other way, which meant you needed to get off the road, the South Korean convoy would just concertina, and you had to find somewhere else to go. I had a couple of fairly close shaves.

The other convoys were not a problem, but the South Koreans, no way. They played it hard, and they survived. They knew what they were after. So I would get the vehicles, without any hassles really. At one stage, the latest model Ford, a six cylinder vehicle, turned up, and it had been stolen, presumably, by a free wheel Serviceman from Saigon.

And driven down to Vung Tau. I got to hear about it, so I got onto the bloke who had something to do with it, and I can’t remember more than that. I said, “Look, I’m a bit sick of having to go and scrounge a vehicle every time I want one. Why can’t I have this one?” He said, “Oh, you might as well have it as anyone, I guess.” So I had it for a week and then the CO saw it, and decided it was better than what he had. And the bugger pulled rank on me, and took my own private car off me.

But the system was incredible. I was literally, it sounds ridiculous to say it, but at one stage I was within a day in supplying a pair of GP [General Purpose] boots and getting a brand new American Jeep. If I had done it a day earlier, I could have been the proud owner for the rest of my time of a brand new American Jeep, no questions asked. You could get anything out of the Yanks for a pair of GP boots.

They would trade anything. Because our boots were supposed to be the best, and they had tremendous bargaining power. And with the Yanks, once something got in-country, that was it. They lost all interest in it. With our people, anything over ten dollars had to be accounted for. And I can still remember to this day, a highly paid major, Australian, full-time, going around the camp trying to track down petty little things worth eleven or twelve dollars.

And the Yanks would fly surplus stuff out to sea and dump it. Choppers, everything, particularly towards the end. If it got in-country, they didn’t want to take it back. So it was not hard to get stuff, if you knew the right people. And I had some fairly hefty bargaining sticks. The people in ordnance, one bloke there loved yippy books and stick books. And if I gave him first read,

then I could have what I liked. I could get pairs of GP boots that had been thrown out, and he would give them to me so I could then trade them, whatever I wanted.

No, the boots stick out, in my mind. It was generally the other way.

I’ve got an American, good quality flying jacket. I didn’t get a lot of stuff. You just couldn’t avoid getting some of it, there was so much of it to get and so easy to get. It was mostly trading that way. But GPs were our staple bargaining item, I think. Our headquarter company mess used to get a box of inch thick, literally, American steaks. We used to get a box of steaks a week for a pair of GP boots.

Or a tin of paint, which was a different colour to what they had. You go back to basics when life gets hard. You bargain with what you’ve got.

Church services?

Well, Vung Tau wasn’t that big. It wasn’t at all hard to find…There were two padres….Catholic and Protestant. Protestant meant everybody who wasn’t Catholic. The Sallies weren’t regarded as….They were there as philanthropic reps, they weren’t there as religious people. So there were the two denominations and two chapels, or churches.

So it was common, very easy knowledge to acquire that sort of thing.

Oh, I always went, to the Protestant services, yeah. One of the most special Christmas Eve’s….it started early, people shooting up the cross, but once we got over that,

it really was a fairly special sort of a night. I don’t remember why. It was everything, I guess. Being a long way from home, and something uniting you with people at home doing much the same thing at much the same time probably made it mean something.

No, I don’t believe there was really anything that tested me. I think my faith is a fairly simple one. I’ve got my image of what and who God is, and what kind of a person he is. I could accommodate most things, I guess. I don’t belong to the school where I think God punishes people by letting terrible things happen to them.

I just don’t believe that’s true. I believe if you live in the world you have to take what comes along, by and large. So terrible things happen to innocent people, which doesn’t make it any better. But I don’t see that it interferes with my faith. I guess, if anything, without being able to be too specific about it, things happened and I saw things that reinforced my faith, not

destroyed it or weakened it.

I don’t know. I guess they fitted in with my philosophy, and nothing that happened to me would indicate that I was not doing something which was worth doing, and doing it to the best of my abilities. I guess I had the feeling,

a sense, that I should be there. That it was important, what I was doing. I was working with, primarily, with young men, many of whose lives were at risk, and it was my job to make their lives as happy as I was able to help them to be, in the time that I was there with them.

It changed me tremendously. And I knew that when I came back, it had changed me, not always for the best. That it had had an effect on me. I didn’t really appreciate what it was. I have never been an incredibly demonstrative person, I suppose, but I was even less so, probably.

And if I was hard on anyone, I was harder on the wife, than I was on anyone else. And yet I didn’t put my finger on it. I had seen some fairly tough things, had a few frightening experiences. Had matured a lot in many ways. In many ways the experience was a very positive one for me, irrespective of what I did with the positive effect on me.

But it was twenty five years later, when I was working for an Aboriginal organisation here, and I ran into a fairly classic case of reversed racial discrimination, and I went through twelve months of hell, in 1985, and I was as close to going mad as I ever want to go to. And I was eventually diagnosed with post traumatic stress. And then a psychiatrist said

that the seeds had been sown, while I was in Vietnam. But it required another catalyst, it happened twenty five years later, before it manifested itself and reduced me to being not much better than a vegetable, for almost two years, I guess. It was not a good time in my life, and I’m glad it’s gone. I had no counselling. I don’t know whether I was benefited.

I didn’t feel I needed it, at that stage. And I suppose I knew enough about psychology, to not want to be psycho-analysed by somebody. A little bit of knowledge is often a dangerous thing, they say, and I think that is fairly true. And I knew enough about psychology to think that I could probably sort out most of my own concerns. And we can often do that. But often all you do is bury things.

I didn’t suffer a fraction of what the blokes, particularly the fellows up at the sharp end of the stick. Not all of them, some of them never went outside the camp, unless it was to come down to Vung Tau or to go to Saigon. But the blokes who went out and did the dirty work. Some of them had some incredibly tough traumatising experiences.

By and large, as I say, they were treated badly. There was no debriefing. They were treated like scum by many people. It was interesting. When we were in this chase, after this bloke I was telling you about, that I tried to find when I came back. My son-in-law has a brother who is very highly placed in the Victoria Police and has links with the National Crime Authority. And my son-in-law said, “I will get onto so and so because if this bloke has

got a record, he’ll be able to find him. He will be able to access all the records in Australia.” I said, “I don’t know whether he’s got a record or not.” I wasn’t getting anywhere, trying to find the bloke up there, at that stage. So, it was a fairly unusual name. There were only two people of that name served in Vietnam, and only a few people in the phone book.

So my son-in-law’s brother got on the blower. He looked up the name in the Melbourne phone directory, and there were only three or four people there of this name. So he started ringing. And I don’t know whether it was the first one, the second or the last one. But at one stage he got onto a bloke and said, “Is so and so there?” And he said, “No. There was a lady of that name. But she has left here.” And he said, “I have no forwarding address for her.” He said, “Can I ask

why you want to find this bloke.” He said, “I’m a Viet Vet, and he’s a Viet Vet and I just want to catch up with him.” And there was a long silence, and eventually the bloke at the other end of the phone said, “I was an anti-war protestor in those days.” And this bloke said, “That was your right, mate,” he said, “that’s what we were up there for. To give the people the chance to say what they want to say.”

There was another long silence. “And we treated you blokes like shit.” And he said, “Yes, you did.” The other bloke said, “I feel terrible. I don’t know what to do about it.” He said, “Are you on the computer? Email and so forth, on the internet?” And the bloke said, “Yep.” And he said, “Well, look, I’ll give you this home page address. It’s the Vietnam Vets page, and if you write your story and put it on there….

At any one time, three, max. The YMCA had three people up there, I think. The Sallies would have had….and the Everyman probably four or five. They might have been up there longer.

Oh roughly the size of this house, a little bit smaller.

It was just an L-shaped place. And the gym and the library were on the foot of the L. And the recreation room cum bar where we sold soft drinks and cigarettes and my office were in the longer leg. So it wasn’t huge.

It was big enough, but it wasn’t huge.

