Australians at War Film Archive

Oh golly, well I was born in Emerald in 1925, at that time I was number five in the family then two years later my brother Bunie was born,

and I did have a bit of a chest problem out there and I'm diverting here, but my father – at that time, my mother and my father married at Claremont, they had to be kangaroo shooters and as you know in those times money was very, very scarce, it was during the Depression and Pop used to shoot the kangaroos and sadly the koalas. He would bring them home.

Pop would skin them and then Mum would have to salt them and peg them out to dry and of course that had to be a job well done because the better the skin was treated the more money they would get, which I imagine was very little and of course bullets were very, very scarce so Pop used to pick up the shells after shooting the kangaroos and he would bring them back and Mum would do the reloading. All of this had to be done on an open fire. They lived

in a little hut that Pop had built and he made it out of kerosene tins and bags and a little bit of corrugated iron and the fire was outside of course and Mum used to have to do the cooking and washing and then when she had Daphne, the first child, she had to boil the nappies in the open fire, but that open fire was where she melted the lead to prime the bullets for Pop. They did that for a number of years

and then my other sister was born. They shifted into Claremont and my second sister, Dorothy was born there and Pop was doing various work around the place and then we moved to Emerald in central Queensland, and that is where he was a timber cutter, wood cutting of logs and cutting them up for firewood for house people and for the railway. That is

where I was born. After he finished that, he then had a cordial factory in Emerald but because of me at that particular time having a bit of a chest problem the doctor suggested that we come to a moister climate. So as my auntie was married to a man that was one of the part owners of Smelie and Co, which was a hardware store, mostly from Rockhampton but they opened a shop in Cairns here.

So Aunt Doris and Jakes were here, so Mum decided to come up to Cairns and I remember coming up to Cairns although I can remember before coming to Cairns and I would have only been two at that particular time, coughing my head off and having a bit of gastric and I'm sitting out on a little potty in the backyard being as sick as a dog and I remember the tank, I thought this tank stand, the water tank stand was right up high

but my sister assures me that it was very low but being only little and down on the ground, to me it was a huge tank. But anyway we came into Cairns by train and I remember Mum had six children by now and this was in 1927. I remember coming because Mum had made a bed for myself up in the luggage racks, the trains in those days had luggage racks, and it was

a long compartment, it wasn’t the six eight compartments like they had later, it was only on either side of the carriage and they had this deep luggage rack up the top and I presume that I remember that because I would have been scared, probably scared of falling out. She put my brother and I up there, I remember that. I remember her putting my brother in a woven basket that my grandmother had brought off the Afghan travellers,

they used to go round from town to town selling their wares and granny bought this set, it was for carrying your luggage really but Mum made a bed for Bunie. I can't remember arriving in Cairns but I remember that Mum and Pop had just bought a lovely home. Before that, my father used to be a cook in the early days; he was a cook in a drover’s camp.

Many years later I read in the North Queensland Register where this Bill Downey was a good cook and a wonderful yarn teller but he spun them out, and it’s true, Pop would take ten minutes to tell a story, like his daughter I think! Any way he was a wonderful storyteller but when he came to Cairns, he wasn’t short of work being such a good cook. He got a job cooking in a cane gang.

He bought this little home on Mulgrave Road and every Sunday night Pop would ride the push bike out to Edmonton which is about fourteen miles, rain, hail or shine they did that and he would cook in the various cane gangs around there and then on a Friday evening or early Saturday morning depending on the amount of cane that was being cut, he would ride his push bike back home. However, with this lovely little cottage that they purchased, they didn’t even have time

or the money to insure and next door to us was a man who was building a hardware store, well where we lived at Mulgrave Road, was considered way out of town and it was most unusual for a man to build a hardware store out there where there was no houses. However we kids couldn’t help notice this man wheeling loads and loads of

paint and other things up to another house and we used to say to Mum, “Why is Mr So and So doing that?” We didn’t know what was going on but we soon found out, because not having any money we used to have to walk into town and you would walk into town and do what we called a ‘blocky’ you would just walk around the main block which was Lake, Albert, Shields and Spence Street and then we would walk home again and of course we did

this on a Sunday night, we had walked into town and we had not long come home and settled down to sleep when we heard this stick running up and down the side of the little galvanised iron walls that we had and I woke up to flames coming through, I was on the veranda with my sister. In those days, which they still use today, instead of the guttering that you have outside, they used to put that down

on the bottom of the galvanised iron and the air, there would be a space like that between the floor and the wall and all the lovely air would circulate, well my sister and I woke up to the flames coming in there. We lost everything, Mum and Pop lost everything plus the little bit of money that was in one of Mum’s teapots and the policeman came the next day and

Mum said, “Oh look this money is good,” because you could see the number on the notes. This silly duffer, he just said, “Oh no, that’s no good now,” and it certainly wasn’t any good because he ruined it. Well Mum, the Saint Vincent de Paul people were very good; they came and gave us clothes and I remember they had a pair of pink melanese panties that were all the go then and they were too big and the elastic had gone in one leg

and Mum couldn’t afford to buy elastic I imagine and I remember distinctly being tormented by the boys in the area because my pants were always falling down and I have a habit today of making sure that everything is right. But after the fire, we went up to Mount Molloy which is about oh sixty miles past Mareeba.

I'm still in the mileage, I can't keep up with the kilometres but anyway it was up past Mareeba to Mount Molloy and Pop decided, well Pop had heard that there was a vacancy for growing vegetables and also for a café which there was nothing in the town. So he went up there and established a vegetable garden and he also built this lovely café with our sleeping quarters on the side. My father had to leave school like a lot of boys in those days, he left school at twelve but he was a natural builder, worker.

He built this café place and I remember distinctly the café and I remember also my first introduction to the Aborigine people. Mum was busy in the café, having six kids and cooking, making pies and serving people in the shop, plus all the tablecloths on the tables were starched and ironed, that was my mother, and we had

Kitty who was a pure Aboriginal lady who used to be over at the police station. At that particular time the police were responsible for looking after all the Aboriginal people. Nearly every outback police station had a shelter for the Aboriginal people to sleep. So Kitty came from over there, she was a typical pure Aboriginal with frizzy hair, red cardigan and skinny legs.

She used to keep the matches in her hair to keep them dry, they were the small little wax matches then, and I can still see Kitty with that because Kitty smoked a pipe and Mum always made sure that Kitty had plenty of plug tobacco and Kitty smelt of the tobacco, she always smelt of the pipe, which I can still distinctly smell today. When I get that smell I think of Kitty. She was lovely and my little brother and myself, as I wasn’t at school then,

we would sit down, Mum had the laundry downstairs, she had a special table. Kitty wouldn’t come into the house, she sat down at the table and Mum set the tablecloth and everything on for Kitty and my brother and I would sit down there every Monday morning and have lunch, dinner with Kitty, which would be corned beef, cabbage, the whole works, plus sweets. And Mum was a very good cook, and Kitty loved her

puddings, anyway I enjoyed my introduction with Kitty. A little while later Kitty came over to Mum and said, “Oh Missy you got Nestles milk, my man, my Tom he very sick?” So Mum gave her Nestles milk. Anyway, we all went over and there he was and other Aboriginal people lying underneath this big shelter,

like they would keep their horses and that kind of thing, the black trackers were there too and we saw Tom and they used to have them, they had red blankets, they loved red, their red blankets were rolled up and anyway poor old Tom died. With the Aboriginal people up there, the black tracker when my father was away whether the police organised it or not,

the black tracker used to stand outside our shop, our café to sort of guard and make sure we were all right and I still remember him in his black clothes with a collar up to here and he had a cap and the black pants had a red stripe down each side. That was the town of Mount Molloy. The piece of land where we had our café is the RSL [Returned and Services League] in Mount Molloy. I didn’t go back until about

fifty years later. My brother and I, we had nothing much to do and we’d play and of course in those days the bullock teams used to drag the timber logs into the mill and the mill was owned by JM Johnson. We could hear the bullock teams coming so we would race, as we were only little, I was only about four at the time and Bunie was two, we would race over and get under a little drain,

it must have been small because we had to crouch to get underneath it but I think it was the challenge of being close to all those bullocks. We would sit in there, crouched up like this and I had enough sense to know then that even if the bullocks came, they couldn’t put their horns in the small place but we would be there as scared as hell with all the sand coming through the cracks in the pipes underneath the gravel but anyway they were just little things that we enjoyed up there.

Then we came into Cairns and Pop started cooking in the gangs again. We lived at various places around the town. I was in Cairns and we lived in Severn Street at that particular time, 1932 when there was a riot. The hobos during the Depression time they all had to keep moving. They had to travel at least forty to sixty miles every two weeks I think it was

and they would have to move between each town to get their dole. The government decided to keep them on the move so that they wouldn’t congregate in one particular town, to make the facilities of that town, overstretch it, so they made them move throughout Australia. Of course the quickest way to get from town to town was to jump what they called the rattler, the old goods trains.

They had timber wagons and they had a canvas on the back. It was a crime for them to do this, to hop on but what would happen, a lot of the guards on the train were sympathetic towards them, some of them were nasty but most of them, they would come out of town and the train would slow down and the men would jump on. If the police or the guards that were not so nice were around

the men could hide under the canvas and where we lived in Severn Street the railway line came right in past there, the line has been taken up now but it came up Spence Street and there was the Alligator Creek Bridge which had the signal to say whether a train could come into town or not. If the train stopped at that signal, the men could hop off with ease, with no problem at all and we would see them come past our place and of course they all congregated at that time in the stables and other sheds

at the Cairns Show Ground. The Cairns Show Society decided to put on another show, they couldn’t afford to have a show while the Depression was on. They decided to have a show and of course we had a couple of stirrers in amongst the hobos, and in fact I won’t mention names but they went into Parliament later on. They stirred the hobos and they weren’t going to leave at all.

We kids were going to Parramatta School at that time. We would go by and all the hoboes used to sit outside and they had sticks, paling fence, those times we all had timber fences with a paling and they would have razor blades on the top or barbed wire around and they had knives, anything they could find that they were going to fight the police.

We had Miss Munro and Martin in Cairns here who were quite wealthy and they saw the situation and they said they would decide to build a tent city for them and of course these trouble-stirrers, they would have put water on at the boundary but these trouble stirrers knew that they kept saying, “We want to have water at every tent.” Well they couldn’t afford to do that. They were only deliberately standing off. So it came

that way that the police and the citizens of Cairns said they were going to fight them out on this Sunday. And we had our lovely uncle living with us who was very placid and very quiet and he rode his push bike at about a mile an hour, just as long as it stood up. Nine o’clock was the scheduled time. First of all, I forgot, the week this was going on men would tell us kids, “There is going to be a big fight.

You stay inside. Tell your mother to keep you inside.” Well when we saw these hobos coming off the train we would run out and say, “Mister, don’t go down there, there is going to be a fight,” and they took no notice of us, you know, little kids and one elderly gentleman, it was on the Saturday afternoon and we did everything to try and get that poor man not to go down there. He got hurt, that fellow.

But anyway nine o’clock was the scheduled time and the big gates used to open into Scott Street which is Scott Street now but it didn’t come through because it was all scrub, Alligator Creek came through where Barlow Park is today. The big corrugated iron gates opened up and the roar of

all these men rushing out and of course Uncle Jakes who never even got quite up to the gates, we always laugh and say he kicked up dust, because he came so fast home, anyway we kids weren’t supposed to look out the window. We had the French lights, there was an open veranda and then French light doors that opened out like this, it was glass and we kept popping our heads out to have a look and we could see what was going on which was rather scary because you could see a couple of them, some of them were very, very angry, they wanted a lot of things.

One fellow pulled a paling off the fence just next door to us and there was a short policemen and I still see them in their lovely greeny grey serge suit and they used to have a stand up collar with piping on, it’s amazing what you remember. This fellow, the angry hobo hit the policeman on the back of, the balding patch on his head with this nail, but the policeman didn’t stop. The blood was coming down but it couldn’t have been real bad because he didn’t

stop. Anyway they drove them, the policemen came along until they went over Alligator Creek, that was to go out of town. Well little did we know that a friend of ours who lived in Millar Street, Mrs Undy – see to come into Cairns then you had to walk along the railway line because there was no street between Severn Street and Buchan Street, that road was put in

later in life by the men on relief work. Any way to get back to Mrs Undy, it was Sunday, she was coming into church into town and one of the good men, hobos, who got away early said, “Look, Mum don’t go any further.” She was at the railway line at the bridge and he said, “There is a lot of angry men, I’ll help you down,” and he helped her down into the mud underneath the railway bridge and poor Mrs Undy stood there with the mosquitoes and the tide coming in

and he said, “Don’t leave until you feel safe, until the others are finished.” Poor Mrs Undy stood with the tide coming in up over her knees, the whole works. She didn’t get hurt or anything but we kids saw that and we were very scared about it all. Of course my father was building a home in the bungalow area, that was down the railway line, as I said there was no street then and we used to walk down the railway line and

on either side of the railway line was a mangrove swamp, and there were all the blooded shirts, the men just threw their shirts and you know being little kids, you see the bloody shirts, we were awfully scared. And then out where Pop was building the home some of the hobos had built these beautiful bark huts. There were a lot of melaleuca trees around with the very thick bark

and they had cut those and made beautiful homes, really waterproof homes out of them but the police chased them too. They weren't doing anything, I would say they weren’t quite hobos, they had probably had enough money to support themselves, but we had the men there. It was a very scary experience at that time and something that has always lived in my memory. Even though we felt sorry for the men. Oh I forgot to mention that the same night of the riot

when all this went on, later in the afternoon we had the policeman come to our place and Mum said, “What do you want?” And he said, “Oh look Missus, don’t worry about it, just keep the kids inside and they will be right.” They were looking around and they left and then about nine o’clock that night they came back with torches. We had these huge trees at the back of the home, all along where we lived, at the back, Severn Street ran on to

what is now Parramatta Park and they were getting these torches and they said, “It’s all right lady, don’t worry.” Then we found out that these two stirrers, the future parliamentarians, were hiding in the long grass. There was an empty allotment next to us and they hid in that long grass and they got away the next day, the police didn’t catch up to them. Then they became big noted people, I won't say any names, anyone listening

can trace that up, it’s a bit of history, research for you.

He burnt the place down.

He burnt his shop down, he built the shop, apparently he had done this elsewhere – that we didn’t know.

He had built the shop with the pretence of going to build, have the shop out of town, you see there were very, very few houses as Cairns finished at Parramatta Park then and people had wondered why he was building the place and he decided that he wanted some money. He said he was painting the shop and a hurricane lamp slipped over and with the paint, the place burnt down.

Well I found out later in life that he had done the same thing in Babinda.

Not a penny because Mum and Pop had not long bought it and they hadn’t the money or the time to insure it. I have a photo of the little cottage somewhere and it’s a shame, it was such a lovely little place. I know we were only very small, by the photograph I was very small but I remember the fire distinctly and

Mum in her nightie, in her pink nightie, because we had to escape in our nightwear and Mum standing out in the street shivering. The fire must have been in cooler months of the year because we were all cold and of course my little brother and I were hanging on to Mum’s nightie. Mum was very distressed because the last time she saw my brother who was a year older than myself,

he was running back into the fire, but someone had caught him. One man standing around by the name of Mr Healey, Bill Healey, he took his coat off and he was a nuggetty fellow and he took his coat off and gave it to Mum and also took his slippers off and gave Mum the slippers. The slippers were far too big but at least they kept Mum warm. And it meant that we had nothing.

A little while later when we were living, I can recall this, living a little bit down the way, a bit further from the old house, a man pulling up in the front with a Model T Ford Roadster with the little dicky seat in the back and it had a sewing machine in it and he came up the stairs and asked for Mum and when Mum came out he said to her, “Mrs Downey, I believe you have lost everything in the fire,” and he said “Can you sew?” And Mum said,

“Yes.” And he said, “I have a Singer sewing machine here for you,” and Mum straight away said, “I can't afford to pay for it,” and he said, “Mrs Downey, I don’t want you to pay for it.” And she said, “But I can't have that.” He said, “I'm giving you the sewing machine. If ever you can afford to pay for it, you pay for it.” I remember Mum breaking down and crying, and anyway Mum accepted the sewing machine

and from there on she made all of our clothes, our hats, Mum made everything for us except our socks and shoes, she couldn’t do those and that Singer sewing machine is still on my sister’s property at Dimbulah. She wouldn’t let us sew on it, we never learned to sew on Mum’s machine and I can understand why, it was such a treasure for her because the clothes that were given to us by St. Vincent de Paul,

Mum could alter and that meant that we had clothes. In our start in Cairns we had absolutely nothing to start off with but luckily Pop was employed in the sugar, the cane season but see, that was probably for only four or five months of the year, in the season, but in that other time he had to go on to relief work and relief work paid, if you had six children I think you might have got around one pound seventeen and six a week

while you were working and it went from, it graded, well Pop had six and those that had five and four, they had less and less work and that meant that they didn’t get very much money. Of course the man that had no children at all got very little work at all. It was very difficult times, but then we managed, Mum was a good cook and made all our clothes, and Pop built this big home on the corner of

Kidson Street and Little Spence Street and we lived in a little house at the back while Pop built this little home for us until he built this place. How he got the timber for the place, there was an elderly gentlemen, Mr Loven, who had a second-hand shop and he had money, in fact his son was the first child born on the Esplanade, Louis Loven, going right back.

Anyway Mr Loven had these homes that he wanted to pull down so that he could build other places, I think they were the places in Spence Street where he built these nice shops, and he let Pop buy two of the homes for three hundred pounds and Pop and Mr Jack Shepherd pulled the houses down and carried it, Mr Shepherd had an old truck and they carried it

to the property and he stacked it all up until he could build the houses. It was by the goodness of Mr Loven that we got this beautiful home and the help of Mr Shepherd. We had no electricity and no reticulated water, no nothing, so Pop sunk a well. Being an ex-bushy he knew how to do a proper well, to put the timber and everything all around it and

I can't recall whether we had to drink that or whether Pop had, we must have had a tank but you see the malaria was very bad at that time in Cairns because of the low lying swamp area and we all got malaria, but Mum got it very bad. Our family doctor was a Doctor Clark and he said to Mum cause he tried everything.

There was Dr Coe previously who had discovered that quinine would suppress that, the memorial is in Anzac Park, the casino grounds now in recognition of what Dr Coe did. Well we had lots of Dr Coe’s mixture which was mostly quinine, very good for your teeth, I can assure, they rotted it. Anyway, Dr Clark said to Mum, “We have not tried this new treatment on the white population,

but we have tried it on the natives in New Guinea and they become very, very ill before they get better.” So Mum said, “All right,” and she tried it. He gave Mum the same amount of tablets that he was giving the natives in New Guinea and poor Mum went black, well dark brown, nearly black, it poisoned her system.

Anyway she got over that, they treated her for it but Mum was the first person to be tried with Atebrin in place of quinine which until during World War II we had the boys here in Cairns experimenting, that will come later. Mum for many, well I maintain that Mum always had kidney trouble, she had kidney trouble right at the very last and I feel that was caused from the experiment.

In 1939, when the war broke out, I had just left school. I didn’t like school whatsoever and all I wanted to do was work in Woolworths which had only newly opened, a little store in Abbot Street and I first started to work in, while I had my name down at Woolworths to have a position, I must admit

I put my age up two years and I looked it and I acted it, but anyway I worked at the time at a little café, the Black and White Café in Shield Street and when the war was announced that afternoon the boys that used to work over at MacKay’s the jewellers in Shield Street, they all came over for their milkshakes and different things. I recall this one fellow, he wanted a lime soda,

that meant that you put the lime with ice cream and then the soda in it. They were talking about having to go to war and one fellow said “Oh I won't have to go to war,” and the other fellow said, “I know bloody hell, it’s just my age,” and I recall now that it happened to eventually be my husband. But anyway after I left there, I got a job in Woolworths

at Christmas time they took me on, first time as a trial. They put me into the back room gift wrapping all the parcels. You didn’t buy all these pre-packed gifts like you do today, they were done, at that time I had to do them all up. The men had a bottle of Californian Poppy and a comb and a handkerchief. So I would gift-wrap that, wrap it in lovely clear cellophane, cellophane with all Christmas wrapping and put a little bit of a bow on it and for the ladies I would put the powder, like talc powder and the other different things and make up

all these lovely Christmas packs so they could sell their gifts, not like it is today, not commercially done. So anyway, whether they were just trying out to see if I could work on my own or whatever because I had to work on my own, and I continually kept going because in our family everyone had to do something and keep working with six kids around the place. And then the war came on and as I said they announced the war and we were very scared and

with our radio, and at that particular time we didn’t have a radio at home but other people did, and you could hear the war news every hour, eight o’clock, twelve o’clock and four o’clock there’d be the war news come on and they would tell us what was happening in Britain and of course even though it was a long way away I was very scared, we were still scared. But you see

there had been a German ship go up and down the coast here, there was one fellow who turned out to be a spy and he came into Cairns and was taking photographs but he was caught in Darwin, Von something, I forget his name now. At that time too the upper New Guinea area, in Dutch New Guinea and other places, there were a lot of German people, missions and that type of thing and then there was the German, what they called the raider ships going up and down the coast

and they were down the bottom part of Australia too. They were merchant ships with guns and various things on, they were making out that they were merchant ships. At that time we knew that they were around but we still felt reasonably safe. What we did do, the local people, particularly the women, formed the various clubs and the young children even in the schools learned to knit and we had even a halfpenny, which we had in those days,

the farthing had gone out but we still had halfpennies and a penny, well a penny and a halfpenny, goodness if we found one of those we were rich, if we found a thruppence that was amazing, but six pence and a shilling what you could buy. You could buy ten little black cats, which I loved, for a penny and I always wanted brooches and we used to lick them and stick them onto our shirt and my Mum was always going crook because the ants would eat it but it still didn’t stop us.

If we found money, it was good but what had happened is the schools had various, like the Red Cross, before I left school I became a member of the Junior Red Cross and I had my white dress and my veil on and we used to go to the hospital and help in the ladies ward particularly, cleaning the lockers or if the ladies wanted water, we’d post their letters for them and that type of thing,

that was just before I left school. With the various organisations like the CWA [Country Women’s Association] and the YWCA [Young Women’s Christian Association] and all those church guilds, they all formed, they were already working as a guild but they then called upon other people to knit for them and make balaclavas and gloves and socks for the boys overseas. For the first couple of years it was all for Britain,

everything we saved up to give. You’d save all the fat and that type of thing. In those days we used to eat lovely roasts with all the fat and do our vegetables in the fat, they were lovely. What we used to do, we’d save up all the fat off the roast and rendered that down until it was almost pure and then we’d get the suet and different things from the butcher and render that down

and we’d put them in seven pound syrup tins which were about so big and they were blue, Bundaberg Mill had this seven pound syrup and they would solder around it and we sent that to Britain. All the various things, Australia sent tinned fruit, the whole lot, anything, any money to help the poor British people. See they were being bombed and you couldn’t help but feel sorry for them. A couple of nights I know that I dreamt I was being shot with a bullet.

They say you don’t wake up or something if you feel you’re being shot in the night but I woke up. I was so scared that I was in the war, over there. Of course we used to have our boys go away and I was a member of, the Cairns RSL formed the RSL junior auxiliary, women’s auxiliary. Why they did that, we had so many of our troops going away,

see the 51st battalion, their recruiting area went from Tully up to Thursday Island and out to the Gulf of Carpentaria and that meant if any of the men volunteered to go away, they would all have to come to Cairns to leave the city. They would have to come the night before and the RSL always gave them a farewell dinner. It got that way that so many of the men were coming, it was a bit much for the women so they called upon, the RSL men,

called upon us junior auxiliary women to help the ladies to do the waiting on tables, wash up the dishes and then after we did that work we would then go into the front hall which is lovely, it’s still there, I go there now for our ex-service women’s meeting, that’s my hall and that’s where we used to dance and entertain all the boys. Of course I had some lovely boys and you’re dancing with them

and they say, “You’ll wait for me Vera, won’t you?” I’m still waiting, they haven’t asked me. I don’t know who’s missed out, me or them but we had some wonderful things.

The Junior Auxiliary as there were so many soldiers going away when they were forming up the AIF [Australian Imperial Force] divisions, not only the army, we had the navy and the air force people and of course we had the various ships coming in. We had

some New Zealand ships coming in as well and then the American Liberty ships that were carrying the cargo to and from Australia. See they were calling into the RSL as well, and the men of the RSL decided that it was a bit too much for the ladies so they got us to help them. We started off with the entertainment and I don’t recall it but one of the girls said that we had

to take our turn in the kitchen, maybe with washing up, but I know that I couldn’t get to the front hall quick enough to dance and Mrs Hodgkins, a lovely plump lady, and she played the piano as well and no matter what you asked for she would play and we would dance to Mrs Hodgkins’ music. We would have these soldiers come the night before and if we had a navy vessel coming in to town,

word would be given to the RSL that the men would be free, so the RSL would put on a special dance for them. And I was working at Woolworths, which I said I wanted to work, and one of the girl’s mothers was on the auxiliary and she used to phone Woolworths to tell Jean that the dance was on tonight, a special dance. Apart from us farewelling the troops, early on they would only have once a week and then it became twice a week and then it was three times a week that

trains would depart with all the troops on. If a navy vessel was coming in to town, as I said, they were notified so we would go along and we would dance there, have a lovely time, because all I ever thought of in life was a feed, a sleep, and a sing-song and a dance. I just loved life and then what we would do, we would dance with them but when we would farewell the troops going overseas,

after saying farewell to them, but I must tell you, we were not allowed to go out of that dance hall, we had to have proof that we were going home, we were restricted by these elderly ladies in charge of us. So what we had, everyone rode a pushbike in those days, we didn’t have cars, you couldn’t afford a motorcar, there were no buses or anything like that, so we had to have a torchlight,

a little black torch that sat on the front of our pushbike. So if you had your torch and you went out you were okay to go home but don’t come back again, you had to make sure that you went home. They were really strict with us and that was all the time, doesn’t matter whether we were farewelling the boys or the visiting ships. When we farewelled the boys, after our dancing, it would always finish at half past nine or ten so we little girls could go home

and have a sleep so that we could be up at the railway station at half past seven in the morning. We were dressed in our white uniform trimmed with red, white and blue, and we had a forage cap and we had an apron with the red white and blue if we were working in the kitchen. We had to be at the railway station at seven thirty, you needed to be there earlier because the boys who were going, they would all have to congregate at the 51st Battalion headquarters, which was in Lake Street

and then they would march down Shield Street to the railway station, which of course is where the big city shopping centre is at the moment, central. They would march down there and all the parents and everyone else was there, and we girls used to be there and that’s why I said I'm still waiting for the boys that gave me a kiss, “You’ll wait for me?” They all came back, that’s the sad part about it.

Never mind, they were very nice and I had a lovely time. Some of the men, we had some fellows who were navy men who were stationed at Archer Point, that is ten miles south of Cooktown, Cairns was the closest place they would come on for leave and there was one particular fellow by the name of Harry Grey, he was the cook up there. He used to frequent the RSL an awful lot in the afternoons.

