Australians at War Film Archive

OK I was born on 18th of November 1918 in Melbourne.

Lived in Hobart for three years from the age of 1 to 4. Came to Brisbane and remained in Queensland ever since. Came to Brisbane in about 1922. Primary school’s in Brisbane. Secondary school in Brisbane. Church of England Grammar as it was in those days. Now the Anglican Church Grammar. University of Queensland medical course commencing

1937. Qualified 1942. Had to do a year’s residency before the army would take me. Enlisted in 1943 spent most of my time serving in odd units in southern Queensland. Eventually got through just before the end of the war and over to Morotai and then to Borneo. Five or six months in Borneo

after the war because there were no ships to bring us home. Left the army and joined Repat [Commonwealth Repatriation Department] when they hired the Brisbane General Hospital in Rosemount in those days. Later we moved and took over the 112th Army General Hospital. Gordon Wright and myself went over one day and we took over started to take over from the army and we each took a ward over. We took wards over one at a time.

Put in about two years with Repat and then went up to the country. I was Superintendent of Kingaroy hospital and Wondai hospital. Then went to Hervey Bay. I was 17 years in the bush altogether. Came back to get a 9 to 5 job in Brisbane. Worked for 2 years for the Commonwealth Government as quarantine medical officer for the port of Brisbane.

Then I got the job I wanted with Workers’ Compensation. Then we until I retired at the age of 60. Then got a part time job with the Defence Department at the recruiting centre in Edward Street, Brisbane which I did for the next 22 and half years. Retired two and a half years

ago. I’m 85 now. That’s about it.

My mother was very Scottish. She had emigrated to Scotland in her

twenties and met my father out here and she was a very forceful domineering sort of a person and very hard working. Very fixed ideas on everything. I don’t know what else you want me to say at this stage.

My father was born and bought up in Galway on the west coast of Ireland did his Engineering degree at Queen’s College Galway. He emigrated to Australia at the beginning of 1914 and my parents met and married in Melbourne. He enlisted in the First AIF. In those days a university degree in Engineering didn’t give you a commission and he went through every rank from Private all through the NCO [Non Commissioned Officer] ranks. Ended up as lieutenant colonel

and after the war they were building the Tasmanian hydro-electric scheme. So he went down, he was engineer in charge of the transmission line when they built that. Apparently he did a couple of unusual things there. The Americans made him associate member of the American Society of Civil Engineers and he also got a degree in engineering from Queensland University as well. He was a man in the

genius class and being an ordinary average bloke it was very difficult when your father is a brilliant man it made life very difficult for me. But don’t misunderstand me we got on very well. But he died in 1937 at the age of 45. Never had a day’s illness in his life. Went through the war and everything else as the indirect later result of an aircraft crash he’d been in

18 months before. But at this stage he was. He joined the Commonwealth Lighthouse Service in the early twenties. Came to Queensland as a District Lighthouse Engineer and not very long before the State Government had handed lighthouses over to the Commonwealth and there were only 4 lights in working order on the entire Queensland coast.

Then when my father took over there was a tremendous surge in construction and when he left there was something like about 80 lights. He had to site the light, that’s the site where it was going to go. Supervise and design it. Supervise construction. He spent most of his time up and down the reef. I didn’t see much of him as a boy. But later on during the war I ran into Brigadier Lucas who was an Australian Engineer

Office who was Deputy Engineer in Chief South West Pacific and commanded MacArthur’s command. He was apparently a friend of my fathers. He was the opposite number in New South Wales and told me my father was the most senior of the engineer colonels and if he’d lived another 20 months when the war broke out he would’ve gone up to major general. This is what I don’t know. This is just what Brigadier Lucas told me. But he

had just reached the top a the tree. He was the senior civil engineer in Commonwealth employ and he was pretty senior in army too.

He served in one or other of the two pioneer battalions. In World War I the pioneer battalions we called Assault Engineers. You know the first on the battlefield to remove mines and the last on the battle

field to mine bridges and blow up roads and do all those sort a things. But I don’t know much of his service in France. He was invalided out of France back to England with the flu he wasn’t wounded. But I don’t know a great deal about his actual service there. I think it was the 3 Pioneer and 5 Pioneer Battalions he served with.

Didn’t see him very often. He was away most of

the time. Particularly at the later stage when my mid-teens when I would’ve been really interested he was promoted and went down to lighthouse service. As a Depression measure they combined the job of Director of Lighthouses with Principal Lighthouse Engineer. He did two men’s work and he went down to Melbourne and my mother stayed

with me to look after me while I was doing my senior so that I saw very little of him in those years that I could’ve talked about things.

Well it was disappointing because you know he was a tremendous man. Brilliant man and as I say was just at the stage when I would’ve been doing a lot of

talking I only saw him on very rare occasions. I did my first year medicine. Family were in Melbourne. I did it in Queensland. Went home I’d passed my first year and I went back and I was only there about a fortnight and he got sick and two operations in three days and he was dead.

Well of course at the time when he died he had a bowel obstruction.

All 28 feet of bowel were massive masses of adhesions and everybody was very puzzled as to what happened. It was only later when I did a medical course I realised what happened. The Lighthouse at Point Lookout went on the blink so he thought he’d better go and have a look at it. Normally it used to take 3 days and they used to take a launch to Amity Point. Truck along the beach and always had to work the tides and all those sorta things. So he hired an aircraft and pilot.

He only went as the passenger from a chap called Ross Monroe was the pilot and they just a little open engine. Probably might’ve been a Tiger Moth I don’t know what it was. And when they landed on the beach the plane wheels hit a soft spot and she just went over cart wheeled over and his head was about that far from the hard sand and the seatbelt was the only thing saved his life. But it killed him in the long run because it was three days before we got him home and I did

see his abdomen which was just a matter of all black and blue. Obviously he you didn’t see a doctor in those days unless you were dying. And he never saw a doctor about this and very obviously what’s happened he’s had a haemorrhage into the peritoneum which should’ve if they’d realised opened him up and washed it all out he’d a been right. But that stayed there and that formed adhesions you see. You know blood clot in the bowel it ends up this great mass of scar tissue.

So that’s what’s happened there.

Well in those days you had to cope with everything. We had no money. Though my father was fortunate to have a job right through. See in 1928 about 6 months before the Great Depression started my parents they had a splurge. They went and bought a new house and

they bought a new car. The old Model T Ford had had it at that stage and he bought himself a new expensive car and that worked out on his salary of 750 pounds a year they could manage. They were paying 16 percent interest on the house but they’d calculated everything. The only thing they didn’t calculate was the Depression and then very shortly after the Depression the Commonwealth Government, as a saving matter, reduced everybody’s salary by a third. So in actual

fact he ended up with 500 pounds a year instead of 750. Still could’ve survived on that comfortable except he was paying 16 percent interest and the calculation. So though he was working we had absolutely not one penny literally one penny to spend on anything. And so life was you know, we had a pretty grim time of it. But life was always grim and real and earnest for me because I had to study and work

so hard and there was never any social life what so ever through University days. The examinations in our medical course were competitive as well as qualifying. We started off. Do you want me to go on with this?

Well I went to various state schools. When

I went down to Hobart and to Melbourne to do some schooling there they told me Queensland standards were dreadful so they dropped me a class and when I came back to Queensland they said Melbourne and Hobart standards were dreadful dropped a class again. So my mother with the light of battle in her eye went and saw the authorities. They gave me a test and put me back to where I should’ve been. But the very best thing that happened they sent me to the Buranda State School which had a very good reputation at that time. A very tough well run

school and I had a most marvellous teacher for the 2 years before scholarship. I was terrified of him and I loved him. He was a marvellous marvellous teacher and he made me work. I was naturally lazy. And I got a very very good scholarship pass within the top one tenth of a percent of the state. I was only about point 1 or 2 percent under the joker that got the Lilley Medal. So that got me a very

fortunately for family finances that paid my schooling at Churchie [Church of England Grammar School] for the whole 4 years. So I thought, “Gee I must be good.” So I loafed. Didn’t like study much and they were going to take my scholarship away. So I worked put in about a month’s work and got just an ordinary fair average junior pass and thought I could do the same for senior but it didn’t quite work out that way. I still passed senior but a very poor pass.

But in those days to matriculate all you had to do is pass the exam to matriculate. And I matriculated in 7 faculties. There were only 11 faculties in the University at that stage so I matriculated in 7 out of the 11. So it was quite large a relatively large number of us started medicine. Anybody who passed the senior in the right subjects could go in. But of course they had too many

so that they started ploughing out particularly in first year and third year and final year they ploughed us out. Now 67 of us started in 1937 in first year. Of that 67 only 19 qualified in the given 6 years. 48 fell by the wayside. A number of them passed in subsequent years. But only 19 originals of us passed. Actually 25 ended up passing first

go. But we’d picked up 4 refugees from Hitler’s Germany and they joined us at the beginning of fourth year. They had to do the last 3 years of the course. And two of our men in the previous year Bob Quarters and Wilf Simmons they’re two top blokes. They dropped out to do a science year and got a science degree and then came back to us. So that made up the 25 that got through. But only 19 out of 67. The exams were they were only allowing a certain

number through each year. See lots a people who passed that exam didn’t get promoted to the next year cause there’s the cut out point. So that it was very you know we’re all very worried and we had to work incredibly hard.

Well you repeated the year and they’d only allow one repeat. If you missed that unless there were exceptional circumstances.

That was the end of the course you were tossed out of the year. These days of course they chop you out they take the top one per cent. They take the top people to get in and they don’t have must wastage. They say this was wastage but the only catch is that people like myself who were slow in maturing wouldn’t get in to the University. Because I don’t think I really matured until I was 23 or 24.

And by each year my exam results through medicine got better every year. Well I bucked in worked a bit harder and so on. But the whole. Do you want me to keep going on University now?

You see there was not one red cent of Government assistance to anyone. That’s not quite true. The State Government provided 18 scholarships for the top 18 in the senior and that only went for three years and people wanting to do medicine

well these were still Depression years and there was no money. And so the only reason I still to this day don’t know how my mother managed. The biggest part of our debt was the house at East Brisbane. It was opposite the chapel at Churchie actually. It’s been moved now: the old house (built in 1884) magnificent old Robin Dodge (the home that we owned) is now out at Maroon Dam.

Churchie has moved it out there somewhere. But it was a magnificent old home. But my mother after my father died she sold the place and with the money she salvaged from it from she built 2 brick flats at Highgate Hill and we lived in one and she rented the other. And she had a very small Commonwealth Government Superannuation Pension and how she managed I don’t know. She could make a penny go further than anyone else. But of course there was no luxuries.

No social life what so ever. I never went to the pictures. I went to one dance which I couldn’t get out of. A medical ball and you never went. You just studied the entire time. Cause the medical you see a lot of people doing a University courses, Arts courses and these airy fairy things, they might do one or two lectures a day sometimes two lectures a week. But we went from 9 to 5 everyday. Lectures, practicals and so on. There was never any dead time.

And then of course you had to go up for another 3 or 4 nights at least study every night of the week 7 nights a week to catch up. Once you started getting behind you were in trouble. You don’t have to have a lot a brains to do medicine but you had to have a bloody good memory and that’s what saved me because in those days I used to have a photographic or semi-photographic memory anyway and that was a great help to me. But life was I’m not complaining you know. I was quite happy in

my life. But then again also I had to go out and get work whenever I could. Odd labouring jobs around the place and every Christmas holiday I used to go up to Bamf’s vineyard and pick grapes and then I was promoted next year to packing grapes and they used to make cases. You’d work about 8 or 9 hours in the day picking or packing grapes and then I’d work up with the light of a candle light making cases. You ought to seen my thumbs because by the time it’s 11 o’clock

at night and you’re pretty tired by the candle light you started hitting your thumb making cases. But that’s the way we survived economically and so forth. But it was a tough road. You know medicine was a very tough course. Queensland had a new medical school and I was in the third batch of graduates. First was 1940 then ’41 and then ourselves in

’42. So that for a new school to get recognition they had to have very high standards. You know if you just let anybody through you wouldn’t get any recognition. And I was unfortunate to be in the most brilliant year that ever went through. I’m quoting Professor Sutton who told me 20 years afterwards. He was our Professor of Surgery, he said that we were the most brilliant year that ever went through. Not that I contributed much to it. But

we had people like Ivan Lester who died recently. I was at Churchie with him for four years and then six years in the medical course. But he in his day had got the Lilly Medal, the Burns Medal and the Senior Tops Scholarship Junior Senior. Topped first year medicine. Then Evan Thompson later Sir Evan Thompson he topped the next 5 times. But and then there were quite a number of very very solid

brilliant people. But according to Nipper we were the most brilliant year that ever went through. So

Well my father asked me when I was about 15 what did I want to do? Well of course like most kids at that age I had very fuzzy ideas and you never. You buy a car you can take for a test drive. But you can’t take a career for a test drive. So I

sort of thought I might like to be an Engineer as he was an Engineer though my maths were not very good and he talked me out of that. Then I thought I’d go to Duntroon Military College. Like I was always interested in army and he had considerable influence. So it was all arranged for me to go to Duntroon and everything went til I had the medical examination and because of my bad left eye. Which I could get through as a pilot these days but in those days you had to see

6/6 in each eye to get into Duntroon and I could see 6/6 in one eye and 6/9 in the other so I couldn’t get into Duntroon. So then I just thought I might do medicine. Rather vaguely. It wasn’t too sure what the hell I was in for. But you know those days there was nobody to advise you. There was never anybody to ever counsel you under stress and there was nobody to advise you. You had to sort of sink or swim. And my first year medicine was

an easy year. I found that old Bobby Lansky that taught us science. Chemistry and physics he taught me for four years and he was always saying he’s not teaching us through senior years. He was teaching us the subjects of chemistry and physics and found he had all to go and do first year chemistry and physics. I knew it all. We’d done it all before. He had taken us to first year uni standard. And the only other subject was biology which I had not done before. Churchie didn’t teach

biology at that time and I was interested in it and had a marvellous professor old Ernie Goddard. Who could make things. He was a little man very dynamic and he was a bit theatrical but he got his point across and I found that Ernie Goddard’s lectures were so fascinating and I was fascinated in the subject so I passed without any trouble first year.

Well not really.

By the time I studied and by the time I did odd jobs and labouring and you know the holidays were all taken up with picking and packing grapes. We needed the money. Well one thing I forgot to mention. My mother had to stay in Melbourne for a year or two. Well the first year there they were there and I went to Kings College University College here for two years. Yes two years I was there. The first year my father was

alive but the second year my mother had a lot of things to do and so I stayed at Kings. The only thing I did there the only sport that I went was rowing. But that’s the only sport I did at University. With my vision which is still worrying me to this day. I’ve got unequal size. If I close this eye your face is that size. But I do it with this one it’s only

that size. I’ve got 2. So ball games were out I couldn’t. I never saw the ball til it was 6 feet away and that was a bit late. So I had to concentrate on sports where vision was not important. So I represented the school just in a relay swimming and I was in the seconds rowing crew. We only had fours. There was the first four and the second four. I was in the second four.

But the only other thing I represented school when I was talking about eye sight oddly enough was rifle shooting. Represented the school Cadet Corps in the Lord Roberts Shoot. Which was open to all Cadet Corps in the entire British Empire. There’s a long story you can read the story of that in the little book that I gave you about rifle shooting. But so

well the only other activity I had as a social activity I spose was army. I joined the 9/49th Battalion and A-Company was the University Rifles you see. Only had a Company. These days they’ve got a full battalion. And so I had three years with them. When war broke out in 1939 I got all enthusiastic and rushed up to Redbank 1939 to

enlist and found that they would take first second and third year medical students but I was now a fourth year and we’re on the prohibited list. The reason why I was fourth year. Normally there’s 3 terms per year but in third year it only. You see the first three years of medicine were the academic years. Chemistry, physics, biology, anatomy, physiology and those things. And that finished at the end of second term which was about

August I think and so that what would normally have been third term third year became first term fourth year and fourth year was a four term year. So that by the time September came along I had just passed by a matter of weeks into my fourth year you see so they wouldn’t take us. A couple of us went up and sent us home with a flea in our ear. So then I had to stay until I finished the medical course.

Well they could see down

the track they’re going to be short of doctors during the war years see and by the time we’d got to fourth year they. First second third year medicine. Like Jack Meyers I think he was about second or third year they took him. He went in the navy. But no fourth year and onwards they wouldn’t enlist. We had manpower restrictions and every form of life was controlled. Couldn’t do what you want. You couldn’t change your job without manpower approval and so forth. And so we had to finish

our course and then do our residency before they’d take us. But I spose there’s not much point in allowing medial officers you know or medical students rather third and fourth and fifth year and go out and have them doing infantry work or whatever and they could be more useful later on as medical officer.

Well it didn’t worry me at the. Well I was a bit upset that they wouldn’t take me but I got over it after a day or so and thought no more about it. Mind you come to think of it several things saved my life. If I had gone into Duntroon in 1937 I’d have come out in ’39 as a Second Lieutenant and the mortality rate at the beginning of the war of Second Lieutenants was very high.

So that probably saved my life there. And then not going in at a time the similar argument coming through later and then serving as medical officer probably saved my life I spose. But you don’t think along those lines at the time.

With great relief. It was the perpetual anxiety that you would fail.

You only had one more crack at it and then you were out forever. Even if you got to your final. No final they did allow you. I know Ted Ponting had 3 goes at finals before he went through. So they apparently when you got through the finals were a little bit more. But then you see I couldn’t afford to fail a year because we had no money. It was actually a subsistence type of living. You know we had no money to spend. I bought myself a little

125cc motorbike to save the tram fares. The penny tram fare.

No no no. You see we were just in ’37 we were still in the Depression when we started and I suppose half or more of my year were the battlers. You see only about

half of the first year were people like myself who went straight from school to university. The other people had done all sorts of other things. Now you take Doug Gordon for a start. You see Doug had gone down in the 1930’s to Melbourne somewhere I think, did first year medicine and then his father died and his father had a farm outside Tarro outside of Maryborough and so he went back and ran the farm. Then his father died and by the time he had got the farm

settled up he decided to carry on with his medical course you see. But he was quite a few years older than we were when he came in. There were about 4 or 5 men who were chemists and wanted to do that and they came. Others were school teachers, others were 50 percent of my year were people who had worked in other things before and wanted to do medicine. Couldn’t afford to go to Sydney and then Queensland started it’s course. 1936 was first

because most of them had done first year in Sydney then came back and did second year in 1936 and went through and so on. So that lost my train of thought.