For God’s sake, up to and probably including Vietnam - the first thing the medics did to an injured bloke was shove a cigarette in his mouth - I’d always believed, for whatever reasons, that smoking wasn’t very good for you. And I only ever smoked a pipe and that was only

very briefly, for about eighteen months. But I still had the original packet of weed when I gave up smoking as when I started. So I wasn’t a heavy smoker. But I just believed that…I knew that it was wrong. I believed it was wrong and bad and I couldn’t see the sense of me doing it in front of my kids, and then turning around and telling them it was something they shouldn’t do. It seemed a bit hypocritical so I gave it up. It wasn’t hard.

I would have thought so. My memory would be that probably the majority did. But they had a pretty stressful thing. When it was go, it was go. It was all go. If they had a chopper or two come in with wounded blokes, they worked. They really did. And they weren’t just cuts and bruises. They were some massive injuries. Limbs shot off and stomachs ripped open. Head wounds.

The medic system did a wonderful job up there.

Oh, I always got out of the road. If I saw a dust off chopper coming in, I got out of the road. Because I had no role there, I had no purpose in being there. And I probably would have stuffed things up if I had stayed around, so it made sense to get out of the road.

Once they’d been patched up, yeah. Mind you, they also had ‘major industries’ like…There was one company major who had a fetish about making sure that all his men were circumcised. And that’s pretty big stuff. Terribly important when you’re in a war theatre to be circumcised. The mind boggles, doesn’t it?

You had these blokes lying there a glass of cold water on each side. That was to keep things under control, if an attractive nurse walked past. That was the lighter end of the scale.

They had circumcisions. There was one company up there, if the OC found out you hadn’t been circumcised….There were reasonable health grounds for it, but it wasn’t essential. I’ve never been circumcised. But this bloke had a fetish about it.

I don’t know whether he was Jewish or what he was. The mind can tangle with some big issues at times.

No, I think I helped a few people write letters, but I never had to do it for them.

If somebody like me was doing it they would generally keep it plain and simple.

Not so much as writing the letters, perhaps, as talking on occasion to a bloke who had been dumped. Which was hard. It was also understandable.

A woman just doesn’t switch off everything when the bloke goes away. There are two sides to the story. I think it was probably disappointing, the number, if we knew, and I don’t think anybody does, but I think it would be disappointing the number of women who played up when fellows were away.

That would add greater drama to it, if you like. At Vung Tau, the number of blokes who put their lives on the line was comparatively limited. Sigs, ordnance, maintenance, transport blokes, but most of them, and even a lot of blokes up at the Dat, weren’t in overly risky situations.

It was one of my most popular tours, from Vung Tau, was to go to the sharp end, so they could say they’d been to the sharp end. They’d been in the war zone. They suddenly became grunts as against pogoes. Pogoes were the blokes who never left the comfort of home. The grunts were the blokes that…the actual digger.

So it was a fairly keenly sort after change of status. It was as close to being a grunt as you could, and getting as far from being a pogo as you could.

Well, apart from the Viet Cong cell. One day was potentially dangerous, but also very funny, in retrospect, we were heading up towards the Dat, and we had to cross a bridge, over the Mekong.

And as we came up towards the bridge, there seemed to be a lot of congestion around. And on this day, I had probably my biggest convoy. It was three or four three ton trucks, filled to the gills, and three or four Landrovers as well. So it was a fairly impressive cavalcade. And we ground to a halt a good half a K from the bridge. It was mostly civilians. There weren’t too many troopies around. Not near us, anyhow.

But there were South Vietnamese soldiers, we found out, on either side of the bridge, at the approach to the bridge. At our end of the bridge there was an American semi-trailer that was the cause of the trouble. It had jack-knifed and completely locked the bridge off, and they were trying to work out what they were going to do about it. Between the ARVN [Army of the Republic of Vietnam], the South Vietnamese troops and the larger vehicles, there were probably

two hundred or more people on two stroke motorbikes. Specially imported by Field Marshall Kee. And they would get impatient and they would all start revving up, and there would be these huge clouds billowing out, and they’d sort of edge forward and edge forward. And when they got too close, the South Vietnamese ARVN would fire a couple of volleys of shots over their head. And the first time this happened, it caught us completely by surprise.

So to a man, we all dived out of our vehicles and down into the ditch, by the side of the road, which fortunately was dry. And when we got to the end of the ditch I said, “Righto. Who’s got any ammo? Who’s got some ammo?” And there wasn’t one bullet. And I’ve got about eighty or ninety blokes with me, and there’s not a bullet amongst us. I said, “God, what a security help you blokes are.” I said, “I bring you out on a nice trip and all I expected you to do was look after me and there’s nothing. There’s not a bullet!”

I said, “Keep your heads down.” So I went for a walk up front, and discovered what the problem was. And once we knew what was happening, it was somewhat easier to take. But for a while we thought we were for the big jump and it wasn’t funny at all, for a while.

No, it wasn’t.

I can’t claim any insights into that at all. It was primarily started by my predecessor, and certainly my initial energy in keeping it up was as an alternative to going to the boozer. Because they used to drink to really excessive…The number of people that come home from Vietnam, as alcoholics, would have been rather frightening. And most

Vietnam Vets, very many of them, have got a drinking problem. You can’t say all of them, but a lot of them have. So it was first and foremost a hopefully attractive alternative to going to the boozer. And so it proved. As I say, my key recipes to success were Nui Dat, to get these pogoes up into the sharp end and to going on these off-limit things, because they were going to places where they weren’t supposed to be, which was exciting.

They never took any ammo with them, on those trips either. So we were sitting ducks if anyone ever decided to have a go at us. But yeah, it turned out that they were getting much more out of the trips than I thought they were.

They probably didn’t know it was being done. I got the vehicles through the transport, so obviously

anybody there that wanted to know, would know. I mean, I didn’t go to the boss to ask for the vehicles, I went to the blokes, to the NCOs. And I would get the stuff through them. Apart from one real idiot, the one I told you about, the other OCs, when I was there, were pretty reasonable guys and they would have been all for it anyhow. I’m sure they must have known. I couldn’t have gone on getting the number of vehicles that I did and get away with it.

It must have been known. And people would have appreciated what was being done. Even at the basic level of just getting people out of the boozer, because alcohol was a real problem.

I don’t know that I took the fellows to orphanages. I used to go myself. There were two or three that I went to. I started off going there…I don’t know how the connection developed, but that was where

I started to cross-culturalise myself and the Vietnamese people. I think I might have mentioned to you, off camera, about the fellow and his homesickness? It really was funny and demonstrates the dangers of not really being on top of your subject. But an army major…In actual fact,

he featured in a documentary a year or two back. He went back and found a Vietnamese fellow who had worked for him, and he brought him out to Australia. He, all career officers, hoped he would go to Vietnam. Because it was important to get that in your CV [Curriculum Vitae], if you’re an army man. And he went and learnt Vietnamese. He was really a terrible linguist.

And I think the blues he created must have been legion. But he worked at it very hard, and went to the Australia-Vietnamese Friendship Association meetings, and battered everyone to death trying to get his Vietnamese up to class standards. And I think that he probably did. And the proof of that was that he had only been in country two or three weeks, and he knew more about the graft and corruption that went on around the system, than

his American counterpart, who had been there three years and still couldn’t say “Good morning” or “Good afternoon.” And that says a lot, I think. Jim was, mind you, fairly unusual. The majority of COs wouldn’t have gone to the trouble that he did. Anyhow he was up at the mess one day, and we had a team of Vietnamese girls work there. Very nice girls, intelligent, fairly well educated. The head girl really was a bottler. A very nice girl.

In fact if I needed some assistance in creating or mastering a phrase, in my shopping ventures, I would go to the girls and I would get them to work something out for me. Anyway, Jim was having his lunch one day and he was feeling a bit down, a bit homesick. He got halfway through his main course, which was probably turkey, and I defy anybody to eat a plate of slab turkey. It just lies there and defies you to eat it. He got halfway through,

and pushed it off to one side, and Thy came out, the head girl and said, in Vietnamese, because he always talked to them in Vietnamese, “Oh Major, is there something wrong with the food?” He said, “No, no, no.” And what he thought he said was that he was homesick. Thy went white, which wasn’t a bad achievement, and clapped a hand over her mouth and shot through like a Bondi tram. And Jim, being pretty perceptive, thought that he must have said something wrong.