He would frequent the RSL and Harry loved our amber fluid in Cairns here and Harry used to sway in the breeze and he had this cap that sat on the back on his head and we reckoned that he held it on with a nail. Then when the Coral Sea battle came, that is when we had more men come in, more men came and they were going away and we had three train loads a week

of farewelling the men. Can I go on to saying what Cairns was like with the Coral Sea battle?

Just before that well okay.

OK, as I said we used to have a lot of the boys coming and we danced with them and as I said I worked at Woolworths. It was just prior to the Coral Sea battle that one ship-load of

troops called into Cairns and it was the first time we’d seen our men dressed in green. The other boys before were 51st Battalion, they trained with horses and they were dressed in this heavy khaki serge type of clothes.

These other boys came in dressed in this khaki green, dark green and they called in on the ship. They weren't supposed to be saying where they were going, but you try and stop young men trying to tell us where they were going. They went up to Rabaul. It was the 17th Lark Force, 8th Division and some of the men got off at Thursday Island and some of them went up to Rabaul.

And of course when the Japanese came through they took over, they just advanced so quickly and a lot of these men were taken. Word came back to us after a while that the biggest majority of the boys that came into our shop, into Woolworths had been killed, and I have told the story about the others, some of them escaped into Cairns here.

My brain has gone vacant at the moment! We used to dance all the time, we’d go to the Aquatic.

Every nice girl loved a sailor, there is just something about it I don’t know, we loved them all but the navy boys.

See, I have to divert over to when the HMAS Platypus came and this was after Coral Sea, we had nobody and the HMAS Platypus was a depot ship and it had been bombed in Darwin and it eventually came into Cairns. Of course we had no one to defend us, was it any wonder that we loved the navy boys when they came to town. We thought we were safe and we thought it was marvellous, we had nobody

before to defend us. All these sailors came in and they used to come to the RSL because there was no mess on board, for what do you call, the ratings, so they used to come into the RSL, they called it the Anzac Club. Beer was rationed because of the amount of troops around. They would queue up outside the RSL,

the front door, it’s hard to explain but anyway they would queue up and go in the front door and they would then go out the side door and form a ring, and those that could stand the last and Harry Grey when he came down from Cooktown, from Archer Point, he was one of those that was still going round and around until the beer ran out. They kept the queue going until the beer run out or they

fell over. It was noted at that time, see we had the Cairns Brewery, the beer apparently was a bit stronger than the others and the young lads who used to come into Cairns, they didn’t know this and they’d get a couple of them and as one of the boys said, two beers and they’re happy, they start talking and laughing and after the third beer the megaphones would come out, talking loud and playing up.

Yes I danced with them all and we danced mostly at the Aquatic Club; there is a lot of controversy now, they are going to pull down the old Aquatic Club on the Esplanade and put up a high-rise and of course to us who danced there that was the main dancing place. The floor seemed to have a spring in it and we’d go along, it only cost a shilling to go in.

When I worked at Woolworths I didn’t keep my money, my father at time was up in Petford which is past Dimbulah and I would just take my pay packet home and hand it to my mother and I didn’t have any money to spend so Mum would pay my fare in and if someone didn’t ask me would I like a drink, I wouldn’t have a drink all night. It was a shilling to go in and of course we danced and then one of the songs, when it came to medley

was, ‘Who’s taking you home tonight after the dance is through and who’s going to hold you tight?’ I still remember that and the boy that wanted to take you home, would always try to get the medley with you but of course I had my Mum, my Mum used to come to the dances with me. Some of the boys would say “Vera, can I take you home?” and I would say “I can't really, I will have to ask Mum,”

and it’s true, from there I nearly always went home with Mum, we rode our pushbikes home. There was also the Trocodero which was upstairs on top of Rockman’s building, the square in town and that was mostly jazz, where the Aquatic Club was old time, Marian Jenkins orchestra played there, and it was lovely and swinging and so relaxing. Of course when you got hot you could go out on to the veranda, the balcony, and

a lovely sea breeze was coming in off there. For those that wanted to get romantic you’d go out, the moon would come up over the inlet and shine on, reflect on to the water and the few palm trees around, rather a romantic setting. But we did have a wonderful time and as I said, as long as I could dance and sing and eat, I was happy.

Mostly the old-time, the waltzes and occasionally they would do a quick step

which they classed as modern jazz then, and the Pride of Erin and the Maxino and because they didn’t do such this as quadrilles and the square dancing, that type of thing, I had done that previously at Parramatta School where I went to, I was a pupil and they used to have a dance on Friday evening and that’s where we used to dance the square dance and the quadrilles and all the old fashioned, where you take in a lot of people,

any dance as long as I was dancing, as long as there was music, it didn’t worry me. Occasionally they would bring in a modern waltz at the Aquatic but it mostly old time. The Trocadero, that was mostly modern jazz and they would bring in a few old time ones there too but it didn’t matter as long as I could get up and dance.

Dances?

I think I loved the modern waltz more than anything.

Maybe because they held you closer, I loved that one. I loved anything, it didn’t worry me because I had all the energy under the sun and then the Boston Two Step, that was another one and my, after we danced all that time, we started at eight o’clock and then finished at twelve and then you would ride your push bike home. I can assure you, your legs were pretty tired after it.

Still, we would come back the next night for it. Then of course it got more so when the Americans came but you want to keep that for later.

I didn’t like school, I loved Parramatta School, but I didn’t like the schoolwork, you see. I did not realise that I had a hearing deficiency and it wasn’t until I came out of the army that my hearing got worse and I

wore a hearing aid for thirteen years, and then I found out that there was a man in Melbourne first brought it into Australia, he went to America and learnt what to do and then there was a man in Townsville, Dr Hopkins, who had gone to America to learn it too. When I first heard about it, this was after the war of course, I was a bit scared, but I read, they did say that

they didn’t know if the flesh would grow over what they put into your ear for five years. So anyway, five years time I said, “Okay,” I would give it a try so I went down to Townsville and Dr Hopkins did my ear, this first one and it was fantastic, I could hear the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s and it was marvellous. And I had it done in November and I went into town and first of all I didn’t know that

there were so many motorbikes, Suzuki motorbikes and I didn’t know that cars and motorbikes would rev up on a corner before they go around and rev up when they come back. Anyway, I used to have to wear a plug in my ear because it was too much. I was in town and shopping at Coles and just coming up to Christmas and I saw this little girl walking along and I heard her say, “Are we

going to see Santa now, Mummy?” Previously I would have heard ‘are’, ‘going’, ‘Santa’, ‘Mummy’, see you miss all those in-between things. I was like Mary Poppins when she came out of the convent, I floated along. My first lovely sounding when I came home here, I sat on the patio and I heard the roosters crow. I said to Ronny,

“Someone has got roosters!” And he said yes, because it was coming up Christmas you see and chop the heads off the roosters. I hadn’t heard them for years, it was just beautiful and all the little children. I used to think this was a quiet place, but it was ‘nappy valley’ and it wasn’t until that I got the hearing back that, I learnt to, people don’t know until you have been in that dark world and you come out of it, you see children on television now with this cochlear implant,

and the sound comes and oh and I could hear it. I was on the table, you are awake when they do it and I said, “I can hear!” and he said “What can you hear?” I said “Scrubbing up and whatever.” They had a look and it was rooms away and I said something about it, “I can hear!” and he said “What else did you expect, woman!” I didn’t expect to be able to

hear like that, it took a lot of getting used to but I am still in the land of the hearing and it is wonderful.

Oh we were too busy to fight, no I tell a fib, my two sisters used to fight, they used to have fisticuffs out in the yard. My brother and I used to have little spats but none of that but

the two sisters they really used to get stuck into it. But anyway Daphne was the eldest one and she was a pretty girl and she too turned out to be hard of hearing, apparently it comes in the family, and she married early in life, in those days you married early and then Dolly, the other girl, Daphne has passed on, and Dolly, Dorothy is still alive and she lives in

Mareeba now. She had six children. She is fairly decrepit, she can't see too well, she has macular degeneration and then with her hips and we say, “How do you manage?” and she says, “Oh I get bloody mad,” but she manages and she still lives on her own, being independent. And then I had my sister Ellie, Elsie, sadly she’s going through

chemo [chemotherapy] and all the rest of it at the moment but I'm afraid the time is numbered with her. See I told you I wave my arms around, I can't help it. Ellie sadly but my brother Robbie, none of them went into the services, because they were married most of them but my brother Robbie who was just twelve months and fourteen days older than me,

he was in the army and he went up to New Guinea and he was in the medical, in the ambulance services and then of course there’s me and then there was my younger brother, Bernard was his name but we called him Bunie, I don’t know why but he sadly died when he was ten. He had osteomyelitis, which is bone decay. A kid threw him down at school, into the gutter and jumped on him and of course it bruised the bone and

apparently he got a boil and I believe you have to get a boil or some other skin break and a germ gets in and attacks the bone and there was no such thing as penicillin in those days and Bunie died in Brisbane, he haemorrhaged. They put him in plaster because they didn’t know what to do in those days, so we lost Bunie. So there is only three of us at the moment and sadly in a few week’s time there will probably be just the two of us.

But then, ‘There but for the Grace of God go I’.

Well no, Dolly and I were closer together, more so than Ellie. They sort of lived their own life and my sister, I would say, has only just got to know me properly after this time because

I have been the one that had to take her to the doctors and surgery or whatever, chemo, the whole works and drive her around the countryside. You know, some people live their own lives and because I had to go to work and do other things, she once thought I was hoity-toity [snobbish] and thought I liked being a career woman. It’s not that I wanted to be a career woman, when you’ve got a husband that has a business you just have to do it whether you want to or not. So I’m there.

I would have loved to have stayed home and done but I am not sorry because it is good for you.

We all had to work, oh my father always maintained that a busy child is a healthy child, he hasn’t got time to get into mischief. We had this big home at the bungalow, it was a half-acre allotment, two allotments together

and of course every home in those days had their own vegetable patch and WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s and cats and dogs and the whole works. We had our vegetable garden and he would come in of a Saturday from cooking in the cane and he would find that probably we didn’t do what we had to do during the week and he would go into town but before he went into town he would say, “I want that cleaned, that cabbage patch, I want

all those weeds pulled out,” because in Cairns weeds grow better than vegetables anyway, and it used to be so hot and it was black sand at the bungalow. So Mum, she was on our side, we would go downstairs and pull up everything while Pop rode his bike up the road and Mum, she would be the lookout, she’d watch and say, “You’re right.” So down the weeds would go, we wouldn’t do any more, we would play and when the ETA [estimated time of arrival] came, the expected time of arrival came,

Mum would be looking again, “He’s coming.” Well there more weeds pulled up in that ten minutes and it is not until I’ve grown up that I realised that Pop would have seen that it was fresh soil, I mean when you pull a weed up and leave it for an hour that becomes wilted but that’s what we used to do. For our entertainment we used to have concerts at home

and we had a piano and Mum played the violin and I being number five in a family of six I didn’t have an instrument, so we used to put the spoons in a bottle and I would mark the time and my brother used to have a saucepan with the spoons on the drum and everyone had an instrument to play and our home had a veranda on two sides, upstairs and downstairs,

and we used to have a dance on a Saturday night, it would be either at our place or at some other people up the road further. We had some neighbours across the way who were part Aborigine and they played guitars a lot and then we had the Pitt family up the road, Dulcie became Georgie Elie over in America, very famous and then Heather, Walter and Sophie, they used to all sing with the guitars and I grew up with all this lovely Hawaiian singing music.

But they’d all come home and we would have, of course every Mum would bake and bake, you can imagine and there was another family in town and they had about nine kids I think and they’d come out in their old vehicle. We all had a fabulous time all Saturday night and then came supper, all this beaut food. The ones up the road, that Mulgrave Road, we would all walk up there,

Mum would carry all the food and the people there, there was no lino on the floor, it was sort of a sanded floor, and they would move their dining room chairs back and table and the lounge would be put out on a little veranda and we’d have a candle on the floor or else we used to get the sawdust and put a bit of kerosene on it and spread that on the floor and then if you get a bag and swing it around like that with a kid sitting on it, it makes it nice and shiny and we used to dance there.

Then the supper would come on which I would love and on the way home, we would have to walk home, and we would be singing our heads off. The walk along the street was always singing and of course some of the neighbours would call out, “Shut up,” and it made no difference because we still sang. It was one way to keep the little ones awake. That’s what we used to do for our entertainment, there was always music and singing in our lives.

Pop was a very good, he’d make up verse, he was a bush poet. We always had poem competitions and of course, Pop would always win but I can't tell you what he used to say.

Some of it, well you can take it off, well let me go back first, for our school holidays

we had seven weeks school holidays then and our main grocer was Lee Sang and company in the famous Sack Street where all the street girls used to live, the red light district. Lee Sang and company were the merchants in there and they fed us because Pop didn’t have the money and whatever Mum wanted she just had to write it down and the boys used to come.

When I say the boys, there was Percy [Unclear] and they all rode motorbikes and they would come out and get the order and they always made our home their home and they would deliver it out. I can recall Mum, used to say, “Oh I can't afford to pay for it,” and old Lee, the big fat fellow said, “Mrs Downey, don’t you worry about that, your children are my children. My children are back in Hong Kong, I do not see, I have your children.” So he let us book up

and Mum kept paying off and paying off, and I was with Mum when she went in to old Lee and paid off the last of the three hundred pound debt. That was a lot of money then. He stood for three hundred pounds and when Mum paid the last money, he gave us, we used to have these salted plums and lychees, crackers, every year we got that, however for our school holidays

Percy or Johnny would drive their MG [Morris Garages] or GM [General Motors], big delivery truck because they used to deliver hay and that type of thing around to the various farmers. So he would come out on the Friday afternoon that school broke up, no previously to that they would bring out sack bags and Mum used to hose the sack bags, potato bags, hose the dirt out and we would have to cut the stitching on the sack bags

and then we would open what we had to and then Mum would hose them all again, then probably Pop told her what to do. We would have to sit there and stitch it up again, all of that was all prepared for Friday afternoon of school break-up so their truck would be absolutely loaded with all of our kid’s food and

the whole lot plus the tent and Pop used to go out and build, put these saplings, he would cut down the tea-trees around the place and he would put the frame of the house up and then all the bags went around the side and he would make our beds out of crossed timber and a bag would be slit over those two and we slept in that and each and every one of us had a roll up window, where our head went we had a roll up window.

This hut, that was our home for six weeks, we used to come in a few days before school broke up but that’s where we slept in there and outside he put another shelter with a long table because it wasn’t only Mum and Pop and six kids, we had three or four men from Lee Sang and Company, they were the ones that would bring our food out to us. What would happen is that when they would come out this week, Mum would write a note

to say what she wanted next week and then sometimes we would say anything that was urgent we would get the boys to put it on what they called the ‘white car’. The white car was between Cairns and Mossman and the white car used to leave Cairns and the return trip at about one or two o’clock in the afternoon. They used to, road was so bad they used to break axles and the whole works, there was none

of this lovely highway that we have and there was no concrete wash aways, it was always rocks and that type of thing and of course coming from Cairns to Palm Cove, that’s where we were then, it could be anything. The expected time of arrival would be four o’clock up there, and of course it could be anything from four to six and this is why Pop had one very good poem. We were mucking about playing, swimming and God knows what and Mum said, “You had better hurry up,

the white car might be coming,” so we raced up and sat on the Sweet Creek Bridge and we waited and we waited and we waited and that’s when Pop made us all make up verse to fill in time, it was a competition and you can take it off if you wish. His winning one was, “We left the camp in a hurry,

we travelled pretty fast, just to come up here, and sit on our bloody arse.” That was my father and I grew up with that, well it was true. See we lived, even though we were in the sun all the time, we did wear hats and shirts but we’d get sunburnt, not like the kids are burnt today, we’d only get burnt a little bit but we used to swim all of the time and

it’s a funny thing that little did I realise, as far as we were concerned we owned that beach. There were some other rowdy blokes that used to come in a little utility and they camped, they turned to the right. Our camp, when you go out to Palm Cove today and you come down Vivas Hill on to the Esplanade where you turn, that’s exactly where our house was, that’s our piece of land

and our toilet used to be in and the trees are still growing, the bushes where Pop had this bag house, little house on the prairie sort of thing. Anyway the people that used to go up the other end, well we used to go crook because they made a lot of noise and maybe we were jealous we weren’t amongst it but little did I realise until I got married that Ronnie was one of them. But there was nothing out there at Palm Cove then and later on

after a few years, they eventually built a little kiosk type of place and they used to hold dances in that. We used to stay out at the beach, go out every year for about six years or something and it was our recreation. There was nothing much to do in town. We could run up and down the beach and do what we wanted to do. The jellyfish used to be bad, the

stingers. Let me come back again, at the same time this would be, something else that we used to do, there was an elderly gentleman who lived in Wentworth Street by the name of Mr Younger, he had been a carpenter, a bridge builder, he built homes and everything and he built this fourteen foot flattie and he had it moored down at Smiths Creek, down the bottom of Buchan Aumuller Street.

We used to go down, Saturday, Mum would cook all day and we had a big huge cane laundry basket, and I mean a big huge one, and she would have that full of food and cups and that type of thing and we would have to carry that down Buchan Street which from Spence Street down to the water was all scrub.

You were walking through scrub and you would always break off a branch to beat off the mozzies, there were so many mozzies, oh my God, they’d attack you, and anyway we would get down to Smiths Creek and we’d load everything, Mum and Pop and the six kids, the basket of food and Mr Younger and I maintain that the top of the boat was only about this far away from the water. Then we would row and as I said Pop made us work and everyone had to take a turn at rowing.

We would row around the other side of Admiralty Island, which during the war years exactly where we used to go that became the slipway for the Catalinas to moor when they came right up the inlet, they would slip in to there and of course coming home, what would they do, they’d drop anchor and of course the boat, the flattie, would go around and around and I used to be so scared, I was sure that we were going out

and Pop used to give me clout across the ear and told to lie down in the bottom of the boat which I used to do. One of the things that doesn’t happen very much now although I saw a photograph of it the other day in the Cairns Post, one of the lifesavers netted this huge jellyfish. We used to have these huge jellyfish and I mean huge, they were about eighteen inches across to twenty inches wide and they used to pulsate just like a parachute,

they were there by the thousands and you would be trying to row and you would be hitting one of these damn jellyfish. Even though I was only little, seven, eight, nine, whatever, we all had to row and I could see the boat going down can't I and all the jelly fish taking me. I was always in trouble for that. Of course when we got out there was this mud and we didn’t wear shoes, Mum couldn’t afford. I had one good pair of shoes a year because we couldn’t afford it. We wore sandshoes but you wouldn’t

wear shoes like that. I’d get out of the boat and put my foot in the mud, yuck, I can’t stand it, same as going in a WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK yard. If you’ve been in a WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK yard you know what I mean.

They probably would have done if you met up with them, but not like the ones you have today. When we camped at the beach there were

a number of people were stung. They became really ill. What they have found now is what we knew then, a tiny little thing will get caught up, mostly under their arm or at the back of their leg and Johnny Ah You who I spoke about with the Chinese people, he stayed one time. There were two people stung and they were in this house and Johnny got port wine. Mum always had port wine

and other people usually carried port wine, a very good tonic and Johnny kept massaging it and he saved them. For the ambulance to come out and get them, first of all to get to a phone you had to go a couple of miles up onto what’s now the Cooks Highway and then back a bit before these people had a telephone. As I said the white car used to take a couple of hours to get out and the ambulance had to but Johnny saved these people

with massaging. Today when you get stung and that type of thing you put some methylated spirits or vinegar on. We had a lot of fun.

No, we didn’t. First of all I'm number five of a family of six and we had this half-acre allotment and my mother always maintained that kids should stay in their own yard. Other children were allowed to come and play with us and I didn’t have a lot of girlfriends because I’m in between two boys. I had the three older sisters and they used to play together.

I would say that I had more boyfriends sort of thing. Being between Robbie and Bunie and there is one certain person in Cairns, he’s retired now, Dick Chant who was a very good footballer player but I maintain that I taught Dick to tackle because I said I used to get into trouble with all the black sand from my sisters and playing but Dick and them, there was Dick and another nice boy by the name of Ross Smith he used to come down with

a horse. Ross had a beautiful white horse and I thought it would be lovely to get on this beautiful white horse and of course there was no bridle, no saddle, no nothing and of course they put me on and what did Ross do but give the old horse a good smack on the rump and here I go off down the road and nothing to hang on to, only its mane. Luckily the milkman who used to come along in his horse and cart,

Mr Hoad stopped the horse for me; that was my first experience with a horse and I would say it was nearly my last. The only girl I used to play with were two girls just up two doors away, Joannie Bradfield and her sister, Thelma, the two of us used to be but by not going out a lot into town and as I said we were rather poor at the time and we never went into town very much.

It was only on rare occasions that we’d go into town. It was mostly the boys that I grew up with and I was a tomboy, I mean, why walk if you can run. I loved sport, when I was at school I used to run for the school in the Parramatta State School. I would run in the school sports and then I played tennis at school. As long as I was doing the sport type of things, I was happy. I had no interest in playing with dolls. Mum gave me a lovely

celluloid doll one year and typical kids, you haven’t a clue, you know they haven’t the money but come Christmas time I thought, “Well she could have bought me a tennis racquet but instead she gave me this doll.” I can assure you I was most disappointed however you get over it and I still have the doll somewhere. One of the kids I lived near, close, later on, Mum let her play with it and she bit the nose off. I could have killed her even though I didn’t play with it but it was my doll.

No I played with mostly the boys and Joannie Bradfield, but as Mrs Bradfield had six children and they were made to play in their own yard too. We had some girls up around the corner of Buchan Street. It’s a funny thing, I often think about this girl, as I said, singing and that type of thing was all I loved doing.

I could not remember this girl properly but the song You Are My Sunshine came out and of course she knew the song and she taught me and we were walking up and down the railway line singing this song and blow me down I went to an ex-servicewomen’s reunion at the Gold Coast a few years back and this girl come over, this woman came over and sat down alongside of me and she said “Vera, don’t you remember me?”

Golly me, after all these years. She said “I used to live around the corner from you, don’t you remember? We sang You Are My Sunshine.” As soon as she said that, I could put it all together and it was lovely to have someone come out of the blue like that type of thing. Most of all living on our own, Mum keeping us in our yard, we didn’t have a lot of friends. As I said, we danced and sang.

Mum kept us entertained and working, Chris [interviewer] asked before did we have to work, yes. We had this downstairs big, big kitchen come lounge area and of course it had this beautiful linoleum on and what used we have to do of a Saturday morning, get down on our hands and knees and put the polish on first and then hand polish that linoleum. My mother was very clean and very fussy and we always said she chased the flies off the floor.

How that came about is that upstairs with the big home it had a hallway down the middle and the bedrooms at the side and she had this lovely linoleum runner carpet and of course on the side she had it painted a brownie colour like a floor and she got down on her hands and knees and polished it and then she’d got to the doorway and looked back and saw

something on the floor and she got most annoyed to think there was something on the floor. So she got the polishing cloth and went flick and it was a fly, that’s how fussy Mum was. And then with our beds, we always said she chased the flies off the floor, and put a spirit level on the bed because Mum’s bed was, her mother was born in Bohemia, Austria, and she came out here in the 1800s and Granny was fussy like that too, the European people were very fussy and Mum had that.

Golly me, there was not a lump or bump in Mum’s bed. We had these white bedspreads, like chenille, like you get with tablecloths, like a damask tablecloth with the pattern in, pure white, which she used to boil up in the copper boiler with the sheets and wring them all out, hand wring everything, no washing machines, nothing like that. So we said Mum chased the flies off the floor and put a spirit level on the bed.

She was so fussy. One time Pop concreted part of the house and it was pure white sand and it was beautiful. Mum thought it was lovely and we had this hemp runner that ran up the middle of it, this was like a side veranda underneath the house and we daren’t put our black feet on this white floor, it’s true. She had six of us.

She had to do all the washing in the copper boiler and with the ironing, everything was starched, all our clothes, the tablecloths and everything were all starched and ironed. She ironed, first of all we had, she would have started off on a Mother Potts iron and then we had the petrol iron. You put the petrol in the little tank and then heat would come through into a solid base like this

and to get it heated you would put methylated spirits in there and put a light in and then sort of charge it and pump it up and that used to be, they called it a petrol iron. She used to have that and iron all our clothes plus the starched tablecloths, there were six of us at the table, three on this side and three on the other side and Mum that end and Pop that end and the cat, Grey the cat used to sit on the end near my brother who used to feed it unbeknownst.

Anyway when the girls got a bit older, the older girls and they wanted to go somewhere, they used to stand behind Pop and the deaf and dumb people used to come along and they had this little card with all the hand signals on, A, B, C, D, E, F, G and we all learnt to speak that. The older girls used to stand behind Pop and do all this to Mum, could they go out and of course here we all were being good children, we all had to sit there with our

arms folded until Mum came and sat down and then Pop sat down and told us we could go. We daren’t spill anything on the tablecloth because Mum had to wash and iron that tablecloth. It wasn’t that strict discipline, it’s just something that we got used to and we knew we had to do it. There was no way you could sit slummikey at the table, you had to sit up, while Pop was home particularly. He was strict with that but it didn’t hurt us.

Oh yes, you could twist Mum around your finger, well the older girls did anyway. I was younger at the time but the only time that I clashed with Mum was when very early in the piece and we had these fellows here. I can understand why she wouldn’t let me go but at that time. It was just before I went into the army and I’d met up, there was this one particular lad and he was a very nice person and

he had this special place in town and I hadn’t a clue what it was all about and I was seventeen and I asked Mum, “Could I go and talk to the boys?” And she said “No,” and I said “Humph!” and the next thing I know I got clunk across the face and that was my discipline. But I found out after that was he was there in, what do they call it, it was always the blue light, with the army they had a blue light and any of the boys that felt

they had VD [venereal disease] or whatever after they had been out with a girl or else if they wanted a cover, they would go there and report. I didn’t know what it was all about but he was such a nice person in the medical field, but she wouldn’t let me go and I can understand now why, but at that time no. That’s the only time I clashed with my mother.

Well he was one of the medical attendants there,

see the blue light centre was handled by the Australian Army Medical Corps, but I hadn’t a clue what they were doing there, I hadn’t a clue because we lived at the bungalow and that part where they were was sort of out of the main city part and I used to have to if I was walking, I’d walk by the shops or go into work, into Woolworths, I would ride by the shops there. Well I say the shop, it was next to a Chinese Pac-a-Pu place.

Pac-a-Pu was a forerunner of what you have today with Gold Lotto, it’s gambling. The Chinese had this ‘Pac-a-Pu’, and you had a sheet and you put marks on all the Chinese numbers, it was all done in Chinese, and at the end of the day or after a while, they did two drawings a day, probably tumble wheels

and the numbers would come up and you would take a ticket. I think it might have been a shilling for this ‘Pac-a-Pu’ and it’s the same thing today as we have with Gold Lotto. One time my father won a hundred pounds and that was an awful lot of money and I forget what they did with it, that might have been when we got the piano, Mum having so many kids and loving music sort of thing, she paid off the piano from Palings music store in town

and we had that, it was a lovely Beale piano. That was the only time that I sort of clashed with Mum, and all I did was, “Humph!” disgusted and clunk clunk. See whatever Mum and Pop said was law in all of our families, it just wasn’t ours, but they weren’t hard on us but we knew that we just had to behave and accept what they said.