None of us had any money. Only one bloke in the year was one you might say the Golden Youth and he had some money but

he failed at the end of first year. Everybody who was there, none of us had any money at all you see. I dunno whether you people can understand a community where nobody had any money. The Depression was so all encompassing it caught everybody one way or another in its net. I’ll tell you later on if you’re interested in a very interesting character, a chap called Gordon Grant.

I’ll just give you a little anecdote of Gordon. Gordon wanted to go into the air force when he was a young man. His father said, “None a this fancy fly-boy stuff. You do pharmacy.” His father was a pharmacist so he was apprenticed and he got his Diploma in Pharmacy. The ink wasn’t dry when he tore madly down to Point Cook and joined the Royal Australian Air Force. This is back in the early ‘30s you see. Went through that and his training he was a pilot

officer. Then he became a flying officer. Was transferred to the Fleet Air Arm where he was flying the old Walrus airplane which had an engine up on top and was a very unstable aircraft and he crashed his aircraft. They were spotting for HMAS Canberra and HMAS Melbourne. Two 8-inch cruisers were target practice using live ammo in Bass Strait and he crashed his aircraft into a salvo of shells. His observer was killed. He had 72

fractures and he was court martialled but acquitted. Routinely if you lost an aircraft you were court martialled. And so he was then put on the reserve of officers for the Royal Australian Air Force. Came up and started the very first Wickham chemist shop in Wickham Terrace. Down where Silverton is now. But he wanted to do medicine. He had no money either but he’d run his pharmacy for a year and then thought he’d go and do a year medicine. Put in a manager and then he

would have to go back to his pharmacy to do another year you know to get enough money and do medicine again. And he joined us, we came together in third year and I shared a corpse with him. In those days we dissected a body. Took 20 months to 18 months to dissect the same body. But these days they don’t do that. They just look at models and drawings and pictures you see. And it was very

good this hands on approach of dissecting everything. It really impressed it in your mind. Anyway Gordon and I we shared, we were in the same group. There were 2 to a side, 4 to a body and Gordon was in our group. He went as soon as ’39 came he went and they took him because he was already on the reserve as an officer in the Royal Australian Air Force. His papers were marked never to be allowed to

fly again because of all his injuries. He lost several inches in height but he seemed to get on quite well. But Gordon can talk his way in and out of anything. He flew Hudson’s against the Japs [Japanese] in Malaya. And went over and served in the Royal Air Force in England. He got an OBE [Order of the British Empire]. He’s now a Group Captain. Came back to New Guinea. He was in charge of the Coast Watchers there. Then he went onto US General Douglas MacArthur’s staff. There was so many complaints about Yank [American] planes

strafing at beach-heads, strafing their own men that MacArthur decided that every front-wave landing should have a senior air force officer with his radio walkie-talkie there to you know to try and sort that out. So Gordon did five first-wave landings including Leyte Gulf, which is an all-American show and oddly enough he also did this job at Balikpapan. Years ago later when we got together we were both in Balikpapan and we didn’t know. But

any rate he gets out a the he’s still in the air force and wondering. Now he’d done three years of medicine another three years to go. By this time he’s 45 years of age you see. Any rate decided he might give it a go. Was terrified to miss a lecture so the University year had started before he had been demobbed from the air force. He didn’t tell me this but a mutual friend did. A staff car flag and all get out you see him Gordon with gold braid and gold arms and two or three rows of ribbons and go out and sit in as a little fourth year you

see. And any rate he did his course. He finished that but he never actually practiced. And later on when I came to Brisbane and went to the Commonwealth Health Department here was Gordon my old mate. But I mean here he is qualified pharmacist. Qualified doctor and a qualified air force pilot. Not too many people you know had 3 careers. Very courageous man. He’s a marvellous bloke Gordon. Anyway sorry I’m diverging. You can wipe that off the record if you like. It’s not really relevant

to me.

I was just pointing out the sort a blokes we had and.

I don’t know. I think three. One two three four. I can’t remember who of us went up to Redbank. But others may have gone at a different. At that particular time you got a train to Redbank and then walked the rest of the distance. Got a free an area and then came back.

But quite a number in first second and third year did join up yeah.

As far as I remember yes. I think a little list was put up on the notice board and you’d find out whether you’d passed or not.

A sinking feeling in the stomach and a great relief when you found you’d passed. Angus Buchanan was a very good mate of mine. He was secretly engaged to Dory Wood. Dory was the secretary of the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine you see and she was not supposed to do this but she allowed Angus to in the back door and showed us the faculty meeting, they’d decided who was going. The first one that went in the line was the red line was

under Angus you see. He’d passed so she was very happy. But when he came back they’d moved the line up three and Angus had failed you see. So he had to repeat the year. But that was the way we found out that year. But that only applied wait a minute. And final year. Yes it must’ve been other years it did go up on the notice board. But usually it did go up on the notice board and I think we got an official eventually by post we got a letter from the university.

Do you want me to tell you all about the Brisbane General Hospital?

You were just ordered to go. They had a medical committee as part of the manpower part so you just went where you were told. And

at that time Brisbane General was called in those days we were told it was the largest hospital in the Southern Hemisphere. The reason for that is that the Brisbane population being so expanded by the two million Americans that went through and everything involved in that and so we had a daily average of 1,650 in-patients.

That meant that every 37-bed ward had 67 patients. They put beds in between beds. Beds round the sister’s station in the middle. Beds all round the veranda and even in the corridor going to the main public corridor. In those days hospitals didn’t say sorry we’re full. Doesn’t matter what happened they took you in. Even if it was only putting you in a cupboard somewhere you were always admitted.

And then at that time we only had 19 residents were allocated to the Royal Brisbane. The Mater Hospital which was quite small and rudimentary in those days it got one or two or three I forgot. I think Townsville and Toowoomba got one each or something. I’m not sure of those figures. But we got 19 at the General and on 19 Junior Residents we ran the Brisbane General Hospital. The Women’s Hospital. The Children’s Hospital and Wattle Brae that was. I don’t

think that exists now. That was the Metropolitan Hospital for Infectious Diseases. Plus all the outlying pavilions they had there. Now just to give you an idea of proportion. 20 years later I went down to Brisbane General to do a refresher course found that they had only 950 daily average and to service that 950 they had 49 residents doing the job when we had to do 1,650 with

19 residents. Now of course this was not the government’s fault because the wartime and the place was so crowded. But normally you were supposed your first year was supposed to be a learning year where you had your hand held and you were allowed to do operations and the senior bloke would be alongside you and so on and then you would have time to study up at night what you had seen in the day time to consolidate your memory. But that didn’t apply. We were purely a labour force.

Slave labour force and we worked on an average it was 128 hours a week. But eventually we put in a complaint to the board and I was on the committee there and I was told that had to have a figure the board couldn’t possibly argue with. So our committee of three went in and we came up with a figure of 118 hours per week. They couldn’t possibly argue about that. This was not hours on call. This was hours

of actual duty and for that we were paid 2 pound 17 shillings and 6 pence per week. To give a proportion on that. Our liftman at the time worked a 48-hour week and he got 4 pounds a week you see.

Because the hospital ran everything on the cheap. Now to give you an idea of what the unscrupulous government of the day. Prior to our first graduates in 1940

the government had to give junior residents and entice them from the south and down the south they only got 2 or 3 pounds a week. But they were treated like fighting cocks. They had time to study patients and to learn things. We were perpetually running. You never had any time to absorb anything. We were just clinical clerks you see. But the government to get the people up to fill the vacancies they had to offer 5 pounds a week you

see. So having got these people from down south in the beginning. See all hospitals their intake is in January and everybody leaves it in December. But once half way through the year there’s no vacancies. So what the government did they promised things in writing in advertising and got the people from the south for 5 pounds a week and this was 1940 and the first lot of graduates from Queensland would graduate and of course they had

total control. You couldn’t go where you wanted and so they. But these people having got them in knowing that they would have their own graduates to fill the vacancies they dropped the salary to 4 pounds a week. And these blokes were furious of course but there’s not much. You couldn’t go anywhere. So when the state government of the day the Labour government of the day bought in the 1939 Medical Act which has only just been superseded

incidentally and which stated amongst other things that you couldn’t practice medicine in Queensland until you’d passed all your examinations, got your degree and had done 12 months in a prescribed hospital. And so therefore you went. Meant that the first batch of graduates getting through in 1940 were forced to go whether they liked it or not. You couldn’t go and say, “I want to go to Melbourne.” No you were under manpower regulations and

you just went where you were told. So the government having done that then dropped the pay to three pounds a week. Now the just as one little story. There’s one job every weekend for 4 men. Only four staff were on duty and there would be the odd registrar. I’m talking about the junior residents and one looked after medical wards. One looked after surgical wards. One looked after

casualty. And the other was extra on. Now extra on looked after all the outside pavilions. Ward 16. The psychiatric wards. The urology wards. Wattle Brae and half a dozen other funny little bits and pieces hey had round the place then. So come every night of the week except Saturday night every night in the week you were on call from midnight to your own ward. Whether you’re on duty or

not. And when I was looking after 130 medical acute. 130 acute medical beds you were always called out three four six times anyway between you were allowed sleep from midnight til eight. Well you had to start work at eight so you had to get up a bit earlier to have breakfast a shower and all the rest of it. Anyway they. Lost the train of thought. Oh yes coming back to this weekend I was on as

extra on. So alright I was on I’d worked til 10 o’clock that night. I’d gone to bed. I had about 4 or 5 hours sleep. The Saturday morning I did my own wards and then I looked after for the rest of that day up to midnight I looked after these outlying wards. You’re always running. There’s only 4 of us doing the whole of a huge

hospital. And so then theoretically I was off duty from midnight Saturday to 8 o’clock Sunday. Which I was I was called out several times for my own ward. Then at 8 o’clock on Sunday morning you start a fresh and you did your job right through til midnight and then you took over the whole hospital so that the other people could have a night off. And which meant you were running.

You’d work continuously from 8 o’clock in the morning until 8 o’clock the following morning and then you started your week bright and fresh during your job. And round about 5 o’clock that afternoon a poor old bloke came in with this mangled finger. Dropped a rock on it or something and you had to amputate. And you injection you just put a local anaesthetic on either side the nerves go on either side a the bone.

And there was a tradition in those days that only a little Bismol. There’s a drug called Bismol and it was used for syphilis and it had a characteristic little brown bottle. Nothing else looked like a Bismol bottle and nothing else ever went on a suture tray except a brown Bismol bottle. They recycled everything which was a good idea. And I got this tray and there were two of these on which I was some what weary. I’d had something like 4 or five hours sleep in the previous

3 days and so I didn’t ask. Here on of course I’m in trouble. I didn’t ask why have I got two. Any rate I squirted some of this stuff onto the blokes finger and he started to yell and scream and wriggle around and he was a very stoic old bloke see. He was a working man and he very tough sort of a bloke. So I squirted some of this stuff into my palm smelt it. It was ethereal soap. A mixture of ether and soap we used to clean up. Some nurse. We didn’t make the tray up of course. Some nurse had

put ethereal soap into a Bismol bottle. So I ran round to Ken Watson who was the registrar and asked him what the hell I could do. I though I’d better put some local inside on either side and squeeze as much a this stuff out. He thought this was very funny and I was very worried and didn’t appreciate his sense of humour. Eventually I did it. I did put some local anaesthetic and eased his pain and I put a cut on either side and I squeezed this out as best I could. Then I went and amputated partly amputated his finger

and I was very worried about this. So I said you come and see. Normally I’d a got him back in a week or you know if he got an infection let me know. Got him back next day and here was a black spot on either side and I though oh my god. Gonna end up with an gangrenous finger. But fortunately it came good. Instead of taking about 4 weeks was the average one it took about 5 weeks and he ended up with a perfectly good finger. Apart from the bit he’d lost from the injury. But anyway to show you the viewpoint and the way the board looked after it. I went and

saw the Superintendent and told him what had happened. Now I said I am negligent. I have squirted this in. I didn’t I mean it should a been local anaesthetic in that. But I said now what is the legal position I said I think his finger’s going to be alright and I don’t think there’s any trouble but where do I stand legally if I’m sued. I am negligent I have injected this into his finger. And he said, “Well, the board having satisfied to themselves that you have the right qualifications to have thus

absolved themselves from liability and if anything should happen you’re on your own. Neither the government or the board will support you, you see.” And I said well the mere fact that the board makes me work these hours and I wasn’t exactly thinking very straight. But the system we had for working during the day. We were flat out during the day in whatever job we were at. But come 5 o’clock you had every. Switch used to ring you and tell you of a new admission to your ward you see. Every admission

that you had been advised of by 5 o’clock you had to continue and go on and see and often there’d be 8 or 10. These would take you hours and hours. You couldn’t go down and have your dinner until you’d finished. And by the time that would be 9 or 10 o’clock at night you’d finished the kitchen staff had gone home. It was all shut up and blank so you got no meals. And I suppose that’s what happened 3 nights 4 nights a week you wouldn’t get any food. You weren’t allowed to have a break and go a meal you had to continue your work you see.

And I always thought this was a labour government all for the working man. We apparently weren’t regarded as working men. The big trouble was that with this system we never learnt or got the experience and knowledge because we were so flat out doing clinical clerks jobs.

Well I lost a lot a weight and you just keep going. You know we never worried about stress or anything.

This was the norm for life. There was a war on you see. We were lucky we weren’t away in the front line and there’s no point in complaining. I mean we did see it wasn’t the hospital board’s fault the were so overcrowded.

It didn’t affect the issue at the Royal Brisbane. You got everything. Just

breaking in for a moment. The interesting thing the little quirks that one remembers. Rubber gloves were very hard to get in the war very short and by the usual method of sterilisation they would perish in no time. Probably much better quality gloves than we’ve got now. And Felix Arden a marvellous man was Superintendent of the Children’s Hospital and he had bought in

two innovations to save things economy. First of all the gloves were carefully scrubbed with Zephron. Was it Zephron? I’ve forgotten which antiseptic it was anyway. Scrubbed very carefully with that and then they were soaked in Zephron til you needed them. That kept them away from the heat you see and we never had any infection wounds you could say was due to gloves. And also because cat gut which all came from Japan before the war we were short of cat

gut you see. And so he used ordinary white sewing cotton. Now we used to use cotton for sewing up skin but he used up everything. He was doing a bowel operation joining a section of bowel he used the cotton. It never absorbed of course. It just got pulled off in the scar tissue and did all the internal muscle layers when you were repairing and that worked marvellously. It was just a neat little innovation. He was a marvellous man Felix Arden.

Hospital provided quarters. Salary was three pounds a week but they took 2 and 6 tax off us you see. So we got 2 pound, 17 shillings and 6 pence. But that included board and lodging. Now the board your food we were a bit short on because they wouldn’t let us. We were not allowed you’d be severely disciplined if you went down and had your dinner while you still had people

not yet admitted. They came first that’s fair enough I spose. But I think they should’ve had some arrangement so the food would be kept warm for us but they didn’t worry about it. But they had very nice quarters up there we were in a very nice room and which I didn’t see much of.

Oh yes we had a room each. There was only 19 of us.

You were allocated the Registrar’s. The Superintendent drew a roster you see. And I’d start off I was for that Sir Alexander Murphy. He was the honorary in charge of 130 medical beds. He used to claim bitterly he couldn’t examine everybody because the beds were so jammed in together. And he was quite right too. But then you do a month or was it

2 months? Some residencies were one month and others were 2 months and then you’d all switch over and you’d go to a surgical ward or you’d go down to the Royal Women’s Hospital or the Women’s Hospital or to the Children’s Hospital. Can I tell a story against myself? The very last day in the service of what was then the Brisbane and South Coast Hospital Board I was. The last period of my residency was at the Children’s Hospital. Children’s Hospital in those days

comprised of Felix Arden the Superintendent. Charles Fisen the Registrar and 2 Residents. That’s all there were 4 medical officers was all we had for the Children’s Hospital and they had a tradition there that all sorts of small minor operations seen through out patients during the week we didn’t have time to do them were allocated a Saturday morning you see and one resident was allocated to go down and do all these little bits of surgery.

I finished at midday and this was my last Saturday morning. So I went down there and a kid came in to have some warts curetted off his leg and I circumcised him by mistake. Now with all these medical accidents there always a multiplicity of factors. Now what happened in this instance. This is I think quite an illuminating little story.

I had seen this kid 3 weeks before he came. He had a huge mass 50 or 100 warts all over his leg and so I looked at this with a certain amount of dismay. So I just wrote on the card to give him some trichloroacetic acid. Which I spose in 50 percent of 40 percent of cases would work. You try it first you see and thought no more about him. But sister he name I can’t remember. She was an old battle axe that had run the out patients since the ark and

she took it on herself. Decided this silly young resident didn’t know what they’re doing so she listed him for operation to have his warts curetted. We used to put a general anaesthetic and go round with a little spoon like thing and just dig them out you see. And so she listed him for on his and her own little note for this Saturday morning to come in and have his warts done. Now at that time every patient every mother was given a roneoed sheet of instructions.

You are to bring your child in at such and such a time. Do not give this child anything to eat and all the you know all those sorts of instructions. So by mistake the sister gave the mother a little letter saying you are instructed to bring this child up for circumcision. You know they’ve got pigeon holes and these had got mixed up. And so mother takes it home and doesn’t read it you see all she looked at was the time. Didn’t bother about looking at anything else. So come that Saturday morning she comes in at 7:30 in the morning. So Junior

nurse is and all these people and so she gives her the instructions for circumcision. So nurse says sit over. The next person with warts sit over here. And the next people with something else and something else. So she had them at 4 or 5 compartments. So sister came along. Now the sister that’s in out patients that had written that down had on that previous Friday night gone away on holidays and we had a relieving sister who didn’t know this child at all. So she came in and questioned each mother so

mother gives her the sign you bring your child for circumcision. So sister said you know, “Is your child for circumcision?” Mother wasn’t very bright says, “Yes.” So there’s no doubt in the sisters mind. So I come down in a Lordly fashion at 9 o’clock when they’re all ready for these things. And I said, “How many we got? I had 4 or 5 circs and so many warts and so many something else. There were about a dozen or 15 or 20 of these little jobs to do. So I said to the sister, “Well I’ll do the circs first”

because they’re surgically clean cases you see. Any rate I’m scrubbing up and I looked at this kid there. He was sitting up and his sheet had fallen from hugging his knees and had fallen off. I saw a lot a warts. So I said to sister I looked at his card you see which is alongside where I was scrubbing in and all it had was my reference about his warts. I said look sister I wanted to do the circs first not the warts. “Oh,” she said, “his mother wants him circumcised.” I said, “Well there’s nothing about it here.” “Oh no” she said, “his mother wants him circumcised.”