So he high-tailed it back to his office as quickly as he could, and pulled out his English and Vietnamese dictionary, and after much assiduous searching decided that he must have said he was having his monthly period. Which was a fair reason for Thy being a bit shocked.

I had many embarrassing situations. If I got a phrase…I was okay with the bloke where I brought most of the stuff. I used to buy this stuff for the fellows

And if I got it with Charlie, and it was fairly simple, I was pretty right. If it got a bit more exotic, and I had to go over to what they called the New Market, then I would have to get a phrase from the girls. If I got it right the first time or the second time, then that was okay. And I got to be reasonably well known over there. But if I didn’t get it very quickly, I obviously got worse and worse, and I don’t know how many occasions,

but it was several, when I brought the market to a stop. And all stall holders gathered round for their weekly bit of entertainment. With this ‘uc da loi’ who didn’t know what he was saying. I had no idea what I was saying, but it was obviously not right. And they got vast amounts of amusement from it. Whether it saved me from death, I don’t know. But it was certainly very embarrassing. And if I had more sense I would have given it away, a lot quicker than I did.

Yes, I got to know quite a few. At the orphanage, I knew quite a few people there. I knew some trades people in Vung Tau. Like I used to get photographs processed at a place, a normal Vietnamese business. I got to know several South Vietnamese Army people. And I used to go across to their camp,

fairly often. And it was interesting that on one occasion towards the end of my stay, I went over there, and there was one particular major that I got to know quite well. And he obviously had much better English than I had Vietnamese. I said to him, “What’s going to happen when we pull out?” I said, “We both know that we’re going to pull out, before we’ve really done the job. What’s going to happen?” He said, “Oh, we had the Chinese for three hundred years. The French for

a hundred and fifty years.” He said, “Communists? Fifty years. I’ll be dead within six months. I know I’m on the hit list.” But he said, “Fifty years and we will be independent again.” And it’s even more interesting that when I went back two years ago, we had an American, who was the tour leader, but they employed local guides, where it was appropriate. And we were in Saigon,

and we went up the Mekong and did a few touristy things. And we had a young Vietnamese bloke, in his late 20s perhaps. And I got talking to him. And because I was fairly comfortable in talking to Vietnamese people, I could generally do this a lot easier than anyone else in the party. I guess I had some background, which made it a great deal easier. His father had been killed by the Viet Cong, and because of that, the whole family

was tainted forever. And he and his brother, who were only very young, and his mother, had had to spend twelve months in a re-education camp. Which he said did absolutely nothing for them. And none of his family would ever get a job in anything involving security. Police force, army, never. He was a suspect because his father had been killed by the Viet Cong, so he was poison. So he had to do

things like be a tour guide. And I said to him, “What do you think is going to happen in the future?” I said, “You going to stay under North Vietnam?” “No, no,” he said, “twenty five years, at the most, we will be independent.” Horribly close to the time the Vietnamese major put on twenty or thirty years earlier.

In many ways, they are as different as chalk and cheese, the North and South Vietnamese. Life is a lot easier for the South Vietnamese. They can produce more crops than they can up north. They’ve got a lot of industry down there. And they’re just more go ahead. Saigon is a very modern place, a huge place. It had trebled in size, over the thirty years,

from more than three million to eleven million. And yet, when I was there thirty years ago, you couldn’t see a hundred metres down the road because of smog. When I went back two years ago, the air was as clear as the air in Alice Springs. The Communists banned all two stroke engines. They banned all kerosene fuel, and they banned wood burning, I think.

But essentially they banned all smoke creating pollutants. And it’s just unbelievable. It can be done if it has to be done.

Oh, pretty circumspect. I had places to go to and I had a place to stay, which was in the Australian compound,

and I didn’t go wandering around. I wasn’t a hero, and I was fairly busy anyhow. I’m not an idiot, totally.

Probably a bit disquieting. It wasn’t really getting better. I mean, there was a Tet every year, and I in one case, inadvertently, went

up the road to Nui Dat during a Tet. A Tet that happened while I was there. And I went into Nui Dat, the village, the town, and was doing my shopping and a couple of MPs came in and they got me out of there very quickly. They didn’t bother to find out why I was there. They said, “Get out of this place. If you don’t, we will take you out under arrest.” It was too dangerous to be there. I was just too stupid to know it.

There was sort of an overt settled situation where we were. But in reality, just under the surface there was an awful lot going on that wasn’t very good. And it became quite obvious that the free world psyche wasn’t coping with the Asian psyche, and we were going to be out-manoeuvred. They were going to out wait us. There was no question of it. The only people who could match them, were South Koreans.

They were the only Asian people there. Western mentality just couldn’t cope. The Vietnamese said, “We’ve got to win this thing. So we’ve got to dig tunnels and go underground.” So they dug tunnels and they went underground and they were prepared to wait until we pulled out. And they did. They just out-waited us.

I had a tremendous respect for them. They really didn’t appear to be looked after properly by the army, and I have no idea why that was. They were constantly short of stuff. And it was their job to train this company of South Vietnamese. Whether they were militia or ARVN, and train them, and use them. I don’t know if they were

supposed to go into conflict all that much. But they were there, I suppose, as defensive guard type situation, basically. And I would think that all the Vietnamese families had their wives and children with them. The pay system was almost non-existent. They would go for months without any pay, then they wouldn’t get full pay. So the situation of the families was pretty desperate,

and used to be tremendously frustrating for the fellows, the half dozen Aussies in the teams. So I developed this system of getting clothing and other relevant stuff up that I could. And I would give it to the fellows and they would parcel it out amongst the other people. I wasn’t able to do much food-wise. I was able to get a little bit of stuff, but nothing of any significance. I would think that for the Australians, the frustrations were

really the difficulty in being accepted and supported by the army at large.

I think it’s always inherent. God, look at the lessons that history’s got. Even recent history, has got

to point out the folly of going into a country where you are not wanted. The Americans, I believe, only went in there for economic reasons. The same as they’ve gone into other places for the same selfish reason. They paid no respect or courtesy, by and large, the free world forces to the local population.

They treated them like dirt. The Australians, too, as I said, treated them as second class nogs. And most of the Australian troops treated them pretty badly out of ignorance and macho stuff. There were some blokes who treated them quite well. But it takes a pretty special sort of a guy to be the odd one out in that kind of situation. Particularly when grog comes into it, as it inevitably does at some stage. I think the

Australians did more, genuinely, to try and work with the Vietnamese people than the Americans did. The Koreans made absolutely no effort to work with them. They just went in and pacified an area and they said to the village, “Any Viet Cong come into this village, or if you help the Viet Cong, we will start with the head man and we will shoot people until you stop.” And they only had to do it once or twice, and it stopped.

By the time I came home I knew pretty well where I thought I was at.

Well, my rationale in the end, and I think it was an honest one, we had gone there for the wrong reasons, but having gone there for the wrong reasons, we did some worthwhile things. I believe we did give people

a better look at democracy than they would otherwise have had.

No, I don’t think it could. We didn’t have the right psychology. And that was proved by the number of Americans who were on drugs, while they were there. Somebody asked me about Australians and drugs, and I said at that time,

and at that time it was true, that most of the Australians were too busy drinking to be worried about drugs. I only remember two people that I know that were active with grass. And nobody thought they were anything special. They thought they were as weak as whatever you like. It had no status, with most of the blokes.

The changes in me? Well, as I said before, I knew that I had changed. I knew that it had an effect on me but I really didn’t identify it for a long time. I’m not a particularly introspective person, I suppose, and I just got on with living. I had a fairly busy life when I got back. Most of my life, I tended to be in jobs that had long hours.

And not a particularly wonderful pay, but I’ve done the work I thought was worth doing. And so, I didn’t sit around staring at my navel and wondering what was going on. And it really, it didn’t help our marriage for some time. We went through a fairly rocky patch, and most of the problem there was mine, or came from me. It wasn’t until the last year I had at work, where I said I ran into racial

discrimination of the reverse nature, that things really blew up and I fell to pieces for a while.