When they said “No,” you didn’t argue back. But no it’s the only time. So I know that a ‘Humph!’ can bring a clunk.

That when I was at Woolworths and I had the friends there, yes, because when I was working at Woolworths, Jean Middleton, Jean Sayer now, Jean Middleton’s Mum was with the Senior Womens Auxiliary and then we had another

lovely girl that I met was Billie Gavin, I had a lot to do with Billie at that time, but I used to go to her place but not like girlfriends like they are today, how they are so much together because you see she lived on the other side of town and what went on the other side of Cairns we didn’t know what happened on the other side. You would

have to ride your push bike and very few homes had telephones and that type of thing, and one boy that wrote in my book stated that we didn’t know that the kids were up to on the other side of town and that was true because we were so busy playing and mucking about in our own area that we never worried, we used to think, those over there. See we had Edgehill, the North Cairns State School that is now used to be called the Edgehill School, and that was a long long way away because you’d have to walk that and that was pretty hard to walk.

It wasn’t until I was older that I got a pushbike and a second had one at that. You had to walk everywhere and that’s why we are like we are today, we built up the muscles.

Oh Gawd no, that was, you didn’t talk about sex, oh no you never mentioned anything like that. All you knew, we knew what happened sort of thing and you knew that the same as we knew

VD was very bad and I said how the boys used to with who’s taking us home tonight and the dancing and oh God you were frightened to get too close, you might get VD. I know it sounds silly but it’s true, we were scared of that type of thing. Then of course when I went into the army and they gave us such a huge lecture on this and you were frightened to even look at a boy

in case you got VD, like it is AIDS [Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome] today, that’s how VD was very bad. That’s why they had that blue light area for the boys to, you see where they had the blue light place, the army medical, that was just around the corner from Sacks Street where all the girls used to be, it used to be Chinatown beforehand for the Chinese people that came from Cooktown after the mining finished and they congregated and had all little shops

in what they called Sacks Street that went between Spence Street and Shield Street, and on either side there were these little shops that were empty shops from the Chinese people and of course the girls came into town and prior to the war they were there, they still had quite a number of them. Of course Ronny Bradley could tell you how the boys used to deliberately ride down the street and the girls used to say, “Come on lads, come just for a shilling I will teach you all about it,” of course they never went in but

they used to deliberately ride down there to hear what the girls would say. Some of them weren't very polite but anyway, that’s where, and of course during the war years, you could imagine that street became very popular and there is a story in my book about how one of the boys, he was in the Allied Works Council and he was only eighteen, and he came into Cairns on his first night and he thought he would go to the pictures. He was stationed on the corner of McLeod and Spence Street so

he just walked down Spence Street and he saw the crowd of people. Of course everyone used to queue up, we never knew what queuing up was until the war and there were these lines of queue up of men and he thought, “Oh that must be for the pictures,” he hadn’t a clue where. Anyway he comes and he’s standing in the line and he says to this bloke, “By God they are slow with that ticket office, aren't they?”

and the blokes looked at him and said, “I think you are in the wrong queue, lad!” And he said, “What do you mean?” and he told him where it was and he got out quick smart on that. But would happen was that, say he was in the know, he could make money because he would go along and stand, particularly when the Americans were here, the younger blokes used to go along and stand in the queue and when an American or an Aussie boy came along and they wanted to go in, it was ten and sixpence to go in and see the girls and ten a six was a lot of money,

they would sell their place to a Yank and a lot of them got more than ten and sixpence just so they could go in. A lot of the young Cairns boys made a lot of money down there in Sacks Street. It’s all education. That was our sex education, down there, we knew that the girls were there and we knew what it was all about. I used to go by the girls in the daytime when we would go to Lee Sang and Company.

If Mum wanted to go to Lee Sang’s I would go in with Mum, cause you normally went with your mother and we would walk past all these girls and they used to stand out there in their beautiful negligees. They had beautiful clothes because they had good money, they made very good money, even before the war and during the war, lots of money. One girl we know and this was prior to the war or earlier in the war,

her father was a doctor in Macquarie Street, he thought she was up here being a secretary to a solicitor, yeah, and she was a beautiful person and she had this beautiful MG red motorcar too. Oh yeah, they were lovely girls but that was their calling so fair enough and we didn’t look down upon them. We thought, “Oh God no, wouldn’t be there,” but that’s what they wanted.

The thing is if they brought that in today, what they had the girls, every month they had to report to the base hospital for tests to see if they were carrying any venereal diseases. The girls that are walking around the streets today don’t, see it was a necessity, we didn’t have any rape or very few that I know of rapes even during the war itself

because Sacks Street was available to all the troops and the local men who wanted that type of thing and we could walk all around anywhere, you could ride your pushbike or walk anywhere, you didn’t get knocked out or raped and that type of thing. We maintain it was because the girls were in that street, there were about a dozen of them and during the war of course there were many more plus they also took over houses, the Americans took over houses and had their girls in there. Then of course, hopping onto war time now, we had the

Manpower Officer. See everyone had to work, when you were eighteen you had to register and be registered with the Government and you couldn’t change jobs. Well some of the girls the Yanks brought up from Sydney, they would be reported, from Sydney they would report to Mr Creedy, who was the Manpower officer saying that, “So-and-so is missing and we think that she could be in your Cairns area.”

So Mr Creedy would go looking and sure enough he would find her in a house somewhere with all the Yanks. A lot of them were with the big Negro boys too. It was, well they made money didn’t they, that’s what they were interested in.

No, Cairns is trying to get a brothel now but I’m not quite sure whether it will go ahead, there are so many people are against it, but if only they’d realise the benefit of it, the place would be safer. Well we could hope

anyway because it is a sad thing the way things are going on today, and if they had more brothels around and licenced these girls and they had to report to the hospital whether they liked it or not and if they didn’t the police would go and get them and take them to the hospital to be tested. If they did that today we would be far better off. After all, it’s nature and you want to know what we used to say? “The flies do it in the sugar basin and the dogs do it in the street.”

You wanted an old saying didn’t you? Okay, I'm telling you that! We knew that as kids, sorry whoever is listening.

Haven’t you? It’s true though isn’t it. Oh I'm sorry.

No. I had older sisters and I knew that something happened but just what it was, well I sort of knew what it was, but it sort of didn’t come to me and when it actually did happen and see some of the girls used to stay home from school and the others used to say, “Oh she’s got her things, she has her things.” And I sort of knew what the things were

but then the day that it actually happened to me, I think Mum sort of got an inkling beforehand, I was too busy having a damn good time to notice what was on my clothes and that, but on the morning that it actually happened I got the shakes, I don’t know why and I couldn’t understand properly. I knew what had to be done type of thing. Mum talked to me but she didn’t talk to me beforehand. No, it was sort of not talked about in those days, not like it is now.

It’s sort of, well goodness me, little kids know don’t they? From what I gather, right back from when they’re school age, little tiny kids at pre-school they go down the back of places, sadly. No, we were having too good a time.

We knew there was this man called Hitler, for sure, because my grandmother being

Bohemian Austrian coming from Bohemia in Austria and her sisters still lived over there, and in 1928 Granny received a letter, no, she received a letter from this girl saying, it’s most interesting, we had it translated, and in those times you had to wear your hair long and the bun at the back. In 1928, Pauline wrote to Granny and said, “Do you have the – ”

in other words the ‘bob’, hair cut off and the bob up like that. A lot of girls defied their parents to have it but they had it cut and then what do you call it, that big balloon, the aeroplane that went up, the Zeppelin, “Do you have Zeppelins in Australia?” that type of thing she asked us, and it was rather interesting from this 1928 letter. Then it would have been around ’29, ’30 that

granny received a letter from her sister saying, “This could be the last letter that you receive from us, as they are closing in.” I presume it was the German people coming. I don’t know how she smuggled the letter out, probably someone going out of the country took it to her. Granny, they were in the peace movement and they were against what Hitler was doing. We knew that Hitler wasn’t a very nice person

and we had learnt that, how he became popular was that the country was in a poor state and he told them all, little did they realise what he was building it up to, he got them in the forces, and we knew that he had all these young people in his armies, what he called the people’s armies and that type of thing. One of the soldiers, one of the men who lived near us had a photograph of myself as a young girl and he had it in his wallet.

When he was in Tel Aviv, he was a signaller and he was learning German and he made friends with one of the German signallers and they off their jackets and they went into town and met in town and Foster showed this man my photograph and he said “Oh, one of Hitler’s girls,” because of my fair hair and the high cheekbones and all the rest and I had a lovely round fat face then, that’s before and this is after.

Yes, anyway they were closing in over there, yes. It wasn’t at all good. We knew all that was happening and we were scared but we were more scared as our parents kept saying about the horde of little yellow Japanese that would come. Of course at that particular time we were selling all our scrap iron to Japan and they were buying

everything they possibly could, so much so that people were complaining, saying that it would come back in bombs at us, in bullets, but Mr Menzies, they called him ‘Pig-Iron Bob’, because he was letting all of our iron go out and sure enough, well what we had thought of Japan at that time was during the Depression time, they too were having a depression and what they did to

make money, they introduced, they started manufacturing all these cheap kids toys, little aeroplanes, the kids would get their little aeroplanes and other things for Christmas. What they did they would stamp them out, they would have the pattern, say it was the aeroplane and they would stamp them all out and their little wings would have a little piece of metal attached to the side and you put the two together and they’d hook them like this. Well

they would break off quickly and the wheels were only put on by a little shaft, it was very thin. Every Christmas day there were tears because the toys broke. With their crockery, we always thought that the Japanese made cheap junk crockery, it wasn’t till later on that we found out that they made beautiful, but what they did they made the cheaper crockery for the rest of the world who wanted to buy their articles at a cheaper price. They made money on their cheaper manufacturing goods

and we in Australia who didn’t have any money could afford to buy those things. That’s why when the war came, we thought, “Oh we are right,” because whatever the Japanese made was just rubbish. When they bought all our pig iron, they were building the planes and the ships that we knew nothing about. That’s what came back at us and this is when the boys went up to the islands, we Aussies were very ignorant of what the Japanese could do at the time.

It wasn’t until their little Zeros came in and the boys found that our little aircraft, see we didn’t have any money in Australia at that particular time because it was all going to Britain. We were manufacturing aircraft pieces and ammunition and that was all going to Britain. When the war came here, we had nothing to defend ourselves. The prime minister tried to get Mr Churchill to let the troops come back home. Mr

Churchill said, “When I finish my war over here I will come to your aid.” In the mean time, here we were, all Australian people who had given so much to help Britain to fight the war, when we wanted help he wouldn’t come so you could imagine how we felt. We felt very let down and I was one because if I found a penny or a halfpenny that went into a charity box to help Britain. So it was very, very hurtful and a lot of the people cannot realise or a lot of the troops couldn’t

realise why we particularly in Cairns were just so grateful to the Americans but I will come to that after.

Entirely, if you want to go on to

that I can, when the Japanese did come into the war. See as I said before we knew the war was over there and we felt very safe, it wasn’t on our door step. I particularly felt very sorry for the not only the British people but also the civilian German people all through Europe who were being bombed and losing all their homes, I thought that was terribly sad and even when the Japanese came into it we thought we were fairly safe. When they

bombed Pearl Harbour particularly. We knew they had bombed Pearl Harbour but we thought we were still all right because in those times you realise that Pearl Harbour was a heck of a long way from us. We didn’t have lovely big aeroplanes or the big fast ships that you could get to and it wasn’t until the beginning of 1942, that is when we realised, they started to come down all through the Pacific Islands, and they went in through

Rabaul and those places that we realised that there was something happening. In March 1942, I think that’s when the Government asked us to evacuate from North Queensland and we were sort of left in the lurch, it was March 1942 that the Government. Let me go back further, when MacArthur had to get out of islands because of the invasion of the Japanese

through the islands. See within three weeks they had gone zoom, I always say like their flag the Rising Sun, that’s how they came down through the Pacific Islands to our north and as far as we were concerned they were heading towards Australia. MacArthur came to the Philippines, he landed in Alice Springs, he went down Alice Springs by train, down to Adelaide and then on to Melbourne. First of all he met up with one of his aides on the train,

and he asked his aide just what Australia had to defend themselves and his aide told him that we only had twenty five thousand trained troops to defend the whole of Australia and this aide wrote that MacArthur went white and weak in the knees. By the time he got to Melbourne and saw the Prime Minister at that time he said that for the Prime Minister to get on with

governing the country and he would take over the battle. Well then what they decided to do as we did not have the amount of troops to defend the country, he decided to close off the Brisbane Line and down into South Australia, where all the manufacturing was, there is said about the Brisbane Line. The Brisbane Line really did exist. The government will say that it didn’t, but it did.

That was where all the troops, where everything was to be guarded and they took our 51st Battalion away from Cairns here. That was our area, their area went from Tully up to Thursday Island and we were left with nobody in Cairns. They took them down to Townsville because Townsville had a government aerodrome and the bigger harbour they felt that would have to be guarded. The only other place was down around Rockhampton I think had a few troops but the rest of all round here

here and the rest of Australia was left to the mercy of the Japanese. That is when the Japanese came through and they bombed Darwin. After the Coral Sea battle, that was when that was on, as I say we had nobody during the Coral Sea battle, we always maintained we didn’t even have a mango to throw at them. It was a poor mango season. Me being me in my stupidity, I thought, “Well they won't come to Cairns here because of all the

mud, they would go up to their necks in mud at the Cairns Esplanade,” and not thinking they had all of the rest of the place and they could have come down. I was only seventeen or eighteen at the time and you think that way, a little knowledge is dangerous isn’t it? Oh well, we had to laugh our way through it. Anyway we had the VDC, which was the Voluntary Defence Corps. There was a song then “They’re either too young or too old.” The Voluntary Defence Corps men were boys

from seventeen onwards and older men who were unfit to fight on the front line, or men who were in essential services. As I said, Mr Creedy was the Manpower Officer and everyone in Australia had to be registered and when you turned eighteen you would have to report to him and you would either have to join one of the military forces or prove to him that you were in an essential service work.

If you refused to do that, to join one of the forces, he would automatically put you in the army. You could select beforehand, you could select that you go into the army, navy or air force but when you played up and you mucked up a bit you would automatically go into one of the forces. That meant that it left very few people around to defend us. These are the men that defended us. And at the time of the Coral Sea battle, the VDC were guarding what we call Buchan’s Point.

When you’re coming down onto Ellis Beach. They were there with these sixteen and seventeen year old men, they had a few rifles but very little ammunition and the people in the Mossman area, the farmers and everyone up there, they knew that is where they could have invaded and come down and they had nothing to defend themselves because the government had called for

the Impressement Officer. He would take in the various equipment like tractors and trucks and that type of thing and they asked them to hand in rifles, and revolvers and cameras and that and of course the farmers had done this previously and that left them with nothing to defend themselves. Did you notice that clock up at the back there?

What does it say?

That’s right!

I was very scary because at that particular time we lived

near the railway line. We could see when the government called for voluntary evacuation a lot of people went out of Cairns. They sold their houses for practically nothing and some people walked away and left their home and their car and everything, they were so scared. It was very scary because you knew they were just out there, the battle was just held out there and you knew they were coming down. At that time

we weren’t told very much. The policy of the government was not to tell the civilians because they may panic. Maintain panic, don’t tell us, we could handle anything. We didn’t have a clue what was happening but we could see train after train load of people going out of Cairns, nothing come in to defend us. That went on for months and months and it wasn’t until, as the forefathers of the city knew that we had nobody to defend us so it was the members of the

chamber of commerce, port authority people, the harbour board and other people went at their own expense to Canberra and asked the defence department to please, they begged them to have troops come to Cairns to look after us as we had nothing.

It wasn’t until then, I think it was about April, we lived on the railway line and there was a thing I shall never forget was that the train was coming into town with all this yackaying and at that particular time our trains were timber carriages and they had the timber shutters which were louvres, that went down and then they had the glass window. If you hit the side of the carriage like this, this would all rattle so

it happened all over, when the troops were coming into any city or leaving the boys would lean out of the carriage and hit the side, apart from yackaying and carrying on. We didn’t mind at all, we could hear this noise coming from out of town so we go outside and here’s about three or four carriage loads of troops coming into Cairns, how beautiful, wonderful. That was the first load of troops to come into Cairns. Another time soon after that

Mum and I were asleep, it would be about three in the morning and we woke up to our ground, our beds vibrating and shaking and we could hear a rumble and that rumble became louder and louder. At that time we were expecting the Japanese to invade, we hadn’t a clue what was going on. Mum and I got out of bed and had a look and we could see out of town, coming on the railway line there were two lights. We knew a train

doesn’t have two lights, the engine doesn’t have two lights but what it was, the vibrations became more and more, this was later on in the year, there was this trainload of, the only thing I can describe it was dirty big guns. There were guns and tanks. We hadn’t a clue what it was but there was our troops coming in to town with something to look after us. It’s three o’clock in the morning and there’s Mum and I cheering and clapping our heads off,

to think someone at long last was coming. That’s how we felt. We did not feel safe until getting into 1943.

We were very scared as we knew, as I said in the book, the war had come to Australia.

We didn’t have to go to the war, the war came onto our shores and we knew that they were coming down, we had been told that. By this time, Mum had got a little mantel wireless that we paid off, Mum took a shilling out of my pay and a shilling out of my brothers and she put in some and she paid up to three shillings a week and we could hear the war news that would come through. The only war news that we had at that time, the ABC wasn’t in Cairns, we only had 4CA Radio

and Innisfail had a little radio station but we would hear the British news. Most of it was done by short wave radio and we would hear the Big Ben clock chiming and – “This is the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] London with your war news,” and what ever it would be and then because it played a special tune and then we would listen and it was mostly first

what was happening over in Europe and very little of it came in to what was happening in Australia. By radio 4CA they were able to give us a little bit of news and of course you must realise that us being closer to the front line, we did not know what was happening, where if you were in Sydney, you would get more news as to what was happening here because the Japanese could have been eavesdropping and also they did have spies.

We had one particular lot of spies who had the 4AT Atherton Radio and they were church people, German type of church people, they would caught. One dairy farmer was down in the milking shed and he left his radio on the night before and he could hear this talking and signals being sent and they were sending out signals to the submarines just out here. See the Jap [Japanese] submarines used to go up and down all of the time,

this is very early in the piece that they found them. And we knew that was going on but you see the papers had, and the radio was on all the time, “A slip of a lip can sink a ship,” all of that type of thing was spoken and you weren't supposed to ask questions, but one way or the other we used to. One way or another, we used to pick up information from here, there and everywhere.

I mean, boy meets girl and brain turns to jelly, doesn’t it and you would be surprised what you could find out but anyway. I'm sorry but I'm stupid. Anyway we were very scared but we did laugh a lot and we had to keep laughing or else we would be very scared. The Government told us that we had to keep on with our lives and they said they would look after us and evacuate us if necessary,

if time came but the silly part about it was see petrol was rationed. Now if we were going to be invaded they would let us know and you would take you car down for to the oil tanks for petrol which was down near the waterfront, well the Japs were coming and you had to get your petrol and there were only two ways out of Cairns you either went down the Gillies Highway or up the Kuranda, well the Kuranda Range at that time wasn’t working properly.

You really only had one way to get out of the city and then they said they would have vehicles already stationed for us and we would go and report in to a park, in the city, we all had to go in there, you ride in and then they were going to evacuate us out of town and take us as far as possible and at that time was when the Brisbane Line was on, they would supply vehicles to get us out of town and I imagine a train would take us down to

Brisbane way. I think we were to go right out west, away from the Japanese. We thought this was hilarious in the sense that here we were to report into town when the Japanese were coming and no way to get out and it would have been a shemozzle I can assure you. Anyway thankfully that never happened. We were afraid continually but because they said to us to go on and live our life as much as possible

we did do that. As we had no, Mum and I had no place to evacuate to we stayed to face the issue and thank God the issue never came. As I said, my thinking that, “All right, they’re not going to come because they’ll go up to their neck in mud on the Esplanade,” much as we didn’t like the mud I thought this is one time that it will come in handy. But however, the troops started to come into town

little bit by little bit and me being a female, we’d have all these lovely young men come to town. One minute we had nobody to dance with and the next minute we were getting all these various boys, services coming in. During the Coral Sea time and just prior to and just after, the only service personnel we saw in Cairns were those on leave, we had nobody until that train load of boys came and they stayed

in what was the Cairns Central School which is now the Oasis Complex I think, one of the complexes in town.

Of course I used to dance with these boys and when I was doing my book, blow me down, I had a letter from one of them telling me this and that and I thought, “Oh my God, yeah, I know mate,” it brought back memories of those times. Then what would happen, at one particular time

a lady told me that she was in town and no, it was her son. She was from Mossman and she was coming down to Cairns and she was in a little white car and there was a little boy in the coach and he had a little timber gun and he said, “When are the Japanese coming Mummy? I want to shoot them.” See

even the little children were frightened when the Japanese were coming. That’s all we could think about it that the Japanese were coming. A lot of people won't have it but believe me it’s true, we had the Japanese reconnaissance planes flying over night after night. We had various air raid sirens, and we were told in the paper and the radio, that if there was to be a raid, the homes at that time nearly all had iron bedsteads

and with a big thick mattress and they told us to take the mattresses off the other beds and put it around the outside and put as many mattresses on top and mattresses around like this and then climb underneath on your hands and knees and put a dolly peg in your mouth, you know a dolly peg is a little, with a split, and you put it like that and the peg will stop, if the bombs drop it will stop the shock of the jaw hitting like this.

Well we did that, the sirens went and Mum and I climbed under the bed and me with my stupid sense of humour, I was scared, sure I was scared and here was this dolly peg going up and down, head down, bum up and I couldn’t handle it, the funny side of it got me and I had to get out so I went outside to have a look. Luckily there was no bombs dropped but I was too curious. To me it was a funny episode

being so scared and the jaw quivering, yeah that’s one of the things we were told that we had to do in case of bombs dropping around and shock, that type of thing.

We were a population of about fifteen thousand. Some people say it went down to about five but Mr Creedy who was the Manpower officer said it was seven,

it dropped down to seven. And as I said, there were so many houses that went for cheap, a lot of people were so scared that they walked away and left all their furniture, their cars, the whole works, behind. There was a little bit of pilfering but not a lot. See then a lot of those empty houses, the people after they realised that the Japanese weren't going to come and the troops arriving, I imagine

a lot of them would have come back and got their furniture. Those houses were still empty when the troops came particularly the Americans and they took over these empty houses.

Oh no, I was too scared but let me tell you what happened and you may realise how scared I was. I was coming home

from the RSL dance and one of these lads was in town, I think he could have been from the 17th Engineers in New South Wales, they were sent post haste and it was just after the Singapore massacres up there. I was riding my push bike and he stopped me on my push bike and he said to me, “Vera, if the Japanese come, cut your throat

before they get to you, if you don’t they will do it after they had finished with you.” You can imagine that was a bit scary for a seventeen-year-old female. That’s all we could think about, what would happen to us if they did come. Particularly what was written up about what they did in Singapore and we didn’t want to die and nor did we want to be their mistress. I suppose it would have been better to be a mistress than cut your throat. I never did work out which would be the best alternative.

Then we always said, if the Americans hadn’t come in on it we could have all had Japanese children around the countryside. Regardless of what the Government and what a lot of other people will say, as far as we in Cairns here and the boys who were in New Guinea, like Ronnie when he was there, having to defend the place with nothing, we were positive that the

Japanese were going to come down here. It appears that they had their eyes on Townsville. I have read that they were aiming to take Port Moresby and to harass Townville and Cairns. Well they were so close to us but then a lot of people have said, “Why didn’t they invade through Cape York?” See, prior to all what was going on, the Japanese fishing fleet

knew all of our coastline and also mapped all of the reefs and everything like that in the early 1900s. I think it was ’23 that the Australian Government bought maps of our reefs and coastlines that were done by the Japanese and those same maps were used during World War II by all our defence forces. So you see

the Japanese knew beforehand, why invade Cape York because it was too hard to get down here. They knew the reefs all right and that’s how their submarines used to get through. We did have Japanese spies up on Mount Thornton which is just outside of Mossman, and some up around what was the place, past Daintree, Cape Tribulation,

because they were actually seen. One family, you know how you’re almost sure that someone is looking at you and the war news was coming through on the radio and Mr Mason had a feeling and he looked around and there was a Japanese soldier looking through the window and listening; and then the people at Mount Thornton, living around that area, they had all their vegetable gardens and the Japanese used to come down at night time and raid their garden and

these were the boys up on the hill with their senders and receivers. Then I think it was just after the war, a cache of Japanese money and Japanese food was found near Cape Tribulation so that is why we say that some anyway were going to come and they actually did land here and they did bomb all along there. I had a story from Mr McGuffie,

who was a member of the 17th L of C [Lines of Communication] Coastwatchers. It was an army organisation, not navy. It was the navy Coastwatchers in New Guinea but it was the Aussie boys here. These were men that had been wounded, had served elsewhere and did signals. His is a wonderful story of how he was stationed up along the north Queensland coast and how the Japanese used to try and bomb them out of their sights. They used to be on the islands

and they did come down along there, regardless of what the southerners say, we did have them.

Angry, the elderly people, see me being young but I knew it was on, never been so let down in all their life. We were very hurt

that Mr Churchill wouldn’t let the troops come home, when we thought, well the words were, “Bloody hell,” we had sent everything over to them and now we want help here and we didn’t get it, we were really taken back. When they closed the Brisbane Line, we in Cairns and me being even young as I was at that time, had never had such a let-down feeling. All our parents, we really were and at that time and even

after the war as far as the Government was concerned Queensland finished about three hundred mile outside of Brisbane. It wasn’t until Joh Bjelke-Petersen came along many years later that made people realise that we have something up here. It was him that really helped North Queensland, otherwise we were just, well Perth had the same feeling, that they were the other side of the moon and that’s how we had. Cairns was like the other side of the moon and we were very let down

because as I said, they took our troops away and nobody to defend us, only the 51st Battalion boys. The 51st Battalion had formed a Women’s Emergency Corps and they trained these young women to help them to evacuate the people or look after the people in case of invasion. Well when the 51st Battalion went away, we still had some of those

girls were still active but it mostly disbanded because the head lady, she evacuated down to Brisbane and left these other people high and dry, but most of the other girls came and joined the junior auxiliary. We had the ARP [Air Raid Precaution] men and they were trained, that was men in air raid precaution, and we had black out of course, you mustn’t forget the black out. When I look around here and see all your black curtains hanging up, it takes me back

as we had to black out or brown out. You had to have no lights out and our street lights were turned down and they were half lit and the same as the motorcars they were allowed to have a light and they had brown paper and they put a slit in the middle of it, there were very few motorcars, not many people had them but the houses were and of course if you had a very serious RAP man, you were told in no uncertain terms

to turn that light out, you couldn’t have a little bit of light coming through your windows. We did have electricity on at home and it saved the electricity because you couldn’t have the electric lights going too much. What else did we have? Oh we didn’t have anything much, we didn’t have anything at all.