She was a woman of middle age and rather uncertain temper and she was getting quite upset about this. Anyway I went and had a look at him. He was nine years of age by the way and he certainly badly needed circumcising. There’s no argument about that. So I said, “Does his mother want it?” She says, “Yeah.” So alright I scrubbed up and I went and I did the circumcision. A little while later Charles Fisen come in and he said, “what happened, what happened to this kid so and so.” I don’t remember the name at this stage. And I thought. I did a circ

why? And then I got worried. I said, “Has something happened? Is he bleeding or something?” He said, “Well, mother bought him in to have the warts done” and he said, “Now that she’s gone into the recovery room and seen which end’s got a bloody bandage on it she’s fainted.” So so I started to laugh. He said, “What mother? She’s going to sue the hospital.” See what’s sticking in her craw

now she’d got over the shock of having the kid circumcised which he really needed. She said, “You didn’t do his bloody warts.” So I left the service of the Brisbane and South Coast Hospital in a certain blaze of uncertain glory. But I never heard any more. I went straight to the army then. But you see medical things you hear all sorts of things and you say this is gross negligence. But there’s always a

multiplicity of factors. It’s very rarely that one does one silly thing entirely on your own.

Well you just go one day you’ve got your degree and the next day you go to. We had no holiday break. We went straight. There might a been a weekend between and went straight in there and became a resident at the Brisbane General.

Well we

had done in our last 2 or three years we did a tremendous lot of time in the hospital and we’d done for our own purposes taken histories and full examinations. We were quite accustomed to the procedure. Except of course there’s no legal cover we had. We had no legal cover at all. But the annoying thing for me was I didn’t get the surgical training I should’ve. Mainly because the senior surgeon I was attached

to old Joe Meyers had just been appointed Dean of the Faculty of Medicine in Queensland University and he was not well at the time so the only surgery he did were the things that came from his own out patients. You see they had Monday ward so and so and so and so get all the admissions. Tuesday another batch of wards’d get admission. But none of that came into his ward. So he did practically no surgery the 2 months I was with him so. Although because

on his operating times and they grabbed me and I was just sent to do routine work in out patients. So I never I got practically no I did three appendices and that’s about all. And so I got a very poor training as far as surgery was concerned.

All you wanted was sleep. Not

one of us went to pictures to a dance to anything. We just collapsed in our beds. But we couldn’t complain there was a war on.

How?

Very closely. We were very very interested in the war. I’ve been asked this question before how we felt when the Japs came. You’ve no idea how naked we felt. We had our three Australian infantry divisions were in the

Middle East. Our entire air force or almost our entire air force was over in Britain fighting and here were the Japs at Port Moresby and bombing Darwin and we had nothing absolutely nothing to stop them. And this is where I get so angry with politicians and all these silly people that had the barricades and yelling and screaming and so on they forget we had nobody to help us except America and the Yanks annoyed

me as they annoyed everybody else. But on the other hand we would’ve been a slave nation without them. They destroyed the Japanese fleet in the Battle of the Coral Sea and that removed a lot a the pressure off. Just to feel in this country we’ve got nothing to defend ourself with and then when Curtin brought the Divisions back home, quite rightly so. I know everybody else was annoyed at them in doing it but I think they did the right thing because we had nothing. We might’ve had a Militia

Division or so who’d never seen service and hadn’t some of them were very partially trained. We had nothing. Everything was overseas. We got the three Divisions but that’s only three Divisions. And a Division would be only 6 or 8 thousand men I’m not sure. It varies quite considerably. And we felt absolutely naked and the only thing that saved our bacon was the Americans. And when all these people are screaming out now about [Prime Minister John] Howard doing what [US President George W.] Bush wants him to do

well of course we’ve got to do this because we’ve got to keep getting brownie points with the Yanks whether we like it or not. Because they’re the only hope with this vast continent and our small population we can’t defend ourselves. And I mean when you’ve no idea how absolutely naked we felt. And you know if we say Indonesia with 200-odd million people and Muslims and they don’t like us very much they’re not prepared or equipped at the

moment but ever they ever do that whose going to help us in the world? Only America. So that when America gets into trouble we’ve got to tag along whether we like it or not. And everybody whether they think you know it’s very easy to go and say we shouldn’t follow America but for future defence of this country we have really no option. Now the navy is all American and even in their equipment and totally away from the British navy in their training and

so on well makes sense when you have guns that take the same ammunition and that sort a thing logistically. But however that’s diverging.

Yeah the Japs at Port Moresby and we were in Brisbane. There’s a bit a country but the people up there round Cairns would feel even more naked. They could attack anywhere along the Queensland coast and

we had practically nothing to counter it and I think everybody had that or any person who did any thinking felt very naked. We had no army to defend us.

Big. Fat. Brash. But thank God they were here.

We had nothing to do with service personnel. We were only treating civilians at the Brisbane.

The Americans had a hospital of their own somewhere. It was Camp Cable I think. It was somewhere around the place. The 112th Army General Hospital at Greenslopes which is now Greenslopes was built as an Army Base Hospital. We had an Army General Hospital it was the 2/4th most of the time I can remember was at Redbank and under tents and they looked after all service personnel. We might

occasionally get an odd Yank in that maybe in a brawl or injured and we may give him you know do casualty work or something. But I don’t remember any of them coming in as patients. They may have I don’t know.

Big increase in venereal disease.

Well we saw more cases of it yes treating. But we didn’t treat them.

But I had heard I’ve no idea of the validity of this statement it’s just that I had been told that roughly 10 percent of the American troops had syphilis. Whether that’s true or not I don’t know. But we hadn’t seen much in the way of syphilis locally and it came in in big quantities. Not that I saw that much of it. You’d get an odd 1 or 2 in casualty because they had a venereal disease clinic down at Peel Street I think.

You know where the William Jolly Bridge is? They had a clinic there. Male clinic. I’ve forgotten where the female clinic. Somewhere in town. But no the Americans were on the very friendly. They were very superior. Now I might add this explains some later things that’ll come up but I might add that we were forced in our year at the General to all go in and do one month army service. So that’s when I was given

my commission and a Q-number which will cause me so much fury later on and I went for a month out to Goondiwindi to be medical officer of the 1st Aust B-Class Training Depot. Every man on parade was B-class medically you see. The whole bloody battalion was one walking sick parade. So I had a month there and it was a very busy month actually and then came back to the General. I thought I’d be a smart arse and do a

bit of short circuiting. I saw the local brigadier and I said you know, “How do I get in the AIF [Australian Imperial Force]?” He said, “Just fill in the form.” So I did that. Did I get into an awful lot of trouble? I was trying to get direct transfer to the AIF but I had dragged back to the General to do another 4 or 5 months.

That was just routine sick parade. And a lot a these troops were sort of being trained or

retrained probably going back to other units and I had to do immunisation. Would you believe there was 33 or 35 hypodermic needles they gave me which had been used for the previous two years and were absolutely blunt and I had 1,600 men to inject with 33 blunt needles? And each one I had to screw in. I was apologising, apologising to these poor buggers. They took it pretty well. But you see that’s all they would give me. I couldn’t go and make needles

anywhere.

Well these would be a mixture. Most a these were B-class medically. Instead of being Class-A you know fit for combat duty they’d have all sorts of disabilities and sometimes these things needed ongoing care. Otherwise the most things there would be a bloke whose fallen over a stake and gashed his leg and you know that sort of general practice sort of thing. Coughs and

colds and illnesses like that. It was pretty boring and pretty deadly. The only thing I was very mad about. My fiancé as she was then she was in the VADs. You know the VADs? Voluntary Aid Detachment. Don’t know whether you know what those girls did. Oddly enough only yesterday I came across one of her certificates. But

anyway she was at the 47th Camp Hospital at Goondiwindi and I though whacko I’m just only 3 miles out at Boggabilla. So about a week before I was due to go there she was transferred to Glen Innes. But that’s beside the point. The other thing was we’d agreed to get married on her next leave which we thought would be 6 or 9 months, she went back to Glen Innes and

so she rings me up or writes me a letter I can’t remember which, I was still at the General, that she her unit was on a movement order to New Guinea and they were to take pre-embarkation leave and she was having leave in 3 weeks time and then whenever she’d get leave after that god only knows. So I had to organise this was the middle of Lent and I didn’t realise getting married was such a problem. Had to organise it in 3 weeks. They did have all sort of dispensation from war time

and she insisted I wear the uniform that I’d had at Boggabilla. I didn’t have any Australia’s yet. I wasn’t really properly in the army. Still had the commission I had the uniform I spose I was entitled to wear it. And she who was a serving personnel she got dressed up in a dress you see. I always thought that was the wrong way round. But any rate I went along and I saw the Superintendent and I said I’m getting married this afternoon. I said, “How much time can I have off? “Oh,” he said, “you can have this afternoon off,” which it was afternoon, “and you start work

come back to work at midnight tonight.” So that was my marriage and honeymoon. Actually some 2 or 3 of my mates doubled up and never told anybody and covered for me so had a couple a days off. And then she went back to Glen Innes and I went back and finished. I had a month or two to go before 3 months to go before I went into army full-time.

Well Dr Steele gave me the loan of a little cottage he had at Surfers Paradise on the beach. It was a very short honeymoon.

Well there’s difficulties with the parson because it was Lent. I didn’t realise you weren’t supposed to get married and you had to get a dispensation from Archbishop and that eventually came through

and there was all sorts of bits there. Something to do with the Church and so on and I didn’t have much time. My parents-in-law did most of it but I was every now and then caught up with some a these things and I didn’t have the time. But however we made it and a course those days frocks and so on you had to have your clothing coupons and all her sisters contributed and it was hell of a business getting married in a hurry during war I’m telling you.

This goes back to about 1937. When I said I had no social life that’s not quite true. We did have a little tennis club at Toowong which didn’t cost us anything because somebody or other had borrowed the tennis court near the railway at Toowong. And there was a group of us played tennis and that was a couple of hours on Saturday afternoon and that was the social part. And sometime Helen’s

that’s my wife her Aunt lived nearby and her Aunt was an invalid but she would have some of us the boys and girls over sometimes for sort of a you know sandwich tea and that sort of thing and we’d play cards and so on for a while and that was the entire social thing. So I met her playing tennis. Take along just an ordinary grass court. Nobody played to any standard and Doug Jones my best mate took me along he said, “there’s somebody I want you to meet.”

Helen was standing there and she had in those days the long skirts when you played tennis. She had a broad brimmed hat and I looked and her and thought you know she’s the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. Couldn’t say or do much about it because I had no money. I had no job. I was still a student and particularly latterly. I used to see her fairly regularly on Saturday afternoons and then in the last couple a years of the course of course that had to go by the board too because we had so much work to do. They shortened the course.

I didn’t mention that. 18 months before we were due to sit they told us that we’re going to sit 6 months early. I worked out that we did exactly the same number of lectures. Pracs. Hospital rounds and so on. All they did was wipe all the vacations. Christmas holidays was Christmas Day and Boxing day. Otherwise we went through the hospital rounds. We did lectures. We did everything right through. We had none of the usual

University’s 3 months holidays and by doing that and working weekends working right through. Here again there was never a break and so that when that happened there well I gave up playing tennis. I was working on Saturday you know. We’re doing hospital wards and all that sort a stuff and then what the University did to us. It was sheer bit of bastardry. We were due to sit on I think shall we say the 18th of May. Mid-May sometime then they came into us one day

in March they said, “Gentlemen, we’ve altered the Examination timetable. You sit next week.” So we went to have a look and what they’d done you see they’d left the paper was done still in May but for each subject we’d have not only one or two papers depending on the size of the subject. We’d have 3 vivas [oral exams] you know when you get an examiner and one to one’d ask you any question he felt like asking you. And then we’d have 3 practicals. Then we had 3

clinicals for each subject and of course there’s an enormous multiplicity. So they started us 6 or 8 weeks early and I went and had a look and for next Monday I had a surgical practical with Nipper Sutton a viva with Nipper Sutton our Professor and you know you’ve got to do something and in my particular timetable I was doing medicine and I’d left surgery the last. I had done no revision in surgery and I had about 5 days to go and start the exams for it.

And then you wouldn’t get it all over in one week. Say take surgery. This week I might have 2 vivas the next week I might have one prac the next week I might have 2 or 3 clinicals. This went on and on and on with every subject mixed up for 6 or 8 weeks. And some of our blokes poor old Ken McMurray just collapsed and lost consciousness in the middle of the exam. Poor old bloke he’d had no sleep for weeks. But I thought that they’d have to be give us a reasonable go seeing as

they’d treated us so drastically. But no as I say they still wiped a third of the final year. We started of 37 in exam and which 12 were failed. 25 and as I say the original 19 included in that. So life was pretty you know we’re all pretty cheerful about it. The big worry was whether the hell we’d ever get though.

Well actually I wasn’t in a position to think about getting married. You just couldn’t get married for years so I sort of kept things rather at arms length and I

think she must’ve liked me. But we sort of a very slight courtship at a great distance virtually. But eventually when I stopped seeing her I didn’t really have a talk to her about it and so she went and joined the VADs and off she went away to war you see. Joined the army anyway. Have you had a

talk to anyone from the VADs?

No but in this camera business?

There’s a lady who. I’ll tell you about

Well the VADs went in they bought their own uniform the army didn’t and they worked for no pay for the army. And you had to have a St Johns Ambulance certificate or a St

Johns Home Nursing certificate and they went in and did all the skivvy work [menial work]. They couldn’t have run the Australian hospitals without them. You know the scrubbing and the cleaning and the changing of bed pans and cleaning floors and cleaning walls. The nursing sisters didn’t do that. They were nurses aids which in today’s language. But they went with no pay. Had to buy their own uniform which was quite expensive in the early ‘40s when nobody had any money and work for nothing quite cheerfully.

The were Volunteer Aid Detachment VAD. And then the army of course realised they couldn’t run their hospitals without them so they wanted to have control so they wiped them as VADs and they became AAMWS. Australian Army Medical Women’s Services you see then given a QFX number.

We

corresponded quite a lot and then I don’t remember the exact details but she was on leave and I saw her at the time. I didn’t have much time because I was working at the General but I did ask her to marry me and she said yes and so we agreed that we’d get married the next leave that she had. This came a lot earlier than we thought it was going to so we got married.

And that was more or less it. There wasn’t any great romantic courtship I spose for all sorts of reason. Economic. Army. War and everything else.

Well we knew about that. That was fully to be expected. You couldn’t settle down and have a normal married life. I mean we didn’t settle down at all to a normal married life until war was over so that we had round about three years I spose.

Teeing up leave for one was bad enough but teeing up leave to correspond for 2 was impossible. And then we about 18 months later she had our first child. Then she had to leave the army of course soon as she became pregnant or half way through her pregnancy. And I was stuck at Warwick at that time at the 2/12th General Hospital but I was able to find her boarding

at a nearby farmhouse just across the paddock. So we did have a little bit of time together at this stage. This is when she’s pregnant and expecting John. So then after that. That was it the end of it and so. I don’t think John my son probably didn’t remember me he was. Strange man comes back from war and takes over. Don’t think he liked it very much as a child. He’d been the only pebble you know the usual sort of thing.

There was nothing else but. The phone call was exorbitant and didn’t work very well so you just wrote letters that’s all.

Well it was the only contact I had. I looked forward like. You’ve no idea how much I looked forward

to getting letters from her.

Bloody glad to get out of the place. Going to the army was like having a holiday. I was able to get a full night’s sleep most of the time and was able to put on some weight and get some food into me.

Well I expected as soon as I. I went in whenever I got a chance and bout once a fortnight I went to see the DMS [Director of Medical Services] in Brisbane, Sir Kenneth Fraser. He was a full colonel and because. Only a small number of us were going to go into the army. They’d made a

mistake. The previous year they’d taken all the medical officers into the army, navy and air force and there was nobody left for civilian things. So now they were only going to allow a certain number through so I used to go and lobby him to make sure I got into the army and so when the time came there was no problem. I saw them gave them a date when I finished up and couple a days later I just went straight in up to Redbank, the Recruits

Reception Depot RRD and then was enlisted. Immediately was sent down to Cowan Cowan and that was it.

Got about 10-pages of it there. Do you want to use it there or talk about it now?

Well the, I went there as Officer Commanding 56th Australian Camp Hospital. This was a small 30-

bed camp hospital. Some of our beds were over at Litton. It closed down. Don’t know whether we got all the beds back or not. But it was only a small camp hospital. And the whole why do you need a hospital at Cowan Cowan on Moreton Island? You know the map of Moreton do you know what it looks like? The Bay?

Well do you know where Caloundra is? All shipping during the war.

This is all due to shipping. All shipping went to a navy station at Caloundra they called Port War and they were they’re checked over. I don’t know what process they applied by navy and every ship was given a number which they flew by flag in the day time and by lights at night. You see the steamer channel comes down from Caloundra down outside the full length of Bribie Island until you come almost to Moreton and come to Cowan and then you do a right hand

turn into the Bay. Between Bribie and then there’s the channel and then outside there’s a huge lot of banks and so on. There’s a huge lot of sand banks there you see. So that back in the 1930’s they had installed two 6-six naval guns at Cowan Cowan. They’re big guns those. They send a about a 100-weight about a hundred odd pound projectile out a

distance of about 20, 22 miles. And they were sighted looking along the coast of Bribie they were pointed towards Caloundra in case any big ships tried to force come down the channel you see. Now they were put down oddly enough sighted by my father as the engineer colonel in Australia in Queensland at the time ’34-’35-’36 I’m not sure when, and he as the engineer officer installed those guns. Then you had to

the navy had to protect the port of Brisbane. I might add at the moment breaking in that going down by launch Miramar or Mirrabell to the army grabbed the two Hale’s launches. The Miramar’s 90-feet. The Mirrabell was 60-feet and they were our lifeline. They took personnel, gear trucks, they took everything down to Moreton and back. But when you went down the Brisbane river the first wharf started where South Bank is now. Howard Smith

Wharves were there and then you had wharves at. Went down and then you had them at Tanner Reef just past New Farm down to Newstead and then Hamilton and every wharf was triple-birthed. By that I mean you had 3 ships tied one along the other. So that the outer one would have to be loaded and unloaded across the other two. You rarely ever saw this with only 2 ships. There’s 3 seemed to be everywhere. And at the same time there’d be 24-25-26

ships waiting their turn. You see Brisbane was the biggest port in the Southern Hemisphere. All MacArthur’s everything that MacArthur went through Brisbane. And I’ll explain a bit more about that in a moment. So you at any given moment have 20-plus ships anchored at the pilot light and if a submarine got in all these ships at anchor it’d be like shooting fish in a barrel. So from Cowan they put a string of mines. Single like mines beads on a string. Went all the way except

where there was sandbanks and nothing can get through went all the way from there to skirmish in Bribie Island. I’m not absolutely sure I could be guessing but I think something like 18 miles of this. Not all of it had mines but most of it did anything that had enough depth for a sub to get through. Now how do you know when a subs there? So what they did was to put in front of the minefield they put an indicator leaf. This was a

magnetic device. This went all the way to Skirmish too and they had a navy station at Cowan and they had a lot of big gauges and anything metallic going over that magnetic strip registered. So if you had a submarine it would show you see. And then they only had a minute or so to pull the switches and blow the minefield. Now having had this navy thing down there this would be a tempting target if the enemy wanted to attack Brisbane

they’d put a raiding force and wipe out the navy stations. Spike the guns as it were. So to protect the navy we had a full infantry battalion. And we had other guns at Rouse Battery, about two thirds of the way down on Moreton Island on the ocean side the army had two of their 155mm guns. These were French ‘Long Toms’ built in France 1917-

1918 and each gun and limber weighed about 15 tons and would you believe they got this half way up one a these big sand dunes and buried these guns. The altitude of course gave them a greater range out to sea. And they also had small guns. Old 18 pounders, World War I vintage to protect the small boat channels.