I’ve always lived from the precept that your actions speak louder than words. Words can be important, sure, but there were chaplains there to provide the spiritual element, where people wanted that. And so I believed it was not my function, and I if got

too overt in that direction, I would have been pulled into line fairly quickly. There would have been jealous padres around or something. And so I believe that it was my role to provide this haven, if you like. This friendly, relaxed, accepting, encouraging atmosphere. If people wanted to go farther than that, then

that was up to them. And I was ready to work with them, where they were. But I never took the lead. I waited for people, it was up to them. If they wanted to do something, then well, they had to do it. I mean, if I’d seen somebody who was obviously going mad and couldn’t get it out, I might well have done something. But most people can get round to it, if you can open things up and set the right atmosphere. Enough to open up the thing.

And it’s important that they own it by doing it.

Certainly with men, sex is a pretty important part of their life. A lot of the blokes who went into nashos,

hadn’t really lived life to any degree at all. And they may well have been virgins when they got to Vietnam. In actual fact, my wife and I discussed, after I got up there I think, whether or not it would be acceptable to her if I felt that I really had to satisfy myself, sexually. If it would be all right

if I graced a prostitute. And she was all right with that. She accepted it. I put no pressure on her. She said, “If you really feel that you’ve got to do that, I’ll accept the fact that you have a need to do it.” I never did. Sexually transmitted diseases were not unknown up there. I just couldn’t be bothered taking the risk.

But I can understand people, and I think that probably my wife was something of a rarity, I don’t know. But I would have thought that might not have been an attitude that many women would have had. I could be wrong about that. I could be quite wrong. And she was very sensible about that. And there was no suggestion for her, well, you know, a tit for tat, if you play around up there I’m going to play around down here. I think they were two quite different situations.

But it wasn’t a problem. But a lot of blokes did, but they regarded their lives up there as being completely separate, and one which become unreal when they got back to Australia. So they had no trouble dividing it up in their minds.

There would have

been a fair number, that talked about it.

Oh yes, I heard some quite funny stories and things that happened. One bloke sat down on the toilet out the back and his wallet dropped down into the toilet, which was a pit. And he had to go down and get his wallet. And he tried to bring it into my hut. And I said, “I don’t ban anything in here, mate, but that’s not coming in here.

You take it somewhere else and clean it.” It was on the nose, I can tell you. His problem, not mine.

It wasn’t my role to be judgmental. My wife says I’m a fairly judgmental sort of a person. But I don’t think I am to the extent that she does. But it wasn’t my role. My role was to

provide a place for the general welfare of the Servicemen.

Oh, the Korean bloke. He was quite a guy, and he was tough as nails. One shoulder was elevated and it stuck out there. He had broken his shoulder, and he didn’t stop doing a thing.

Still playing judo and being a soldier and everything else. And he had this broken shoulder, and it mended, but it mended out of kilter a little bit. I remember him coming down, he was in a reasonably regular group. Half a dozen or so fellows used to come down. And one bloke missed a night. And the next night he came in the sergeant said to him, “Where were you on Tuesday night?” He said, “Oh, I was a bit sick.”

If looks could have killed that bloke would have dropped dead, then. The Korean bloke thought he was weak as water. Just a bit sick? He said, “See that shoulder? Never stopped me doing a thing, when that was broken.” They were tough, and I think he was a bit disappointed in these tough Aussies who were really rather sissies.

He was a good instructor. I don’t know how much of

his attitude you’ve got to cop, but he was certainly a good Judo instructor.

Oh, the old balsa kits. And I had paint by number kits, all sorts of models, tanks and boats and planes. I got a sort of an idea of what fellows wanted before I went. But strangely one of the most satisfying things, and I experienced

this to some extent myself, were these paint by number kits. They have them all drawn out and they say ‘Number five is green and number four is blue.’ And you would think that it was automatic and not terribly satisfying. But it was surprising how you can make a mass produced thing like that personal, by crimping the lines or by doing a little bit of something else. They were popular. They were very popular.

I had mixed feelings to be honest. As I said earlier, after about nine months, that’s where life was. You were in Vietnam. I was a two tour man, by the time I left there. Not everyone gets to be a two tour man. It was a status-y thing for immature people. I knew it was time to come home because of the fact that I was growing away from the family.

What I didn’t appreciate was the fact that the family had grown away from me. And that my wife had become totally self-sufficient and I was just an occasional nice appendage when I got home. We had to go through a period of quite marked readjustment when I got home, because I was irrelevant. They worked out a life pattern without me. If the kids wanted tools, they’d go ask Pat.

My tools, and they would ask Pat where they were. And they had a system worked out to cope with everything, and I just wasn’t necessary. We had a few rocky patches there for a while, and we had to do a bit of working on it to sort it out.

It was a bit of an anti-climax, actually, because I was doing a freebie. I was disobeying orders from

the National YMCA Secretary, who had said, “Come straight home, Keith.” And I decided that I wanted to go to Hong Kong and look at a position in the YMCA there. It turned out they only wanted a white lap dog. It was another reverse case of racial discrimination. They just wanted a white bloke to kick around. So I lost interest in it fairly quickly. So I arranged to fly down with the RAAF, going through Penang again.

I said to the bloke (UNCLEAR) he said, “But look, we’re not quite sure when it will happen.” He said, “Can you be ready to go within an hour, within a day or two?” I said, “Ten minutes, I will be packed and ready to go.” So I got the call one morning, about the first or second morning I was really supposed to go,

and he said, “Quick! Go!” So I went over and jumped on this plane and flew down to Penang. And I got down there. I knew the movements officer down there and he said, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m going home.” He said, “Have you got any movements?” “No.” But he said, “It’s all right, if you haven’t got anything.” And it just went from bad to worse. I got down to Singapore and I rang the RAAF base up and I said to the bloke,

I said, “Good evening, my name is Williams. I’m coming home from Vietnam and I’m flying out with you people tomorrow.” And the bloke said, “Do you want the bad news or the worse news?” And I said, “I don’t want any news like that.” And he said, “Well, the bad news is we have never heard of you. We’ve got nothing on you. And the worse news is that there is no plane going out tomorrow. There is a remote possibility of one going out on Sunday…” This was on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. He said, “It’s probably Tuesday of next week.”

I said, “You can’t do that to me, my man. My mother is waiting for me, and if you knew my mother, you would not let me get stuck in Singapore.” He said, “Well frightened and all as I am, there is still no plane.”

Well, he followed me into Puckapunyal, so he had twelve months there. He was one who did have some YMCA background, then he came up to Vietnam and we had a week’s take over again.

I would presume he did pretty much what I did. You tend to shape things a bit to your own personality and style. And I certainly had adapted things a bit, but basically they were the same things, I guess, he would have gone on with. And obviously he had the confidence of people. If a fellow was prepared to come to him and talk to him about something as personal, as it was, then he must have had peoples’ confidence, which was good.

Just all the basic stuff. What I was doing, why I was doing it. I introduced him to key people. But that sort of thing, if you were any sort of an operator, basically it’s best to get into it. You warn people of

potential traps, I guess, but basically you’re better off getting into it, working through it, finding out, adapting it to your own way of operating as quick as you can. You can only go so far in following other people. Not to just jump in and changing things automatically. There’s often no need and no benefit in doing that, so his follow up would have been pretty much the same as mine. And what I said would have been

fairly basic stuff, and let him find out the rest. I would have answered any questions that he would have asked. I can’t remember whether he did or not. But most, I think, reasonably good operators are better off operating their own way, providing once they’ve got a rough idea of what the layout is. I certainly would have familiarised him with that.

I stayed on for the extra month, for a particular reason, which eludes me now. But there was a problem there that was better for me to stay and fix, than to hand over to someone else. I can’t really remember what it was, but it made sense for me to stay there.