Well we only heard a little of Darwin being bombed.

I would say we were more interested in ourselves, here in Cairns. We did hear that Darwin was bombed and we knew that was bombed few times but it wasn’t until after the war that we found out, what was it, a hundred and seventy times? Something like that. But you see the same as when Sydney Harbour, the little Japanese submarines went in there, oh my God – it was the end of the world. That’s what they thought, that they were the only ones that had anything, they hadn’t a clue

because they were never told what was happening up here. See in July ’42, I think it was, a Japanese plane came and it dropped the bombs on Townsville and nobody was killed because they were very poor shots and it went into the Ross River, but if you were there at that particular time and that spot you could get the pension now. Anyway that same plane flew over Cairns area, the air raid siren did go

and he dropped his bombs the other side of Mossman at what you call Bamboo Creek. It was a little tiny farming, mostly all cane farming and he dropped his bombs, there is a little river that goes through and the air force boys told me after that the area that they bombed looked just like the Cairns aerodrome with our rivers coming through. There was one little girl hurt,

the shrapnel went through the corrugated iron of there and went through the cot but only just grazed her head.

She lives in Sydney that lady and then of course when I was doing the book I was able to get onto the information about this Japanese man and the Townsville RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] museum had his history and had some photographs and I was able to copy his log book, and yes that Japanese pilot who had flown

from a point just at the end of New Guinea and had flown down here, twenty seven hours was it, no that would be too long, but anyway he’d flown quite a long time and he did say that he thought he had dropped the six, seven or eight bombs over Cairns. When I was doing the research in Canberra it had first of all one report had one bomb and then they had two and three but after researching further

and his story, he dropped eight bombs all through the cane fields, a bit scary.

Oh my God. Well, I told you we had nobody to dance with, did we? Anyway

I saw their troop trains come through but most of them came by ship. From my records that I’ve done with the research for the book, they landed in Brisbane, I’ve got the story of them leaving America and then the landing in Brisbane and then coming up either by train or by ship and landing in Cairns. Some of them arrived in about June ’42 and typical Americans, they unloaded at the wharf

and within the hour or two they had gun emplacements in Wharf Street and Abbot Street and they were defending the whole city. They came and unloaded all their vessels and they were the first lot of boys that went up to Mareeba, they didn’t stay here. See, MacArthur said he had to have a strip closer to the battlefield. He had Townsville and all the satellite strips down around Townsville, Charters Towers and Longreach and that’s where the planes flew

after the Coral Sea battle and anyway he decided that he wanted something. So in the beginning of May or just before May it was decided to build the aerodrome up there and the main roads department and the allied council and then some of the Negro American boys, they built that strip in four weeks. It wasn’t ready,

a lot of people think that they flew out of Mareeba to fight the Coral Sea battle, they didn’t. The first commissioned flight out of Mareeba was the 25th of June 1943, ’42, anyway it must have been in ’42. They definitely were not going while the Japanese were in the Coral Sea times. The planes flew out from Townsville, reconnaissance planes mostly

because the Coral Sea battle wasn’t fought by that, it was fought through the big aircraft carriers fighting each other and our Australian navy ships, they were the, Crace who was the commander of the Australian fleet at that time was very disappointed. His – Nimitz, I think it was Nimitz – he was the American man, he wouldn’t let the Australians come in even though Crace had more battle knowledge than the Americans

but sadly, we knew and I had it confirmed while doing the book from the American people themselves, service personnel that they never gave, even MacArthur wouldn’t give credit to what the Allies did. It was always, “The Americans did this and the Americans did that.” Okay, they can take that but we know our boys did an awful lot but we could never have managed if America hadn’t come to our aid.

Another thing a lot of people don’t know how we got help is that through the Philippines where MacArthur was, when the Japanese were invading up there, the people in the Netherlands East Indies, they had to get out in one heck of a hurry and they had all their ships and what they did, they loaded their ships with everything they could possibly find, even fencing, the whole works and their buildings

and their supplies, the supplies that were being sent from America to help fight in there, those ships were bypassed and came into Sydney and with the help of the supplies from the Netherlands East Indies and what the Americans had to give us, that is what helped save Australia. We were poor and we didn’t have the money to build the things and it was mostly by what they did and that’s why people haven’t a clue how

Australia really and truly was saved by the American money. Our Aussie boys came home from the Middle East and when they arrived that made a big difference on it all.

Well we had all these good-looking suits and there is a saying, “Doth clothes maketh the man?” Well, here they were in all these beautiful shiny material and little did I realise,

I found out that that was made in Australia and here were our Aussie boys had this horrible heavy khaki, drill type of thing. They came into town and they had lots and lots of money. They opened the American Red Cross at the Strand Hotel, which is now the Pacific International. There was this old hotel, it used to be a tourist hotel, and they took it over as their main place and that meant that the troops coming through

from up the top, they could always stay over at the American Red Cross. They employed civilian girls, local girls to help work in the place, and then they erected a recreation hall at the side and that’s where we had the dances. Well now, the Americans used to send out their various bands like the ABC [American Broadcasting Company], the American television bands, and also some of Jimmy Dorsey’s men came through

and other big bands. Here we local girls were dancing and the beautiful trombone, which I just loved, and I maintain I had calluses on my feet from dancing. At first they invited us to come along, the young girls of Cairns, Victorettes we were called, to entertain the troops and they asked our mothers to come along first so Mum could see what we were up to, what we were doing.

If Mums passed the test, like if Mum said it was OK, we could be members. First we used to ride our pushbike in but when more and more American troops came, plus various Aussies, see the American army came first and in December 1942 we had three thousand five hundred paratroopers land on our door step at Gordonvale, they were the ones that were supposed to support MacArthur in the Philippines but they had to get out

of all the various places and they landed out here at Gordonvale and that’s another story, a marvellous story for them and of course their boss was pretty firm, their head man. When the men came here they were hungry because of their food, after getting out of so many places up there, their food became on the bottom of the ship and they only had one meal a day and word spread like wild fire that all these thousands of men were around town and at that

particular time there was a beautiful watermelon season and all the farmers from the tableland all around came down here and sold their watermelons at a fantastic price, they must have made a fortune. But of course the Yanks didn’t care, they would cut their watermelon and they would drop it and they were dropping the seeds and skin and everything in the street and one of the civilians, one of the business people there spoke to the commander who I found was a very strict disciplinarian. He got all the brooms

that he could find in Gordonvale and made the men go and sweep the streets in Gordonvale. That was the first disciplinary action here in Gordonvale, which is only fourteen miles away. Then you see we had the navy come in, we had the PT [Patrol Torpedo] vessels come in, they took over the various places. As I said the Americans took over all the various units, houses I mean

and I wondered how on earth they came about this and me being inquisitive I just started asking questions and I asked various people and it wasn’t until I was halfway through the book that I asked one of my and in fact I had her husband here interviewing him and I mentioned about this and Beryl said, “Oh that was done through the army hiring service,” and here she was, a member of the army hiring service, a member of our ex-servicewomen and I didn’t even know.

Had I found out that you probably wouldn’t have got the book but she told me it was like a real estate business. You could have been an officer in the American army and you had gone around town and you’d seen these various buildings that would suit your unit as to what you wanted to do so you then would go to the Australian hiring service, it wasn’t just for army,

you say I wanted this. Then the army hiring service would send a man out and negotiate with the owner of that house as to how much they would pay. A lot of people thought, when it was the Americans used to bully these people and they felt that they had to get out of the houses but I found out they didn’t have to, if they stood up to them they didn’t have to shift. See everyone had to do the right thing for the war. You had to help the country

and so OK you abided by what it was. Some people objected. I found out that’s how they came in and they took over the empty houses and the various business houses and the big sheds that people had vacated when they shifted down south. Then we had the navy came in down Smith’s Creek and we had the American navy there as well as the Australian navy. Yes, we had a lot of Americans to dance with. To get back to the

dancing with the Americans, when as I said all these troops started to come, the American Red Cross sent out a courtesy car and we had never heard of that before. What it was, was either a utility or another car and they would pick us up and take us to the dance and then take us home again. After the dance or halfway through the dance they would have supper. Golly me,

we had never tasted ice tea or had we had these special ice-cream cakes or these beautiful Swiss pastry type of thing with all the fillings, just typical what Yanks ate and we used to have a fabulous time. I still have my, after the war they sent me a little battered brown parcel came with a thank-you letter from the American Red Cross.

I don’t know what happened to that letter but I still have my American Red Cross Volunteer badge that they sent me all the way. They had addressed it to Vera Downey, Spence Street bungalow where I lived but luckily for me the town being only small, the boys in the post office knew that Vera Downey was now Vera Bradley so they brought it home for me. We had a fabulous time and we met up with so many people from the other side of the world, we didn’t have to go on the other side of the world. One thing that was most noticeable,

Australian children were taught in our geography and history, we knew where most of these people came from and do you realise that a lot of these boys never had a clue where Australia was let alone Cairns. At least with the Australian education they taught us and then of course we knew by their accents that they were Yanks. Let me tell you quickly about when the 503 paratroopers first came. I’d come home from work

and this was at the end of ’42 and we were still a bit scared and I could hear these heavy trucks coming and me being inquisitive, I looked out and there were these big green trucks with slits on the back carrying all these troops and we could see these shiny domed hats and we thought it was the Japs coming to invade us and anyway I kept watching and watching and they had to

slow down to go around a corner and next thing I could hear these dog gone Yanks. What a relief to know it was the Americans. Do you know that went on, the trucks going by our place went on for over a week. By the time they unloaded the ship at the wharf and came down Spence Street and then went out of town that way, they took over a week to unload everything. They left here in ’43

some time to go up into the Markham Valley where they parachuted in. But one of the main entertainments for people was to go to the wharf area and look over Green Hill outside, just Gordonvale way and you could see them all parachuting down. That’s why they chose Gordonvale because of all the cane fields and less electricity wires, that type of thing. Only a couple of boys

in all the time they trained there got caught up in the electrical wires. The wind blew them in the wrong direction. MacArthur came and he went up on the tablelands and held them all up and one fellow jumped to his death out of it. He, MacArthur, wasn’t really nice, he kept them waiting and waiting and waiting, he went up to the tableland, the same with Blamey, he was with Blamey,

and MacArthur was going out to inspect and watch the jump that they had specially trained for and he was about three hours late and here the boys were, they had loaded into the aircraft and they were flying around and if you have never travelled in one of these aircraft, all it was, was nothing else in it but seats on either side and believe me, when you’re up the top there you get a numb bum chum sitting on those cold seats and here these poor boys were. Anyway, one fellow jumped out, took his own life,

I'm not sure why, probably the frustration of it all. I have a wonderful story from one of the girls who was a parachute packer. See they got local women and they were the first women to pack American chutes. The Americans called for volunteers and I went out and I couldn’t handle the test, it was well over my head but I was only a kid. It was one thing that I would never have got in because I was too young.

You had to take on the responsibility which was a very big responsibility. Out of all the girls they selected twenty five and those girls had to train and day after day they learnt and if a girl made the slightest little error, they were shown the door and told to go. If you could make that error here, you could do it at any time. Then when they came, they built this big drying shed, they had this high-rise place where up here

in the tropics at that time it used to rain and they used to hang the parachutes up there to let them dry, then they had these big parachute packing sheds with the long tables and then the girls ended up getting torn hands and what did they have to rub on to it, alum I think that we used to use in putting in stain and that type of thing and it made the hands hard.

They got an awful lot of money but they did have to work very hard. It was all an interesting time.

Well, they ate all the silly food. Their breakfast was ice cream and all these lovely cakes. Now I’m older I can agree with it because I like sweets at breakfast time too. That was the main thing, their food and they used to come in,

they loved steak and egg. We had a Comino’s café, this Comino’s Arcade in town now, that used to be the café and Mr Comino had a lovely big place that he cooked these big steaks and steak and eggs that all the troops wanted. The Americans, they lived on all this, they’re rubbish, we consider it. Our Aussie boys think that the Americans were more

well fed than them. The officers may have been because the officers, a lot of people don’t realise, the officers had to feed themselves. They used to have to pool their money and buy their food but the enlisted man, he had to eat what the others had. I had the story from the 90th bomb squadron who were stationed at Iron Range up past Cooktown, Portland Roads. They told me that their officers used to come down to Townsville

or Cairns and they would buy a huge, ice cream used to come in a churn and they would have a thick padding around like this about nine inches thick of padding with the proper lid over and they used to take that back, and that was the officers and if you were lucky enough to be in the officer’s mess you could have a bit of ice cream. But the other boys maintained that, oh the Australians, they reckoned that they had nothing else to eat but mutton, our Aussie boys say that too.

Surprisingly they missed their Spam, which is similar to our tinned corn beef, but they just loved their Spam above all things, and it was horrible. But they just grew up on that type of thing. But a lot of people don’t realise that the big squadrons were up and built there. They had three strips up at Iron range, near Portland Roads and Portland Roads is only a little bit of a harbour in there. Yes it’s all very interesting.

Well, how I came to join the AWAS was that the government, the Defence Department - when I say government, most of it is the Defence Department, they were the ones that called upon people to do things - and when they formed, they had, first of all, when the various services [UNCLEAR]

women’s services. They met a lot of reaction from the government, maintaining that women shouldn’t be in the war and if women’s services were to be formed, for the women not to expect anything special in the way of accommodation and all the rest of it. And this goes right back to 1941 when they wanted to form the Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force. And they had a lot of difficulty

getting permission. Anyway, eventually, after a lot of hassle, it was formed. And then, when the - and of course, when the Japanese came in - just prior to the Japanese, all of our troops of course were going away to – as I said to you, we were losing them by the thousands in this thing. And that meant that the Defence Department, ammunition factories,

and all of the big factories, they had to call upon women to come into the war to do some work. Prior to all of this, the women’s place was considered to be in the home. The women did not do men’s work. Well, after a lot of hassle, they did, they called in women for ammunition and then other factories. Then when they formed the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, the Australian air force, the girls

did the work. Also they were repairing aircraft and everything like that. Then of course, there was the army, where hundreds, thousands of men had joined. See, to get into the air force those days was very difficult early in the piece. Ronnie was one that volunteered to be in the air force, but as they had very few aircraft, they could only take a certain number of crew. They hadn’t the big repairs. The men behind the

air force, they didn’t have that, and that’s when the men that wanted to join the air force, when their number was up, they had to go into the army. And of course that was – by the amount of people going into the army was leaving a big void in the workings of everything, and they called upon the women of Australia to join the services to replace the men, to release the men for the front line. And that is how the WAAAF [Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force], the women’s air force, and the Australian Women’s Army

Service, they were doing work pertaining to all army positions. They were secretaries, they were intelligence, they drove vehicles, they learnt how to handle and man the searchlights and the guns. But they never, ever fired a gun in battle. Women were not allowed to carry a gun. We were not allowed to fire. We could do everything else but go in the front line.

And the girls in Cairns here, they manned the searchlights and the big ack-ack [anti-aircraft] guns up on The Esplanade. But the only time they helped fire them was when the navy in Cairns had a little bit of a mock battle. They wanted to try the guns out, because you see these big guns were stationary, so you must keep them working every so often. So they had this mock battle. That’s where the girls fired them, but only just in friendship in firing.

And of course, the government, or the Defence Department, wanted more women and more women, so they were advertising in the various papers, and in the Cairns Post came this ad [advertisement] for women to join the Australian Women’s Army Service and also the Australian Army Medical Women’s Service [AAMWS] and the latter was just serving hospitals only. We didn’t do anything in the defence line; we were just all hospitals. And of course, to join that you had to be 18,

and you had to be just under 40. Well, okay, I wasn’t quite 18 when my mother said to me, “What say we join the AAMWS?” “Oh good,” I thought, “I’ve always wanted to be a nurse. Right. That’d do me fine.” And because she could get in, but she had to wait for me to turn 18 on the 24th of August, and she turned 40 on the 9th of September. We had those few days grace for us both to go in together. So anyway, that’s how we went into the army. I have a paper cutting showing,

advertising for girls to go in. So anyway, we went in on my 18th birthday. And we went down to Brisbane to – I went to Enoggera. First of all we stayed at, oh gosh, some army place where we had to have all these medical tests. And of course, Mum sent me in first and okay, was fighting fit, and she went in second and the old doctor there told Mum

that he’d never examined such a healthy specimen, yeah, me. And anyway, I was given the army number of QF272202 and Mum was given the army number of QF272203, next door to me. And previously Mum had signed that she was quite happy to work in laundries and of course, I wanted to be a nurse. And I thought, “They won’t stuff me in a laundry.” Anyway

we go out to the Enoggera army training base for our rookie course and Mum handled it really well. She was 40 and she handled it better than a lot of the younger girls. But is it any wonder, because Mum had looked after six – (noise in background) – Mum had looked after six kids and done all that work and she could handle it really, really well. Anyway, I loved the PT [Physical Training], the drill. Oh, it’s just what I like. And [UNCLEAR] and they’d call

certain people out every so often, and I went out, and of course, oh, I could call them quick march and all the rest of it and keep in time. And unbeknownst to me, they had selected me to be a PT instructress. And I was given a lance-corporal stripe. I was only in there for what, four weeks or something like this. And of course, the time came for our posting. I was called up in front of the officer, and the officer told me how happy they were with me, that they

had selected me to be the PT instructress and they had given me a stripe. But, as Mum had signed on the dotted line that where she’d go, I’d go, I had to abide by that. Because you see, if you were under 21, you were classed as a minor. And if your father or brother or older sister joined the forces, they could claim that the younger one goes where they go. So I

was told I was going to go. They said, “Oh, we have posted Mum to the 4th Australian Hospital Mobile Laundry unit at Charters Towers. “Oh my God,” I visualised myself washing clothes in these huge big washtubs and wringing them out. And I wasn’t a crier, I mean why cry when you can laugh, sort of thing. And I started to cry, “Can’t you change it?” And they said, “No, we’re very sorry, we did try to change it for you, because we wanted you to be an

instructor in our school.” Major Roach, who was in charge of AAMWS in Queensland, wouldn’t rescind it. She wouldn’t change it. Anyway, I cried my eyes out, and here I was, we went up to Charters Towers. We were posted to the 116, to the laundry unit, which was attached to the 116 AGH, Army General Hospital, at Charters Towers. And of course, we went up in a hospital train. Well, if you’ve ever travelled in a hospital train,

the beds, stretchers, are all alongside in tiers on the side of the cabin of the carriage. And there was no sitting room much. You had to – so if you didn’t lie down, well that was too bad. Anyway, we eventually got up to Townsville and we had a meal at Stuart, that’s Townsville, and I apparently picked up a bug there. But previously, the notice came through that a mother and daughter were being transferred to the 4th Aust Hospital Mobile Laundry Unit.

And of course, all of the girls wanted to know what this mother-daughter looked like, particularly the daughter, with her mother. “What is she like?” So anyway, I picked up a gastric bug and ended up in hospital and they didn’t see me for a couple of days. And of course, I must admit, I didn’t look 18. They tell me I only looked 15 at the time. And then when I go down there, “Oh, that’s the kid.” And of course, that’s what stuck to me

all the way through. And even after the war when I met up with some of the girls, “Oh, you’re the kid.” I’d say, “Do you remember me for me or by Mum?” “Oh no, we remember you because you were the kid.” (laughs) That’s what it was like. But anyway, when I got to the unit, it didn’t turn out, I wasn’t scrubbing in a big washtub, and I wasn’t wringing out clothes, like I thought I would have to do. But the boys – this was a mobile laundry – and it was on wheels.

It was similar to a circus wagon that they carried the lions and that in. You know how they put the sides up like that. And the lion is in there, but instead of the lion, we had the big washing machines and driers and that type of thing. And when the mobile laundry became stationary, they would fold down those sides and they were the platforms, and they were held up with spikes. The boys, the men in the unit, first of all, this was a New South

Wales unit – I’ll come back to how that came about in a minute –but anyways the boys did all the handling, we didn’t handle any dirty clothes whatsoever. See, when the clothes came away from the ward, if there was blood, the girls would have to sort of rinse that out before, and other dirty things. Well it meant that the boys would put them into the washing machines and big tumblers, which I’d never seen before. They were about 12 foot long and they were huge, they would be about

three foot across. They would tumble and then they would spin them dry, or spin them a certain amount, and then they would put them in this old heavy old clothes trolley that we used to have to drag out to the line. And all the lines were erected by the men, and of course, they were all up here, weren’t they? And we littlies used to have to jump and throw the clothes over the line, the sheets. And of course, we didn’t have

sunglasses or anything. We had our hats. But oh, the glare was dreadful. And Charters Towers can become very, very hot. Very hot and very dry and then it can become cold. However, we had to hang the clothes out on the line, we had row upon row of clotheslines, and by the time we hung the sheets, got to the back of the clotheslines, the front ones were dry because it was so dry and hot. So they had to come off and we’d take them to what we called the folding shed. And there were girls rostered.

We were all rostered on the various things. And one week on clotheslines and the next was folding. And then the other was with ironing. And Mum became a corporal first, and she was in charge of the folding tent for a while or she became in charge of the ironing area. But the girls on folding, that was done under a tent fly, you know, the white ones.

Oh, it used to be so glary and dreadful, and it was so hot out there. We hated the folding tent. Okay, if we went on the lines, we could have a little bit of a spell. We’d come under the shade. But when you were in the folding tent, you had that hot, humid air all of the time. And then of course, we’d have blanket days. Oh, did we love our blanket days. The soiled blankets from the hospital. There’d be big rolls of 12 blankets would come,

they would come to us in a bundle of 12 and they were tied on each end and in the middle and of course the boys used to put the blankets through the washing machine and then they would put them through the spinner and then drop them into the trolley. The boys used to have to help us drag the trolley out. But here we little ones were with, because you’d have to throw the blanket over your shoulder to throw it over the line. We’d have to jump to throw it over the line. And you know, grey stinking woollen blankets,

and we had wool in our nose, up our, in our throats, everywhere. We hated blanket days. And of course we then had to take them off the line and shake them and roll them up again. Well, we were just covered in this fluff all of the time. Oh, that was a horrible job. It was very heavy work, but we knew it had to be done. We were looked down upon by some of the girls in the nurses. We all wanted to be

a nurse, but it was just at the stroke of a pen that you became a nurse or you became in the laundry. You could be a slushie [kitchen hand] in the kitchen, in the officers’ mess, which one of the sisters, they offered me a position to get me away I suppose. Give me a chance with Mum. And they asked me to go into the officers’ mess. She said, “You’ll become promoted over there.” And I thought, “I'm not going to be a slushy to the sisters.” I must have been a little bugger. But

I didn’t say it but I thought it. And I thought, “No, no I'm quite happy here.” Well I was in a sense, because we laughed and sang our way through the heavy work. Well, then we had to do our week of ironing. We’d have to do the ironing, because everything had to be starched and ironed. And starched and damped down and ironed. We did all the nurses, the doctors and all the staff’s uniforms, khaki uniforms and the VAD [Voluntary Aid Detachment]. When we first went into the

AAMWAS, the Voluntary Aid Detachment was formed first. And some of the girls, the Voluntary Aid Detachment, even though by the name it sounds voluntary, but they became members of the Australian Army, and they went over to the Middle East. And when they came back from the Middle East, there were two reasons why they changed the uniform. It’s because we didn’t have the blue drill type of material. What do you call it? I forget. Blue material.

And also, apparently, the Australian Red Cross, who had formed the Voluntary Aid, had had a bit of a fall-out and we were separate. So here I was, preparing to wear this lovely blue uniform, but I had the khaki one. But to get back to the formation of the laundry unit - and it was a New South Wales one - the major whatever of the,

major-general of the DDMS, which is the [Deputy] Director of Medical Services, he knew that they had to have a laundry unit, particularly in Charters Towers with the hospital. And of course they called on Major Snelling, who was the controller of AAMWS in New South Wales. And of course she put on a performance and said, she stamped out of the room and said, “No volunteer aids of mine is going to work in a laundry unit.”

And the DMS just said to her, “Well, it’s this way Major Snelling, if you don’t let your girls come in, we’ll get the AWAS,” the other army girls, and of course Major Snelling wouldn’t have that at all. She said, “I’m not having AWAS in my hospital.” So that’s how the 4th Aust Hospital Mobile Laundry was formed in New South Wales. And we thought we were the only ones, but there was a 5th Aust Hospital Mobile Laundry, but they,

that was in New South Wales, but they didn’t work out of the feedlot we did. See our laundry unit at Charters Towers was in the Mount Carmel school grounds. The 116 AGH took over the All Soul’s school for the hospital, and Mount Carmel for the hospital as well as the laundry unit. And that’s where we had the laundry out there. We ironed underneath the old school. And when we worked, there was a cyclone that came through

Townsville, and blew down the, I think the 14th Australian Hospital, AGH, and we had all their patients, and then we had all the extra clothing, it all got wet with the cyclone. Oh golly, and we worked day and night for I don’t know how long, and the army very generous. They gave us a day and a half off over at Magnetic Island, and that was a lot of time off. Anyway, Mum and I got on quite well,

and as I’ve said in the book, a lot of the girls used to say to me, “Vera, why on earth are you bringing your mother into the army with you?” You know, in that you know, “Why in the hell bring your mother into the army with you?” I said, “I didn’t. She took me.” And then of course, other times they used to say to me, “Vera, won’t your mother let you go out with boys?” And I said “Yeah.” I’d never thought of it. But Mum was quite happy, I was quite happy to go to the dances, because see, I was used to going to the dances with Mum before we went into the army. And of course, Mum used to –

she loved dancing and it made no difference to me. She was just another member of the group. And at Charters Towers I didn’t have very many, make real good friends of the girls, because I had Mum. But I must tell you something that when – there’s two things – at the hospital, the various, like the RAAF, the Americans and [UNCLEAR] troops camps, would notify the hospital that there would be a dance on a certain night.