The one round what’s that from Moreton Island? You go round [(UNCLEAR)] Moreton there’s a narrow channel there it’s name I can’t remember. We also the navy had an undersea asdic [submarine detection] unit to detect anything in that one. And the south passage in Moreton we had this lighter artillery to deal with you know small mosquito craft coming through. We had troops at south passage and so that was the whole sort of object of being. So we had a little hospital there. I

didn’t have much work to do. The troops were all pretty healthy. When I first went over the 7th Garrison Battalion was the infantry battalion and they were practically all men from World War I who were over-age or B-Class but I’m telling you what they might’ve been short of wind but they’d give a very good account. That battalion had every decoration the British Empire can

give for Victoria Cross. One bloke he even had the Polar Medal. He’d been to the Antarctic with Shackleton. And the old and bold. Rugged and buggered or whatever you call em. But they were a mighty lot a men they really were. Then they were replaced by another unit the 2/2nd Australian Headquarters Guard Battalion. They were all much younger men but many of them were B-Class. Many of them sort of found their way by accident there. Others were

misfits that nobody else wanted and they were not the group of men the. Yes. I’ve given all this in the pamphlet. But I to give you an idea of the 7th Garrison Battalion. I had my you know what an RAP is? Regimental Aid Post. Do morning sick parades or 1 or 2 sick parades a day as required and one day an elderly Lieutenant came along dragging an

even much more elderly Private literally by the ear. And the Private was saying, “Look Jim, I’m OK. I don’t want to see the Doc. Nothin’ wrong with me.” And so Jim comes in and says, “Doc I want you to look at old Joe here. He’s been very poorly.” He said, “I think there’s something wrong with him. He won’t tell me anything.” So I had a look at this old bloke and found he had 3 broken ribs. And I said when did this happen? He said, “Three weeks ago.” Night exercise he fell into a slit trench you see. And

since then he had not reported sick and with full rifle and equipment you know an infantry man carries a hell of a lot of gear. The sand hills in Moreton. You know those big ones south of the cape? Very high sand hills which I don’t know that I would like to walk up them. He walked up and down these sand hills for his so many hours beat there carrying full army equipment with 3-broken ribs. Any rate he was looking a bit he was a fair bit of pain and so I thought I’d put him in bed

and give him a bit of a rest. He also looks as though he needs a feed. He was a very thin old man. The next morning I’m going round doing my rounds and by this time his ribs are all strapped up and he was sitting on a deck chair and out sunning himself you see and I noticed he had a quite a marked deformity and huge scarring on the top of his foot. And I just said casually, “What happened there?” “Oh,” he said, “gun carriage ran over it in the Boer War.” He was 74 or 75 or 76. He’d told lies

about his age. Still full rifle equipment everything else marching up miles of bloody sand hills at that age never complaining.

I was just running a hospital. The hospital and myself everything was there in case of need. I mean we treated all sorts of minor things you know. Somebody a broken toe or sometimes minor

fractures which I could handle I did there. Others anything that needed anything complicated I put in a launch and send to Greenslopes. But illnesses. There were always you know always had a few patients in with something or other.

This was a little thing under tents. We were supposed to have 30 beds I think we probably only would’ve had 20-something. I can’t remember at this

stage and our operating theatre was a small. It was only limited for minor things. But we would be there supposing in the event of an attack we were there to provide immediate first aid or glorified first aid treatment. I mean we weren’t capable of. I spose we could’ve if need be. There was another medical officer with the battalion we could’ve probably got him but we never had to to

give anaesthetic. Now wait a minute we did give a few anaesthetics. But we would be there between the two medical officers. His other main job was his own infantry battalion he could probably help me out and I had nursing sisters there and we could do the initial battle casualties sort of thing. Fortunately we were never needed. It was a wonderful holiday. I had half an hours work a day to do. All except boat day. Three days a week I had about two to three hours work all

filling in forms. Otherwise the fishing was good. The fishing was magnificent. It was a holiday. Not exactly the sharp end though.

Well I slept. I had a marvellous time. Regained my strength and my everything else. But you see I was very angry of being shunted to Moreton Island. You know some old middle aged

GP [general practitioner] could do that very well and I had vague ideas I joined up I wanted to go away because they were very short of medical officers in New Guinea. And so then I realised I wanted to get away. And they said no. I wanted a transfer. No no no. They’d come and try so I was making seething noises. This was at the DDMS’s [Deputy Director of Medical Services] office. So I read up the regulations that stated that every medical officer on enlistment must go to the

Australian Army Medical Corps training school in Healesville in Victoria and from there you were reposted. So I applied to go to Healesville. I wanted to get reposted. Also I wanted to see what they had because I’d been given no training how to be a medical officer or anything else. So I saw the Colonel and he looked up my records. He said, “You’ve done three years infantry.” He said, “This course is only to tell you who you salute and who you don’t salute and what the ranks are.” Which is not quite true of course

and he said, “Request denied.” So I was stuck there. Later on I found out I only got away at the tail end of the war and most of our blokes that joined up that did come in at the DDMS had filled up every little whistlestop in his own Q L of C area [Queensland Lines of Communication area] and he had not told the Director General of Medical Services that he had these medical

officers and they were screaming out for them in New Guinea. The reason I know that for certain is that when we went away to Borneo we had a new CO [Commanding Officer] for my hospital who’d been the Director of Army Medical Services Training before he came to us. He was a full colonel. And just about that time the major general I’ll think of his name in a moment the Director General of Medical Services only

found out that Ken Fraser had all these people propping up little places all there with practically nothing to do you see. And I kicked up a fuss. They said we’re sending you to the 2/12th General Hospital. They’re going overseas shortly. As it turned out we were all ready to go overseas but whatever campaign that was it fell through and we didn’t. So we were still stuck round southern Queensland.

I think this was an ego trip. He had lots

of medical officers. Didn’t have to go short. Every little station. Every little battalion RAP he had a medical officer. But it was only at the end of the war I found this out and then from a man who would know.

Well that’s the 7th Garrison Battalion but when they were transferred and went somewhere else and were relieved by the

2nd Guard Battalion, that was a whole new ballgame. They were misfits or medical unfit. A few people had accidentally got transferred. But they were not a very impressive unit at all. As far as nothing compares with the 7th Garrison, the other blokes.

Well there were some people who may have been. Well the commanding officer for example had been bowler-hatted [sacked for incompetence, made a civilian] out of the Middle East.

He’d gone over as a battalion commander had been found wanting was sent home and replaced with somebody more competent. And so he was given this unimportant little command at Moreton Island. Which he didn’t like and he was an arrogant bastard and a total dictator and being the senior officer on the island he was automatically CO of the whole island and we all came under him and he made life very miserable. Couldn’t make life very miserable for me because

I was an independent command. But he had a very nasty tongue. He was a nasty bloke. Tell you a story about that. In the middle of all this he gets a what was it? A damned efficiency decoration. Which is just 20 years commissioned service you see. Or we used to say 20 years of undetected crime and he was awarded this. Now normally when everybody’s doing all our duty jobs round the place you didn’t wear

ribbons. So he made a proclamation that everybody must wear ribbons. So he could wear and show his off you see. And he also went crook at the padres. Now the padres did hold rank but they usually had two black stripes you see on their applet and padres never usually put up their rank. And there was an late middle aged padre there and a younger man

and the CO used to make fun of these people and be quite rude in the mess. We had a composite mess you see. My nursing sisters, myself, five navy officers and the infantry and the artillery and so on we all had a communal mess there. And this particular CO he’d issued instructions that the padres were to wear badges of rank and wear medals. So anyway the next morning the senior padre came along. He was a full colonel

when he put his badges of rank up and he had I think it was a Military Cross and DSO [Distinguished Service Order] I just can’t remember. He had one or other. Both I think from World War I you see. So the CO was a very embarrassed man. Padre never said a word. But I was told by a mutual friend that he had a certain glint in his eye. These are petty little things when petty little people are given too much power. At one stage beer was stolen from the

sergeants’ mess so the CO decided it was A-Company or B-Company I can’t remember which they did it you see. There wasn’t one scrap of evidence so they were to be punished. And every now and then some of his punishments said dig the troops all had to have a parade at 2 am in the morning to be issued with a round of bootlaces and that sort of petty thing. You’d never believe it would happen in army but it did with this bloke. Any rate he sent B-Company or A-Company whatever company down to

south passage. South passage was nobody wanted to be there because there was so many sandflies you see. So as punishment they had to march 20 miles across the beach with all their gear and equipment in the middle of the night and he took the precaution of withdrawing all ammunition. I think it was probably as close as any Australian unit ever came to I dunno whether they though mutiny or not but the CO took all ammunition. But these were the nasty little things.

Anyway won’t dwell on that. But otherwise Cowan Cowan was a delightful holiday. I really enjoyed it but I wasn’t doing much war service.

Well you see I was then sent to the 2/12th Australian General Hospital which was at Warwick. Now you see I went from being a

medium sized frog in a tiny puddle to being a tiny little tadpole in an enormous puddle. When you go to the AGH first of all there was the commanding officer was a full colonel. Two lieutenant colonels. One in charge of medical divisions. One in charge of surgical divisions. We had 11 or 12 majors. Most of them were specialists. Ear nose and throat. Eye. Surgery. Medical and so on. They had all these things.

And then there were five general duties Captains of whom I was the forth most junior you see. I only had one bloke junior to me. So I was really a tiny little tadpole in a huge pond. But I was just given a medical ward there and treating mostly malaria. It was a very strange situation. You see blokes would get either injured or get malaria in my experience I

wasn’t on the surgical side. I was on the medical side. Once again you went where you were told. And a bloke in New Guinea would get malaria and go to one of the general hospitals there. But then they’d start getting over crowded so he’d be sent down to an AGH on the mainland. I think we had two AGHs on the Atherton Tablelands and he’d go to one of those two. Then they would get full and they

would send them down by rail to either 112th at Greenslopes or the 2/4th at Redbank. Then they would get full and they would overflow to us. Then we would get full and then I’d send them down to it was either Armidale. Glen Innes I think was another General Hospital down there. So some of these blokes would go through one two three four five hospitals and a couple of thousand miles for one attack of malaria. See

malaria I don’t know it was such a huge factor in New Guinea. Now I never was at Oro Bay in New Guinea but I remember I was at a lecture where we were told that they had the highest incidence of malaria during the war and the incidence there was 200 men per 1,000 per week. So that within 4 weeks the commanding officer would have no battalion left and those were such appalling things and that

of course meant it had enormous implications. And of course they’d always be getting people back who recovered from their last bout of malaria. But malaria in New Guinea and when we went to Balikpapan was very severe.

Blowed if I know. Nobody complained. They would only be shifted if they

considered. If they were in severe stages of Black Water fever or something they’d keep them there. But if they were convalescing and improving they would be sent to other hospitals. Cause you can only when you’re full you’re full.

Everything under tent and wards. When we went there we had the old fashioned EPIP tents [English pattern, Indian product].

They were a circular built tents with fancy. They were quite good tents. They were made of some special cotton that was woven very closely. They were very comfortable tents. And we used to have some of these all joined together and while I was at Warwick we got a whole new lot a hospital tents. Hospital Tent Expanding Mark I they were called. And these were made of very very heavy canvas. Which was incredibly heavy. They weighed tons

of canvas you know, heaviest duty canvas you’ve ever seen. The tent poles holding them up were that diameter machined timber with metal tips at the top and this steel foot at the bottom. And these things would go and if you had enough tents you could get them a mile long. Each one would just brigade onto the next one you know these special fittings that they would attach. They were very good tents. And

we were just on dirt floors. Sometimes we had dirt floors occasionally we’d be given little things a bit like a pallet. You know the ordinary pallets these days you know the forklift goes under to lift up a lot a cartons you know those things? These were a bit like it. Bigger. They were just slabs we put down rather roughly. We just had to watch out for your ankles with these things as floors. But I’ll break in at this stage

talking about administration. It was the most incredibly efficient unit I had ever had anything to do with because we had a very good CO. Old Dad McCartney DSO, Military Cross from World War I. He had to leave. They wouldn’t let him go away this time he was 58 years of age and was replaced with a younger man. But the main man that everything went round was a chap

called Wilf Laws. His rank permanent substantive rank was warrant officer. He was now a temporary Major and he was scared that the war would end while he was still just. Cause he was permanent army and he’d go back to his substantive rank and about a week before they dropped the bombed the. Or it might’ve been a fortnight or 3 weeks before. But shortly before he talked to me he said to me in the mess he said, “Frank,” he said, “I’ve got my commission.”

As a Lieutenant you see. Permanent of course so that when after the war he went back to Lieutenant. But he eventually ended up as a full Colonel commanding the. He wasn’t a doctor. He was a administrator. But he was the most efficient administrator. When we packed up everything at Warwick I think this figure is right that I was given. It sticks in my memory anyway. The hospital had 960 cubic tons of gear. Now what the hell a cubic ton is I’m

blowed if I know. But it sounds a lot. Anyway everything was packed and was taken by truck to train in Warwick. Came down and was offloaded at Geebung and stationed and eventually of course it’s put onto 2 ships when we went to Borneo. When we get to Borneo and we were allocated a place. It was the top of a rise that had I’d been told were 47 Dutch houses. They’d been heavily bombed by

the bombing that preceded the invasion. And the Engineers had levelled the top and just pushed the wreckage over the side of the hill and there was our sight for our hospital. And of course after it had been dozed and levelled and it rains every day in the tropics it was very muddy and very clayey. So the ship that had our medical gear. Our theatres. Our laboratories. Our X-ray equipments. Those crates were bought and dumped in the mud there because they sent that ship in first. The ship

with out tents was still anchored in the middle of the harbour you see. So we went 3 days before we got the tent. And we had no outside help only our own staff to put it up. But even counting the 3 days we worked in 10 days we were operating on 800 beds. Nearly the size of Princess Alexandra Hospital. They were tented beds and we had bits of timber on the mud where we could. The Engineers put down concrete slabs for our X-ray and for our operating theatre.

And would you believe with the 960 cubic tons of stuff when we unloaded god knows how many times it had been handled. It had come all the way from Warwick to Brisbane. From Brisbane to I think I’m not sure. I think it went to Morotai too and then to Borneo they had one breakage. A large glass beaker worth 25 cents. I mean that’s incredibly efficient. And even though we got the wrong we had no control of which ship came in or anything. Ships had all sorts of other priority cargoes

that were needed elsewhere. We were always low down on the priority. We were a 600-bed unit but we expanded to 800. Fortunately by this time casualties were fairly light and we didn’t need our 800 beds thank goodness. But you see that’s a hospital almost as big as PA [Princess Alexandra] and it was put up in 10 days and we could do any surgery that was available you know that we had the skills to do at the time

we could do with. Just to show you how efficient. I could do and did something I can’t do in Brisbane today. My glasses fell of and broke. So I went along and the optometrist he was Lieutenant checked my eye on the spot and gave me a pair and I walked out half an hour later with a pair of glasses. Which were you see I’ve got a very complex astigmatism. But what they had gone they had

taken tens of thousands or many thousands anyway of blanks to the nearest. You know each division between each part of say a stigmatism or myopia. Say myopia each grade they would have quite a few blanks already made. So that if they couldn’t get it exactly they could do fine adjustments there by grinding. And so I walked out with the best pair of glasses I have ever had in half an hour. You can’t go in and have

a refraction done and get a new pair of glasses in a half an hour. But this is what you could a mile or so from the front line. So that they were incredibly efficient.

I was a very small fish so I had to mind my P’s and Q’s.

I had about 15 people senior rank to myself on top of me.

Thank god I was out of Moreton. This unit was supposed to be going overseas. I wanted to get. There was no point in joining the army and sit round Queensland which is what I did for a lot of the time.

I

knew you’d ask me that question. I’m just trying to remember a drug that I used every day. We had very little quinine. Quinine was still most effective. We had very little quinine. We only reserved those for severe cases and I think the malignantertion sometime were black water fever. I know latterly we used Plaquenil. But the main drug we used before. We used a lot of Atebrin but the main drug we used

I and this is before chloroquine for some odd reason a hole in my memory I can’t remember it. I knew I’d be asked this and I’ve been trying to remember.

That’s all and good nursing of course. Sometimes they’d be sweating so much that here’s a bloke sitting and there’s a mattress that thick and then under the mattress in the middle is drip drip drip drip. And it was mainly good nursing yes. You’d have to.

Many died. Tremendous lot died. Yes you died of malaria.

Blowed if I know. All I know that if any of my patients died there next time I went round the bed was empty or another face in it. I don’t frankly know what funerary arrangements were made.

Well when you do medicine you can’t however attached you are to people and however devoted you are you cannot you must wrap a bit of armour plate around your heart. You can’t fret and die over every patient you lose. Otherwise you’d end up as a gibbering idiot. You have to have a little bit of armour plate around your sensitivities and don’t dwell on it. Otherwise

you’re no good as a bloody medical officer. That applies in civilian life as well as anything else and you can get tremendously upset and so on but you can’t let it interfere you don’t dwell on it. I mean that may sound callous but logically you can’t. Every bloke that dies nobody’d be practicing medicine. You’ve got to wrap that bit of armour plate whatever else you may feel about it.

This is over 60 years ago you know and I never thought about it. Well I spose I did the usual wake up.

Have a shave and a shower and get dressed. Go down to the mess and have breakfast. I’d spend all day on my ward. I had two medical wards and mainly malaria. There was a few other oddments you know somebody had the flu or somebody had you know any medical condition because I was on the medical side of it not surgical. And I’d do my ward rounds and by the time that’s finished there’s a few more admissions that I’d have to go and take a case history and full medical

examination prescribe treatment.