So it was a fairly action packed period, I guess. I was doing normal things and sorting out this problem and then setting him up when he came up. I guess I was probably pretty tired and looking to getting out, and getting home, with a slight detour through Singapore, which turned out to be a slightly longer detour than it should have been. So I was looking forward to getting home. But also some regrets

at moving on. But in my YMCA career, I moved on quite a bit. And I always believed the main thing was to set it up so that it would keep on working. And it didn’t make any difference if you were gone. That you never owned the thing, that you only ever operated it. From that point of view, I wasn’t jealous and I was going back to pick up the operation back in Puckapunyal, which in many ways was fairly similar.

And in many ways just as valuable. Not quite as dramatic perhaps, but still doing the same sort of thing.

Yeah, I had the standard one, which was in the officers mess. And that was interesting, mainly, because I think I was probably the first, maybe the only person

who remained a teetotaller and drank Coke instead of beer in the final test of manhood that one had to undergo. I forget how big a container it was, but it was a fair size. I had it set up anyhow at functions, with stewards, that I only ever drank Coke. That I never drank alcohol. The army’s got rituals with passing it with the right hand to the left…And all this garbage. I could do that all right.

I had my Coke and that was all there was to it. And there were a lot of nice things said. People always say nice things to your face. But I believe I did a fairly good job up there, and that most of what was said was probably sincere. But in point of fact the send-off that I appreciated the most was in the ORs mess, where I was one of the very few people who was not an OR to have ever been invited to go. And I had an open invitation. I had been up once or twice before.

But I’ve got a plaque there that they presented me. It’s the arse end of the horse, and they weren’t given to everybody. I regard that as my most meaningful, significant send-off.

I was stuck at the end of a telephone and no plane.

There was a pregnant silence hung between the two of us for a fair while, and the fellow said, “Look, I’m not telling you this. But the best way to get a plane to fly out as soon as possible is to go down to army headquarters and tell them that you are going to stay there until you are told that the plane will be flying out. That will produce action. But I never told you.” So I did. And they did.

And we flew out on Sunday. So I then had to ring my wife and tell her that I wasn’t going to be home when she thought I was. And that was all a bit of a drama, because she had had the phone put on, while I was away. But I hadn’t written the number down because I was never going to ring home, from Vietnam. The need for it had passed. By the time she had got it on we were past that really critical stage of missing people. So I hadn’t written the number down. So I had to go down to the post office

in Singapore. I finished up talking to the exchange at Puckapunyal, trying to find out the number. I started off in Melbourne and I went somewhere else, then I went to Pucka and then went to Seymour and eventually somebody…I said, “Look, she works for the hospital.” And we tracked it back, so I got the number and I had to ring the next night. But I got my time schedules mixed a bit,

and I forgot that we were two and a half hours ahead. I worked it out that about ten, ten thirty she would be home, because she worked various shifts, and I knew she would home at that time. It was half past one in the morning when I rang, and woke her up. So she was hardly in a frame of mind to be told that I wasn’t coming home, and I wasn’t in the frame of mind to tell her I wasn’t coming home.

Anyhow, she eventually got the message. She said, “Thank God we know where you are,” she said, “because so and so in the Y had checked up and nobody knew where you had gone to.” Because I had not been doing this on the approved method, as I had been told I had to do. And I just disappeared off the map. So she found out I was in Singapore and I said, “Well, I’ll be home as soon as I can.” By the time I got there it was Monday. By the time I got home to Melbourne.

In the meantime I was propositioned by a homosexual, and I had several other very exciting…I was staying in a small private hotel and the night watchman was a big….I think he was about ten foot tall. He was huge. A very savage looking man, and I had to ask him to wake me up, so I could catch a taxi at five o’ clock in the morning. And realised too late that I

had my taxi fare, but I had no money to give him as a tip. And I just hoped he wouldn’t hit me in the back with scimitar. I was very nervous until I got into the taxi and rolled away. I felt bad about it, but there was nothing I could do. I had a good time in Singapore. I made the most of it. I took in a bit of Chinese culture.

It was good to get home, but it really did take quite an adjustment when I got back.

Well, we actually landed at Richmond. And the first thing I saw was a customs officer who had been one of my members at Sydney YMCA some years before. I had nothing really contraband. He said, “Pass.” And all my stuff went through.

He actually finished up driving me overnight down to Sydney because I had to stay overnight, then catch a plane, because they weren’t quite as frequent as they are now. And I flew down the next day, to Melbourne. I landed down there where I was met with the family - my wife and the kids, and my mother and father. Pat’s mother had died, but Pat’s father was there, I think.

A bit overwhelming. So much so that I actually went into reverse, and I think it took an awfully long time to forgive me. We stayed in a hotel in town for the night. Mum and Dad took the kids off. And the first thing I did was turn on the TV to try and get some decent TV. I think it was the awkwardness of the situation, probably. But Pat found that pretty hard to forgive.

It didn’t help matters at all.

Well, we did a lot of talking, I guess, particularly amongst the family ones. Three of the kids were fine. They hadn’t changed to any critical extent.

The eldest girl had changed a lot. But she was a young lady, and quite independent and forthright. And I lost ground with her that I never really picked up again. We’d been very close, before that. And we never ever got back to quite the same point. Which was a pity.

I went back up to Pucka. I did another twelve months up there. Then the eldest boy, the second child, came home and he used to be a very open kid, and just gave himself totally to anybody. He must have come home for tea or something, it was about the only time I was home during the day. And he came home in tears. And I said, “What’s the matter, Steve?” And he said, “So and so’s father’s just been told that he is being posted away.” And he said, “He is the fifth best friend I’ve lost in two years.

I’m not going to make any more close friends.” And he never has. He has switched off. He will not let people get close to him. And as far as you can blame, I blame myself for that, because he is such a lovely guy, and ideally suited to marriage and having a family, and it’s just not happening. And he is in his mid-40s, and it’s just not happening. And it’s really sad. I regret that. That’s probably one of the few things that

I really do regret about my time.

Well, I felt that army kids, generally, lost the ability to have close friendships. They have this superficial thing. They can make friends. You and I could meet and we would be holding hands in five minutes. And there was that surface friendship, but it didn’t go any deeper than that.

Because everybody knew that everybody was going to move, sooner or later. And so people didn’t develop the ability, or deliberately shut down the ability, the capacity to really open themselves up and have really good friends. And I thought that was really unfortunate.

I think so. We get on pretty well, but I would say, and I’ve said it to her, it’s fairly clear to me that she values her friends more than she does her family. And I think that came as a result. She’s not, not family, but there are lots of things happen, little things happen, that would illustrate that she values friends

very highly. The family are more to be used than to do things for, for arguments sake. She would do more for her friends than she would for her family. So that she sort of developed her own little island, in that sense. And I think that probably came as a result of that period.

I regretted the impact that it had had, particularly on Steven, and to some extent on Robyn. The other two I don’t believe suffered any harm at all, in that sense. Pat certainly learned to be more independent. But we’ve pretty well sorted that out. So there was no real harm done there.

It certainly, as I found out twenty five years down the track, had done some damage to me, which I would have been happier not having had. But I’ve learned to live with that, and I cope. I’ve developed some fairly effective avoidance strategies, of things that I know will get under my skin and upset me. I don’t know whether going to Asia had something to do with it, but I became quite interested in meditation and I practise

daily meditation. And that certainly helps me a lot. Nothing magical, but over a period of time I believe I’ve calmed down and settled a lot. Got a lot more relaxed about things. I regret the effect that it had on the kids, in particular. I accept what it’s done to me, and I don’t believe it’s done irreparable harm to our marriage.

I don’t believe that. We worked through things and got over it pretty well. We had some rough times. And both of us had to adjust. It wasn’t just me. We both had to adjust and compromise on things. And I think basically we’ve done and we’ve got a very good, happy relationship now. When my wife’s not trying to dominate me and get me to do all the things that she wants done, which I don’t want to do. Apart from that, life’s pretty good.

No, it wasn’t, because it was so familiar, I guess, and sort of the same. It was quite a bit harder, I think, when I went down to…I decided in my year back at Pucka that I had to get out because of Steven, coming home and saying…

I thought ‘This is it, it’s the kid’s education. It’s time to get out of this. I’ve done my time here.’ So I was invited to join the senior staff at the Melbourne YMCA. I worked equally as long hours, but I made much more of an effort to do things with the kids. I made my own fibreglass canoes and kayaks and we went kayaking up the Yarra River.