And we all had to put our names down. And they would send a truck and pick us up and then take it, when I say truck it was classed as a bus. A bus. But it was a big truck covered with a tarpaulin, khaki, and just some seats, either along the side, or this way. So it would take us, and I went out to Bredon one time, and of course when we girls went out we always had to wear our army hat and our gloves and our stockings and the whole works. You were

not regimentally dressed unless you had that on. We’d go to the dance and of course the boys always left, we had one of the dances in one of the long mess huts. And in the mess hut, that’s where we used to leave our purse and our hat and our gloves, and you’d be sure that the purse was still there and everything in it. Nobody would dare touch anything. And of course we’d dance all night, and time came for us to go home, and of course we had to find the hat and to find the gloves, and

the hat was missing. Couldn’t find it. And here’s everyone loaded in the truck and me still down here and Mum there, and of course, me being me, I just “Mum, I can’t find my hat.” And Mum being the sergeant that she was, just piped up and said “Anyone seen a hat with VD in it?” You can imagine. I wanted to be an ostrich and (laughs) – Never forgot that, from there on I always put VGD. (laughs)

Because I told you how scared we were because we had so much lectures. It’s the same as AIDS today, isn’t it? (laughs)

Oh yeah, we all had – what else could you do when everyone in the truck was just bursting with laughter. And all the soldiers, the airmen standing around, of course, had a big laugh. And then another time, oh, this is interesting for you to know, we used to go into

town. We didn’t work of a weekend unless we had these emergencies where something drastic happened and we’d have all these – see the hospital trains used to come to Charters Towers and we used to do the work for the hospital train too. And if there was some big emergency, well, okay, we’d have to work on the Saturday arvo. But normally we’d work on Saturday morning, which was the general thing for business right throughout Australia. You worked on Monday to Friday and half day Saturday. And of course we then would go into

town, into Charters Towers, for the weekend, and the Comforts Fund, or the YWCA, Young Women’s Christian Association, had this place in town where we could stay for two and sixpence, bed and breakfast, for two and sixpence. Twenty-five cents. That’s good money then. But anyway, Mum and I would go in and because Mum was older, we were let to stay down in a little room

downstairs with two beds in it. Because Mum being older and more secure sort of thing. So anyway, we’d go to the dances and it was in this hall in Charters Towers. It was very progressive those days, and very musically minded. And they had this lovely dancehall upstairs which the Comfort Fund took over, and it used to be a dancing studio, teaching studio. And that’s where we used to have our dances. And of course, Mum being Mum,

being older, she would meet up with all the older ladies in the kitchen making the cakes, and of course where there’s food, you’d find me. But however, in the dancing I found, I met up with this lad whose Mum was in the kitchen. She was one of the volunteers for the CWA [Country Women’s Association] or the YM [YMCA – Young Men’s Christian Association]. And of course, he was quite nice. He was a nice fellow. And we were dancing and he said to me, “Vera, can I take you home?” What did I say? I said,

“But I’ll have to ask Mum.” (laughs) And anyway, he said, “Oh, all right.” So in the next dance, see, there were more men than girls, so they used to cut in. Tap on the shoulder. So I was dancing around the next dance, and he tapped in and he said, “Well, can I take you home?” I said, “Oh, yes, I asked Mum.” But I must admit, you know, Mum took about five minutes before she’d agree to let me go home with him. Anyway, he said to me,

being a Charters Towers boy, see, he could go home to his home and get his pushbike, he said, “Well, okay then, I’ve got my pushbike downstairs. So I get on the pushbike with him, and the hospital was a couple of miles out of town. And it was up on an incline and it was gravel. And of course, I'm sitting on the bar, and if you’ve ever had a double on a man’s bike, you’ve got one part of the bar sticking into you here, and the

seat that he’s sitting on, sticking into your back. And of course I'm going over this bumpy road, and I kept saying to him, I said, “Look, this is too hard for you to push up.” But no, he wouldn’t get off. Anyway, that was okay. Oh, he did come in another time and take me out; that was okay, he was transferred. Then it would have been 38 or 40 years later, our ex-servicewomen

had a return trip to Charters Towers. And the organiser was very much an organiser and I thought, “No, I'm going to do what I want to do this time.” So when we got to the motel I just dropped my bag and I went into town on the bus and I said to the driver, see some of us were here and some over the other motel. And I said to the fellow, “Now look, I’ll get off here.” And when I got off, there was Charters Towers just as I left it and I wanted to walk down and find

the house that Mum and I stayed. It was still the same, exactly the same. The only thing different, next door was a tennis court where Crawford and the other tennis players used to come. So I held the racquet while Crawford hit the ball and the racquet goes – So I could say I play tennis with Crawford, only Australia’s tennis player. But anyway, there was a house there, and I walked back, the other girls were up at the RSL club. I knew where they were and I knew where to go.

And I walked through the park and I thought that shouldn’t be there, that should be there, whatever, whatever. Anyway, I get up to the club and I put my foot on the base of the bar, which I never did do in life. Anyway, I was telling the girls, I said, “It’s wonderful, nothing’s changed.” I said, “Even the house that Mum and I used to stay in for two and sixpence.” I said, “Sadly the tennis court’s gone.” And this fellow alongside of me said, “Oh yeah, that used to be Dr Griffiths’ home.”

I said, “Oh yeah, do you know that?” He said, “Yes, I knew a mother and a daughter in the army here.” And I said, “Oh yeah, there weren’t very many of us.” He said, “No, but I knew the one here.” I said, “Oh my God, you’re looking at her, you know.” And he said, “Oh, you used to have such beautiful fair hair.” And I felt a real frump. Oh, anyway, then he said to the girls, “Yeah,” he said, “you know I asked could I take her home, you know what she said, ‘Oh, I’d have to ask my Mum.’”

And then, he said, “I took her out one other time,” and I said “Where did you take me?” He said, “I can’t remember.” I said, “It was the pictures.” “Yeah,” he said, “and do you know what happened? We got her back to where they were staying,” and he said, “and I thought I was doing good in the hammock.” Doing good; it wasn’t a hammock, it was a wooden swing. But anyway, he said “I was doing good in a hammock,” and then he said, “Do you know what she said – ‘Oh, I better go in now. Mum might be worrying about me’.” True, true, true. It got me out

of so many situations. (laughs) And to think after all of those years, you know, I had not seen him, but I’ve got back at him when he said about my hair, and I said – see Les kept, the name of Les, I only went out with two – I didn’t go out with two, but I had associated with two boys, and Les kept coming in my mind. And I said, “Well all right, what was your name?” And he told me Manly,

Ted or something Manly. And I thought I got back at him because he told me, well my hair was going in between times. But that was my good times. And then another boy, this is what I used to do, you know. They’d say, “We’ll go out with girls.” But we didn’t because we didn’t have to, because everything was sort of arranged. But I met this Les – might have been at a dance or something – and he was stationed out at Sellheim, about 15 mile away. So what he used to do, he would come in on his

leave truck and he would get off at the gate of the hospital, the big gates, and I knew what time, so I had a dog, Rusty, who befriended me and I befriended him. So I’d go up to the gate and meet Les, and we’d go to the hospital canteen, and we’d buy a bottle of lemonade and a packet of Arrow biscuits and a packet of Minties. Now this was our entertainment, true as I'm sitting here. We would race Rusty around the football oval. (laughs) And the girls thought

I was nuts. But that was what I liked doing. And that’s why, as I said, I didn’t have time to get into trouble, I never left the hospital. Some of the girls who knew the area, see Charters Towers has a lot of mines, and there’s a lot of [UNCLEAR]. But the fence came along and okay, with the gully, the fence wasn’t [UNCLEAR] here, it would go like that. And of course they would watch – there used to be the patrol, the guards

would walk around the patrol so they’d watch. And if they snuck out without a leave pass, they would watch when the guards would come in. And of course sometimes they would come in, or else they’d meet some of the patients, I can’t be sure. And they’d have been making up around there. And I said, “Bloody hell, what do you do?” I said, “It’s so cold out there.” One of them said, “Oh yeah, silly bugger, don’t you know, you just kick a cow in the ribs and where it’s been lying is nice and hot. The ground was warm.

And that’s what they used to do. True. I nearly died when I – my first introduction into what goes on in the outside world (laughs) They weren’t all like that, but some of them were. But it was good fun. I didn’t have to worry, Mum was with me. (laughs)

(laughs) But he

wasn’t really, because I wasn’t inclined. I didn’t want anything like that, but you know, you pick up the vibes quick smart don’t you? But anyway, that was Charters Towers. We had a lot of fun. But then after a time, the government – there were lots and lots of troops coming in around Cairns, and not only it was it malaria bad, but the troops were coming back from the islands so they realised they had to have another hospital.

And see, they had a hospital up in Atherton Tablelands, Rocky Creek, which is about ten mile Mareeba side of Atherton. And first of all they were going to build in Cairns here, but there were too much malaria, mosquitos. So they took over Rocky Creek area and they first of all had the 5th Camp Hospital go up there with all the AAMWS, and then they had to have a bigger hospital.

And the 2/2nd AGH got blown down, a cyclone, washed them out around Watten I can remember it if I say ‘rotten’ because it was out west and there was not a tree within sight. But anyway, their hospital got blown down, tented hospital, and they were sent up to the Rocky Creek. And that meant the 5th Camp Hospital girls had to come into Cairns here.

When things became, when those hospitals couldn’t handle it, 2000 bed hospitals, and then they had a big convalescent depot as well, up on Rocky Creek. There is a memorial up there now. At the camp where the 5th Camp Hospital was, the first hospital, the Atherton Shire Council, with some other people, have built this beautiful memorial on the grounds and they have big rocks with the various units on, and they –

I'm not sure how many they have now. But they’ve made it a memorial park. Which is good because they’ve still kept the grounds, and immediately across the way, there is still the big igloo that was the entertainment igloo. And that’s still standing today that igloo. But anyway, that’s getting away from, when the government decided, or the Defence Department realised that they had to have another hospital in Cairns here, and the Americans had built a big hospital.

See, as you know, we had hundreds of Americans and the Americans anticipated having many more in this Cairns area. When they first came into Cairns in late 1942, early ’43, it was decided in America that Cairns would be their main depot base. 25 per cent of all goods needed for the islands were to come into Cairns. And they were to build

this port and transhipment project on – they were to have a mile long wharf down in Smith’s Creek. And of course they did do a lot of building there, but when the AIF [UNCLEAR] boys came back, they were training on the Atherton Tableland as well, but then they could go up to the islands and push the Japanese back. And by 1944 a lot of the Americans pulled out of Cairns. But they still had this vacant hospital. So that is how the Australian government negotiated

and they took over this American base hospital at 116 AGH. Well they moved to Cairns. Well they’d left us and we thought we were in for a fabulous time, because the little 5th Camp Hospital transferred back out to Charters Towers. And we thought, oh this is heaven. You know, a small hospital. Oh, but in no time at all, the matron claimed that we come into Cairns. So we came by train and we lived, our unit, the girls, our barracks, was

358-360 McLeod Street, just up in North Cairns. And the boys had to erect the unit, the mobile laundry unit. The boys towed it up with the back of their trucks. And we were at North Cairns. They had, the boys had to help reclaim the swamp where we were located on. And we always said the perfume of the day was citronella, because of the sand flies, the mozzies. And they built this big iron shed, big

black iron was what they used then because you couldn’t get anything else. And black iron was only supposed to last five years. That’s the anticipated life of it. But it was just so damned hot working. They built the big shed like it had been the Allied Works Council mess hut and they erected it. And we would do the ironing and folding in that, but our clothes still had to be hung out in the boiling hot sun, hence I got that, that I can’t claim off the government, they

reckon it’s because I lived here. But anyway, we would have to go out and as I said, jump to get the clothes on the line. And the boys did the laundry. And then we didn’t have any fans for quite a long time until Lieutenant-Colonel May Douglas came up to Cairns. She was the controller of all AAMWS within Australia. And she came up and saw what we were doing. But I’ll go back to how the unit was being formed, Major Snelling. She wasn’t going to have

the girls work in laundry. And I don’t know why but they just took on like a jimmy or something, and when I was at this reunion, and she came up to Cairns and she stayed with me and she wanted to know where we worked. So I took her onto The Esplanade, which has been filled in the area, and I explained it all to her. “Oh,” she said, “get me out of here. I can’t handle it.” Yeah. It was very difficult. And it was just so terribly, terribly hot.

They eventually, I think Major Snelling got us a drinking fountain, drinking water. But the irons those days were only one weight, damn heavy. There was no controls or anything on them and we were always burning them out because everything had to be starched, damped down and ironed, that type of thing. We did all that. When we came to Cairns we still, even though we weren’t living at the 116 AGH, we weren’t their official laundry, we were only attached.

We did their laundry plus other things, and of course then when the laundry broke down for the 2/2nd, that had to come down here too and we did all of that. We worked damn hard. But then Mum was still with me at that time. She became a sergeant. And we went out and then Mum got sick. Mum was asthmatic, and she did take sick in Cairns here. And she went into the hospital, and she had a discharge. And the army called for girls, AAMWS, to go into

the Australian and to be an army pupil nurse. They figured that, they felt the war was coming to an end, they realised that in ’44, ’45, and they started this special Army Pupil Nurses’ Training School in Darley in Victoria. So Shirley and Ollie – these are the girls that I did make friends with – Shirley, Ollie and

Joyce and myself – we were the four musketeers that were always going around, well we wanted to go to the same school together. But they wouldn’t take us. They only took a certain number of AAMWS from the various states around Australia to this special school. So Ollie and Joyce went in the first school. And Shirley and I went to the second school. And then we went to, went down there and did the proper course and I was then sent back to 112 AGH.

To Greenslopes Hospital. But I didn’t finish my nursing training, because the war was coming to an end, and I listened to somebody else and I got married. But it was quite good and it wasn’t difficult being in the army with Mum. I loved the life, to be honest. I would have loved to have stayed on, but coming from Cairns we were very insecure. Like when I went to the nursing school in Darley, as far as I was concerned, I didn’t have the qualifications, I came from Cairns, I was nobody.

And of course, when we sit for all the exams, to think that I got hygiene, the hygiene I got all the credits, all the high marks, whatever, and the others who I thought, that came from Sydney, oh, they had to be good. And they all had to do posts when they went back. See, we didn’t have the confidence, because Cairns being such a small place, we didn’t have the interaction like they would have in Sydney and other places. You know, you’ve come, after a while you’d realise that you’re not such a dumb cluck after all. But then we got married

on the 17th of July, 1945 and at that particular time in the services, or previous to that, if a girl became pregnant, they still had to wait three months or more to be proven that they were pregnant. But not me, oh no. I had what they – they introduced the toad test. It might sound silly. But what they would do, they would take a specimen of urine and they would inject it into the toad and if the

toad became pregnant, it proved I was pregnant. So I got out of the army. I was the first one to get out of the army. Six weeks after I became pregnant. Of course, I was a real good Aussie girl. I had my baby on Anzac Day, didn’t I, in 1946. Oh yeah, that’s something that a lot of people don’t know, that they did the toad test. I don’t know what technical name they had, but I can assure you it was a toad test.

Well, with the machines themselves, as I stated before, it was like a circus wagon on wheels. Only difference is there were no

lions, but there were the washing machines and in the first one, I think there could have been two washing machines and on the next one, next wagon, was the spin drier. And of course, there could have been two spin driers, because the boys used to wash the sheets in the tumbler and then we’d spin-dry them. Then we would hang them out on the line, but all

the things like bandages and other smaller articles, we had to – no, they did the towels. Only time we had to put the towels out on the line was when their drying machine broke down. But normally, they would; we would have the sheets and the hospital bedcover with the big red cross in the middle of it. And then, all the other things like bandages, everything had to be washed and recycled.

You could not afford, like they do today, there was no throwaway things. And anything for the theatre, all of that was done again, was washed. But they were all put – and in the folding tent, they had the – there would be Mum and another lady, Marie, and they would be in charge of organising which – everything had to be marked – theatre, ward, so and so. And what came from ward

16 went back to ward 16. They would be packed in a big canvas bag, like a white [UNCLEAR] canvas. If we had time, we would roll bandages, but most of that would be done by patients in the wards to give them something to do. And then of course, with the theatre work, everything that went back would go through their sterilisers. They did have sterilisers then. We didn’t have big things like we have today. I know that the girls

- but I used to have to do it too – everything was boiled. We didn’t have all the gloves like we have today. All the gloves had to be sterilised. They’d go in a special solution. And then everything else had to be scrubbed and boiled and boiled and boiled. There was always, mostly a primus – it might sound silly – but mostly a primus in every ward, not only to make cups of tea, but to do some sterilising. And then after a time, you did get an extra steriliser.

But to come back to the laundry, everything had to be packed in the various bags and had to be folded a certain way, so that they could do the same. With the sheets, the folding the sheets and the bedspreads, there was always two girls. Both of you would stand and you would stretch out the sheet and fold it this way and then grab it and fold it this way, and then come to meet each other and fold like that. You just had a system. After a while you knew exactly where to go. And then

you would have to fold the towels and the pillowcases, or anything big like that; surgical gowns and that type of thing. We had to do all those. But they were always rolled. We rolled the surgical gowns up, yes. There are certain ways of doing everything. And of course, it was usually the corporals or the sergeant that was in charge of the folding tent, who knew exactly where to put everything. It relied upon them, because the only word, there was quite a stink if things went into the

wrong – they had no idea just how many hundreds and thousands of articles that we would put through in a – not hundreds of thousands but thousands of articles in one day. But in a week it was hundreds of thousands of articles that would go through. Yes, and you know, we’d get no recognition, because as I said before, that the girls in the ward, they looked down upon us. And even later in my life, in organising the various things, one of our local girls

here, just said to me, she was at 116 and she said, “Oh, them,” she had a bit of a lisp, “them laundry girls,” and I said, “Hey, hey wait a moment,” I said, “I'm one of them.” And I had to pull her up because I could – I said that and a lot of people that I’ve said it to since, or the nursing sisters, they say, “Oh no, don’t be silly.” But it was true. And while doing the book, I had a letter from one of the girls in the 5th Aust Hospital Mobile Laundry – there were only two, the fourth and the fifth

with AAMWS in – and this girl wrote exactly what I wanted to say. And she said I couldn’t very well do it. In my book I didn’t want to have to do that, but she has said it in her words, how what used to hurt her was the way the laundry girls were looked down upon. Little did the nurses in the wards know that our feet and legs ached as much, if not more as them doing ward work. Yet we did get looked down upon.

Oh, we were over here and they were there. We were slept in separate quarters. See we were the laundry unit attached to the 116, so we were inputs if you follow and we were different and we only had one place and these other girls, they lived in other houses and quarters and we took over the boys’ school see, Mount Carmel. And you know, boys in those days slept in a big dormitory,

oh God, poor little devils, because there were no walls on half of it and we were in the cold, cold Charters Towers and believe me it was freezing. And the poor devils because then of course when it came to have your shower, you’d go downstairs for the shower room, which was next to the swimming pool, well you’ve seen a swimming pool and the big change room at the swimming pool with a seat in the middle and that’s what we had to go to. You’d take, oh it was embarrassing, we weren’t used to stripping off in front of people and if you didn’t

go down early in the morning to get undressed in the cubicle, when I say a cubicle, a cubicle consisted of canvas between there and there and there and I mean okay, you dropped the soap and bent over to pick up some soap and you hit that cold canvas, believe me it’s cold on your bum. And of course I wasn’t used to undressing in front of a lot of people, we found if you got up very early in the morning you’d

down before the rest of them. Some of the girls would just strip off, all right, I know there’s nothing wrong with it but we just weren’t used to it and I never did get used to it but that’s part of army life but with our toilets we didn’t have, a lot of them only had canvas dividing and no front door on, but we were lucky, we didn’t have that because we were attached to a hospital and we had a little bit more that way.

Yep, well I wasn’t showing my bum to them all and of course a lot of them, if anyone had stretch marks, you know, women, girls being girls and if you’ve had a baby you get stretch marks on the side there and I never had a baby, but I had stretch marks, you see because I was number five of Mum having them so and I was born with those stretch marks. Well if they’d have seen that, they would have had me down as having a baby, but I hadn’t. I had

those for years but now I’ve filled out and you can’t see them any more, they’ve gone. Sorry I don’t know who’s going to audit this tape.

Yeah I have, yeah that’s true. True, I highly agree. I’ve shrunken and gone out.

At one particular time we had 75 girls, 75 AAMWS, because we worked hard, we did work hard and four were on mostly, maybe six on the lines, you take your turn about and then sometimes there were about 10 or 12 girls in the ironing room, and from what I gather I think we had

about 70 at one particular time in the laundry, then when we came up to Cairns we didn’t have such staff, although we had a number because we took over the two houses and there were two girls in the spare bedroom and then where used to be the lounge/dining room there were six girls in there and there over in the other place there was the same if not more. So we did cover a fair number but it wasn’t a huge, and we didn’t have the discipline like another.

When we came to Cairns, see when we were at Charters Towers, we didn’t have a female officer over us, we had to abide by what the matron and what’s her name said, from the 116, we abided by what they did and of course you had to be a good girl or you got in to trouble. You didn’t stir trouble.

Oh if you cheeked back or you refused to do things and that type of thing, you did what you were told. And it was just an accepted thing. We knew we had to do the work

but if you objected to doing this and that and the other it was always that, well there was corporal who complained to the sergeant, the sergeant would then complain to the officer up above, you know what it was like, then there’d be discipline and if the same as going AWL – that’s absent without leave – and you would get fined and if you did too much you, if you broke the rules too much, you got a dishonourable discharge. But, see we didn’t think of it, we just

got on with it, we knew we had to do the work, we knew the war was on and it was something we had to do and you just did not ask questions. You did as you were told. But being good [UNCLEAR]. Pardon me. Well, gee, I had Mum didn’t I.

No, no, no, no, what would happen, Mum would tell me to do something, an order to do various jobs and I’d forget, I’d say,

“Yes Mum, oh yes sergeant,” whatever. I’d forget all of the time that Mum. We had a lot of fun and some of the girls smoked like chimneys, some used to have the amber fluid and we had one girl in Cairns here or a couple of them, and I didn’t know there was such things as the women’s, what do you call them, they were not military police, they were for the

women and I did not know that. Two of the girls were called up in front of Mum, they brought them home at some ungodly hour, they’d had a little bit too much of the brew, but we had one girl which was interesting as history. Her name was Daphne Campbell. Now Daphne loved horses and she loved the Americans and when we were at Charters Towers of course there were plenty of horses around there and believe me there were plenty of Americans,

and of course with the laundry unit, the aerodrome was just to the right of the hospital and when the Yanks were going off, they’d met up with the girls the night before and they’d say they’d be going at such and such a time, so what would they do, they’d come over and buzz the hospital and of course we had, near the laundry unit was a special place where we put the poor boys who were shell shocked. Well, do you think you could get the message to those Americans not to fly over there? You’d hear the boys screaming, you see they were shell shocked

and they, any noise like that, any bump, they were gone and the poor things were out of their mind. And of course the boys used to, Daphne was the biggest culprit, oh she knew who was going and when they were going and anyway she continued this in Cairns here and before she got out I’ll tell you that, but when we were in McLeod Street, up the top, Mum was on duty, you see the sergeants had to take orderly room duty, and

Mum received a phone call one night to say, “Sergeant Downey, you have a Daphne Campbell with your unit?” And Mum said, “Yes.” “Well, we’d like you to know that Daphne is in Port Moresby but we can’t get her back until tomorrow.” She hitched a ride on the Americans’ planes, no problem to Daphne, we didn’t know where she was, but anyway they were doing a, she loved horses and she was beautiful, she had this long blonde hair and they were doing the

film, The Overlanders, so they needed somebody so Daphne applied and she was in, if you ever see the old film of The Overlanders and there’s this beautiful looking girl with this hair flying to the wind, that was our Daphne. So see we did make it to the top. Yeah.

We had a couple of girls. There’s one girl I’d like to mention, Eileen. Eileen was half Aboriginal and for an

Aborigine girl to come into the forces was something most unusual and of course she had very much inferiority, but she was my mate and then there was another girl who came from the Solomon Islands and Jean Watago was darker again than that, but we used to sing and we called ourselves ‘two dots and a dash’. I was the dash. And we got up one night at Charters Towers and they were having a concert, so we sang our heads off, but see we used to sit on the blankets,

the dirty ones and the clean one and just sing our heads off. We, with the ironing particularly, we worked, ironed for one hour and we were off for one hour. Well in that hour if we weren’t making Perspex brooches which you get from the aeroplanes, they had the Perspex windows, and we used to get pieces of that and if you had a metal Snoopy brooch or something else like the Rising Sun [badge], and you heated that and you press it into the

plastic, it melts so okay you shouldn’t paint it and then you fill it in at the back and you’d attach it and you’d have a brooch or you’d have a key ring or something like that. So we used to do that. Our electrician taught us to do that, but we used to sing most of the time. But I still have Eileen. Jean has died but Eileen is still alive and I hear from her.

Oh yes, she felt very much embarrassed and she told me a story. She was a very good runner; she used to run for

Queensland. And then we had the big inter-unit sports out at Sellheim and Eileen was there and because we were all cheering her on and she said it wasn’t until everyone was cheering her on and clapping her that she realised she was accepted. Yet to us, see I grew up with the native, the coloured people in Cairns here and I sat alongside of Walter Pitt and Pat Sang on the other side and it made no difference to me and they were all and we were all just really good friends. But it wasn’t until

she won the races at the big inter-school sports that she felt accepted. But it was very unusual for an Aborigine girl to come into it.

Well the Aborigine people, see I told you, they were under the control of the police and it was just that they never had the, they had a lot of inferiority and they were taken into the

various missions, and if they didn’t come out of the missions early enough they didn’t associate with those other people. Like in Cairns here we had them living in houses around but some of them wouldn’t come in, they would live in the, not swampy area but out of town a little bit they had there, what was considered the blacks’ camp. And no matter how much, see they were given all the opportunities to got to school, the same as what we did because the government, because Pop was on relief work they supplied our writing

and reading books and everything like that, that was all for free, well it was all open and available to the coloured but their parents, after all they came from nothing the poor things and they were thrust into what we expected a civilian life and a lot of them couldn’t handle it and they didn’t want to, but we respected the fact that that was an Aborigine camp and they were lovely people, we had no bother with them at all, we got along well with them. Ronnie can tell you how he exchanged a

tomahawk for a boomerang one time. We’ve got little native boys out here. What else would you like to know?

Oh god yes, there was one in particular. See we had the, I told you about the aerodrome in Mareeba, MacArthur said the Americans were to come there and the various squadrons were up there and they would come down to Cairns for

their R&R [Rest and Recreation], their leave and they would stay at Hyde’s Hotel or the Grand Hotel or somewhere like that and they would come for the dance and I was, at the time working in a little shop in town and this, oh he was lovely, oh God yes, and he asked me could he take me, could he come out home, and of course everybody used to come home, you take them all in. We had the navy boys, Aussie boys would come into Cairns and they’d been up there fighting battles, no questions asked,

the ship would come in, they would come home, they would sling a hammock between the trees, Mum would feed them and they were there when I came home from work. So everyone came home and he said, oh could he come out? Yes, yes, yes. And of course, and I told him, I just said quickly, I was very quick, cause I thought he wouldn’t remember. I said, “Look you just go here, there, there, there, there, there, there,” and anyway when I got home Mum wanted to go to the dance, and I thought oh he won’t come. Blow me down, he turns up at the

dance, he went out home and the lady who was living upstairs at the time told him that we went to the dance and where it is and when he walked in I felt dreadful. Oh but he was nice. Oh I could have gone to America, but anyway he was to come back again. I met him a couple of times at the dances and he was to come back. He told me he was coming back sometime and then he didn’t come and another fellow came and he said to me, we had a song,

“I came here to talk for Joe, gee that kid who loves you so,” and whatever, whatever, and anyway he just didn’t come back. His mate told me, oh I really thought he was so different, he was a navigator, and he had class. He was very nice. A lot of them were very nice. A lot of them, they were nice, they knew they had to behave, particularly the American Negroes. They knew if they got into trouble

kaput, kaput [finished]. No trouble at all. They knew they had to behave. That’s why we had no bother with them, but the other American boys, as far as I know there was only one death in Cairns caused with the Americans and that was because they were having a fight and a civilian got knocked out and he got concussion and he died. But we didn’t have, Townsville had the problems, Townsville and Brisbane, down there. But see, as the police always said, Cairns doesn’t

sleep. There was always someone roaming around. But we were different, we weren’t Townsville, we were Cairns.