Well you go around and see each patient. You check on his chart. Most of them of course you know their history. You’ve seen them once or twice a day for some days and you’d have to go through check their temperature and pulse. We didn’t our laboratories were rather primitive compared with the modern ones. You didn’t have these 57

automatic magnificent tests. But we would get a few laboratory tests done. We were quite primitive really. Diagnosis in those days was a matter of the seat of your pants. You took a history. You made a careful examination. And then from that with your knowledge of medicine put all that together and come up with a

diagnosis. Which was a matter of balancing probabilities and surprisingly enough we were right most of the time. These days of course you just go and get the battery of tests at Sullivan Nicolaides [Queensland pathologists] and get the battery of test whole lot of scans and the diagnosis is made for you. And for example this back of mine nobody every examined me. In the old days the careful clinical examination was the backbone and a careful history.

Well yes because particularly in southern Queensland. Along all the Queensland coast there’s a great mass of number of ill-determined fevers which we knew very little about. In the mid-1930s Dr Derek in the middle of that isolated Q-

fever which had never been heard of before and since then of course we’ve got Barmah Forest fever and what’s that other fever? The name of a place? Can’t think of it.

Ross River yeah. And of course that left us pyrosis [heartburn] and all these things which we had great difficulty in distinguishing and diagnosing. They were always diagnostic problems trying to differentiate out of this great mass of people that came in with a

fever or quite ill and high temperature and what the hell did they have? Dengue fever was another one. But we were getting a lot of scrub typhus and all these things. Particularly when we had troops going out into the bush you ‘d have all these things and you would have to try and differentiate. And of course there’s the ever-present malaria. Cause blokes’d get over their malaria in a few weeks even if you’re not bitten again you just be

relapsing for years afterwards. Going back when I left the army I went to Repat for two years and we were still having for quite a number of years after wards the blokes back in Australia they’ve been back three and four years from New Guinea and still getting attacks of malaria. That eventually died out.

Well all we could do would be to treat them symptomatically. Just treat the symptoms and

good nursing. That’s all we had in those days.

I’ll have to go and look up the book. 60 years ago since I’ve seen a case. But again they’re mainly fever sometimes with jaundice sometimes without. They get a certain amount of haemorrhages and so on. But I’d have to go and re-read all those because once you’re out of the army and general

practice you never saw them again and I haven’t seen any since then and my detailed memory of these things I know we saw an awful lot of it but it’s hard to remember them all.

Almost nothing because somebody once said that if a person swallowed the entire contents of 1932 Pharmacopeia which is the list of every drug available it wouldn’t do them much harm.

This is an interesting point. You see it was only in my last year a few months before I qualified that the very first antibiotic came to Queensland. That was sulphanilamide. The sulphurs were the first cab off the rank. And followed quickly by M&B-6936-sulphapyridine and then followed again by the best of all of them sulphadiazine. And they were marvellous and it was while I was at Warwick that Sir Howard

Florey visited us and stayed the night with the hospital and gave several of our medical officers including me the first sample free samples he’d bought of penicillin this marvellous new drug. Which I used the following morning on a man who had a carbuncle about that size. You never see them these days. At least I haven’t. With perhaps 50 pus pouring things and he were really ill and this was in the back of his neck. So I gave him a couple a shots of penicillin and

came back and saw him next day and it had started to come in. Two or three days it just vanished like that. It was magic. Monkey magic. Never seen anything like these new drugs. Penicillin was incredible. After it took about 12 months before the staphylococcal infections built up a resistance to it and of course they’ve still got it there today and the staph is unfortunately one of our biggest problems. But this to me was monkey magic. I’d

never seen anything like it.

Well we just got what information that Sir Howard Florey gave us. You see what happened was that Fleming the co-discoverer well he was a biologist and you know the little glass Petrie dishes that they have some agar solution or

blood depending on what culture medium and he had I dunno say streptococcal I dunno what organism it was on there and next morning he comes in and there is a series of white spots with dead organisms and something had killed these organisms. So he check that what he’s got in these little pots and found there was spores of this fungus called penicillium notartum that they had they knew existed. But these seemed to have

some killing effect on bacteria which no drug had had before except the sulphurs had come out. And so he made that thing and well the research went to Florey to find out more on the medical side because Fleming wasn’t a doctor. He was a bacteriologist. So Florey carried this why he produced that. Yes the spores did kill these things. Now then of course it’s along way from that to produce something that’s injectable for a human being and have that effect. But that’s how it

started and Florey gave us the clinical data that he’d used and the stuff had been prepared and this was given by injection and that was it. But it was I was a great source of bewildered thing. You see I’d started off medicine my final years before we had any drug to treat anything. If you had a bladder infection we gave you some potassium citrate solution which merely changed the urine from

being acid to alkaline and changing the pH would kill off some bacteria. We were very primitive and we had sedatives to give people. We had drugs for anaesthetics and you know you had all sorts of complicated not very effective cough mixtures for all the rest of it. Breaking in on the subject the old physicians used to refer to pneumonia as the captain of the kings of death.

And the point about all this is that as far as I remember and I think my memory’s right and the figure. The average expectancy of life in 1939-1940 was about 39. A) because of an appalling child mortality rate. Thousands of children died every year in the state of Victoria alone from diphtheria and they of course bring the average from birth to death down. The other big thing that caused a lot of death was in the mid-40s

people you get a young well he’d be in his mid-40s. Middle aged strong tough working man as fit as a fiddle and. One bloke came to me one morning he came to the General Hospital and was admitted straight away because he was quite sick. Woke up at 7 in the morning feeling a bit off. I saw him at 9 and I reckon clinically he must have lobar pneumonia not bronco and yet I could hear nothing in his chest with a stethoscope.

So I thought well I don’t know much about this. I was only junior resident. So I got Len Walters who is a brilliant physician and got Len to check him over and Len said, “Well I agree with your diagnosis. I’m sure he’s got lobar pneumonia. But I can’t hear anything in his chest either.” So we started and filled him up with I think one of the sulphurs at that stage one of the early sulphanilamide but he was dead by 11 o’clock. Even though within two hours of the first symptoms even before any lung changes could be detected with the stethoscope we

started treatment very early but he still died. And that used to be the norm but you don’t see that now. Pneumonia used to kill off hordes of people in their early to middle age. Late middle age and that’s one of the reasons why so many people now are living into their 70’s and 80’s and 90’s. Got one old bloke in the village he’s over 100. His 100th birthday six months ago he gets up and

dances they’ve got a little square in there for dancing with his wife. And that was something unheard of in the old days. Mainly because people are now who would’ve died in childhood of diphtheria or one of these things now die in old age.

Well there were very good reports. We had nothing else

to treat them with. So this anything. You’d try anything once. Anything’s better than nothing. We had all the literature. They’d done all the experimental work and so on and they’d used it in England for a while. But as far as I know I could be wrong on this. But as far as I know the stuff that he gave us was the first penicillin to be used in Queensland which I used to the following morning. But it revolutionised life. We used it for everything of course. It worked for most things too.

Allergies were always there. I developed an allergy to penicillin myself. Though I’d never had it. Probably handling it. Bout a year or two afterwards I got something or other and was given one shot of penicillin and I had a violent urticaria you know the little rash thing there and swollen up and they gave me I think it was

largactyl that had just come on the market. The first antihistamine and that made me sleep for the next 40 hours. But that’s the only allergy that I’ve ever had just to penicillin. But I’d never had an injection for it. It was just handling it I spose. You get some on your fingers might have a cut or something.

Well at any moment of time in a big hospital like the General there were probably hundreds of highly infectious people. Now we had virtually until because penicillin I used this was after my time at the General. But this is a very interesting point that you’ve bought up by the way. Cause we had the only fight. Thing that we had to fight infection was

asepsis. In those days we were dinned into us you must scrub and once you’ve scrubbed be conscious of everything you touch and I see some of the young doctors these days and they do it to me when I go to Sullivan Nicolaides. They any of these people the girls goes she doesn’t wash her hands and she goes and sterilises or puts you know some antiseptic probably a methylated base. Then she puts on a cuff

that everybody. She goes and put on a pair of gloves. But then she’ll go and put on a highly contaminated cuff then she’ll go and having done that with her finger go and tap that up then put a needle in. Fortunately I’ve never had any infection. Had a bit of a low grade ones a couple a times. And I go to my GP to move a little carcinoma from the leg and he goes and has a perfunctory wash of hands.

Very perfunctory about 20 seconds. And pulls on a pair of gloves. Then he goes and gets a little bottle he’s gonna put the specimen in and then picks up a pen that’s been used all the time and writes the name on it. Then he goes and chops it out. I got a nasty little infection. It took many weeks to settle. But in our day you see these days they’ve had so many antibiotics oh we can give a bit of antibiotic that to me they

nobody even today on the slightest little thing the moment I wash my hands to do anything I’m so conscious of anything I touch. And we had to scrub for 5 minutes or more cause 5 minutes was the minimum time and then you’ve got to be very careful for your gloves everything you touch. And we had actually very little infection from operations apart from any infection that may have been there before we started. We had very little cross-infection. Now between every operation the

operating theatre was cleaned out. The floors were scrubbed. Every nigh the entire walls in the 10-foot high ceilings were scrubbed with Lysol by the nursing staff. These days as I’ve seen some of the wards. Wards with a bit of cigarette there and dirty old you know clothes he comes and he gives it a quick slop over and that’s it and yet we’re getting huge amount of cross infection because we didn’t. We had no

antibiotics therefore asepsis was dinned into absolutely everything. Anti-sepsis using basically the I mentioned it’s name. Carbolic and those sort of things. Carbolic acid. That’s what the nurses used. They scrubbed the ceilings in the theatre and I can’t remember any cases of infection that you could attribute to the theatre. We were so fussy about

everything you touched. If a surgeon inadvertently touched something on the way through say clothing somewhere he’d go and completely rescrub again. That was the only weapon and it worked fairly well. With very little we actually achieved I think quite a lot.

Well it didn’t. I mean

we scrubbed our hands and just usually with a washbasin but the water was changed all the time and you just scrubbed with a scrubbing brush til your skin was nearly raw. Most of the time in the ward you wouldn’t have to scrub as much as that because you’re not dealing with open wounds or open sores. If we were we scrubbed. But normally going from one patient to another if I hadn’t examined him. Sometimes you’d just have a few minutes talk from the end of bed well that was OK. But if I handled anybody

examined anybody immediately I wash my hands. I notice some of the doctors these days when I’ve been in hospital go from one person to another examining don’t worry about it. And they’ve forgotten that lesson. That’s when I’m on my pet subject. Cause we had so little infection because of prevention. Rather than trying to cure it with antibiotics once you’ve got it. I said to my orthopaedic surgeon and one of my fractures there it imploded or it

exploded the bone and a fragment of bone went backwards and was sticking into my spinal cord and he was thinking of operating and I said, “Now what do you people, what’s your level of infection.” “Oh” he said, “the last 2 cases I operated on I only got a very slight infection.” I said, “You shouldn’t bloody well have any infection in the first place.” He gives me a sickly grin. But that discipline we had to. We had no other defence.

Well I had very little to do with the VADs. They were rather low down the pecking order and the you dealt entirely with the registered nursing staff who held a Lieutenants rank. And

There’s always a few. Most of them were very nice women actually and very fine women. This is a story out of school. There was one nursing sister that I was rather attracted to. Actually she was a young sister. She would’ve only been perhaps in her mid ’20s and

she was in charge of this ward but one a the old battle axes in their mid-40’s late-40’s came up and I had no idea. I was just sitting on the other side of sisters desk just writing out my charts you see what this was all about. But she tore strips off the younger sister you see. And then she disappeared. The other younger sister could do nothing else but take it. But as she was going she muttered at the retreating back and I heard it. She was most embarrassed. In short she said was, “You really

ought to go out and get rid of your crystallised virginity.” Then she realised I’d heard that and she was very embarrassed. But I thought that was a fairly apt remark. You know we had our little dirty digs even back in those days.

Yes most of them were very dedicated people. You got a few that were lazy and not good but that’s in any cross section of the community. But I would think that in those days or any day to do nursing you’ve got to be dedicated. It’s a thankless job. Nobody says thank you. Usually low paid down the end of the scale though their skills are very high. Particularly these days. My daughter she started nursing

35 years ago I spose. She dropped out to have a family. She’s back now as a Registered Nurse in one of the Nursing Homes here but you see she a couple a years ago she goes back to University and she does a course in Gerontology nursing and got a diploma or a bit of paper something or other. But she kept bringing a lot of this stuff for me to go through and I’d wade through a lot of these articles. Some to see if they were

of interest to save wasting her time and I am surprised at how erudite and she knows a hell of a lot more about a lot a things than I ever did. But the nurses are trained more and more as doctors. In those days they merely sort of as one nurse a friend of my son’s who used to be very much in women’s lib and women’s so. And she said, “The nurses job is not to be the hand maiden of the doctor.” You see. So I of course this is how they started to help the doctor do the nursing.

So I said to her if that’s she’s not to be the hand what is her job? And I never really got a. But that’s what started off you know to assist the doctor. He would give instructions to what nursing and what injections and what tablets and drugs to be done and I found that the nursing staff some of them in the country were remarkable women. And I relied very heavily on them. Their observations I’d go round. You see they’re with the patient all day. You only do a round in the morning or sometimes you

might see them several times but then I’d be very intent and listen very carefully to what sister or matron would tell me of their observations. They were valuable bits of information. Without them I couldn’t have functioned you know. I relied heavily because they were very dedicated and most of them were very nice women. I struck a few battle axes but they were relatively not very. Mind you a friend of mine old Dr Steele who was Superintendent of Rosemount and Greenslopes

said to me once, he’d been a Professional Superintendent for about 30 years and he said, “You know,” he said, “give one woman a little bit of power after another one and do they sure put in the boot.” And there’s a grain of truth in that too. But generally speaking I’ve got the greatest respect for nursing staff. You can’t function without them and they’re very helpful. And most of them are very dedicated and very careful with patients. I’ve seen a few rough ones but not many.

The soliders? Well it was always a very friendly relation. It was a doctor patient relationship. Rank meant nothing and whether you’re treating a bloke who was a full colonel or whether you’re doing the latest

joined up private I mean you know we still had a very friendly relationship with all of them.

What was going on in?

Oh yes you’d hear all sorts of stories.

So many I didn’t they didn’t register. But very often their experience in battle and a lot a these people were wounded and

some of these wounded blokes would come into the medical ward for something to treat the infection and those sort a things and they would tell you their life in the forces. Most of them of course there was that great sense of humour. They’d always make light of it and if there was a funny side you’d see the funny side. They wouldn’t tell you the grim side. Now just one little example.

Chap his surname was Lord I think and he was a prisoner under sentence. They had a military gaol in Warwick at the time. And he came in with maybe malaria I don’t remember what he had and two guards came and sat on either side a the bed so he wouldn’t escape. And he didn’t say very much. He was a very decent sort of a bloke. I had no idea why he was in jail and I got

to know him reasonably well. And then one day the commandant for the jail came down to see me about somebody else. And I was asked, “How’s Lord going?” I said, “Alright.” He said, “Lord mentioned to me the other day that there’s no point in wasting time with two guards. He’s got no intention of escaping.” He said, “Did Lord say that?” “Yeah.” “OK,” he said, “I’ll take the guards away.” So he did that and Lord eventually when he was better went back to jail.

Talking to the CO afterwards he said, “Well, he used to be in my company when we were in the Middle East.” He said, “He was restless character.” He said, “He’s one of the best soldiers I’ve ever had.” He said, “When the battalion was pulled out of line, we’d be sitting doing nothing, Lord’d get bored and he’d go AWL [Absent Without Leave]. Then he had his mates and

his little grapevine.” He said, “And the night before the battalion was going into action Lord’d be back again.” He said, “He was a marvellous soldier. The moment we would be doing nothing he’d disappear. He’d go AWL.” He’d done that 6 or a dozen or 8 or 10 times. But he said, “He’s one of the best soldiers.” He says, “If Lord says he’s no intention” and he said, “I know him well.” He said, “I believe him.” So we got rid of the sentries which were a bloody nuisance in a hospital ward. I’m telling you falling over them all the time.

So Lord was that sort of a bloke.

I can’t recall off hand. You were either sick. In those days malingerers got a very short shrift and we had very few of them I might add because most of the people were volunteers

and you never reported sick if you could walk you know. Almost literally people would carry on with wounds after an action where they were still fighting. Instead of going to hospital you know they see the MO [Medical Officer] and go to hospital they continue fighting carrying their injuries with them. But no I can’t remember anybody being embarrassed. I mean malaria and sick you’ve got no disgrace in that and there’s nothing to be ashamed

of.

You had a few yes. Always had a few begging you to get out of this place I want to get back to the battalion. Yes you struck that every now and then.

Cope with it? Well we treated it and

I mentioned it over the phone. Now for example in Balikpapan in Borneo we had a ward or maybe two I’ve forgotten how many full of dysentery. Now what do you do with the waste? It’s highly infectious. So we had a very simple and very economical thing. You know the old copper your grandmother had? You know a steel plate around the wall and you drop this the ordinary copper that you boiled

up your clothes in and we had about 10 or a dozen of those so all the waste went into those and there was plenty of firewood of course in the tropics. That was no problem. So that they would boil there for a day or two and as your little girl on the other side she said, “What did you do with that, put it down the toilet?” I said, “Toilet? What toilet.” We were in a war zone but they just go into a slit trench. But those are the little things I found interesting because it’s something you’d never think of. We had

to think of those things of course.

In a tent. I lived in a tent for nearly three years.

That’s what everybody lived in. We didn’t carry 10-storey buildings with us.

Usually the padre. Even when I was in the hospital at Warwick

I shared it with one or other of the other medical officers. But when I was with a unit. In a battalion for example there are 2 people that are of the CO’s command but aren’t quite of and they’re attached personnel. One is the medical officer and the other is the padre so we were usually lumped together. In my term I lived with two or was it Roman Catholic priests. Then with a Church of Christ padre and several

Anglican Parsons. I’m not Roman Catholic and I’d been bought up in a Calvinistic thing where the Catholics were all dreadful people. But living with a couple of Irish Priests there I learnt a tremendous lot. I learnt a lot of what I’d been told before was quite wrong and they were mighty blokes and are very good mates of mine and I’ve entirely reviewed many of my things. It was a very interesting experience actually. Poor little Gerry Dineen. A little Irishman from County Kerry.