When I had time off, I mostly had Saturday afternoon and Sunday off, normally, then I made the effort to do things with the kids. I felt I had to do that. I was doing two jobs twelve months or more. I was working four days a week in Melbourne, then I would drive that night up to Pucka and do three days a week up there. Just to make sure things were going okay. Totally mad.

I don’t know whether anyone appreciated it. But that’s life. I believe it had to be done. I was a workaholic. I’m not now.

No, I don’t think it was. It was still a challenge. They were new people that needed help, and they needed the same sort of help. And it was just as important that they got it as it had been either in Vietnam or at Pucka the first time around. And I suppose I was also

trying to put in a bit more work and time with the family. I didn’t have a lot of time with the family in Pucka. I had some. Occasionally one of the staff blokes would come and say, “Piss off. Go home to your family.” There’s no point living in the past. I enjoy the past. I often think about things but I don’t live in the past. And there’s not much point wishing you could go back to it again. So I sort of

tend to go on and look for the next thing.

Oh, I was interested, but I was arrogant enough too. I knew what would happen and it did happen. You didn’t have to be a hypnotist or a mind-reader to see the way things were going. It was pretty obvious, really, I thought. And I talked to other blokes up there about it. I didn’t

talk about it much when I got home. I could see that it was inevitable.

In what sense?

That we pulled out? Well, if we had gone there to do a job, we pulled out too soon, because the job wasn’t done. But it was never going to be done. Because if the Americans pulled out, there was no point in leaving us. And the Americans had

less stomach to stay there than we did. And that was very obvious. Nobody ever said, “We are going to pull out.” But you could just see it, in everybody’s attitude that they just didn’t have the psychological make-up to stay with the Vietnamese mind-set. We were going to be out-waited. They would say to the Vietnamese people, “Dig six kilometres of tunnel under that hill. Don’t ask, just go and do it.”

And they would go and do it. We would say it couldn’t be done, too much bloody work. They just did it. And they sat in it and they out-waited us. And they knew all they had to do was sit around and wait, they knew they would cop a few casualties. But they knew they had us psychologically. I don’t have any doubt about that.

So it’s happened. I knew it was going to happen. It was just a matter of time. And I wasn’t that far out, from when I thought it would be.

Well, I guess I assumed that things would be tough. There is a very strong animosity between North and South Vietnam. The first thing the Communists did was to replace all the infrastructure in Saigon, quite ruthlessly. And they did that. And the South Vietnamese people paid a fairly heavy price.

And it’s interesting to this point in time, well, two years ago, that North Vietnamese Veterans are allowed to beg in Saigon, and South Vietnamese Veterans are not. Say what you might say, but you tell me the justice in that. And it’s resented. The presence of North Vietnamese people in South Vietnam is resented. And they have no doubt, as I’ve told, that they will

eventually win their independence, and be free state again. On the surface of it, when we went back two years ago, life was pretty good. These things are all comparative and you’ve got to take them in context. But the average person seemed to be a bit better off than they were.

There was more food, I think. The food was good, the food that we had was good, and healthy stuff, when we were there. And South Vietnam was quite prosperous. Saigon is just an amazing place. We went right up into North Vietnam. We found nothing but hospitality.

I didn’t wear a badge saying I was an Australian Veteran, but I made no secret of the fact that I had been there. I said, “I had been over here during the war. I was not a soldier and I tried to work with the Vietnamese people as much as I worked with troops. And I’m interested.” And I had a basis for talking with people. And where they had sufficient English, I was able to relate to people pretty well. And I found absolutely no animosity in any part of the country.

They all seemed prepared to accept me for what I was. And they accepted me very well. There were three or four Americans, three or four Australians, a Japanese girl and a couple of Poms, I think. And I, in that sense, stood out and quite understandably because I had the background in Vietnam and I was able work in comfort off that.

I was able to sort of break the parameters that most people would have found restrictive, I guess.

My family wasn’t interested. They had their own life. And I think this is fairly pretty common. I think very few people talked about Vietnam, or talked about any conflict experiences when they got back.

Pat’s father never talked about the Second World War with Pat, or his family. Pat was doing a full-time job, and shift-working and all that sort of thing. I still have hundreds of slides and photographs. And the first time they saw any of those was last year, when we got some out. They were not interested.

I got stuff. I risked my life running out on hills to catch parachutes from flares on exercises, to make sure we knew what we’d do if we were attacked. It was always a complete fiasco, but I suppose it was better to have a practise fiasco, than a real live one. And I got nick-nacks and uniforms and things and sent them back to the kids. The youngest bloke in particular loved those. And I got cultural stuff

and sent it back and they liked all that. And I suppose, in fairness, I wasn’t home all that much. After I had, I don’t know, three weeks or a month’s leave, in which I didn’t want to talk about things, I went back to work and I was working the same ridiculously long hours,

so that there really wasn’t an awful lot of time to sit around and, “How did you find it, Dad?” And the war didn’t really mean all that much to them. They knew what it was in theory and they knew that people all around them, the men were going away, would be away, and that sort of thing. But it didn’t have a tremendous impact on them. I think in their fairly undemonstrative way, they are reasonably proud

of what I did. My youngest daughter finally got me to go in an Anzac Day march last year, which I made all my own, by looking as though I was marching on my own. I sort of got divorced from the main party of Vietnam Vets. But it was good. I felt it was good. And Pat and I went to the dawn service and that was tremendous. I had been to the odd dawn service before but this one really, for whatever reasons, seemed to really mean something. I think the kids are quite keen

and they were very pleased to know that this was happening, and that I was be allowed to forget to get a copy of it. The eldest boy went to a service of reconciliation in Canberra last year, for me. We don’t talk about it a lot. I mean Steven’s probably been in as equally dangerous situations as I have over in Iraq. He went over, the first time,

and he was working with the Northern Kurds. He stayed there that long…He went over for three months and stayed for eighteen months until they finally said, “You better have some leave and go home.” And he handed over to an ex-army bloke from Queensland who said, “Look Steven, when you get back to Australia would you mind ringing the wife and telling her that I love the job, I’m safe, no problems.” Steven had only just rung the woman and the next day the husband was ambushed.

And it could have been Steven. And he was killed. And six months later, after he went back, a French friend of his who worked in prosthesis was wiped out just as stupidly, just as totally. Like the things that are going on over there now, to try and put people off and get rid of them. And Steven finally said, “Look, if you don’t mind, I think I’ve had enough. I’m not really here to put my life on the line.” So he knows what it’s about. He may well

know a lot more than I know about him. But he doesn’t say anything.

Yeah, I do. And it was good to go, last year. I went to Anzac Day marches as a kid, with my paternal grandmother, who was not a woman to be disobeyed, for years. And then I was in a brass band for a few years, and

we marched in front of, making a noise, in front of marchers in Melbourne for two or three years. I just haven’t got around to making the effort. And I feel different, in the sense that my being there was my choice, totally. I wasn’t involved

in killing other people. I was involved in positive things. There’s a fairly significant gap, not that I get together with groups of warries terribly often. But when you do, everyone’s out to be a bigger and better and braver warrior than everyone else. And I’m sure half the things they talked about never happened. Or if they happened, they were much more minuscule and insignificant than they make them out to be. But that’s the nature of man, I guess.

But I can’t tell warries, I haven’t got any warries to tell. And I’m not particularly worried about not having any warries to tell. And I don’t drink. Which doesn’t help in most ex-Servicemen’s rallies. I mean, I’m not uncomfortable being with people who are drinking, but they tend to be uncomfortable because I’m not drinking. And will remain convinced to the day that I die, that it is harder to be a non-drinker than

it is to be a drinker, because you have got to have the guts to stand up and say, “I am not going to drink. Thanks very much. Not interested.” Though you would say it much more nicely than that. I had an incident in Vietnam, in the officer’s mess, where a new officer came in and he was fairly promptly made mess secretary. And at the happy hour on the Friday evening…I always used to go up for happy hours. It was good to go up…

It was that kind of thing. But it doesn’t worry me. If people aren’t mature enough to cope with the fact that I’m mature enough not to have to drink, than that is their problem. Not mine. And I refuse to be worried about it. And I’m quite comfortable with people who are drinking, providing they are sensible with their drinking. I can’t stand stupid, senseless drunks.