It’s ridiculous what the Townsville people think of Cairns and some of our Cairns. Most of the Townsville people, but I understand.

Only during, well, no this come after, before and after. Before, during and after. But during the war, the mayor at Townsville

made out that he was the only one that had the troops, and oh he got money. Oh dear they had it so bad. Come Coral Sea time, the ‘50s celebrations, Townsville got a million dollars or something to have a celebration. We got $10,000 because as far as, see our mayor didn’t complain enough. I was on the committee at that time, that’s how I know what they got and what they didn’t get. But it was all Townsville, Townsville. And we, Daryl

McIntyre who wrote a story on Townsville, Townsville at war, and he came up to Cairns here and went to the Historical Society and said, “Oh you didn’t have many people here,” that type of thing, and the president of the Historical Society said, “Well, I think you better speak to Vera Bradley about that.” So anyway he phoned me, and I'm pleased he did because he gave me his thesis papers. He did a thesis on the Americans in North Queensland, the American Red Cross. So

the information I have in my book came from Daryl, but when Daryl came to Cairns and saw just what we have, he was amazed. Like a lot of other people, they haven’t a clue as to what we had. See at one time in 1943, we had the three AIF divisions and we still had the Americans on the American aerodrome in Mareeba, plus all the associated troops plus the two hospitals, plus the convalescent depot in

Rocky Creek and then we had all of who were down here, both men and women right through. Townsville thought they had the lot, but we had them here. But how there was no problem in Cairns was that the various AIF battalions, we had the different sections and their units, platoons, they would only allow a thousand troops to come to Cairns at one time. So many were allowed to go to Atherton, Mareeba and all the rest of it.

See to try and stop all the trouble that went on in other cities, they would allow so many thousand to come into a city. See, Innisfail was another place where they could go, so it was all divided up and that is why we didn’t have – we had our Aussie and Yank fight, oh believe you me.

Oh we had plenty of them because, as I said the Aussie boys were very jealous of us dancing with the Americans but they hadn’t a

clue as to what it was like. We were only too happy to have them here and they thought that we were being, you know the old saying is, “They were overpaid – over here, overpaid and oversexed.” Well that was the things that they were saying but you didn’t have to go to bed with them to have a good time. My view. But the boys as far as they were concerned, but you see the poor old Aussie boy, he was only paid six bob a day, where even the enlisted American, he got much more than

that. And sure they did have the money to do what they wanted to do, but by my research in doing the book, they didn’t get as much, they weren’t as well fed for sure as our Aussie boys. Our Aussie boys might have been fed on stew, stew, stew, but the American boys weren’t fed, the enlisted men weren’t fed like that and so it was only just, as you say, jealousy of the boys. You can understand, can’t you? You being away and

you have a nice girlfriend at home and you think, oh you're up in the bush, up there fighting, and you think, “God, bloody hell, they’re down there with my girl.” Sorry but that’s what happened anyway. We did have one big riot in Cairns here. What happened is that one girl worked at the American Red Cross and of course this Aussie boy went, he wanted to get her out, he wanted her to, she had to work a little bit later and of course she couldn’t go

out, and he got quite annoyed about that and the, like I said, the military police, the navy military police, see they all used to take their turn in guarding, be the navy one time, the army and the air force sort of thing. And anyway, one thing led to another and this Aussie fellow, he was camped out at the beach somewhere and he got quite annoyed and yeah we had what they called a riot. Sort of a riot, oh they did, they all came,

all the troops. This Aussie bloke, he got quite perturbed. I know what it was: one of the Americans hit him with a baton; see they carried a baton.

Yeah and he hit this Aussie. Well you never hit an Aussie with a baton, you might do with the Americans but you don’t do it with an Aussie. Anyway he went back out to his troops out to his camp and they came in lorry loads in town. And there’s a good story in my book about it. One of the navy boys on duty, Australian navy boys

on duty at HMAS Kuranda down on The Esplanade and he had to be on, of course, he was given a pick handle, he was only to be on guard duty. He said, “I don’t know what I was to do, use it like a cricket bat.” Okay it was sad, to think it was a few, quite a number of people got hurt, and there was a good riot but it was no problem to see. I have a sketch of it in my book there that

a lady at Gordonvale did. An Aussie soldier lying down, all you see is his legs and his boot, and a Yank with his hands up like this and she said, “A common sight around Cairns,” it was her brother. It was common and they sit on the, all the Aussie boys, the navy, army and air force, they’d sit on the steps at our post office, which is now a Japanese duty free [shop], yuk, yuk.

Anyway, they would sit down there and of course anyone that would come along; you didn’t have to take much to pick a fight with them all. Well they had nothing else to do I suppose and a little bit of beer in them, so yeah.

Hundreds. Hundreds. One of the boys told me that they were at the picture theatre and of course as I

said, the navy, they all had to do guard duty at the picture theatre, they all used to keep the troops under control and they used to sit in the two front seats. And this navy boy told me at the pictures when the show stopped and a notice came up on the screen, all troops to report back to their barracks. And when they got outside the navy truck was there cause they only had to go two blocks but they still picked them up in a navy truck

and took them back to their various units to try and get away and that’s when Clive was put on duty at the front gate with a pick handle and as he said, “What was I supposed to do? Hit the bullets back like a cricket bat?” And they came in by truck loads anyway but the police and the army police of course, went down, I told you before about Sacks Street, where the red light centre, and the Australian and American

MPs [Military Police] had a place down there and of course all the boys were called away to come and try and stop the riot. I don’t know how long it went on for, all I know is I wasn’t involved, thank God.

A few hours. It wasn’t a full night, it was just a few hours until they could see sense and then their officers came in, see unbeknown to the officers of the various big units, that’s when their men took off in trucks and once they found out what was happening, well then the MPs

got to town and the MPs came from everywhere apparently. And that settled it down. But every place had to have a fight didn’t they?

Yeah, of course yes. That’s their fun.

That’s right. Thousands, thousands.

Well the various units, see the AIF division, we had the 6th,

the 7th and the 9th divisions up at the Tableland. As you know the 8th Division went up to Singapore and got a belting up there. And only a few members, some of the boys of the 8th Division went to Rabaul that I told you about, but they had the three divisions up there and it would work with the communications that so many though would limit so many people from each group to go either to Innisfail, Gordonvale, Cairns

or Atherton and Mareeba. That’s how they gave them their leave.

Yes. Very various things, you couldn’t do what you wanted to, as I said before, you had to do what you were told. No argument. Either that or end up in gaol, which they had the big gaols around. A lot of the boys did play up. Can’t blame them on six bob a

day.

Oh yes, oh yes, well I had a very long arm. It might sound silly but when you’re dancing, you know, “Who’s taking you home tonight?” sort of thing and a lot of them didn’t have to wait for that, of course come closer, come closer. And you could always tell when, and they’d say something how they’d love to take me home and

whatever, and I had a very long arm, “Oh really, you about there,” you get them that far apart. I reckon my left arm is very long pushing the boys, it was effective, it flattened their ego. I was terrible, but I suppose it was only human nature. They could have done.

Oh well now, Mr what you call, what you doing tonight?

Yeah we did the original jazz that came into Australia and this was at the American Red Cross where I said they had their entertainment hall, and we danced to that. Oh it was wonderful, and I said I had calluses on my feet, but when they first started doing this, they used to pick the girls up and throw them around, but they had to stop that because in a crowded hall it was not really good. But we had a big engineer group that came to Cairns, the

411 Engineers and they built, see when the war went up into the islands, the big vessels couldn’t get into the areas so they had to build these landing crafts and we had this big place, the building is still down on the esplanade, and these engineers built it and we had a monorail. Within three months, they’d built this huge complex, put the monorail in and they started to build their landing crafts. They built a couple of thousand of them and then of course they were

taken up to the islands when a ship was being unloaded out to sea, or a little bit out, they could then take it into the various places where it’d be muddy and all the rest because they didn’t have all the harbours and the whole works would drop off their things. Well we had them here for quite a long time and they were a very good lot of people.

They helped the local industry, the local people. Say you were an engineer and they wanted something done and they would come to your place, Vic Jensen had one place, and they wanted to use your equipment; if it wasn’t up to scratch they would make it up to scratch and they would help you establish your business so they could do what they wanted to do, such as turning or anything like that. But they bought most of all of this out but if you were another person and you needed some advice, you needed something, all you’d do is go to them and they would help you with it. They were marvellous to the city of Cairns.

Sadly for Cairns that the boys pushed the Japanese back so quickly because by early ’44, a lot of things were disbanded, they were going to build another hydro scheme, they wanted to fill in the Esplanade, which there wouldn’t have been all this problem now. They wanted to put that as their main camp, offices and the whole works, and they wanted to cut down the hill near the aerodrome

so that the planes could come in and out and they were going to use that soil, they were going to pump it over the roads, over Sheridan Street and pump it all along the Esplanade to fill that in. The council and the people along the Esplanade entirely objected to it, so they had to abandon that but the electricity and the water and everything like that, had they been here for twelve months longer, Cairns would have grown up, as I’ve said before, we were just a small town, village I suppose with about

15 thousand people if that. Yeah it was good times though.

No, we were the same thing. The only different at Cairns is that we had a bigger shed. Instead of having to fold the clothes under this white tarpaulin, we could fold it in

this huge shed with the black iron roof and the steam used to come down, the steam from the irons and everything like that. But the men were still outside, the machines were still out there, and the clothes lines were still there and they were still up six foot high, very high. And they didn’t give us sunglasses until the last, not long before I went away to the nursing school. That meant that we had the glare on our eyes all of the time. But still, we got there with it.

Well yeah, it was lovely, you could hug, get closer. You know, Come closer my lover, whatever,

but you knew you were safe because, oh you could dance and oh, have the experience of being closer to a person, a man, that type of thing, but you were safe because you were in the big dance hall and okay when they got their ideas, that’s when your long arm came in handy.

Darling, you’re a man.

They didn’t

change, a man didn’t change in all that time. You agree?

Oh yes, yes, yes and you could feel what was going on in their bodies. I tried to be nice and tell you that. Oh yes, yes, yes. Oh well, they soon cooled down. Oh, I hope they don’t think I'm awful.

Oh everything. Well everything with Vera Lynne and as I said Mr What You Call What You Doing Tonight and anything by Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Vera Lynne. We sang a lot of Vera Lynne songs: Who’s Taking You Home Tonight and also the White Cliffs of Dover,

When the Lights of London Shine Again, that was a nice one. And Red Sails in the Sunset, oh you name it, all the old songs that we used to sing.

There was one, what was that? There was one, what was that? Yeah, I Came Here, no not I Came Here to Joe, that was my favourite for him. Yeah, sad,

he didn’t come back. I used to sing it an awful lot. Don’t know why, there’s no sun up in the sky, stormy weather since my man and I ain’t together. I like that, I used to sing that one. I’d sing it in the shower. Couple of people thought it was a record. I could sing it really, you put your whole heart and soul into it, in the shower couldn’t you?

Oh yes, well it was a small room, it sounded good. I don’t know what it sounded like outside but inside was all right. We just sang anything and everything and as I said, like You’re Adorable; You are my Sunshine; Maori Farewell was another one and We’ll meet again don’t know where, don’t know when, another Vera Lynne one and all of those old songs we sang.

No, not before the war, you had no malaria, a big unit before the war, it was only during the war, as I said before, Cairns was very swampy, Cairns was filled in on swamps and

the drainage was very poor and that’s where we – the little bit of water lying around, the malaria mosquito doesn’t like a tank full of water, he only likes a small amount of water and we had the malaria very, very bad. And then when the troops all arrived in Australia, one of the reasons why they used the Atherton Tablelands for their training, is there were very little malaria up there, if none at all. They couldn’t use Cairns, because it was so bad. But

when, in 1943, the Australian Malaria Unit, that was over in the Middle East came back to Australia and they went to the North Cairns state school and they set up their big hospital there where they experimented with the various treatment for malaria, the boys used to come down. Anyone that had contact with malaria up north in the islands, they would go to the North Cairns state school, where

they were treating them, and they had tents outside. Well, they also, that’s how experimental it was. Apart from the experimental stage at the hospital, they had the malaria, like a research, not the research unit, forget the title, but in other words they would be going around cleaning up the various drains to try and - Malaria Control Unit got it,

Malaria Control Unit and they were both working together at the same time. But the hospital, this hospital at North Cairns State School that was the malaria – in fact, it wasn’t allowed to be used, the word, “malaria,” because the Japanese had malaria and it was all secret. It was a research centre that was – I think the title of it, but they were attached to the North Cairns State School and they were

working on the malaria. They had the government or the Department of Defence had called for volunteers who were mostly Italian and German immigrants who came to Australia just prior to the war starting and they were then taken in, they weren’t more or less prisoners of war, they were, I guess they were political prisoners and they were working out west, but they had not been in contact or anywhere serving in North Queensland

or been in North Queensland or New Guinea previously. And those people volunteered to be guinea pigs for the malaria and they had special, the doctors would set them up in a special glass case and they would insert their arm and they had the malaria, the mosquito used to bite them. And the malaria-infected mosquito would bite them and then they would treat them, they’d have to treat them with the various drugs.

What they would do with the mosquitos, they had them, they would keep them in a special cage and they would hang apple and other fruit up there for the mosquito to eat on, so they could build them and breed them up. And then they would get them in contact with someone who had malaria and then they would put them in the boys, the cleanskins the boys were called, and they would put them in their little glass cage to be bitten and of course in no time at all, they would contract the malaria

illness and they would come very sick. And this is where they had all the different types of the medication that they were working on. As I said, my Mum was treated with Atebrin and Plasmoquin, and when the boys went into the islands, of course, they were given the Atebrin, and that’s where the Aussie soldiers went yellow. Malaria – the Atebrin makes you go yellow. Well, I’m not quite sure whether, I think that they may have combined the

Atebrin and the plasmoquin together. See the quinine was a suppressor. But anyway, they experimented with all the various different treatments and then when the 116 AGH, hospital, was transferred from Charters Towers, out to the American hospital at Junjara, the Americans never used the hospital, the malaria research firm, transferred there out to Junjara and they

had a very big malaria complex out there as well as the malaria research was up on the 2/2nd AGH at Rocky Creek. They had a big malaria treatment up there as well. And doctor – oh, not Brinie, Hamilton Barley, Hamilton something or other, my brain evades me, but anyway he was the main malaria man, I think he was either British

or Australian who had been in the malaria research business beforehand, and of course he came to Cairns and his men worked on the malaria treatment and it was in Cairns here that they found out - Hamilton Farley, I’m sure that’s what his name is, it was in Cairns here that they found out the treatment for malaria which was used for many, many years, until the newer people got onto it. But malaria was really rife. In all of North Queensland, you

didn’t have to go to New Guinea to get malaria, cause as I said before, we all got it and we didn’t go to New Guinea. Even though you had to fight the doctors when you took ill for the new ones, the southerners, when they came up here, who couldn’t believe that we could possibly have malaria. But you know damn well when you’ve got malaria when you shake the bed to bits. With the fever and shakes and that type of thing. But they worked in, of course, the Americans had come into Cairns

and they were very much for progress as for draining the city and they with the city council and some of the American Negroes, with the city council members and members of the Australian Army, they had big channels that exist today, admittedly the channels have been widened over the years, but when you go along Mulgrave Road into the city itself, you’d cross two, maybe three channels, see at

one particular time, at that particular time, where, near the showgrounds, that all went underwater, that was very much muddy all along there, when I say, ‘muddy’, it was swampy and that’s where the mosquito lived. And around Edgehill was one of the first places in fact. The Centenary Lakes, which is now, that was, the lakes were put there with the money after we had our Cairns Centenary, which I had a lot of involvement with. And the money that was left over from the centenary

celebrations was put into building the Centenary Lakes. There are fish in there now that will eat the mosquito and that type of thing. It was very bad, it was a very big project. They had quite a number of the malaria control units, they had them stationed from out at Trinity Beach, right through down to Tully. They had them all through, yes, if anyone says there was no malaria in North Queensland you could

tell them to come up here and find out. Read my book, it’s all there.

Well, as I said, earlier in the piece, when the war was declared these boys came over from McIver jewellers. Ronnie was a watchmaker, my brother-in-law was a jeweller and then young Ronnie Clarke who came in later, he was being a jeweller and I recall them coming over on that day and

because I had met him there but I had met him through my sister, as he used to go out to see Ellie and Barney, the sister that’s not very well at the moment. And I got to know him there and of course he came home on leave and that was it. Just like that.

Oh, no he wasn’t with Ellie, he was only just – Ellie was married and he was a friend of Barney, her husband and he

came home on leave and I met up there and of course he asked me to marry him and I said, “Yes.” Ask no more.

Well, you see we were inexperienced in life, generally inexperienced in life. And we were a little bit afraid what the world had to offer us,

I imagine. And you see, I was away from my mother, my mother had been with me all of the time. Had I been on my own, I probably would have seen things differently. And I probably wouldn’t have got married, I would have continued, but one of the things that used to upset me, was the way that the old nursing sisters used to treat us. Because we were doing this special nurses training school, which was only three years and these other nursing, the sisters had to do four, five years and they

weren’t very nice to us. And I thought, “I don’t have to put up with this.” They really weren’t extra nice and I just couldn’t take it, so I guess I took the easy way out and I was discharged, as I said, earlier. I got married and in no time at all I was in hospital and I got – I did get a bad cold – I got a cold, had a cold just before I got married. And anyway when I came back, sure enough I proved I was pregnant.

With my daughter, my first child and I got out of the army six weeks previously, I told you, but here I did all my toad tests. I tell you that beforehand, yeah well that’s it, she’s famous, I tell her that, she’s so offended. But she was born, I woke up at three o'clock in the morning with pain, I was a typical Australian waking up at dawn service parade, I could hear all these people go and yeah, anyway, ten to one on Anzac Day, 1946, she was born.

So I was a really good Aussie digger.

Oh gawd, no, nothing like that. Not in those days. No, I should have got something from the RSL, shouldn’t I? No, no, no. You didn’t think of it in those days.

I think I wanted security more than anything. More than anything, we all wanted security because when you work it out we’d

been living in a sort of a scary situation and not knowing what life would bring and in our time we didn’t have the opportunities like the kids have today, to girls to go on. See, I love sport. Had the sport grants been on now, I could have been a runner or tennis player. But we didn’t have that. See we sort of, it was an accepted thing that a girl would get married and have a family. We didn’t realise the outside world really, if I could have stayed on

at the instructing school, and been a PT instructor, I feel life would have been entirely different for me. Because I would have had to stand on my own two feet even though I was young. But they knew I was young and I could have – I felt I could have gone a long way. Cause they saw something in me that I didn’t know that was in me and it wasn’t until, well I came out of the army and had Veronica and Rodney and then they started the Australian Girls’ Marching

Association and I was asked to go along, Veronica joined a little team and I went along and I became secretary of a marching group and then in 1960 – 1959, yes, 1959, I decided to form my own team and I formed, I had a Scottish team, I had the Glengarry Marching Girls, we had a lovely tartan skirt with the forage cap and the whole works and I just

loved the marching, teaching the girls how to march. I taught the girls from – they had to be 12 and to go out just – if they turned, we had – they were like horses, they had a birthday at the end of 31st of August and if they turned 15 before the 31st of August, they had to go out but if they turned 15 after, I could still have them and anyway it became – I loved it and I kept going on and I used to read up all the magazines

and I thought, well okay, I’d love to take them to a competition. My first competition was in Nambour in 1960. I took the girls down there and of course we won trophies and we were unknown and they were quite surprised about that. And then the next year, 1960, ’61, golly where did we go? We had it in Ingham I think

and the president of the Australian Girls Marching Association, Mr Chappell said to me, “Vera, why didn’t you take your girls to Tasmania, to Hobart for the championships?” And I said, “Well, I didn’t think they were good enough.” Well he said, “I’d like you to see for yourself today, because the team that won the junior section down there, they are marching at Ingham, at the Bibbindown [?].” And I was most surprised, I did get told early in the piece, there used to be dirty work to the crossroads, I did

get told early in the piece that, “Don’t expect your girls to win, because they’ve got you marked.” But anyway regardless we did win. And then I thought, well, and Mr Chappell came over and said, “Well, do you see what I mean?” He said, “I’d like you to take the girls out of Queensland and you see for yourself.” So the next year was in Perth, so what’d I do? I still trained my kids and I stood on the street, near Woolworth’s and Paddy’s, Coles, and

every weekend, every Saturday I was there selling tickets in a weekend train. 1962, it was still shillings then, two bob a ticket or five for whatever, and anyway, eventually and the kids used to say- we used to have little fundraising things and there was so much jealousy going on and people used to say to me, “Oh you’ll never get your kids to Perth.” I said, “Yes, I will, even if we have to march across the Nullarbor.” Anyway we raised enough money

to get there and all I asked of the parents was they had to pay me ten pounds to help with the food, we had raised enough money to pay the fare and whole works. Anyway one mother, I had never seen before, she turned up at the station to say goodbye to her daughter. Okay, they’re good kids, but we didn’t have anything to do with the parents and anyway, but unbeknownst to me, the Queensland Railway didn’t book me through from

South Australia to Perth. And I received a telephone call from one of the men, the Queensland men in the association, that worked in the railway station in Brisbane, he phoned me, he said, “Vera, do you realise that you are not booked on that train?” Don’t ask me how, but anyway, oh great panic stations, five days before I left. Anyway one thing led to another, South Australia came in on it and they billeted us for a few days and they put off other people, other

teams, so this team from North Queensland could go. Anyway we went to Perth and what did we get over there? We got second in – we’d never marched in a big competition like that before, but we got second in – my leader got second, see you’d have a team of three rows of three girls and a leader and my leader got the second and we got second, I think we got one bronze over there. And then when I saw the

famous West Farmers and saw what was going on, I thought, I could beat that. Because what had happened is one of my mothers, a chaperone, she didn’t like the new chaperone, so what did she do? She caused trouble, she asked, she told some of the mothers, she got behind my back and told some of the mothers that she didn’t like this woman, anything could happen, they drew out, what did they take out? Four of my best girls. So unbeknownst to me, this was going on and I had to then get some new girls

in who’d never marched before and in eight weeks I trained them up. And we get over there, we come second. I thought, well I can do that. So the next year it was Sydney, 1963, so we went to Sydney, again selling tickets and raising money to get there. And we got the best team in Australia. So yep, I was very happy about that. And I worked on her technically because she had to have the feet in a certain position. So I had boards made, kicking boards and

they had to swing their arms at a certain height, so I used long towels and – you have to work on these things and they have to work as a team. And if you lost a girl, you would then have to put her in a position where the other girls could drag her along until she learnt. I mean, if you’re swinging your arms and you’re put in number two, you’re out of time, the girls in front of you and back of you will tell you quick smart what to do. So we did, we got the best team in Australia on that fair and then of course when

I lost my first little – my first – my best little girl, who came to me as I was – there was a story about the little one, being cross, we always told about the little donkey, and Patty was my little one, she was little and I had her right through and she was a beautiful little marcher and I used to have her, I’d put her in number five and she kept the whole team together, well then when Patty got 15, I lost – I just felt I couldn’t go on any more. But they still come and see me,

oh yeah, I was a crabby old devil they reckon. While I was on the field, but afterwards, as I said, I knew more about them than their mothers.

No, I never, I’m

a Cairns person, more ways than one, tell you that later. No, I never, ever thought of it that way. I knew no different you see, we grew up here. But it’s the same worldwide. No matter which organisation you are in, you will have parents, if it’s the boys, it’s possibly their fathers that cause the problem. No matter which sporting organisation, there’s always jealousy and there’s always some, so what you have to do is overcome that. So what I used to do, I’d had an experience, when Veronica was marching in this other little team,

and I saw what happened, all the mothers used to sit around natter, natter, natter. So what I did when I got my own team, I wasn’t going to have that. So at first the mothers used to come along and they would sit here. Over here where we’d be training, so I would march them to the other side of the paddock and march them up and down there, teach them there and correct them as we go along. Because being a Mum, when your child is corrected, you get hurt. You think, “Oh, no.” But if they were over there, they can’t hear it

can they? So if they came across to the other side, Vera brought her team back over here. They soon learnt what I was doing and that’s the only way I could do it to keep the team, I had a wonderful lot of girls and some of the mothers were extremely good, some I didn’t see but we did get there – I thoroughly enjoyed it but as I said, that jealousy and all of that rot goes on in every organisation, it doesn’t have to be sport. It can be in a club. I was in

Inner Wheel, Ladies Rotary, and the same thing can happen in there. There’s always someone that wants to knock you off your pedestal and to come down.

It is worldwide and you just have to overcome it and you think, I’d had the experience of being a little bit hurt when this person checked Veronica and I thought, “Oh forget it kid, because that’s what has to be.” So then, when I formed my own team, I was pretty strict with the girls, and I used

to say, “Look, I’m not picking on you, I’m picking on your arms.” It worked you know and cos then we’d come off, so some of them are, “Mumble, Mumble, Mumble.” And of course I was deaf at that time, I was wearing a hearing aid. But they didn’t know I could lip read, did they? But they soon learnt that I lip read. And of course, what they’d do, when they wanted to, “Mumble, Mumble, Mumble,” they would go in a different direction so I couldn’t see them. When they came off the field, we were the best of mates and oh my god,

the stories that I heard with those kids. So they said. I’d be finished and they’d come home and leave – come home here, they’d come to see me and they’d say, “Well, you knew more about me than my mother.”

No, no, they didn’t pick it up. They didn’t pick it up at all. It didn’t come really bad, what it is, the stirrup bone goes hard in the ear and you have to have the

vibration to make it – when I’m speaking to you, you mightn’t realise but the stirrup bones in your ears are going like that and it puts the brain into here and connects up here for you to understand what I’m saying. Well, if the stirrup bone, they go all hard, well that – you can’t get the message through, but if you go into a dance hall, where there’s real loud, loud music, you hear it all right, because it takes that force to make the ear work. But I had this one corrected and then later on I had that one corrected.

Oh, our wedding day. As you know, well you learnt over the time that we had clothing rations and coupons and that type of thing. And Ronnie had heard or someone else had heard that this lady had a wedding dress, but I didn’t feel it was right, so we got married in our army uniform and my old aunt, my grandfather’s

sister, she was living in Windsor in Brisbane and she had a little reception there for us. There was no such thing as wedding presents. You couldn’t buy anything very much at all. We didn’t get anything very much as a wedding present, but we had a little reception in Brisbane and got married in the St Anne’s Presbyterian Church in Brisbane. Because I’m a Catholic, yeah as Father Lisio said, I’d once said I was an RC [Roman Catholic], he said, “Yes I know, you’re like a lot of other people,

retired Catholics.” Very true and of course Ronnie, being Church of England, it was him that said, “I’m not getting married in your church.” I would have got married in his. And I thought, “Well bugger you, if you’re not going to get married in my church, I won’t get – I’ll get married in – ” We got married in St Anne’s Presbyterian Church in Brisbane, which still stands there today. And then we just had the little reception, of course then we had to go back – we went down to Coolangatta, for a bit of a honeymoon,

then we had to go back to our various units, but as I said, in six weeks I was out – I mean it was a one shot job. First try, ‘bang’ whatever. The doctor told my mother that I was the healthiest specimen he’d seen, so what else can you expect. Yeah, well you asked me to tell you, didn’t you?