I’d get him in a corner and say now look your church’s view. I said you have a woman with eclampsia. She’s having a baby. Now her system will sustain herself but it won’t sustain the pregnancy. Her kidneys have had it. Her blood pressure’s 240 over 160 and you’ve the church says that you cannot term. If you terminate pregnancy you’ll cure her for the time being. The church says that

you can’t. So mother and baby invariably die. I said, “Now why does the Church do this as a Christian Church? You’re dooming the woman to death. The baby’s going to die anyway.” And he looked uncomfortable. He said, “Well Doc,” he says, “the Pope’s my boss. And I’ve got to do what he says.” He says, “I don’t really understand all these things. Come and have a drink Doc.” He’d say and off we’d go. But we were quite good mates. And the Church of Christ padre I lived with this was in the hospital actually over in Borneo.

He was a mighty bloke. Little West Australian we were very good friends.

Well every unit. Well a padre is very important particularly for the sick and dying of his flock. And a good padre now what was his name? Dennis O’Hurley. He was another Irishman and I shared a tent with him for a while. And you’d

go looking for Dennis you’d find it with the troops in a slit trench sitting in the mud playing poker with them and he was mighty. Marvellous man to have as a padre. And of course I mean he was there to give last rights if needed. Help anybody with their problems. He’d virtually well we were counsellors de-facto and up to a point and the padres were sort of perhaps rather more professional as counsellors. We had no counsellors as such. Nobody had invented them then

thank goodness. I’m not very keen on the psychology people. But

We had no particular training but by dent of practice and experience and dealing with human life and raw emotions you eventually well not all doctors had it. I think I was fortunate. I was actually turned out I think to be quite good at counselling. But I was entirely self taught and

your own observation and common sense. Common sense comes into all of this.

What sort of?

Occasionally I mean you go and you get a man whose having tremendous symptoms. He’s just got a letter that his wife’s been unfaithful to him ad he’s away at the war and she’s down in Melbourne somewhere and these are not easy things to counsel. But he’d come along sometimes and he’d want to go home get home and sort of sort this out. Which

was beyond my power to do and they’d have a talk. That didn’t happen very often but that sort of thing and a man whose sick and afraid of dying you’ve got to talk to them.

It’s a bit hard to say. It would vary entirely on the person concerned and what you thought the situation was. Sometimes you felt woefully inadequate in what you couldn’t do. A friend of mine once said. This was after the war and in general practice. He said, “If I could

give my average patient an average 10,000 a year,” he said, “I’d cure half of them.” He said, “Well I could either give them an extra 50,000 a year and a new husband or wife as he case may be,” he said, “I’d cure half my patients.” And there’s a grain of truth in that.

No I didn’t. I know that’s an important thing. But I can’t remember

anybody. There might a been one or two I can’t remember anybody talking about fear. Everybody’s afraid of course. Some blokes you’d never know it though.

Yes.

Well some of them would be quite emotional. You’ve been with a bloke and you’ve lived with him for years and you’ve fought with him and you’ve been through battle.

Particularly in an infantry battalion or in a combat unit you rely on your mates they’re part of your protection. This mateship he’s watching your back as it were. And sometimes they’d become very emotional and weepy for a little while. But I didn’t have a great deal to do with that aspect. There was only some people. We normally in the hospital we usually had padres who did do

that sort of counselling work.

How would they?

Most of them very well. Whether they were religious or not. Depended on the padre. I am theoretically Anglican and the thing that used to annoy me is that the Anglican Church sent so many totally incompatible people in as padres. They’d be very good at the old ladies

tea party. But they were hopeless with a they were totally out of their depth with the unlike the Catholics. They got crackerjack blokes you know. Real tough one a the boys with them. But some of the Anglican Parsons I struck were quite useless. They could drone on and so on but they were quite useless when it came to talking to people about their marital problems or whatever problems they were having.

When I was a boy I was bullied at school. So my father sent me along to the Artillery Barracks at Kelvin Grove. They had a warrant officer, who was one of Australia’s very best boxers. At the end of World War I he’d been runner up champion of combined Royal Navy and the British Army. He was a

welter weight. I was only 15 there and he taught me how to box. Not that I was a very apt pupil. Because vision was a little I never quite saw anything that came this side. But any rate I learnt boxing and the only people that he had there they were mainly militia men you see that were coming in. Saturday morning we held this. And there were several of them who boxed in the preliminaries at the stadium and one a these lads. I was a bit of a chubby lad and he was lean and

narrow. We were about the same weight but he was all muscle and he was three years older than I was. So I got knocked out every Saturday morning you see. This bloke he was quite a good friend of mine he decent bloke called McLeod and would you believe he comes into my hands overseas as a patient you see. He was a warrant officer and he looked at me he said, “Doc, you’re not gonna remember and hold it against me these times I knocked you out, are you?” And I said, “No.” Anyway this is really down to trivia.

Had no car. A long way to walk.

At the hospital yeah.

They didn’t tell us when. We were just

going overseas. We had no idea where or didn’t know to the last minute actually. What actually happened was that apparently there was another campaign just where I’ve never heard and our AGH was going and they closed us down in Warwick and then the other campaign that we were getting ready for was cancelled. So we were at a lose end. We were all dressed up and nowhere to go you see. What they did I dunno

what they did with our ORs but with all the medical officers we were farmed out everywhere there was a vacancy. Sometimes I’d go and act as RMO [Regimental Medical Officer] to some unit I can’t remember how many or what they were. Somebody wants a week a couple a weeks holiday and we’d fill in there. Other times I was sent out to do civil locums. I did a locum for a doctor at Clifton in the Darling Downs and then I went and was a month or two acting Superintendent

of Nambour Hospital because Jimmy Trotter who held the job he was an old mate of mine, I went through with him, he wanted a holiday. And I was sent at one stage and I was sued over this 40 or 50 years later. Examined a man for a discharge at Redbank and a routine the examination and 40 50 years later he sued me.

Well very briefly I don’t even remember the man. I don’t even remember being at Redbank. But this bloke had been a farm labourer and was an exempt occupation. Told lies to the army that he was a labourer not a farm labourer so he was excepted and went over to Bougainville and didn’t like it. And he was after there a short while and decided he better get out of this. So he applied to go back

to, said he shouldn’t be here because he’s in a protected occupation. So he applied and was granted a discharge. Now everybody being discharged from the army must have a medical examination. So I must’ve gone to Redbank. I have no recollection. It might’ve been just a day. Any rate I recorded his blood pressure as being 140 over 88 and I passed him. He was 23 years of age. Now blood pressure is a funny thing. For the 20-odd years that I did the

examination of recruits everyday you get some kid whose blood pressure’d be 200 and something or other and you know he’s perfectly OK. He’s just all nervous. Medical examinations does this to people. So I ignored that. At that particular time the upper limit of blood pressure was 150. We’ve subsequently dropped that to 140. But with his blood pressure at 140 over 88 and over the age of 21 as far as his blood pressure’s concerned we would accept him

today as a pilot in the air force. An undersea diver and all these other things that are the top you see that’s the standard. Anyway 6 or seven years later he gets married and before getting married they said they both better have a medical examination and his blood pressure was found to be raised. What it was I was never given the figure. Any rate he applied to Repat and Repat refused so that this you know blood pressure what ever it was was nothing to do with

war service. And then in the 1980’s under the freedom of information he gets his full Repat file which includes this report of mine you see. And his own local doctor in Bowen I know about his man because my eldest son was living in Bowen at that time looked at this and he gave a report that says I was grossly negligent that I had not informed him that his blood pressure was dangerously high. We’d accept

him in the army today with that blood pressure. Even though 50 60 years on we’ve learnt a lot that we didn’t know then. So his doctor did that so his lawyer goes to court. But he waited for a couple of years. Apparently there’s a statue of limitations after the got the information that he would be able to. You don’t want all this garbage do you? Anyway it was knocked back because

he didn’t apply within the prescribed time of getting the freedom of information. So he goes to court again and Mr Justice De Jersey waves that so he can then do that and apparently the Commonwealth wasn’t going to argue the fact that some 45 years had elapsed and he was still alive. It hadn’t killed him you know cut him off in his prime or something. But the crown solicitor came and saw me. He came and visited me

while I was working in the Recruiting Centre and I said, “But that’s crazy.” I said, “Here are our instructions to this very day that we will accept him for anything with that blood pressure. That is a normal blood pressure.” And if I was concerned at 140 is the upper limit of normal we still take them at upper 140. I didn’t bother to do this because there’s no reason. These days of course anybody whose blood pressure spose a kid comes in and he’s 142 or more we’ll get him to lie down for an hour and

take it and 9 times out of 10 it’s come down to 125 over 75 or something like that. But this actually was all ready to go to court and the crown solicitor had been feeding information pointing out that we go the top cardiologist in Dr O’Shea at the time in Brisbane and got his opinion that you know he had a normal blood pressure when he was discharged. Any rate we were all set to go to court

in Mackay and taking Bob O’Shea up with us and then the crown solicitor said, “We’ve settled out of court.” I said, “You’ve paid the bastard? And he said, “Yes.” And I said ‘But they haven’t a case to.” “Well,” he said, “we fed them the information and they realised that they his lawyers that they haven’t got a case so we said we offered them a deal. We’d pay him out.” Because it was going to cost $150,000 for a 3 day court case in Mackay and which of course they

were going to lose but the Commonwealth Government will have to pay that. So he said, “We offered them a much smaller sum of money.” How much they refused to tell me and so that they’re saving the cost of this trial you see. I was very annoyed because of my reputation, this bloke had you know stated I’d been grossly negligent which was all a put up job actually. Anyway they settled out of court and that was that. But it was a a bit of a shock to be sued 45 years

later. This is the way the legal system’s got these days. Anyway that’s beside the point. That really shouldn’t go in.

But however I was just on the point that we were sent all over the place. Wherever anybody was short all our medical officers some of our senior specialists I think went in and relieved at various civilian and army hospitals. We did civil locums and so on. And that went on for a while. I can’t remember how long until

we suddenly decided we were being embarked. We had no idea where to. We went up to Townsville. We saw very depressing but interesting sight at Townsville. The wharfies [waterside workers] had been on strike for some days and there was a lot of ships you know with food and ammunition all the supplies needed for our blokes in New Guinea but the wharfies go on strike. God knows what about and then the strike started I think,

but the ship the convoy was due to go and there’s one ship had to be be another half an hour to finish the loading. wharfies said, “No. We knock off at five.” Refused to do it. The convoy couldn’t wait so then this ship had to go and take it’s chance. Wasn’t loaded til the next day so it had to go as an orphan duck on it’s own. The Japs subs were out operating. And a very loyal people the wharfie. Then they went on strike and the day we arrived to go on ship were the first day the wharfies were back at work. And I

have never didn’t know there was so many Military Police in the Australian Army. They were there in there dozens if not hundreds to keep our blokes from eating the wharfies alive you see. Any rate we went on a US Army transport ship Sea Barb. She was about 11,000 ton ship built specially as a troop carrier which she would carry I think it was 6,000 men she’d carry on an 11,000-ton ship. No

it was 4,000 men. There were 600 men to a hold that’s right. Every hold you know the huge hold of a ship with steel pipes’d go up and out of that would be the pipe berths. You know just the pipe ring and the bit of canvas to sleep on and that was seven high. 600 men to a hold that’s right. 4,000 I think it was 4,000 we had onboard. And it was fast. You’d do 22 knots which was very rare for a small to medium sized

merchantman which it was. An American army transport and they had what appeared to be two 3-inch guns at the bow and one 5-inch which would be equivalent an roughly to our old 6-inch at the stern so she was quite heavily armed. She could do 20-odd knots. But of course she just had the usual thin plating. So every

night and every morning we had to stand to at dawn and dusk and had all our 3 or 4,000 men on deck because if there was a torpedo attack. I know we did drills. Now these were all seasoned troops. You know many years in service. Well-disciplined. Well-organised. With a warrant officer on every gang plank. There were only two gang ways out of each hold. It still took 20-minutes to get 600 men and that was a very good effort cause these were all disciplined troops. Nobody

blocking everybody couldn’t go any faster. Still take 20-minutes to get 600 men out of each hold. So that’s why we had to. A lot a people slept on deck. I was in a room bout the size of that little sound cabinet to there and that size and we had 18 officers in this. Being the most junior I was in the very top one. I had that much space. Had to slide in sideways and I had a claxon horn alongside my ear. Every time it went off I’d go

up and hit my head on the ceiling. But we went over we went round New Guinea. Round the north-eastern side into Biak Harbour which is a little island north of New Guinea we stayed there for a little while. Why I don’t know. And then we went on west to Morotai. And Morotai was a very strange place. Probably many people have told you about Morotai. There’s an island a mountain massive here and a little

low spit there. We held the low spit and the Japs held the rest of the island. But as the Japs were short on ammo and short on food they were not considered much of a threat. And the line of demarcation was a row of 44-gallon drums and I walked along the beach one day came to the last one which is between the Jap held territory and ours and here on it was a sentry. American Negro sentry sitting on a 44-gallon drum slumped right forward sound asleep. Then they

wanted a convalescent depot and they ran out of room at the bottom end so they went and put that on the Jap side. They tell me the Japs used to come in every night and watch the TV and hide, climb the trees and so on. Whether that’s true or not. I wouldn’t be surprised. But it was a strange place was Morotai. Then after a while I don’t remember how long we were there. We were just waiting we had no job particularly to do and there were enough troops to keep the Japs where they were. Then we went on and we went on

an LST. Do you know what an LST? Landing Ship Tanks. 4,000-tons. They’re designed to carry the heaviest of army tanks in their tank hold. But these particular ones we were on there’s a flotilla of 11 of them. All US Navy. Not US Navy Reserve but US Navy. And my first experience except for the Sea Barb. That was US Navy too but there were 11 of these.

11 or 9 in this flotilla? They’re low squat things and they had a little bridge it was only about that high above the deck. Huge long fore-deck you know even hundreds of feet long and in the centre was a vast tank hold. The one we were on was full of earth-moving bulldozers and that sort of thing and on each side there would be a petition and a row of bunks. Just a single row of bunks. And being an officer I was fortunate

enough to get one of these. That was between the hull and the internal wall of the dividing it from the tank hold. This was very interesting experience for me because this was US Navy. We drove our trucks and jeeps out of the Morotai mud onto the deck there was mud coated everywhere and I thought as soon as they cleared port they would be there with hoses and hose down. But no that stayed for the whole I think it was 11 days we stayed on that.

And we were on the flagship there and this was Commander Linthican. Funny how you remember an odd name. US Navy. Not Navy Reserve in charge he had the same pair a pants on for the whole 11 days with two fly buttons missing. But these things had about 20-odd guns all around the side. Light anti-aircraft stuff. Oerlikon type of gun. I don’t know what guns they were and after we’d been at sea 2 or 3 days nobody’d been near these guns.

Now with these guns you’ve got to have them if they’re heavily greased against corrosion you’ve got to clean them out before you use them. They’re not really for instant use. If they’re ready for instant use they tend to rust very quickly and on the Sea Barb the American crews worked those everyday. They were traversing they were greasing they were using them ready for instant action. So I thought what’s gonna happen if anybody wants to use this in a hurry? I was sitting on an ammunition block and it had an ordinary hasp and staple, no padlock. So out of

curiosity I thought what sort of ammo does this thing? Any rate I went to move it. You’d need a crow bar. The thing was completely rusted on. There was no way you could use it in a hurry. So I began to wonder. We went between the Straits of Macassar between Celebes to the south which was Jap-held and Borneo which was Jap-held in the north. We joined up with a big convoy. We made a convoy of about 40-odd ships and the US destroyers dashing all over place and

you see our LSTs were slow ships. They were not fast at all so we probably slowed the convoy down. But we were terribly worried about air because Japs had airfields on both sides. They never attacked us. We’d found out afterwards they’d run out of aviation fuel. We were very lucky. But the night we get into Balikpapan Harbour and we just dropped the pick when there was an air raid alarm. Well you should a seen these Yanks. What had happened our blokes that

we had roughly three times as many soldiers onboard as places to sleep so they slept on deck under trucks under Jeeps and wherever they could find somewhere. And as it rains every night in the tropics they’d tied their groundsheets with a bootlace to a say a Jeep here and tied the other one to one of these gun mountings you see. All expecting of course that the warrant officer’d come along and tear hell out of them to get these things not tied

up on the guns. But they didn’t worry. Any rate I remember two Yanks going past me said, “Say Bud, what gun do I go to?” and they were falling over these booby traps that our blokes their blankets tied up with bootlaces. The end of 10 minutes they succeeded in getting a gun manned. Fortunately we weren’t the target. I dunno whether the target was a false alarm or whether they were interested in bombing some other part and they didn’t touch the harbour. I was quite relieved to get off this boat I might add. Then we went on and were put

the Engineers were still bulldozing this thing and we were put there and we as medical officers had nothing to do. The Casualty Clearing Station which is a smaller type of hospital were coping quite adequately. Casualties at that stage fortunately were relatively light. So we had nothing to do so I went to have a look round this place and I can’t remember if it was this hill we were on or whether it was the next door to one but I went down a gully or two and I’d been told that the 18th Brigade boys had gone through. They’d had the

battle the day before we got there and that they’d cleaned the Japs out of these foxholes. So I though I’d never seen a Jap foxhole I’d go and have a look. It was still partly on fire and smouldering. So I went through and found it a very interesting experience looking through it. Then the sudden though struck me I wonder if they got everybody. If there’s not somebody lying in wait for me. I didn’t have my pistol with me did I. But however there wasn’t anything. This is just the silly thought one gets you know. I thought, “God aren’t I a bloody idiot.”

I forgot to bring me pistol. Coming back to my pistol as medical officers we’re non-combatants and we do not carry arms according to the Geneva Convention but seeing that the Japs violated the convention all sorts of things were altered. I was issued with a Red Cross arm band formally issued and my [(UNCLEAR)] service paybook and so on and signed for and was ordered never

ever to wear it because the Japs picked out in any battalion any unit anybody with a Red Cross arm band was number one target. See if you can go and kill enough of the medical staff you’ve got nobody to treat units and the morale of the unit goes way down if they’ve got no medical back up. And I was also issued this pistol which is quite contrary to Geneva Convention. I’ve still got the thing in my little pay book you know rangement pistol. I was issued with this thing. A 38 Smith &Wesson.

Handle was too big for my small hand. And had a faulty firing pin and misfired just not fire at all every third or fourth shot and I find that was very off-putting. I was very upset because I only got a third class marksman with a pistol. Whereas I’d always been a first class marksmen with a rifle and I was a bit insulted about this but there was not much I could do about it. I reckoned that the thing was useless. If I ever had to use it I’d do more damage by throwing it than trying to pull the trigger.