And yet I worked with them for eight years, in the last job that I had, working with Aboriginal people.

I was with Melbourne YMCA a bit over five years and I, as I say, I continued to work part-time up at Pucka. But I had a full-time job in Melbourne. I was working long hours there.

But eventually Melbourne YMCA went virtually bankrupt. They borrowed a lot of money at the wrong time. The interests absolutely killed them and they went bankrupt. I was going to be out of a job. I had quite a bit of long service leave and accrued leave that I had to take, and I took that. I was off there for six months. And that was good. And then I got a job for a while out at one of the civilian YMCAs. And then the

executive from the Darwin YMCA came down to Melbourne, looking for staff. And it was suggested that I should meet him. And I did, and he was a nice bloke, and we got on. And I said, “Look, I’ve got a widowed mother and Pat’s got a widowed father and I just can’t see it working out.” But we talked to everybody, and they said, “We’re not here for you to worry about us. If you believe you should go, you go.”:

So I went up there and I stayed up there for three years. And I got stuck.

I came up before them. I came up at the end of October, the worst possible time to come here. And they came up in January. And I was with the YMCA for five years. I tried a bit of whistle blowing, but as I discovered it’s not a good career option. People

do not like whistle blowers. However right you are, nobody likes whistle blower.

There were some bad things going on, using funds wrongly. And I believed it was wrong, and I believed it was dangerous. I believed we would be in trouble if we were caught. So I tried to say so, and after twenty five years I was given five hours to resign or be sacked.

I very foolishly resigned. I should have taken them to court, I think. They cost me a lot of money. Then money’s only money. Then I was out of work for a while and then I went back to my trade for six years, which was hard, earning a living in a honest worker’s fashion. Then I had the opportunity to go into substance abuse work, through the church, with Aboriginal people.

I lived in Darwin. I didn’t go out into the community, which would have been a good thing to do. Because I had a bit to do with Aboriginal people in Broken Hill, not like the people you find hanging Darwin. Not the best types, for all sorts of reasons. But I went into that, and I was responsible for working around West Arnhem Land.

Not a job you take on for a high degree of job satisfaction. It was very frustrating.

It was essentially to help people with substance abuse problems. To perhaps create an awareness, an understanding of the programs that they could set up for themselves, and to informally counsel people

if they wanted to try and find a way out. And I was attached to an organisation that ran a substance abuse residential program. So I would refer a lot of my people to the bush, when I felt it was suitable. I didn’t always refer enough to suit the powers that be, because I wouldn’t recommend people if I didn’t think there was a chance that they would benefit. I didn’t see the point of pushing people into something when they weren’t ready for it.

And I believed, it was after eight years I believed I was on the verge of doing something really good. But I ran into some racial discrimination and they went to work on me and they sent me mad. That’s when I broke down with PTSD [Post Traumatic Stress Disorder].

Well the executive officer was a mixed race person

who had never acknowledged her past Aboriginal ancestry until there was money in it and status in it, then she came out of the woodwork and proclaimed loud and long what a good Aboriginal person she was. And she was a lazy, bludging sponge, parasite. And she had a 2IC, off-sider who was a red neck white fellow. And they actually had an affair.

And I started off trying to help them, because I knew more than the both of them put together. And they insisted on seeing it as me trying to take over, which was the last thing on my mind. I was offered to take the job on, but I said, “I don’t want it.” So they just worked on me. They embarrassed me. They demeaned me, and they sent me mad.

It wasn’t a lot of fun, my last year at work. And the next eighteen months, I have very little recollection. I was just a vegetable. It was not a good time in my life.

Well, my first job, and it might sound inordinately out of proportion. But I really concentrated, more than anything else, in the first two years on establishing a relationship. As you may know with Aboriginal people, they can’t function with you,

unless they fit you into the kinship system. I’m talking about real Aboriginal people, not urban Aboriginal people. They fit you into the system, and then everybody else is related. You are normally related to the first person that you have a significant relationship with. And I was made a brother of this fellow who was trying to get off the grog, when I started out at Pelee. And we were made brothers.

And everyone else in Pelee, and all over West Arnhem Land, had a relationship to me in the light of that relationship. All I had to say was, “I’m David Kelly’s brother.” “Oh yeah, then you’re my, this, that or whatever.” But I said to them, “Look, I don’t want to know my relationship. I know I’m David’s brother, that’s fine. But I don’t want to know what my relationship to anyone else is because that can stop me, can interfere with me talking to those people.”

They have what they call poison relationships. Like a fellow with his mother-in-law or his sister-in-law, things like that. And it’s all done to basically order the family system. And I don’t want to know. I want to be able to talk to anybody. So for four or five years I just did nothing about it. And then finally one of the number crunchers at Pelee said, “It’s about time you renewed your relationships. You’ve been coming out here long enough.” So he filled me in on

a lot of these relationships. But I’d go away for a week when I was at Pelee. I used to go to the schools and speak to all the classes, for about ten minutes. And I would go up the club and see people up there. And I would just wander around. Gambling was a big thing. Particularly on pension days you would see a group of anywhere from ten to twenty to thirty people gambling.

And big money. It was nothing for fifteen, twenty thousand bucks to change hands in one circle. And I would sort of wander around, fairly unobtrusively, just informal conversation with people. So that I got to the point where everybody knew me and the vast majority accepted me. And I was told very early on in my working relationship with Aboriginal people, when I was doing recreation work up here,

by an Aboriginal. And I had a major problem. He said, “Look Keith, if you want to get along with Aboriginal people, don’t say what you don’t mean. If you say something, do it.” So I followed that and it was some of the best advice I’ve ever been given. Because I very quickly established a reputation for being honest, and sincere. And if I said I would do something, I would do it. If I said I wouldn’t do something, I wouldn’t do it. If I said I wouldn’t tolerate something, I wouldn’t tolerate it.

And people knew exactly where they stood with me, and that was fine. That’s the way they liked it. There was no mystery. So I got that acceptance that I was after. Because I believed I couldn’t do any work, of any significance until I got that relationship where people would accept me and they would listen, really listen, to what I was saying. And then again, it’s not that easy. Everybody’s got a different button, and you’ve got to find the right button to press. And it doesn’t matter how far people are in trouble, if you press the wrong buttons

they won’t and can’t respond. You’ve got to press the button that works for them. And so you’ve got to work with people, individually, and very much so. But it’s amazing how you do get through to people. And I often heard, what I’d told people, regurgitated to me, months down the track. “Oh you told us this. You told us that.” And so on. I’ve also had totally drunk Aborigines,

holding two cans of beer, one in each hand, as they told me they remembered what I told them twenty years ago. Which is a bit…it makes you wonder how far you have got. But I know I had some very significant successes, and one more recently, although it wasn’t in the normal working sense. I also do some voluntary work for the National Heart Foundation. And I’ve got flip charts and videos

that I can take around with me, because all the outstations have got power. And I went into one fairly small, fairly unloved outstation and I didn’t have the TV thing, so I had to rely on storybooks. But I had taken my Aboriginal mate, the bloke living over there, with me, because he was very good. He knew my spiel just about as well as I did, and if there were any problems, he would just

break into language and they would talk about it, in language, which was fine by me. I didn’t mind at all. Anyhow, we worked on this treatment, and I was talking to them about smoking. And there were about seven or eight…Maybe ten to twelve people all together, but a basic core group of perhaps half a dozen men. None of the women came over on that occasion. And it was all right. No particular movement, one way or the other. But a couple of weeks later I went into the Heart Foundation to take in my account, because they cover my travel expenses,

and the boss called me into his office and said that two of them had been out at Menna Greena the previous week, and had gone to the health clinic and the Sister was telling them that some old character out there had died, obviously from smoking. Lung cancer. So they were using his death as a lesson, a bargaining point with people. And she said an old bloke came in from one of the remote communities,

and I finally worked out which one it was, and it was the one that I was talking about, and they started in on this bloke to tell him. And he said, “No Sister, you can’t tell me about that darkie. That Keith Williams, he’s been coming to our camp. And he tells a very strong story. I know all about that darkie. It’s bad stuff Sister. You don’t have to tell me. I know from that Keith Williams.” And I said, “God, you can’t buy that kind of publicity, can you?” I mean you can’t, can you?