We didn’t know anything.

We didn’t know a thing and there was nothing spoken about, all the various things that – there was no such thing as the pill or anything like that - and for many, many years after you were married, you never knew whether you were pregnant and course, I did have Rodney, two years later, I’m there and of course I wasn’t really well I had to have a bit of a job done that meant no more children, which in a way was quite a relief. Because it’s rather difficult, it was difficult then. So when we come out of the army we didn’t have

any clothes, didn’t have any civilian clothes, they gave us a few coupons to buy some clothes. I have a photo somewhere of myself taken with Veronica; I’m still in my army uniform with an apron over it, because we didn’t have anything. You couldn’t buy curtains. Unless you had relations that could give you curtains and sheets and everything like that, you just had to manage best you could. And we built our house in Enmore, estate area, from a building from 116 AGH.

It was just a little place that grew and then we lived over there in the mud until an elderly man who we knew when we were little kids, Mr Younger, who used to have the – have that. I didn’t tell you about Mr Younger taking us down to the wharf to see the ships off. See Cairns has always been a tourist town. And the ships would come every three weeks. And bring all the cold fruits, there was no refrigeration on the trains then and all the fruit came through on the ships. So Mr Younger would come

in his horse and sulky and, cause Pop was away and Mum and I would climb onto the horse and sulky, we’d go down to see the ships off and he’d tie the horse up to the big high fence down at the wharf and we’d see this beautiful vessel and everyone had streamers, little Bobby Babbister, a little man who used to sell peanuts around town, and he used to take these, have a basket full of streamers and we couldn’t afford to buy a streamer but there were a lot of people going away

that they didn’t have anyone, so they used to throw the streamer down and we’d catch it and we’d think it was great. I mean this was when I was a teenager and we’d hold onto it, you’d hold onto it and hold onto it, the ship would be pulling away and these paper streamers’d be hanging on. They would stretch and stretch and of course, it would go out and the last streamer would break and there’d be quite a cheer, of it all. It was great fun. Then after that, we would still leave the horse and sulky tied up

to the rail and we’d walk around town for a little while because the church services, you’re not allowed to do anything until the church came out, so we’d walk around the town, just to look in the shop windows before we came back to what is the Anzac Park which sadly the casino’s built there now. Where the casino is, that was all vacant and that was the park. And we would go down there and sit on the grass and as long as you didn’t sit under a tree with birds nested, you make sure you didn’t sit under there, well,

you’d get the droppings. But we’d sit there and they had a rotunda in the middle of the park and it’d be the Cairns Culture Society or a quartet or various band or just the solo singers and they would entertain us in the park, all for nix. It was a lovely time.

No. Nup. You’re still too frightened. All you could think about is having a baby.

Not like it is today.

Yep. That went through life after marriage after marriage after marriage; it was – unless the man would do something. Oh there were various things that the women could do, but

you wouldn’t even think of asking, because it was embarrassing. You would never think of asking the doctors but there were such things that they could do, but we didn’t know about that. And you couldn’t after experiencing sex, after I had a hysterectomy, and knowing what it was before, it was two entirely different things. But you see that went through with most married women in that time, right up until they got the pill. It was restricted

thing sort of thing. My view.

Different again. Different altogether.

No, I didn’t want to; I just wore my army uniform. I have a photo of it there. I had Ronnie’s and his army uniform and I had the girl that went to where I met up at the Darley Nursing School and she was sent back to

Greenslopes with me to do our training and she became my bridesmaid and Ronnie met up with his cousin who was in the air force and Ronnie just happened to meet Jack in a café, after all the time, Jack had been over in the Middle East and he’d just come home, and Ronnie was stationed out at – what’s the? Oh golly me, just outside of Brisbane, starts with W, anyway, he just happened to go into town and blow me down, there was Jack.

So Jack became our best man. But can I tell you why I’m very much Cairns. I’m a Cairns person and I’ve been very much involved, right from when the kids got a little bit older and I loved singing, as I told you I loved singing, and I joined the Cairns Choral Society and I was in a couple of various plays that they put on, and not taking any lead, I had the opportunity, but I was too shy, too frightened, I felt I

couldn’t do it. But anyway, I enjoyed it there. And then as I got hard of hearing, I was singing off-key so I had to stop that, sadly because I was singing, I was singing the different key and there was another fellow, he and I got our voices blended so much and he went on further, I had to stay behind. But never mind. And then of course, I told you I did marching girls and then I joined, Ronnie joined Rotary and I became a member of Inner Wheel, which is ladies’ Rotary and

I’d say that for 29 years I was very active person in it. I gave Inner Wheel away to do my book. And I was president for a couple of years; secretary, treasurer, you name it. But then in Cairns – in 1976, Cairns became 100 years old and they formed a Centenary Committee, Bob Norman, Bob and Lady Norman who became Sir Robert and Lady Betty,

over the time. And I had worked with Betty at Woolworth’s, and Betty asked me to be a hostess. They went to the various women’s organisations and called for ladies to be hostesses, in other words to meet the various people who came off the aircraft, and if they didn’t have any transport, we would take them to their motel, hotel, whatever. We wore a lovely yellow – they had various dresses,

I had the shorter one. I felt I was more involved in the daytime things, so I could still wear it at night. And we had a skirt, a wraparound skirt with the bird wing butterfly, the Cairns butterfly here and we had the butterfly along the opposite pocket sort of thing. And that was the yellow jacket and we had a green a little vest type of thing, we wore a little tie on that. And I would – we’d have to go to the aerodrome as I said and meet people or if there was a big function on,

and there was – say we had to carry round food and any other things like that. And I helped very much with that. And then Alitalia airways came in and said that they were prepared to give a prize for a Centenary Queen to be flown to Italy and other things and of course, Betty Norman, seeing Betty was very much – she had already accompanied another girl overseas for the hospital, I think it was the nurses; and

Betty said, “Well, you can’t very well have a girl, might only be 18 that wins this, or younger.” So Alitalia said, “Well I’ll give you another pass and the title will be Alitalia First Lady of the Centenary.” And of course, Betty phoned me up and said, “Vera, I want you to do this, that and the other.” And I said, “I can’t do that, I’m not good enough.” And Betty said, “Yes, you can. You can do it.” She said, “I want you to go downstairs to the Northern Building Society and ask

them to sponsor you.” You had to pay $300. I said, “I can’t do that.” She said, “Well I will.” She did. And anyway, I became involved in the Centenary Committee for 12 months, oh well, this came in about, she would have done it in April. And from April until October, we did nothing else. They had a letter would be sent out from the Centenary Committee to say that there would be a gathering at the

civic centre and we would meet there. And we would have – I never, ever tasted champagne and orange drink before, but oh boy it’s nice and I love it now. Yeah, I can assure you, it’s really good and we would have a lovely, lovely morning tea. But there was a catch, we had all of these, one time we would be given brooches to sell, Centenary badges and then oh you name it everything pertaining to the

centenary, we had a time capsule kit that we sold for $10 and you would fill in all the family names and whatever, as long as you made it only about say a half an inch thick and that went into the time capsule which stands in the grounds of the Cairns Civic Centre to this day. And we all did that and – but it was beautiful, okay we were conned, but you can only get conned because you want to be conned. And

it was beautiful, we were treated like ladies. We’d go to the Civic Centre and there’d be this beautiful limousine to take us to some place where we’d have a brunch and all the more champagne, whatever and would you object to that? It was beautiful, anyway, this went on, for as I say for the nine months and it came time they were going to judge the Centenary Queen and the Centenary Lady and of course, me with no confidence whatever, I just enjoyed the outing.

But in the meantime, I had my Mum here who was going to take me out of her will because I kept going out. Poor Mum. I got trapped, and really trapped, endlessly trapped. And I didn’t get home to take her milk up to her bedroom and oh yes, she told everyone she was going to take me out of her will. But anyway, that didn’t stop me. Anyway, the time came, we knew that we were going to be judged and of course they started off with 25

ladies and it dwindled down to 18 and we were told we were going to be judged at the RSL on Saturday the 1st of October, or was it the 7th, I’m not sure. 1st of October, that’s right and so we were told who the judges were and I had had previous experience of judging up in Mossman, the Miss Mossman and that. And I sort of knew what was expected and I thought, okay girl you better make sure that your nails are right and

I know Mrs one of the judges, she was Sicilian and I thought, well she likes red, so I wore a reddish colour frock. Another lady liked jewellery, so I made sure everything was nice and shiny. And then anyway, we’d go along and so Betty Norman, now Lady Betty, she was at the doorway, the night before, when we had a practice at the Civic Centre as to how we would come on the stage, for the final judging, we drew the numbers out and one of the ladies, have, oh, big lady

business lady. She drew number one. She cried. And I said, “What on earth are you worried about?” I said, “Just go in and slay them and they won’t even be able to see us.” And then of course, I drew out number three, clunk. And I thought, oh eat your own words, here. But anyway, when I go in I thought, well I knew each and every of the judges and I knew that Mr Kattenberg was up in the Tablelands and I knew this and that was one, and

when I goes in, first of all I had an elderly lady I used to look after, a Mrs Cheetham, she lived to 97, wonderful lady. And she was a lady; she always used to play with the Somerville girls, you know Somerville House in Brisbane? That is a real ladies school, teaches ladies. And she used to play with some of them, and she was taught that, “You never barge into a room, dear, you stand. You enter and you stand. And you take notice and you be noticed.”

So the practising of that. I was just so busy because the Centenary Committee called upon me to train a lot of girls for a special function. So I had these flag-swinging girls and I never had time to think about it so every so often I’d go to the doorway there and I’d enter and I’d stand and I’d take notice and I’d think, what the hell are you doing? Then on the day, I did it. I did do that and I was being very polite and I waited till I was asked to sit down

and of course they asked me all these questions and it wasn’t if you were the centenary, it was when you win this and you go overseas and what would you do? And of course, one of the questions was, they said to me, “When you win.” And they say, “Well, what does Australia have to offer?” Me being, me, blubber, blubber. I just said, “Oh we’ve got the beautiful Sydney Harbour and the Snowy Mountains.” and I said, “And then we’ve got our Barrier Reef and our lovely

pyramid,” which I love, our pyramid here. And I said, “And if they want to go out bush, I can even give them the hurricane lamp.” And I thought, bloody hell, what have I said? And anyway, they thought it was all right and then they were asking me more questions and then I knew Mr Kattenberg was in the Tablelands and they were asking about the exports and all the rest of it. And I answered a few things and then they said, “There’s more.” And then, typical again, I said, “Oh my God! I forgot Mr

Kattenberg’s maize.” This is what I was saying in front of the judges. Anyway, I laughed about everything and that’s when I came out I was very good; when I came out I stood at the doorway and thanked them. I left, when they told me I could go and then when I got outside, I said, to Betty, “Well, Bet, I’ve either talked my way in it or out of it.” And anyway that night we had to go to the Civic Centre and all line up on the stage and of course

you had to walk across the stage and then come take your position, well I know, you never turn your back on an audience so I learnt how to do and I pivoted and I did the right thing there and anyway, then we were all lined up and oh they were going on and on and on with the speeches and of course your feet are getting numb and you’re moving your toes and thinking, “Oh for God’s sake get on with it.” And

then they announced the winner. Betty Norman had told me, I knew that there was three of us, it could be three. And Betty said, “Vera if you win, and they announce your name, you won’t be able to move.” She said, “Your feet will be like nailed to the floor.” And exactly what happened, I couldn’t move. It took another ex-Cairns girl, well a Cairns girl at that time, to, “Come on Vera, come on Vera.” I just couldn’t move, anyway, I had to go over and be presented.

Well I just said that Betty Norman told me that if my name is called out that you’re feet would be nailed to the floor and this was exactly it. When they called out my name I thought, “Oh,” and I couldn’t move, but when they read out what I had won, I’m still standing in line, and when they read out what I had won I kept thinking, “oh isn’t that awful, I’m getting all of that and all these girls weren’t getting anything.”

Typical me, but anyway, once this girl Donnelly, once she got me going, I went over and I was presented with the sash, Tompkin I think gave me the sash. The photograph of me, as my eyes are closing, I’m looking down because he came at me to give me a kiss and I didn’t like what I was seeing and I’m looking down and my Grandson said, he saw it in the paper, this is the photograph in the paper and Jamie got the

paper and he threw away, he said he didn’t want that one he wanted the next paper and his mother said, “well why?” “Nanny’s looking down I want her eyes open.” But you know when someone’s coming at you and you don’t like it you sort of close your eyes down, it was easier to look down than look at it. Anyway I was given this and it was the most wonderful feeling and of course I was called out then and during the centenary they had centenary medallions and what

they had done, they had a set of three, the gold, the silver and bronze and they presented me with a set of medallions to present to the mayor of Rome. When they told me I was to win the trip to Rome, I envisaged this little Cairns kid, I mean I would have been happy of they’d gave me a trip out to Ayer’s Rock where I’d always wanted to go, but they told me I was going over to Rome and

I just felt that it wasn’t good enough and I was a bit scared of it all. And then of course I had to say something, what did I say? Hmmm? Oh well, this Cairns kid, I was very, I did say, I thanked this and the other and the other and of course someone said, “Oh she knew she was going to win she had it all made out.” But you see I previously had, being president of the Inner Wheel and everything I knew exactly what I to do,

type of thing. And anyway, I had written it out before but I kept say, “Oh forget it,” because I came home that afternoon and my heart was going two thousand to the dozen and I kept saying, “Forget it, forget it.” And Helena Steiner-Rice had written a verse, “Take nothing for granted for whatever you do, for the joy of enjoying is lesson for you.” And I kept saying that and I kept saying that the same night that I won it. But when he said about going and presenting the medallion

to the mayor of Rome and then they announced exactly what I was getting and there was a little girl down the front and she went, “oh.” Because I was given six hundred dollars spending money from the centenary committee and Alvie Meoli who was the agent for Alitalia gave us three nights all expenses paid in, what hotel? It was a big hotel in Rome. And I was given a lovely

brooch and a bunch of flowers and this and the other, and a free trip from Cains to Sydney with TAA and it ended up that when I got to Sydney, “Sydney? They don’t have a flight to Rome, you’ll have to go on to Melbourne.” So what did they do, they get me on a flight to Melbourne, this is latter on when the centenary queen won hers, I’m in Melbourne and I didn’t even have my case. Ten minutes before we were to board, my strap,

the strap on my suitcase kept going around and around on there, yet there was no case, but the strap was all done up, why, why, why? Did they investigate me or something? But anyway, after a lot of phone calls they maintained that it was still on the round-a-bout at the airport somewhere in Sydney. They told me that it was getting closer and closer and the fella that was organising it all he said,

“You know, I’ve never come across anyone so calm about a lost suitcase.” I said, “Oh well, I know it’s insured that when I get to Rome I can buy some more clothes.” Well there was no good me, I couldn’t do anything getting in a fit over it could I? So anyway we got to Rome and as I said we flew over in the huge, huge aeroplane that I’ve never ever been in before. And when we landed on the aerodrome in Rome I’m looking down and all their little luggage carriers and all the rest of it they were just like

little matchboxes toys we were so high, it was interesting. And then Alvie walked me all over Rome, I saw Rome on foot. As he said, “the quickest way to get over air travel is to walk.” And boy did they walk me, as I said I saw Rome on foot. But I went to the Vatican and they used to say, “What are you going to do when you get to Rome?” and I said, “Well you have to do what Romans do.” You have to have some red wine and you have to have some pasta and this and the other.

So anyway that’s what they did, they took Cathy and I to a restaurant and we were treated like ladies. When the pilots of the aircraft knew we had won the trip through Alitalia, when we were flying over, have you ever flown from Sydney or Melbourne up over Australia and you fly over the various country to see what it’s like? Absolutely beautiful, you have to see it because, I got into trouble because I did the window up like

this and people wanted to got to sleep then so I went right down the back of the aircraft so I could see the McDonald Ranges and Ayers Rock and everything like this, gee I learnt about it as a kid and I wanted to see it. And then the pilot let us come up when we were flying, Darwin was up there and we could see Bali, we were still over Australia and that’s what hit home more of how close the war was to Australia and there’s no way in the wide world that I would live in Darwin,

you could swim across to the other place. Java and those other islands up there, what is it? An hour and half or something flight from, oh no! as I said you could swim across, not me, I’ll live around here, it’s safer.

No, what does he do, he slinks back into the chair like this, he was embarrassed, he wasn’t used to it.

Yeah. Anyway it was,

the next week we had a big parade, a centenary parade and I had to go in that as the first lady and I was very embarrassed about that. That’s where I had my marching, swinging flag girls. They did a jeep up for me with ‘First Lady of Centenary’ it was very nice we had a friend, John Pesch the photographer but he was a very good sign writer and he did that. I was very, very embarrassed about having to do this,

the festival, I had sixty of the flag swinging kids and I was running around putting sunscreen all over them and they had it all down the back of my lovely frock, but I had my long gloves and there I was the queen. I was so embarrassed at first but still I went around into Abbott Street and then the people were cheering and cheering and they didn’t have a clue who I was. But because I had the title of First Lady, I began to sort of relax

and enjoy the moment sort of thing and then when I got to one corner, I mentioned Joannie and Thelma Bradfield who were our neighbours at the time when we were kids, Mrs Bradfield’s on the corner and she’s crying, “Oh Vera, oh Vera.” And I thought, “Well how lovely.” I’ve always maintained that it’s nice to win something but by Jove it’s ever so much nicer to be accepted as that winner and that’s what happened at that time and I’d never experienced that before. I did enjoy it.

Even though at first I was awfully embarrassed, it was nice. I met Lee Marvin at the same time, he was here fishing.

Lee Marvi,n the actor. Yeah, he came along to the function for the centenary queen, Lee Marvin; see the centenary queen wasn’t judged until December, at New Years Eve night, he came along to present the centenary girls their badge or something like this.

And of course we were all lined up outside the theatre, the civic theatre which is still in town there now. And here comes Lee, and he was so embarrassed, he said, “Oh, if only I’d known it was something like this.” He’d borrowed someone else’s jacket and it didn’t do up and he only had, because they just took him off a fishing boat, for being in town. So anyway I got congratulated by Lee, “oh you’re the lady who won, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.” And I got a photograph of him, shaking hands with him.

Oh, I was big time, I could have been but I never let anything like that go to my head. It’s the same as with the book that I’ve done, I get so much praise and all the rest of it for that but it doesn’t go to my head I’m still Vera Downey the kid from the bungalow.

I came here in 1927.

Oh, okay, oh golly me,

we may have had a week in Italy, I think ‘cause I know we went down to Sorrento, we had to fill in time before we went up by, Ronnie’s cousin Nancy is in England and I wanted to see Scotland, I wanted to see Edinburgh, cause I taught my marching girls the Scottish March and I wanted to take my kids to the Edinburgh Tattoo, but we didn’t have the money. So anyway we had to fill in time before we went up to England and we left by train

and of course we got all the food and everything and I was told that when we got to visit Calais that we would be met with the train, that the carriage would go onto there, instead of going across. They may have done that twenty years ago but they didn’t do it, because here’s Cathy and I sitting back in the carriage eating cheese, dry bread and wine, crumbs everywhere, and I said to Cathy, “Gee Cathy, nobody’s getting on.” and the next thing we see this guard come along

and he shot back and he comes in, “Yap, yap, yap, yap,” and we got the message that we had to get off in a hurry and carry our bags to get the ferry across, the train, I don’t know where we would have ended up if he hadn’t come back. But anyway we laughed about that we got there with it. But oh it was really good, we were enjoying that, we had sausage, you see you do what, when we went in to Italy, oh later on we went to London, that’s right, we went over

and then we went up to Nancy’s in the Midlands and then we went up to Edinburgh and we stayed at the Princes Hotel and I ate everything that the Scottish people had for breakfast like kippers and the whole works, you know you do what they do. And then Nancy organised a couch tour around Edinburgh and of course we went up to Edinburgh Castle and everyone got off and I said to Cathy, “Now look Cathy if you don’t want to see me make a fool of myself, you just hop out with the others, because I’ve always wanted to bring my marching kids

here to march, you know with the Tattoo.” So I said, “I’m going to march.” So I did. The bus was here, everyone else went up that way, I didn’t care who was seeing me down that way, so I marched up, down, and around, saluted. So I can say I marched on the Edinburgh Tattoo. As I said, when I took my kids to Perth and they said I’d never get there even if I had to march across the Nullarbor, when the train got to Cook I said to the kids, “Who’s going to get out and march

across the Nullarbor?” Only three, three wouldn’t get out of bed early in the morning, I had spoken to the guard previously, so yeah we got out, we marched across the Nullarbor, we went north, south, east and west so we could say we went and marched across the Nullarbor. Why not enjoy the moment?

Oh gosh yes, this is my home, I’m Cairns, I never change, I like Cairns.

No I had no bother but I was very surprised by the reaction of the people who thought it was marvellous that I should win this. And of course I was invited to the Quota, or one of the other ladies organisations to tell them about the trip. And of course when I was over in, where did I get the Chanel perfume? France. I got this small bottle of Chanel, it cost a mint. I took that along

and the other things and the girls were smelling it, I said, “Take a little bit,” “Oh we can’t do that,” I said, “Look it was your money that got me there.” So I shared that and they couldn’t get over it to think, some of them came over to me and they said, “We can’t get over it that you’re just like you are.” And I said, “Well I am a Cairns person, I’m no different to you.” I always maintain that I’m no better than anyone else and nobody’s better than me. And you just go through life like that and share what you have. Oh they enjoyed the night, I enjoyed sharing

what I had. I took the photographs and everything of being in the snow, we had a snow fight in the middle of the night in the Alps, going from Rome up to Switzerland and because over there their trains are very air conditioned, yes, very hot and here we were in just an under singlet type of thing and I think I didn’t have anything else on but the carriage got to here so you couldn’t see and I had this shirt. And it was magnificent

not having been reared or not have much to do with snow, to look out that window and see this cottage as a post card, and there’s thick snow that’s hanging onto the cottage and the railway station here and here’s this icing cake ground with not a foot mark, not a mark on it and then as you see in a postcard along comes a man carrying a hurricane lamp, a little lamp. And when he got to here, Cathy, she’s a bit of a duffer, she wanted to hop

out and play in the snow. I said, “You can’t, the train will go.” I had a bit of a difficulty with her like that, anyway, the man got to here and we made a noise and drew his attention and we said, like this, and he got what we wanted so he picked up a handful of snow and gave it to us and Cathy put her face in it and cried. But, when you’ve got snow, it’s an instamatic thing, you can’t help it, you just throw it. So what does he do? He picks up snow and we had a fight in the middle of the night

on the way up to Switzerland. Oh that was a lovely experience, but it’s just so beautiful to see these snow covered houses, like icing cakes but as you see in the postcards that we in Australia send around, which we shouldn’t but we do, but that’s how it was.

We were afraid of them you see, they used to have posters, the posters would to come out, the propaganda and all we saw was the Japanese with big glasses on, and buck teeth

and this funny cap, and they were prominent around the place and so we sort of considered that all Japanese were like that. They really had us a bit scared of it all but it was after the war, it was ridiculous how I felt. Okay so we knew what they had got up to and we were afraid and it was a couple of years after the war, that my sister and I went, Dolly, who was still alive,

we went to the picture theatre and we were sitting upstairs at the Palace picture theatre, which is now the backpackers place, and these Japanese men came and I had the most difficult thing to make myself sit there, I could have vomited, but I had to talk myself into it, not to be stupid, that they’re not going to hurt you and that was my first encounter after, and it took an awful lot of discipline not to shift. I would have

loved to shift but I made myself do it. And then I had another, the Japanese fisherman would come in, the Japanese school of fishing, they were younger people and that is how the Japanese people knew all our reef and everything like this, when they did all the maps, because they used to come down here fishing. Well Japan has a Japanese School of Fishing and these young men, their parents apparently pay for them to go to this school to do all the fishing

and learn how to do this type of thing. And they used to come into Cairns here. Did I have them or was it Koreans? No I think it was they who came and Rodney, our son, was very friendly and he met up with these people and he phoned me up and he said, “Mum, can I bring home some men, Japanese fisherman? They’re younger people and they’re really interesting and they’ve never been into an Australian home.” I thought, “Okay, righto.” With that

truck loads, I don’t know how many I had but this place was full of them all. But they were very nice and they gave Rodney a satchel of drink and of course they said to him, in their broken language whatever to use. And Rodney said, “How do I do it?” And they said, “Direction on back.” Direction on back

all right, in Japanese. Anyway what it was was one of those fizzy drinks to make you feel better and that type of thing. But then after later on we went to a Scottish Highland gathering in town here and I could see this, I didn’t know whether he was Japanese, Chinese or what he was, sitting over on his own, and I said to Rodney who was very hesitant to do anything like I asked him, I said, “look that fellow is sitting over there on his own,” I said, “it’s sad,

why not ask him to come over and sit over here?” So anyway he came over and of course it was me that did the talking to him and asking questions and he told me his name was Mamaru and he was able to tell me in his own language, he used to have a dictionary, I’d go, “dictionary,” and he’d go through and find out, “ah, ah.” He told me that he was trained at Mitsubishi, he was university trained, and apparently in Japan, Mitsubishi take

the top students of the university and he was one of those and he was out here working on the Collinsville power station, but he was working in Cairns here and going out there and Blair Stewart or worked for NQEA, North Queensland Engineers and Agents, they were doing some work, they were making the plates for the Collinsville power house and of course Blair took along him to the function but Blair was busy with other things and that’s when he

came and sat down near us and I said, “oh, you cook Japanese?” and he said, “Oh, you like Japanese? You cook Japanese?” and I said, “yes.” Then I said, “You like to come to our home? And you cook Japanese for us?” Well, do you know that man was in Australia for six months and not one person asked him into their home. So anyway he came around, he came out first to see the place and he told me what he would like, he’d made a list.

So I went and got some Red Emperor fish, wow, red emperor, because they don’t cook, you eat it raw, but they treat with vinegar and soya and that type of thing, so we ate raw fish and I had a lovely meal with him. And he kept coming out here and he was really, really nice and when he was going back to Japan he gave me his little teapot and a little tea caddy and a strainer.

And his little wife, Kimaku was his wife, he’d only been married three months when they sent him out here and his wife had given him this little teapot, “When you are lonely you make yourself a cup of tea.” Plus the little canister, which I still have. I said, “Oh but Kimaku, would you like to keep that,” and he said, “No Kimaku, would like you to have it.” So he gave me that and then he said to me, “Vera, do you mind if I bring my successor out?”