Any rate the following day we still had nothing to do. We were waiting for our tents to come and there was not a damn thing they could do. Nobody wanted us and a Jeep whizzes in with an Australian Engineer Lieutenant, he spotted my colour patch, “Ah,” he said, “2/12th AGH. When are the nurses coming?” I said, “They’re not. We’re so close to the front line we’ll be just operating with male orderlies until things have calmed down they think it’s safe enough for them to come.” Because we’d only been

there a day or two when the Japs infiltrated through and snipers and they shot some of our hospital staff. A sergeant I think he was just going to his shower you know in our little complex. So we were close enough to be uncomfortable. Anyway coming back to the Engineer Lieutenant we had a talk about the nurses. Then he wanted his CO had given him a map and I wasn’t sure whether you looked at it this way that way or that way. Just a pen-drawn map of some alleged ammo

dump. And I said, “Ours or theirs?” He said, “I don’t know.” I said, “Do you know where this is? He said, “No, I’ve been sent to find it. Want to come for a ride Doc?” So I said, “Alright. Didn’t even go and tell my own CO that I was leaving. Didn’t even think we’d be going anywhere where we shouldn’t have. And I didn’t even again I didn’t put on this bloody pistol you see. So we went along the remains of a Dutch road for about half a mile and took a turn to the left. He hadn’t looked at this area and then all of a sudden the hell broke loose and there’s a lot a

noise and found we were in amongst one of our 25-pounder batteries. They were firing that way. So we thought well this is not a good place to look for it. So we turned and went back. Took the next road to the left and then there were a lot of shots that were firing and everything else and here were our infantry crouching from tree to tree and running from tree to tree and there were bullets everywhere. So we thought, “Well we’d better get the hell out of here.” Then we went along and went down the third road. This is when I say a road this was just a track

with kunai grass about that high just a wheel track through that. So we went through and we were going fairly slowly because it was a hell of a track and all of a sudden the penny dropped. Everything was dead quiet. He looked at me and I looked at him and we suddenly realised I was doing a visualisation of where we’d been. We’d blundered through the lines and we were on the wrong side of the line you see. So you’ve no idea how carefully without roaring that motor he

had to back and fill and push into the kunai grass for and aft. Took about 6 goes and then we crawled along with the motor just idling along. Then there were bullets everywhere. Now I didn’t know whether they’d found us and were firing at us. They were close enough. You could hear them zipping through the car. Or whether they were unders and overs from the Jap on this side and our blokes on this side. But we were in the middle of this cross fire. So we only had that for 2 or 3-minutes and we got the hell out of that and said phew how the hell why we were so bloody stupid to go

there. So then he dropped me back to my unit and I looked at the pistol lying in the bed and thought, “Well gee. He did have a 303 in the back there.” So I checked that and had a magazine that had 5 rounds in it and I thought, “Well that won’t last long. Sure I can use it if I’ve got to be an infantryman.” But however it all worked out and I though afterwards I thought how easy it is to get these stupid things and get into serious well it could a been a very serious position. I think we were bloody lucky.

I think the kunai grass saved us from vision everywhere else. But however that was my little bit of excitement. Then of course the hospital few days after that we were operating and so I didn’t have any more little adventures.

They just come in at night. You see we didn’t have a continuous line of men. We had a group here and a group there and

a battalion there and something else and they were in rough touch with each other but we didn’t have troops standing locked arms everywhere. They could slip through in various places. So I don’t know whether the hospital whether they were thinking it was something different. We have no idea why they picked us. I suspect they were looking for other units they could do more damage. But they did manage to shoot one of our sergeants.

Well we’re only I

believe it was 30,000 or 35,000 troops we had and we were all tight on a 3-mile perimeter. I’m not sure. Those were the figures we were told at the time but thinking afterwards. We had the 7th Division. A division’s normally not nearly that but we had a lot a extra. We had a lot of extra troops. We had armoured regiments. We had ack-ack [anti-aircraft] regiments. We had cav [cavalry], commandos

a whole lot of extra engineers. We had a tank regiment. It was about you know 2 to 3 divisions really in numbers. It was a big force we put in. And but I dunno we were told 35,000 and I often wonder whether that was correct or not. Then sorry

Then I wasn’t at the hospital very long actually when I was shifted. Whether this was before or after the fighting finished. I don’t remember the order of things. But I was sent from the hospital to the 2/2nd Casualty Clearing Station and they weren’t doing much at this stage when we got there. Maybe the war was. I don’t remember the war had actually finished. The time the war finished.

Exhaled. We were glad. At long bloody last. I’d put in so much time and effort and so on it was long last we were going to get out. I didn’t join the army to sit round southern Queensland. We were a little bit gung-ho in those days and there was a certain amount of adventure about all this. There was no point in joining the army and sitting in a uniform round southern Queensland and doing nothing when there’s a lot of work to be done elsewhere. We should a been

sent overseas. Now you see Noel Sampson, Vic’s brother. Noel and I sat beside each other on the same bench going through recruiting depot. He was given a 30-QX 37,000 number and immediately went up to New Guinea because his brother had asked for him. He was the only one that did. And I was told they couldn’t give me a QX number. They were busy that day apply when I got to my unit. So I got to my unit and

I only had a staff sergeant there looking after the office he put in and it took about 3 or 4 weeks before my QX came and my QX when it did came was a 57,000-number. Whereas he that went through the same day got a 37,000-number. They go on blocks you see and it’s always been a very sore point with me all my life. Very trivial point but these things were important.

Well you see people who joined the army

two years after I did were given a lower number than I was. It was just an indication of how much service you’d had you see. It’s a matter of a bit of pride. You see my wife had a QFX number of 43,000 and mine was 57,000. But that’s pure trivia. May give an attitude of my mind cause we were very conscious of army. We were very conscious of the ethos and so on of being in the Australian Army very proud of it

and we’re there and we’re there to do a job and we weren’t given the opportunity to do a job.

On the Sea Barb everything was superbly well organised and feeding for thousands of troops was done very very well. We had rump steak, whacko! We never got that anywhere in the Australian Army. And

they were all very very well fed and they were all pretty fat too. Our blokes were all thin and lean. And but the Sea Barb was good a very efficiently run ship. The LSTs were very sloppy. I mean 10-minutes to get a gun. If we’d been the target we’d a been blown out of the water a dozen times before they’d of got a shot off. They never cleaned their guns. They didn’t even bother getting rid of the muck on the deck. They didn’t even bother stopping our

blokes from tying you know ground sheets to gun mountings. It was a funny business. They were most cavalier. A great contrast to me was about 3 days after I was there I’m not sure why HMAS Gascoyne came in. She was a river class frigate. She had done a remarkable job. She’d gone to Balikpapan Harbour and the river there was a broad muddy river which she had no charts and had no idea where the sand backs were. Jap

headquarters they had too far inland out of the range of our 25-pounders artillery. They were the heaviest artillery we had. So the Gascoyne went up with a very slow. I mean the whole defence of the frigate destroyer type of thing is speed and manoeuvrability. Now you can’t go fast and you can’t manoeuvre and he had no charts. Had to do everything on a lead line and the seat of his pants which Lieutenant Peel did remarkably well. He went up and the next thing that happened of course that the Japs knew was

several salvos from 4.7 guns they’re big guns on the frigates. 4.7’s into their headquarters did a lot a damage I believe and he came back. But it would’ve only taken one small battery of 18 25 pounder on the shore the ship couldn’t get out of the road. But fortunately the Japs weren’t expecting them to try the river because it hadn’t been charted. How he got there and back without going aground I don’t know. Superb seaman. But I had to go onboard for something or other. I think I treated one not

too sure why but it was concerning a patient anyway. So I went up. Met there by the officer of the day. Who was I, he asked, and what was my business? Told him and so I came on board. And was taken to the ward room and introduced to the Lieutenant Peel. And we were then under instructions I saw this bloke this patient I had to see and went. But the impression when I got on this was an RAN warship the anchor there had a

I spose it was a bar through it. But at an instance notice you can hit it with a sledgehammer and drop the whole anchor. You didn’t have to wind if you had to go in a hurry. Every gun was mounted. What am I talking about? Was manned and these blokes were quietly going round their job. Doing their job servicing maintaining all alert. Everything was alert. They’re I think they had a radar dome going around and the whole ship the engines were there and ready for instant

action. The deck was so clean you could a eaten your breakfast off it and the contrast between the Royal Australian Navy and the US Navy as evidenced by their LSTs was the contrast was just most remarkable.

Well we got the as I said before

our X-ray equipment our pathology equipment our surgical theatre stuff all arrived off one ship and sat in the mud and we had to wait 3 days until the next ship came and our tent came. We couldn’t do anything til we had put up our tents. So we put up our tents and within 10 days we had well we had 200 more beds. They were officially a 600-bed unit but we’d often expand if need be. You’d just run up more tents and put in more beds

you know that was simple. But we had our operating theatre fully equipped everything there instruments all ready. We had our X-rays blokes everything was ready there and we started to accept patients. They came in a trickle to start with. But we were fully functional within 10 days which is a tremendous effort when you think of it.

Our commanding officer was Max Rees. R-E-E-S. He’s

the chap I told you before that had been he was a full Colonel and had been in charge of the Medical Training Corps Camp in Victoria but the bloke his equivalent to an adjutant really but we called him a Registrar was Wilf Laws. But he was the bloke that did the day by day organisation of all the nuts and bolts and the nitty gritty and he did a marvellous job Wilf

Laws.

Exactly the same as we did in Brisbane. We went through that before. Can’t remember what the particular malaria drugs we were using. We switched from several of them. As the new ones came on we’d move on. But mainly malaria and any other illness. Some people’d come in pneumonia they’d get penicillin or sulphanilamides. Came in in various infected things.

We there was you know a bloke’d come in with a gashed leg or put an axe into a foot. There was all that usual sort of stuff to do.

Well yes we did get them but I didn’t see them because I was running the medical wards. They went into the surgical. Occasionally I might be involved in the sort of reception area if I happened to be on duty for some reason and you’d get them coming in. But I saw very very little of battle casualties

because you know we had a medical division and a surgical division. And only the favoured few got into the operating theatre and I had quite a few people who were senior to me so I had took whatever job was given to me. It didn’t worry me much it was just you did what you could. But I didn’t see much in the way of battle casualty you know. I was never in the operating theatre.

Well by the time I got there I’ve remembered. It was most of it’s function the hospital had taken over it’s function. It must’ve been after the war was over because we were converted into a prisoner of war reception camp. We had a large number of Australians who were still prisoners of war in Java. I didn’t know that. I thought they were all in Malaya or had been sent to Japan. And these blokes were at Surabaya or Batavia rather

now I think that’s Jakarta. Anyway there was a squadron of Dutch Mitchells based at Batavia and they flew across the straits to our airport at Sepinggang so we would go and meet these blokes. We were the first Australians they’d seen apart from fellow prisoners in 3 and a half years. For the first couple two or three days you couldn’t stop them talking. Then they all shut up and you couldn’t persuade them to talk. But we checked them all out medically. We gave them uniforms and

we gave them their ribbons and we fed them up and so we actually were not doing the proper job of a CCS [Casualty Clearing Station]. We were virtually just a reception area for prisoner of war and one very interesting thing. They all had their heads the Japs had shaved their heads you see and some weeks and a short while had elapsed and some of the hair was starting to grow a bit. But we needed

more accommodation because they were coming in bigger numbers than we’d been advised. So we had a Japanese prisoner of war working party with two 18th Battalion boys as guards and they were just chopping down the kunai grass you know which is about this high and then we ran up. It was very very simple to run these things up. You just had push posts which went into the ground and then the flooring went in and the joust timbers for the walls

and then we just ran sisal the bitumised paper. You know that bitumised paper black paper stuff? It was quite thick and quite tough stuff and just got a roll and rolled that around and that’s your wall. Anyway the Japs were going very slowly. And the prisoners of war they came in that we’d got the night before off the plane. They were standing with great interest this reversal of role. Any rate one bloke just disappeared and went into the bush and cut himself

off a length of lawyer cane about that long as thick as your little finger. Sort of thing we used to be whacked with at school when we were kids. And we don’t’ know what he did we’ve no idea what his motivation was. All of a sudden I just happened to be walking past and watching this thing and he went in and the biggest bloke who apparently was the most senior officer. Big fat Jap he gave him two strokes only with the cane across this blokes bottom you see. And yelled something in Japanese. What we’ve no idea.

Then all of a sudden they stopped and looked and they looked at all these blokes and realised that they’re our returned prisoners of war. Well this was you know the old Keystone Cops with the old movies in the 1920’s where they’d accelerate it and everybody going about. This actually happened. And we were locking. You’d never seen kunai be cut quite so fast. Any rate about half an hour of this and they were due to knock off for lunch. So the 18 Battalion guard went along and indicated to the Japs stop and have lunch. They wouldn’t

listen. They just kept going. So they had to go and find this bloke that had given the two swipes with the cane he had to come back and give them an order in Japanese. They wouldn’t take any orders from anybody but him before they’d knock off for lunch. Then I was only a very sort time with the CCS and then I went out to the battalion.

Yeah it was quite a strange. But we didn’t think much of it of course but thinking

back afterwards the Japs must’ve got a shock when they realised here’s these blokes all with close shaved hair and they suddenly realised who they were. What this chap yelled out we have no idea. Not Jap but chap. Our bloke that. Two swipes only with the cane which would be the merest less than a drop in a bucket is what he had received in 3 and a half years. That’s all they did 2 swipes and he was happy. He’d got his revenge.

You were called out to see people. Saw your new admissions. All the inevitable paper warfare which was enormous. I had to have full medical records which Repat relies on these days. But I was going to mention one little thing about VP Day [Victory in the Pacific] which came out of the blue. We didn’t know that the Japs were going to drop an atom bomb on Hiroshima. And

everybody went mad. I think I was in the greatest danger I’ve ever been in my life. We had 35,000 troops if that figures correct. Everybody they fired into the air there were bullets everywhere. Ships in the harbour let go star shells. We were all in a tight area and I think I was in the greatest danger I’ve ever been. There were bullets everywhere. Nobody seemed to be hit. No our hospital was on a rise and there’s the harbour and the square mile or two of wrecked refinery.

Very depressing sight and the remains of a Dutch bitumen road it wasn’t a very wide road went past us here and we were up I spose 20, 30 maybe 40-feet on a bit of a knoll the hospital was on top and we were sitting there having a few drinks. Our officers mess the one and only Dutch house that had survived. It was a concrete block type of a place we converted to our mess and while we were having a few beers watching

two Americans. Very few Americans in Balikpapan. We had a Company of CBs [Confined to Barracks] and their main job was controlling the harbour. Ships in and out and that sort of thing. But two Yanks were drunk, having a duel with Very pistols you know those things that send up lights? The red and blue lights and white lights. They were having a duel with this about from here to that bathroom door away. Fortunately they were so bloody drunk they didn’t hit anything. We were concerned elevation

got too high we might be in. But that was VP night.

What was?

Everybody went mad. The bloody thing had been going for six years. Thank god it’s finished. We were delirious. It came unexpectedly you see. We were fighting still right in the middle of it. Anyway what happened we all came into the hospital all the medical officers to you know to have our little party

and Andy Eckland. Andy and I go back when to he was 5 and I was 4. He was always a year in front of me. Our parents were friends and we were boyhood. When I was in the Dutton Park Cub Pack he was my sixer and we had a life long friendship. He died 2 or three years ago. We did a lot of sailing together. We were both mad on boats and sailing. And he was RMO [Regimental Medical Officer] to 2/25th Battalion. Any rate that night I

normally don’t drink a great bit but everybody got drunk that night I’m telling you. If there’d been six fully alert they could’ve walked in and taken over the whole division we were all drunk. But I drank a bottle of COr-10 we called. Corio whiskey, Australian whiskey is the rawest most dreadful stuff on earth and I had a most the the only once and only time in my life I’ve been drunk and had a hangover. Andy went through a

bottle of gin. We shared. He was somewhere he was visiting. I was visiting also and poor Ray Vincent I shared a tent with him about 2 in the morning when I got in and got into the you know the little low stretcher the mosquito net. The tent the stretcher and the mosquito net all did that and I was sick. Fell very ashamed at poor Ray. However at 6 in the morning a Jeep arrived. This was Andy’s Jeep. Apparently for some reason I can’t to this day remember why but I

had been detailed for some duty to go with Andy over to his battalion. I’d never been in that area. That was a different Brigade you see. Any rate so we get into this Jeep and here am I with this grand daddy of a hangover and after about only half a mile of the Dutch bitumen road there went off on a section I had not been before and this had a true corduroy road. A lot of people now have a corrugated road they call it corduroy. But a corduroy road is where you lay logs side by

side and through a swamp you see. And I’m in this I dunno whether you’ve ever driven in a wartime Jeep. There springing was not left much to be desired. And here am I in the back with a grand daddy of headaches and feeling very sorry for myself and with this hangover. So we were bouncing up and down on these bloody logs. They weren’t all exactly the same size either. Then we went through and we got a smell. I’ve never in all my life smelt anything like this. And I said to Andy what’s this. He said, “That’s

a couple a hundred tonnes of rotten Japanese rice. A rice dump.” Don’t know whether you’ve. You’ve probably never smelt a few a hundred tons of rice that’s gone bad. Now we’re in the jungle here and swamp and there was no movement of air at all so you went for quite a distance before you got away from this smell. We went through three of these and then towards the end we got a bit of clear air and then there’s another bad smell. Not as bad as the rice but it was still a very bad smell. And I said Andy you live in a bloody smelly place. What’s that? And he looked round he said

“Tuesday,” this’d be a couple a days before he said, “we killed a half a dozen Japs there.” He said, “The boys haven’t got around to burying them yet.” So when we got to his lines I said where’s your tent. This with my hangover. So whatever job I was supposed to do I can’t remember. But I spent the rest of the day in his stretcher in his tent recovering from my hangover. He was just about as bad as I was I might add. I remember that day very vividly.

Everybody got

mad. Everybody was still firing every weapon machine guns, Howitzers, star ships in the harbour everything. They just put on a great pyrotechnics display all night or most of the night.

The star shells? They’re very pretty. The were designed like a huge light in the sky to light up an area you know and we had very pistols which did exactly the same job on an infinitely smaller scale. And

everybody went mad. We never ever thought this war would end you know it’d been going for six years. I didn’t have six years of it of course but some a lot a the blokes did.