So you get that bit of feedback occasionally. And I believe it’s because I worked on establishing that basic relationship so….Even if I was going to areas where I’m not particularly well known, people will accept me because they know that I’m accepted by other family members.

I used videos, which

I often had to translate in the sense that they were mostly about urban situations. But I think I’ve got a talent for drawing word pictures in a way that Aboriginal people understand. And I think I also have a talent for using their situation. For instance, one particular night I was trying to talk to a group and these bloody camp dogs were proving a bit of a nuisance. And I told a story about camp dogs.

I forget how it went on. But they brought the situation immediately, because it was real. The camp dogs were there, and I was talking about their camp dogs. And so they took the whole message on board. And I believed that that was a talent that I had. That I could work with Aboriginal people fairly effectively, in that way. I say things to Aboriginal people that a lot of people would absolutely be appalled at. Because they

are overtly extreme racial and rude. But they dig my sense of humour better than most people I know. And I can say these things and they will kill themselves laughing. Because they know why I am saying it, and they know what I am really saying. And they just read me beautifully. And they’re not afraid to tell me what they think. And when Aboriginal people tell you what they really think, then you know. When they argue with you, then you know that you’ve really broken through and you really are accepted. Even today I find it very

satisfying work to do.

I don’t know. I use things like the camp dogs…

Oh, I can’t remember. But if it’s a rude remark about Aboriginal people, like

how many dogs they need. Oh, it’s going to be a cold night, you will have to have half a dozen camp dogs. Which is very a rude thing to say. And they laugh and they say, “You should give me some blankets.” “No, why the hell should I give you some of my good blankets? You go and get your camp dogs. You call them in.” It’s a very rude thing to say to people you don’t know, and who don’t know you. But they laugh like crazy and on we go.

Oh yes, I believe I was, in a very limited capacity, and I would only go to half a dozen outstations, but I believe I’ve done some very good work in the past two or three years, since I’ve been doing that.

I regret very much that I was removed from the scene by the people that I had these problems with.

Arbitrarily, they were jealous of me. I think that’s what it really boils down to me. And they just pulled me out of it, and they just made life hell for me. And I believed I was on the verge of doing some really good work. And I regretted that very much. And to this day I can go out to Jabiru, and Aboriginal people will say, “Why don’t you come out to talk to us? Nobody comes to talk us like you do. Nobody comes around to see like you do.”

And this is eight years down the track. And they still say it.

I just felt totally worthless, and useless, and totally out of control.

I had nothing under control. I had nothing. I had no-one that I could tell to do anything and they would do it. I just felt absolute rubbish. They really broke my will. And finances in particular, all I had to do was think about doing the monthly accounts, and I would just go to pack. I would cry. I would lie around for hours and do nothing. I did nothing. I kept my running up. The only discipline I kept going

was running. And I think that saved me from going right under. It was a pretty painful period. I think people, most people, need to feel that they have some things that they can control. And they need to feel that they are not total flotsam and jetsam. That they have some value and some place in the scheme of things. And I’m not a control freak, at all. But

I discovered it really is important to have some things. Unfortunately the only things I could find were negatives. “I won’t do this.” And I wouldn’t do it. I did an absolute minimum. I just sat around. I did crossword puzzles. I didn’t have a computer at that stage. I wasn’t into computers. I read and laid around and did nothing, for eighteen months. It was an absolute waste of time. A total waste of my life for eighteen months

until I managed to snap out of it. I never had any counselling. The psychiatrist said, “I think it’s been too long. And I don’t think, short of medication…” And I wasn’t going to go on medication. I’ve seen what that does to people. So I reckoned I would work it out myself. Which hasn’t always pleased my wife, in particular, but I believed, particularly since I’ve been doing a bit of meditation, that I have ironed out

a lot of things, and that I’m more relaxed about things. I know the things that I’ve got to avoid. I speak my mind to people. I’ve discovered it’s worse than useless to say things you don’t mean, and not say things that you know you should say. I don’t set out to antagonise people, but I believe in saying, and I will say it, but I won’t get involved in ongoing conflict or stressful situations because I just don’t handle it.

Work. Not really. No I think I’ve reached a pretty good accommodation, now. Fortunately, alcohol has never been a problem. I’ve managed to get several worthwhile things into my life, so that I feel

that even at my age that I’m still doing things that are worthwhile. And I know that’s appreciated by a lot of people. And that gives me the bit of purpose and motivation to keep going.

No, not really. I won’t say I never dreamt. I used to dream, a long time ago. And I have no idea when I stopped. But

having nightmares is one of the classic signs of PTSD, but I never had them. Not been a problem.

Oh, Pat says I’ve got a few things that I’m paranoid about. I just say that I’m sticking up for myself. I don’t know.

Yeah, probably to some degree I was…I mean sometimes you’ve got to listen to what other people say, and she could well be right. That there are some things that I am a bit paranoid about. When I believe I need to be in control of something, I’ve got to be in control. I can, for argument’s sake, going on holidays. I can be extremely easy and say, “You fix it.” But if it gets to a point where I believe that I’ve got to do this or not do that, then that’s got to be the way that it is. Otherwise,

I have a real problem.

No, not really. Most of the recollections that come to me would be of a more pleasant variety, I guess. The fact that I believed I was doing a good job, and I

got the satisfaction that went with that, and that, more than anything, is the over-riding thing that stayed with me.

I don’t know, probably, the futility of it all, and seeing these mangled bodies,

living bodies, and wondering what the hell quality of life there was going to be for them. I just wondered what the hell there was in life, for some of those blokes. But I have discovered, as I get older, that as your grip on life becomes a lot more relaxed, it’s amazing how you can adjust your targets, and what you’re prepared to live with, that you never thought you would. In terms of

quality of life. People will settle for a lot less than they would have thought they would.

Oh, it was just a catalyst. The psychiatrist’s explanation was that

the seeds of PTSD had been sown, back in ’69 and ’70. But there was nothing critical enough to bring me to the point of breaking down. I didn’t have the extremely life-threatening, shattering experiences to do that. But I was worked over pretty expertly by these people, at the Aboriginal organisation.

And they destroyed my self-respect, I guess, is what it came down to. And if you haven’t got self-respect, you haven’t got much.

Well, I guess, that you do the best with what you’ve got. You try to be as reasonable a person as you can.

Listen to other people’s point of view. Try and go along with them as much as you can. Being honest. Having as much integrity as you can. And doing something that is worthwhile, because I believe that is very important. I think that people who are self-centred are, generally, unhappy people. And it’s only in doing things, outside yourself, for other people, doing it without worrying about

any recompense or reward, that’s when you really set yourself up as being a reasonably mature person.

I believe my time as a philanthropic rep was a very positive,

worthwhile period of my life. I would regret from the personnel’s point of view, that neither the airforce or the navy have philanthropic reps, because I believe they would help the Service personnel in those branches of the Armed Forces, very significantly. And I would believe that

philanthropic organisations, like the YMCA, should be helped to have representatives when the need becomes evident. Because their value, I think, is unquestioned. I have no doubt at all that any philanthropic rep, even half worth his salt, makes a very significant contribution to the welfare of the people he has been working with. I believe I did, and that’s been a

source of great satisfaction and benefit, in terms of my own personal growth. To me.

(BREAK)

That period of my life was tough and I would change some things, I guess. I think I ignored the family, too much. But I don’t think they suffered any tremendous harm over that. But

I regret actually the amount of effort I put into work and the lack of time I put into the family at times.