The man who is coming to, and of course I said, “No that’d be all right.” And Arkia, this other man came, they came up the back way and he was an older gentleman and I know I was standing there and I didn’t think I showed anything and Mamaru came up to me after and said, “Vera, Arkia not in war, he in university.” I didn’t think, something must have shown on my face but I think it might have been surprise that he was an older person I didn’t expect that

but I didn’t think of him as being in the war, but oh he was nice, he gave me this beautiful fan, but sadly, poor Arkia, being very quite and being a good Japanese discipline man, they left him here for twelve months and nobody took him home. Through Mamaru I had met this Yosha, who was this salesman for Mitsubishi in Australia and I told Yosha, I said, “Look it’s sad.”

I think I might have written to him and told him it was said, here’s Arkia being left in Australia all this time and he can’t go home and know there must be something wrong at home and anyway what had happened was that his wife had left him. But after I spoke to Yosha within the week Arkia came into me, he had bough this little Morris

I think it was, this little utility that he used to go and don to Collinsville with. And anyway he come in, his all excited and he said. “I come home, I go home to Japan.” I said, “When are you going?” he said, “Tomorrow.” I said, “What will you do with your car? I can sell it for you if you leave it for me.” And then he takes a couple of steps back and then he says, “I give you car for a present.” We already had a little car but anyway I get

this little thing and he gives me the car for a present. I said, “All right, I’ll come and get you and take you to the airport.” And then I thought during the night, he had to sign some papers to transfer that over to me so when we get to the airport I had to get a couple of pilots to sign a statutory dec [declaration] to say what he was doing on the back of the licence. Then after a period of time, when he got back to Japan, he wrote to me and asked me if I would give him a receipt for so much

so that he could claim. And sadly he found that his wife had left him while he was out here. And that was my dealings, I didn’t have any qualms about these two people it was only just after the war when the first lot of Japanese, you encountered them for the first time, then I had a lot of discipline and I had to really say, “Look, forget it, forget it, forget it.” Took a lot of discipline but I got it, you get over these things, I knew I was safe.

We’ve had to get over it because, what used to bug me when they first started coming in bus loads and aeroplane loads, what had happened, it’s all Japanese airways they fly, they get all the money, they come to Japanese Hotel they come to Japanese owned coach tour, they don’t leave us much money. The only thing I objected about them was having to get off the damned footpath

for them, they would not get off the footpath, everywhere you walked along you had to go around them. I did object to that, I really used to get niggly about that, but I got over that, see I’m not involved in town so much now, now that we’ve got old and decrepit we don’t go in so much. But that’s what did bug me; they come in bus loads but what happened after a time the people complained about all this, at a time

they took over green island, and you were supposed to have, spend their Japanese money, when you went on and bought your ticket at Green Island ticket office to go over you had to change your Australian money into Japanese money and it kept going until we had a big in 1995 we had Trek Back, was it five? 1993 we had Trek Back when various members, a lot of members from the three divisions that were stationed on the Atherton Tablelands

came back to Cairns and had, and of course when the boys wanted to go over to Green Island they really performed and they bought it to parliament that they did not, and it came that way that you could have either your Japanese money or your Australian money. Bloody hell, they wanted to take us all over. My grandmother always said, right before they came into Australia in the war she said, “Have no fear the Japanese will buy you, they don’t have to fight it, they will buy

Australia.” That was Granny right back very early in the piece, I’d forgotten that. You see, coming from Europe she’d have an idea of what went on.

All right, well we were living, my Mum had come home and she was living in a flat in town and she had got this flat for us, because it was very difficult to get a place, what happened after the war in Cairns, the big homes with the big verandas, we had a lot influx of troops

and they saw the place and wanted to come back, and they married the girls and the girls had to have some place to go, so these big verandas were partitioned off and made into little flats and everything like that and anyway we were lucky enough to get a flat in front of my Mum. But it was just near the gas works, we had these huge gas works in Bunda Street and all the soot would come and then I had Veronica and here was my lovely clean baby in a cot and even under a net

she’d still get coal dust in her eyes. And I said to Ronnie that we’d better do something, and I did say to him, he wanted to build, we could have bought an acre of land for eighty pounds and we could have gone out of town, but I could only see, we didn’t have a motor car and I’d have to ride a pushbike and I said, “Well I need something that’s near a shop at least and with water and that type of thing.” And he thinks that was hard to do, but anyway he bought this place of land near my sister and it was in mud

I hated it. But we built this, first of all, he and his friend Jim Brady they were building this place and we ended up buying a ward from 116 AGH, a full hospital ward, a lot of the timber and the fibrolite in the roof came from the 116 army hospital because you couldn’t buy screws, you couldn’t buy nails, I used to sit, while we were in the (UNCLEAR) flats, they had disposal sales of a big Australian Allied Works Council

place, a big building was opposite the flats and they had a sale, and what did he do, he bought this box of rubbish for, I don’t know how much, but they had nails in it so. I’ve still have the hammer that the boys used, and you know how a hammer has a sharp end, well it doesn’t have a sharp end it’s all round from being used and used and used so much and that was in the box of rubbish. And I used to use that hammer to straighten the nails to build the house, and when we built

one of Ronnie’s friends put up the shell, the outside and the fibrolite from the hospital plus the roof, and we had nothing inside for quite a long time. And the windows we got from somewhere they were second hand and you couldn’t buy the hinges, they were held, the windows were held in by two pieces of timber on the outside, they couldn’t be opened. I think we could open two windows, Johnny found some old hinges somewhere

but the rest of it, until such times that we could buy hinges. Everything was rationed, if you wanted something in the hardware line you had to put your name down and wait your turn. Well if you had the money, I mean money gets a lot doesn’t it. If you knew someone and you payed him a little bit of money you could get it before that and of course your name when down and down. And we

couldn’t buy any electrical equipment, the day I was discharged from the army I was able to pick up an electric jug, a Herco electric jug and a Herco toaster from Coles in Brisbane and that’s all I had. And we had nothing, we felled the big trees that were in the front of the yard when we bought this piece of land and they were great big swamp trees, huge ones and they were lain across the ground

in front of the house, and what we used to do, we’d burn these and I used to boil my babies nappies in a kerosene tin. While we were burning the trees out I did all my washing in a kerosene tin and cooking corn beef and stew in a saucepan on the log fire, because we couldn’t even get a stove. Anyway after a period of time the boys found, where it came from I wouldn’t have a clue, but we got this wood stove, didn’t have any

flu, that’s the pipe that goes up the back and it only had one cover plate so we had tin over the others and it was out the back and a skillion place and we had a piece of corrugated iron up there, so the smoke would go up there and I would have to do the cooking on that until I could get a little electric hotplate like that, it had a switch, it was either damn hot or off

But I managed on that, I had to cook on that and then, as I said you couldn’t buy furniture, you couldn’t buy anything if you didn’t have a parent or relation to give you sheets or curtains and that type of thing, you didn’t have anything up that way and the Ronnie’s father, he live to a hundred and one and a half, he came to live with us at that time and he was a prolific reading and he would go into town

we did have a bus system that went in. And he would go in town and sit at what is now the museum, but it was the school of arts and he would read all the papers and he read in a paper from down south where Simpson in Adelaide were making and selling electric stoves, anyway we wrote down and ordered a stove and when other people in town knew what we were doing they ordered one too

And we had half a dozen sent up and of course who gets the damaged one, everyone else got a goodie but I had the damaged one, but that didn’t matter, it was my beautiful it was a lovely, lovely green, good enamel at the time. It was a Simpson Stove and it had electric plating, it had a big heavy hot one here and it had an oven and in the wet weather we didn’t have dryers, our clothes washing was all

done by hand believe me And when I got my first copper, my copper boiler oh boy was I made, because I had to everything in the kerosene tin stove, when the tree burnt out I had to it on this old wooden strove, put the kerosene tin on there and lift it over and into the, after a while we got concrete tubs, it all had to be done in a big wash tub before hand. And then I got this beautiful, beautiful copper, it might sound silly

when you had a baby you had to have, you boiled everything in those day. So anyway I got my boiler, and when we got this electric stove. In the wet weather, because we really used to get a lot, a lot of rain, it would rain for a week, three weeks at a time and you’re trying to wash the babies nappies, I would hang them up in the skillion, oh for years we walked through flapping sheets and babies nappies and I still put paper, warm the oven and put

paper on the shelves and then put the nappies in there so I could dry them. So my electric stove, my beautiful green electric stove, enamel stove, it came in handy for more things than that. But up until then, we had an ice chest, we didn’t have refrigeration, even when I grew up we had ice, the ice man used to come, and then we got a Silent Night refrigerator, a Silent Night was done on an element, it didn’t have a motor, it was done by,

did we have a kerosene one first? I think we might have had a kerosene one; it took a few years before we got the kerosene fridge and then we got the Silent Night one. And of course the kids knew, I had Rodney by then, and he used to ride this little trike around, and they knew not to touch Mummy’s fridge or Mummy’s stove, because they were precious, you know we didn’t have anything so we appreciated everything. But we gradually, eventually got enough things to hang the windows and eventually buy some three ply

to line the ceiling and that time of thing, and of course being second hand fibrolite I had leak after leak and Ronnie was always busy. I used to get up on the roof and put the black jack up because of the leaks all the time, one year I had thirty eight leaks, see the fibrolite, after its been disturbed, I mean that was asbestos and here they’re all complaining today and we grew up with it and we’re not coughing, maybe what’s wrong with me now

But anyway we had everything hard, it was very hard, but we just accepted it because we weren’t the only ones. At that particular time the government or the councils would let you build a small dwelling at the back like a garage, a temporary home at the back of your allotment, you’re not allowed to do that now, but they had to do that because we had to have some place to live and a lot of people first live in, built a little garage place, they eventually used them as a garage

and they stayed in that until they built their homes. And when you built a home those days you didn’t build a mansion like they do today, you’d build two rooms and a bit of a veranda and close it in a bit at time and put another bit on, and a little veranda here there and everywhere. And we did not expect, like today, I maintain the young people expect to start married life where it’s taken their parents thirty odd years or more to get, well we didn’t have that, well we couldn’t did we?

We weren’t the only ones; everyone was in the same boat and sadly at that time Cairns, early in the piece, what with the amount of buildings that went up apart from the Americans and the Aussies taking over the various dwellings, they did erect a lot of places such as big freezer rooms and that type of thing and for many years the concrete posts stood like tombstones in the various vacant allotments

and of course in our wet weather the grass grows, just like little topsy, really quick and it seems to me after the war for a couple of years it was very, very untidy and then when the victor lawn mower came in, see we used to use the push, oh my god it would rip your tummy out, and then when the victor lawn mower came in and Cairns tidied up, it wasn’t until the Victor lawn mower came in that Cairns could tidy, see they could mow out onto their grass, out to their verge

out to the road and everything

Oh, what year was victor done, you better check that up I’m damned if I know. Because we used to have to push the damn mower up and down, and then Ronnie got an electric mower, oh my, that used to make a noise and where we lived in, we called it Emma Estate then, and in 1952 or ’51 the council wrote to us to say that our land

was gazetted as a business area, and that they had envisaged having a six lane highway in between and there was no way in the world could we ever accept, well it’s a five lane now, when you come from along Anderson Street to Pierce Street but we never ever thought that would happen, but it all eventuated.

I think it was about three years.

Yes, I really do think it was about three years, see we had food rationing with butter, it started off with

the very first, petrol was rationed, then clothing was rationed, butter was rationed, tea was rationed and sugar was rationed. Everyone was given ration coupons, what happened with those is, when we wanted to buy a pound, everything was a pound then, a pound of sugar or more, one ration coupon would get a pound of sugar or half a pound of tea and that would have to last you for a month

or so many weeks. Mum was lucky because I didn’t drink tea so she got my extra ration, that was before we went into the army. We would take them to the grocers store and the grocer, he would have to save up all those tickets and he could not buy any more food until he handed in the various coupons, say he wanted to have fifty pounds of sugar,

well he’d have to have fifty ration tickets, he’d have to hand them into the wholesaler before he could get his supply of the various things that were rationed. I found that out in the research, I wasn’t sure what to do there.

A lot of the returned

but thing is, after the war, a lot of the troops that served up here, just loved the place, particularly those who were staged at the Redlynch Staging Camp out near Junjara, they could see the cane fields, they were looking over the cane fields and many of them swore that they would come back and yes they did. Immediately after the war, there were very few that came back immediately after because we couldn’t get the supplies for building and it wasn’t until

the supplies, by the time that the factories, that had been making all the war equipment had reverted back to the household, building things for the general public type of thing, it wasn’t until they got geared again and supplies became available that you realise there are lot of people down south before us. That’s why it took longer for things to come to North Queensland, where they had more people down south that would get it before us.

But it was, it would be about five years before the influx of people started to come, and many of the men married the girls and came back here and a lot of the boys who served here said they were going to come back. A lot of the men that said they were going to come back didn’t come back for thirty, forty, fifty years, they wanted to show their wives, they always intended to come back earlier. But yes we did have a lot of the troops who came here and left and decided to live here

I can’t be sure on that because that’s something I didn’t ask when I was doing the book. I think most of them would have sold the property, some of them only asked three hundred pounds and those that vacated and left their car

and everything, well I can’t be sure, all I know is that happened but I never did find out as to if those same people returned I think some of them didn’t return, they stayed down south where they went. But we had lots of others that came back and took over.

Well it didn’t change an awful lot, I don’t think so, I don’t think it changed an awful lot,

in that it was still Cairns and it was still a good place to live, there wasn’t any rat race. I don’t think we found Cairns to change an awful lot until about fifteen years later. When the men had to come out of New Guinea, the Australian men that were living there and of course a lot of them shifted down into Cairns, they brought their money and that was another big change. We’d been in a five year period, about five years after we

started to get an influx and more people coming, and then five years later would be another lot. See at that time we still had the wharf labourers and our railway line used to finish in Cairns, the Sun Lander would finish and we still had the railway workshops, but after a period of time, I think it was the late ‘60s early ‘70s that the wharfies went down to Tasmania and Brisbane and other places and then our railway workshops were transferred to Townsville,

and that’s when a lot of people went out of town, but then, that’s when we started to get the people from New Guinea and they started to build the place up. But it hasn’t changed, it’s changed more since this mayor came in, in the last five years, it’s really, say ten years, that’s when Cairns really expanded. We still had our tourists coming and then of course it was more tourist orientated than it was

civilians, you know you had to cater for the tourists and all the hotels, and sadly a lot of the beautiful homes that should have been left standing were pulled down, or relocated elsewhere for another concrete jungle type thing. And early, early in the piece I know that I was on a committee and they were not supposed to build any high rise, see the aerodrome, the planes flying, take off this way and they’re only supposed to go no higher than three stories

up at North Cairns and then they can come higher and higher, but I’m afraid a lot of that has gone by the board now. I think probably with more modern aircraft, see during the war years it was only smaller aircraft and that type of thing. What else?

No we didn’t have to, well the boys used to use bleach, we personally, we girls did not handle that but most of the blood should have been washed out before it left the ward. That all had to be soaked in buckets and that kind of thing and cleaned and then, the boys would put in, what we have Snow White today, but it would’ve been a bleach of some kind and everything used to come out perfectly clean, no stains on anything.

The sheets lasted so they couldn’t have been too strong but they were always lovely and white.

Yes we’d all have to fold them up, we didn’t roll the bandages, we got the patients in the ward did most of the bandage rolling, it was something to do. Had to keep them occupied.

Yes.

You mean more men than women or?

Well I think we had a lot of imports, they came in to fill up the positions. I have never thought about that, on it all

the men who came back they just automatically got on with their job, there was none of this business of, “ah me.” They were glad to get out of the army and glad to get out of all that type of thing and everyone just got on with life. No questions and, “I don’t expect you to give me this or that and the other, okay I know I earned this.” But they didn’t play on it, not like it is today. That’s why you find so many diggers that, they wouldn’t complain of being sick in the army.

And now when they want to get their war service, their gold card, they have difficulty because they didn’t complain. They wouldn’t go, they were classed as malingerers and they wouldn’t go, there’s a good one there, they wouldn’t report to the Docs and that type of thing. Everyone was just so happy to get the war over and as I said in the first place I think everybody was bewildered and, “Okay, what’s going to happen now?” But being Australian people who at that time had to get on with life

We were very capable people we didn’t expect the government to look after us, everyone got on with doing what they had to do, we looked after the government. Ronnie came and just started his business, he was a watch maker, then we started to jewellery business in town there with my brother in law first and then Barney got out and he started with another man named Ronald and they called it ‘Ronald’s’, and then after Tommy went out on his own

the business was a bit strenuous for him, because he was carrying it, trying to repair watches and trying to serve customers, it doesn’t work. When you are with the watches you have to concentrate solely, well then he went on his own, well he went out with another fellow who was doing trade work and then we opened a business in, at the time the Star Broker building, what is – now it’s the Cairns Business College at 65 Lake Street. I think we were there for twenty seven or more years

until they wanted the building to expand, this building society were in there and we came home and I organised to build a room underneath our house and he repaired watches there and our customers used to come out to us, it was still the same. A lot of them didn’t come, we had some people that were quite annoyed to think that we had to shift out this far, people don’t understand the situation, it wasn’t our ambition, idea to come home here but what else could we do. He was still

too young to retire and still had a lot to offer. So we came here and it was until about 1982 that he retired because he had a haemorrhage behind the eye and he couldn’t quite see, he couldn’t see to fix the watches and it’s something I never learnt to do and I had no intention. I could take, when he used to go on holidays and the watches would fill up with water, silly people would go swimming, I knew how to take the watch

out of the case and spray it WD-40 [lubricant] or something like that and put it under a glass until he came back, I knew how to do all that but no way would I get tied up with learning how to repair a watch. One watch maker in the family was enough.

For a long, long time I didn’t know where anyone was and it wasn’t ‘till 1988,

or was it earlier? No a bit earlier than that, I went down to Brisbane to see my elderly lady friend, the one that said, “You don’t barge into a room dear.” And I went down to see her and I stayed at the Canberra Hotel and I saw these girls, because we had formed our ex-service women in Cairns, and I saw these girls with a pocket, and AWAS pocket and I said, “Oh, what are you doing?” and they said, “Oh, we’re at the reunion.” And my train was late, we got

into Brisbane hours and hours late and I couldn’t go to their big luncheon, their big dinner that night but they said to me, I told them who I was, I was an AAMWS, they said, “Oh look, why don’t you come with us, one of the girls had to go home to Gympie, her mother is very ill and she’s already paid for the meal for this. So I tagged along with this people and when I got there I saw these girls with the

badge on, with the little red cross in the middle and I saw AAMWS, and I said, “Where’d you get that? Where’d you get that?” And anyway they introduced me to others around and it’s a strange thing that when we were standing on the railway station coming home, because all I had on was my maiden name and army number and these girls came and said to me, “How come you’re an AAMWS and you’ve got that number, and we’re AWAS?” and see I saw that mine was 02

one girl was QF27200 and 201 and I was 202 and I was an AAMWS and Mum was 203 and she was an AAMWS, 204 were AWAS again. And one of the girls said, “Don’t you realise we were the first combined AAMWS/AWAS camp at Enoggera?” and of course I hadn’t seen it but then in 1988 I went down again to a big reunion we had at the Crest Hotel and we went out to Enoggera

and how many years later was that, here we were, I was walking around and the next thing a girl come and I hear, “Vera, Vera,” I thought who on earth and she came up to me and she said, “Don’t you remember me?” I said, “No, who are you?” “Oh,” she said, “I’m Stella, Stella McGregor; I was in the same camp as you.” “Oh, were you?” I said, “Where did you sleep.” And then I said, “I remember now, you kids wouldn’t sleep near the door, Mum had to sleep near the door and I slept there.”

And anyway she races off and she gets three other girls, four other girls who was in the same camp as myself and we hadn’t seen each other for all of those years and to think at that exact time we would have been parading up and down on the damn parade ground, it was amazing. With living so far up here I didn’t come into contact with any of my army girls until about, it would have been ’82, 1982.

Then of course I joined the Queensland AAMWS association and I became the North Queensland delegate, well it was delegate in name only, I’m their North Queensland organist and I used to line up luncheons. After meeting up with all of these people, thinking, “Isn’t it wonderful, wonderful.” So then when I came home I put a notice in the Cairns Post and I think it came on the radio too that

any VAD or AAMWS we were having a luncheon at this place, and I started with twelve girls and I ended up with about forty odd something and I used to arrange a luncheon three times a year. And I would make them all natty little things, one time it would be a vase with flowers and something else and something else. I did that for twenty one years but this year will be my last luncheon that I’m organising because well I’m

getting a bit decrepit and I feel that I’ve had enough, I’ve done enough so and I’m not quite sure that Queensland AAMWS will go on too, see because they’re all older, I’m the kid remember, they’re all much older and I think the AAMWS it may finish up this year and I am definitely finishing up. I’ll have my last luncheon on the 26th I think, the last Friday in June, it’s about the 26th so I’ll have a big party and finish off with that. I think it’s time I retired.

Well we are because I have all bonbons, one of the places in town, you know the cheaper places in town, Crazy Clarks or the Overflow and they had a big sale, they were shifting, a relocation sale and blow me down they had these 14 dollar boxes of bonbons, started off with six dollars and came down to two dollars, so I bought enough so that I had gold and silver and some red and green ones

to put and I’m going to have a bob bon party and finish off with the last, then I can retire. I was given that life membership badge because they also, oh golly me, so many of the Queensland girls who are in the association served up here during the war years and when we had an ex-service women reunion these girls were coming up and the secretary of the association asked me to line up the various tours for them

I must admit I got into trouble from our secretary of the Cairns ex-service women, on the terms that we were having a reunion within a reunion but it wasn’t, I was only taking the girls around, I had a hundred and something people and I organised three bus loads and took them to the various units where they were and around and they wanted to go up to Mosman so I took them up there. So I did that two times, I think, or three times, I can’t remember, it’s gone on for over twenty-one years.

Then I went down to Melbourne for a short holiday one time and I decided to call in on them for their Christmas party luncheon and anyway when I got there the president said, “Vera, come and sit up with us here,” and I thought, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know Marie, I knew what she was like.” Little did I know what was going on and of course she then started to say about, “We have visitors here today, and that Vera has done this and that and the other.” And I’m thinking, “Oh yeah,

yeah, I did, you know, I guess I did,” And then the next thing she called me up to give the badge and I was speechless, can you believe it. I said that and of course you could imagine from the audience, truly, I didn’t know what to say. For once in my life I was buggered. For the interviewer, I think you’d agree.

Yes and no, as Anzac Day was a long, long time ago, while the Coral Sea and other things were closer here I still go along with the Anzac Day I have that, I would not knock that but when I have been asked to speak at the various schools, and other places on Anzac Day, I just, as most of the kids have been

told year in year out what the Anzac Did, I give a short run down on that and then my theme is mostly what the women did. Florence Nightingale was in the war right, right back and I bring it through from Florence Nightingale until what we did in the war service here and they are still doing it today. So that’s my theme and I’ve had a lot of interviews with my book and the schools have asked me to speak because of the book sort of thing, yes.

Yes it’s not only the girls, it’s the boys, they’re amazed, they’re amazed at what we got up to, what we did and that type of thing. They think it’s wonderful, the best school I have spoken to, the best lot of pupils was Gordon Vale High School, they had a very, very good history teacher and she had taught them all about Gallipoli and the whole ways and a lot of other things but they had not known

what the women do in the war. I had these books, I took about four or five books out and I got them to sit around a table and they had the books and they’d go through and ask me the various things and I went the first time and I gave them that and then they had to do another project, do a film for some competition so they teacher suggested they get so and so and they said, “No, we like Mrs Bradley because she doesn’t even need a book.”

So I went out again. I enjoy it when the kids are attentive, they really are but most of the kids, even when I went back to speak to the little students at Parramatta State School, I was able to tell them, “This was my school.” You start off and get onto their level, you know, down and tell them what it was like, “I had to come to Parramatta School here to get my certificate signed by my teachers when I was eighteen to go into the army,” little things like that.

It catches them up and then the most important thing, one of the most important ones was when I had to speak to the Trinity Anglican School because most of those students are close seventeen, eighteen and their biggest shock was the fact that I told them that, with the manpower officer, they had to do as they were told, if they didn’t join one of the services, they had to do, I told you about the essential work. Well those kids, those boys, they were shocked to think that if the war came now and they had to do as they were told

particularly this age group, at this age. Yes

Yes, oh you don’t have to have the old ones; just the little ones don’t want to do as they’re told. Like you go to the shopping town, they’re racing around like mad, Mum never chastises them, is it any wonder we have some delinquents on the street, I mean they have no respect for other people sadly, I think what it is, mums don’t won’t to be disliked, if they chastise their children they think they’ll be disliked.

By their kids, and little do they realise the ones that are more chastised are the ones that have the discipline turn out the better and they think more of Mum and Dad and they don’t treat them as dirt, as rubbish as a lot of them do. Sadly, sadly. I’m pleased we reared our kids when we did, it would be hassle in this day and age I feel.

Oh it changed me,

well I told you we went in there and I felt, I was just a Cairns kid, I was nothing, and I was inferior to the people in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, they must have had more of an education than we did, because we came from up here. And it was really a very simple night life, we led a clean life, a healthy life and we didn’t have all the outside world, we had to make our fun. And when I went in there I soon found out, as I said before

nobody’s better than me and I’m no better than anyone else. It took me a while, it wasn’t until I went to the nursing school in Darley, I didn’t have to do a post or anything when I came back to the hospital, the girls who I thought, oh they were clever, and that type of thing, they had to do posts when they got back to their hospitals and that gave me a little bit of confidence. But I got my main confidence teaching marching girls, because see I told you I went hard of hearing and I was still teaching marching girls when I couldn’t hear properly

I could lip read though, they found that out. And I did by winning, being able to teach, you have to read a book, this set plan and you have to interpret and that is when I got my confidence and you have a husband that has a shop and you have to go to work and help him and he pushes you into a job that you’re not trained for, you certainly have to learn how to handle things and do things like that, it opens your mind, and that’s how I am today.

That’s me.

Go for it, go for the navy, the navy treated their girls the best and they still do.

The navy is the best, for their women,

more respect in the navy than anywhere else I’ve found. Well I’m not sure about the air force but more so than the army. The girls in the army are treated but the navy really do look after their girls same as during World War II. When we came into Cairns here we came into two empty house, oh I might tell a fib, we had wire beds, mattresses and the mattress had a pillow, nothing else, and we had no stove and nothing to sit on, nothing at all.

But the navy would never think of doing that for their girls, that’s why we were transferred from Charters Towers to here. I found out in the book after reading how the navy girls were treated I tell the kids, look into the army, but go into the military forces and I tell when I’m finished with the students, I say to them, “Go into the services you have no idea what it will do for you, it’s the best thing and your future can be done through the forces.”

And it will give them a little bit of discipline, I suggest “You will have to as you are told but it is good for you.” I don’t hesitate to tell them, they should have it compulsory, Ronnie was one of those that was called in, all that those who turned twenty one in the year 1940 had to go into the army, you had to do it. And that’s what happens when they turn eighteen both male and female; unless they are doing a special course, go into

the army and boy that would strip them down. There’d be a few gaols around, I imagine there’d be a lot of teenage gaols for those that are, particularly how they are now, but it’s a pity they don’t have it, they have it overseas, in Europe, right throughout, they all have to go into the army.

National Service, that’s what it was here, good for them teach them what to do.

No problem.