Well this was the problem. We had a ration which was 1 bottle of beer per person perhaps per week. Very much perhaps and where the mess had got this few bottles of

spirits. Spiritss normally were virtually unknown. Where they got this from I don’t know. But we did have a refrigerator and how we got that refrigerator’s an interesting story. That was part of the Dutch house and it wasn’t working. We couldn’t get it to work. So some of the Yanks CB’s heard of us there and they wanted it so we gave it to them. They apparently they had some mechanics there that could fix it and or did we have

two? I know they gave us some steak. We never saw steak. So we had steak and where all the grog came from I’m not too sure. I wasn’t looking after the mess. I was no longer with them as a mess. We’d always been very very short of grog and we did have a fridge and I dunno whether this was the Dutchman’s fridge. No we gave that to the CB’s. But talking about food

our food was very monotonous. When the place was bombed before the invasion there was several hundred oil tanks. This is the biggest refinery in the Indies. It was one of the worlds big oil refineries you see. And the big worry was that the Dutch had left this in working order. All they did was destroy the cracking pans. Cracking for aviation fuel. But the rest of it produced

all the petrol you wanted you see. And so the air force mainly American I think went in and strafed and bombed the place and everything looked like an oil tank they blasted. Because they were worried there’s a range of low hills behind the beach these were all in that and they were afraid the Japs would just have to run pipes a few hundred yards into the sea and when our blokes came just turn the oil on and put a match to it you see put the sea on fire. They didn’t do that but that was the

fear. So therefore everything that looked like a tank was bombed so they couldn’t do that. This included the water tanks. And at this stage it took them a while to get them going so our water was very suspect. It was a tremendous lot of amebiasis there amoebic dysentery and all sorts of nasties in the water. So it was double chlorinated. Instead of putting the ordinary amount of chlorine you

doubled it. Normally we used a detasting solution which was I think sodium thiosulphate some big word I can’t remember now and put that in which would take the taste of the thing out. But if you had two buckets of water alongside one was contaminated and one was chlorinated you could easily mistake it. So the orders came that we were not to detaste. Now whether you’ve ever tried the usual thing we had

millions of tons so it seemed of potato powder and making mashed potato with double chlorinated sometimes triple chlorinated water that was not detested have a concoction that was virtually inedible. But that’s just a few memories of the place. But as far as the daily routine I mean all I did was go in and looked after my patients and that was

it. There were a few bombing raids while we were there.

Well the main one that sticks in my mind was one I didn’t know I had. Got up one morning and talking at breakfast they were talking about the raid last night. Well there was always noise or artillery not far from us and they never stopped firing and I said, “What raid?” And they said, “We had a raid last night. A bomb fell only a hundred yards or so ago.” And I said, “Bunkum! You’re pullin’ me leg.” He said, “Come out and have a look.” And sure enough there’s a bomb crater wasn’t there the

night before. So then I believed them but I slept through the whole lot. The place was noise all the time you see. You get a certain attitude of mine. Bombing compared with other places of war of course was relatively slight you know but still they were there.

Machine guns firing. You see we were very very close to the front line there and you’d hear machine guns. You’d hear artillery going. There was always some noise going.

Got to the stage it was part of the back ground noise and you didn’t notice it.

I was in medical ward all the time yeah. Good old malaria and dysentery. I ended the war an expert on malaria and dysentery and don’t think I knew anything about anything else. Or at least so it seemed.

Well anything. Well you’d always get some of these ill-defined fevers. They were always with us. But you see I had a backup. Stan Bradfield was a Major and a very good astute physician. Norm Sherwood is a Lieutenant Colonel and he was in charge of our medical division and he was a very good physician. So I had two specialist physicians I could always call on because let’s face it I was very junior

and very inexperienced. And Stan Bradfield is the son of the man who designed the Dr J. J. C. Bradfield who designed Sydney Harbour Bridge he was his son. He was a nice bloke Stan. Quiet bloke but a good physician.

Well they were much the same as everywhere else we went and a lot a skin rashes and we had no dermatologist. And

you know we had a lot of fungal infections and those sort of things. But there’s nothing that stands out. It’s just the normal routine of stuff. Much the same as I’d been seeing in Australia. Can’t think of anything unusual about that. But you see the spleen rate amongst the natives was very high and the children all had pot bellies all had huge because there was a tremendously heavy infestation of malaria and I remember when the war was

over I was able to get round a look at a bit of the place went down to the village of Sambodja a few miles north of Balikpapan and here was the usual Dutch road and by this time I’d be half bitumen. There was just little strips of it here and there and it was raised and down here there was a ditch. Houses all along and as you went along there’s a ditch. There’d be one bloke using it as the toilet you see for both urine and faeces. It was all public. There was no didn’t worry very much.

And then you went down and there’s some kid getting a bucket of water to take in to use and so that the hygiene and sanitation was non-existent in these people. So that you know any water was suspect particularly for waterborne disease. Particularly dysentery. Bacillary dysentery. Amoebic dysentery and some of these other things. But this was a very mundane pedestrian thing. I wasn’t doing anything exciting at all. I was treating mainly malaria and dysentery

a lot of skin infections and my memories are not very clear of all this. It was just mundane ordinary day stuff. I didn’t do anything very spectacular.

None at all.

No. As soon as we could do that the army. That’s another story. The army went and rounded

up all the villagers put them in a compound and ran barbed wire around to keep them in and to keep our blokes out and had Military Police sentries. So we never saw them.

Well a) to get them out of the road of fighting and b) I don’t know. They apparently afraid they would come and steal some of our stuff. I remember when I was with the Battalion the 2IC [second in command]

was talking to me and he spotted a native going through our lines. Which they were allowed to do at this stage. The war was over carrying a 303 rifle which he took from him. When they checked the thing they found this had been an air force thing. The soldier you never ever lose your rifle. But the air force weren’t so fussy and it had been stolen by this bloke. So I dunno whether they’re afraid of them stealing cause we couldn’t have enough men to guard every cook house and everything else.

And it was also a matter of disease.

What sort of thing?

Maths?

Mess. M-E-S-S?

We had our officers’ mess. The Sergeants had their mess and the Ors’ had their mess.

As usual in any army unit. And we ate in different places. Had different messes. I think we probably had a communal cooking area that supplied all three messes. Same as any other army unit. We weren’t any different in that respect.

Overcrowded. Too many of them. Because of all the specialists you see.

No as I said we had this Dutch house which we used as a mess. One room

was a bar and the other was a dining room. It was a big area. It was quite a big house actually.

Officers come and go from other units. We’d occasionally be invited and go to another unit. That was after the war stopped. While the war was going there was no social intercourse or.

We just stayed with your own mess. You’d have a beer or two in the evening and if you weren’t on duty and you’d sit and have a game of cards or play poker or something.

I only played poker and this Dennis O’Hurley this Catholic Priest he was a marvellous card player. Taught me how to play a game called Option Solo. Gee it cost me a lot of money to learn but when I went to another

unit there they said, “Do you play Option Solo Doc?” and I said, “Yeah.” And they were mere babes in arms. They hadn’t heard of what he called the tricks of the trade and I got all me money back with a lot of interest. But I played a lot of Option Solo. Played a lot of Option Bridge. And some poker. I was never overly keen on poker. Never liked gambling much but I enjoyed playing cards. You’d occasionally get a book from the library. The Red Cross had a little library there.

Whatever you liked as a matter of fact the first book I got out. The first book I’d ever heard I’d never heard of Sir Arthur Bryant’s before and read these things. Don’t know whether you’ve read his histories or not. To me they’re the most magnificent histories. They’re not historical novels they’re pure history. The Years of Endurance and the Years of Victory cover the Napoleonic wars and I had this one the Years of Endurance made such an impression on

me. The most beautiful English and beautifully written and completely accurate. Fascinating book I’ve got it there. And then after that I went and bought every I must have 20 books of Sir Arthur Bryant’s there everything’s. So that’s what the Red Cross Library did to me. But I think they had books to cater all tastes you know. People donated books. It wasn’t very big but it was better than nothing.

Letters a course were always your lifeline to sanity. We got letters I’ve forgotten how often. We got them through fairly regularly. I don’t think there’d ever a week would go by that you didn’t mail. Because we had a good service. We had the navy and the ships to our back ground. We were on a port. It’s not as though we were hundreds of miles inland.

Well we couldn’t say anything about the war. You were censored and you had to give your letter to somebody a senior officer. Part of my job was to censor the letters of the ORs and my patients. You every letter going out had to be checked in case they were giving away military information. In which case you’d blank those out with a great black pen and I had to get somebody or other. I’ve forgotten who censored my letters and so on. But

Anything that we had a rough guideline page what wasn’t allowed. You know you couldn’t weren’t allowed to mentioned the name of any unit and you weren’t allowed to mention the number of people or what the unit was doing or how the war was going. All this was hush hush and secret.

Sometimes they’d dump 50

bloody letters in front a me. I’d have to wade through everybody’s handwriting.

Sometimes you had to go through. Most of them knew what they couldn’t put in.

Most embarrassing. Hated reading other peoples letters.

Well you’re just

careful what you say.

News? Well this was just local gossip. Family news and personal things. That was all.

Well you don’t even think about it do you? You’re going away to a war and it was no point in

thinking about the babies you’d left behind. Just hope you see him again that’s all. But I’m not conscious about any of these. You ask a lot of questions along these lines and I don’t really remember any particular emotions about it. I don’t think yeah sure I missed my wife and my son and we certainly it wasn’t til after the war was over and I was. A long time after the war was over before I was demobilised that we were able to come to Brisbane and able to get house which I’m

telling you was anything but easy. The post-war part where tens of thousands of men coming home and all looking for houses. They were hard to find. That’s another story.

Leave what leave? Where would you go? Nowhere to go no. Just accumulated leave til you got home. I mean you were all on duty

7 days a week. I mean there was no holidays you know there was a war going on very close to us I might add.

Only when I went to the CCS. They were on the banks of the Straits of Macassar. My tent was on the sand dune and I could just walk across and have a swim there. I did a bit of sailing there too. Somebody or other had found some Japs sawn timber made a flat bottomed

dinghy found a square pole that would do as a mast and somebody else found some Japanese bails of rough calico. You know the old raw calico you used to get? So we made a sail. It wasn’t a very efficient sail but I had quite a lot a fun sailing this thing round. Don’t know who owned it.

Mile or two down the coast and a mile or two up the coast. I didn’t know the currents of the place but it sailed reasonably well.

I was quite pleased one day when a big native prau thing with two hulls on it trading boat quite a bit boat. I spose it’d be the length of this house it went past and it was barely faster than we were in this little with a calico sail. So I felt quite proud of myself. Tried to race him. He did beat me.

Yes. When I went to the battalion they had a

Platoon of men. No not a Platoon about half a Platoon about 6 or 8 men as a fishing party under the charge of a man called Polish name Markoski or some name like that he came from Maryborough he was a professional fisherman in Maryborough before he joined up. And they had a dinghy I don’t know whether it was the same one as I’d had. No it must’ve been another one and they used to row they got a net and you never asked any questions how the

battalion got that net. So they would row out. This net was about half a mile long I’ve never seen such a net in all my life. They must’ve joined a lot together. So we went out and I went out the first time I didn’t go out any other times. Cause we went through to water the water was about as far as this and to take that net out. That’s right we didn’t have a dinghy. That’s why a dozen or two of us walked this net out. You’d walk on some sand and then there’d be a

hollow and then there was mud an inch or two of mud in that and you’d squelch and things would crawl under your feet and when they pulled the net in I didn’t go next time. There were about 6 or 8 sharks about 6-feet long. Not big ones but big enough to take a chunk of piece off your foot or ankle. And stingrays with bloody they were bigger than our stingrays. Looked the same species but they had spikes that long. One a the blokes was bought into me in the greatest agony I’ve ever seen any man a stingray spike. He was kicking them out of the road and the spike

went in the sole of his foot and came out about 6-inches this side. And of course these have got all sorts of chemical poisons on them you know the dart from these things. And he came into my surgery I took one look at him and filled him up with morphia and sent him on. I didn’t attempt to remove it. Certainly had to be done in the theatre. Just gave him morphia and even half a grain of morphia double the normal dose didn’t even slow his pain down. He did quite well out of it. He came back to the unit eventually this was the battalion. But then he there’s interesting story.

It was an absolutely deserted beach. Not a sole you think. Not a person within a thousand miles until we pull the net in. We had a lot of sharks and stingrays and we got lot a fish we get here. Mullet whiting bream. Not so much whiting. Quite a few bream and we got all these fish in and as soon as we pulled the net in natives appeared from everywhere. And of course we weren’t interested in eating shark and

stingray so we gave them all those and somebody who could speak some of the language said that they told them that we were mad. We were giving them the best fish. They didn’t think much of the mullet and bream. But we were able to get enough fish to feed a Company per day. They had a Jeep and trailer and they’d fill this up. We didn’t have any ice but it wasn’t very far back to the battalion headquarters. We’d leave em there with a tank of fresh water and food and they

lived on the bank and they fished every day and they fed a full Company with fish which was a great relief to our diet. But that’s I didn’t do any fishing there were no fishing lines to be had. I didn’t do any line fishing.

No. It was made very clear that no questions were to be asked about that.

Well there were all sorts of possibilities. I wasn’t sure where. Whether they pinched it from another battalion.

Inter-battalion thieving was not entirely unknown. And probably Japanese some how where they got this that I asked in the mess where they got it and shush shush. You don’t ask that question. So I didn’t ask it anymore. But an interesting story with the battalion. These are all insignificant snippets. A young at this stage all the units were being broken up and the

2/10th Battalion was disbanded while I was with them. They were finally formally broken. Anyway so I was the last regimental medical officer they had. But you see units were being broken down and the troops left were then put with this unit or that unit or some other unit. We were there for 6 months because there were no ships to bring us home you see. And an officer young Lieutenant came into our mess from

somewhere else. I think it might’ve been the 9th Battalion our sister battalion. And he had a strange tale to tell. It’s a bit like the boys own annual sort a story. He was with the 2/9th Battalion when it landed I dunno where he went to afterwards and there was a number of old Indonesian civilians on the beach being caught in the crossfire and they were a nuisance to the CO of the battalion. They’re everywhere you went you fell over these people and it was a danger to them. So he got his most junior

Lieutenant and gave him you know a Platoon a men and to get these and some food. “Get these people out of the place. Get them fed. Get them clothed but get them the hell out of here.” So this young officer was a very pleasant and nice young man who was very courteous to everybody. He was bought up we were all bought up in a rather different way in those days. Anyway so these were old ladies. Most of them were elderly men and elderly women and they were in rags. They’d been 3 and a half years under Jap domination. He didn’t know who they were

or anything else but he was a very pleasant courteous young man. He was very nice to these people and he got them well out of the firing line fed them gave them some clothes. Where he got that scrounged I don’t know and looked after them. Any rate as it turned out one of these old ladies was the mother of the reigning Sultan of Balikpapan Pappin who’d don’t know how she got there but all the fighting Japanese she’d been separated from her son and she told her son about this marvellous young Australian officer how

wonderful he’d been to her. He’d saved her life and done this that and the other. When the fighting finished the Sultan whose mother had told him the story wrote a letter to General Wootton who was our General Officer Commanding the 7th Division and asked if this young officer could be given leave to become his guest for a couple of weeks. Well the fighting was over there so permission was readily given and this man was treated. He had his summer palace 70 miles inland up in the hills you know away

from the humidity and the mosquitoes. Most of the Sultans had that and he was treated to right royal splendour. Now when he went now this is not a story because I’ve actually witnessed this handful. He gave him a double handful of gems. Diamonds. Rubies. Emerald. Amethysts. A few other less barrels and some were cut some were uncut. None of them were mounted but he gave. I have seen this double handful and gave it to the young officer and was

very apologetic that he couldn’t have any of them set for him because his personal goldsmith who was a Hindu was in the village compound in Balikpapan. They’d be separated you see. But he gave him a letter to give to the Hindu. So when this bloke I think it was before he actually came to our battalion in his previous unit he was able to get a permit and went in there. Saw the Indian goldsmith and found out he had a lot of articles for sale and asked him to I think he

wanted 4 or 5 of these rubies set into rings for his fiancé you see. So then after it’d be ready in a fortnight. So the fortnight went up and he tried to get in and new rules from Division nobody was allowed in the compound. So he saw the CO. I think it even went as far as Divisional headquarters. No you can’t get in. Here was he with all his jewellery there you see. He was in a right state. Any rate we were having breakfast when this happened. I was sitting next to John Greeve who was a Company Commander

we shared a tent and he was a captain and he John Greeve said, “Hang on a moment.” and disappeared to our tent and came back. He had 10 days before been given a work permit showing Captain Greeve and party had about 10 or a dozen men to do some job. Didn’t specify how many. It just wrote “and party” and they hadn’t put a date on it and when they went the sentry didn’t

take it from him as he should’ve. So John went and found the dirty old shirt that hadn’t been washed and produced this out. So he said, “I dunno whether it’s going to work but we’ll give it a go. Want to come Doc?” and I said, “Yeah I’ll come.” I’d never been into the village and then we heard there was stuff for sale. Well I had no money. We carried no money with us. You did everything, buy your drinks and cigarettes, and that sort of thing in the mess and that went on a chit you see and came out of your pay book. But John Greeve somehow or other had some gold. He was able lend me

seven guilders. So we went in and the Indian goldsmith was very friendly and his wife came along. This is the reason I never drink tea by the way. She said, “Would you like tea?” Yes you had to be polite. So she handed me a tumbler. An old tumbler about that size that was about half a inch thick with about 50 or 80 cracks right through it and with green mould growing out through the cracks. You see they had nothing. There’s nowhere you can go

and buy another one. And god knows what tea it was. But she had about six tablespoons of sugar in it you see. And I had to drink the lot. You had to be polite under these circumstances and I’ve never really liked tea. I hardly ever drink tea ever since. That’s my favourite story why I don’t drink tea. But I was able to. This bloke got his jewels mounted. They were beautifully done too and this goldsmith did. The Indonesian women wear a sari and they had three

butterfly badges that were filigree. They had a large one there. A chain a very fine chain of gold. A medium one there and a small one down about the thigh region. And I’d loved to have bought one of those but I didn’t have quite enough money and all I could afford to buy with my seven guilders was a watch band. It was so heavy of gold that your hand went down with it. Crude deliberately crude a lot of his work was deliberately crude and very effective. He had a

bracelet which I couldn’t afford to buy of a serpent with about three coils and it came up and the head with the eyes were diamonds and studded with jewels all the way and it was solid heavy Borneo gold. This one I got was just a plain simple articulated thing with little chucks I spose about that by about that all riveted with jointed together which I bought and gave my wife a watch and put this gold band. It’s a beautiful thing. Pure gold. None of this

so many carrots and the damn thing was stolen from me but however that’s beside the point. And then we got out alright without any trouble so that was our little adventure into the village. But I’ve seen this double handful. Some of them I don’t know what they were. Some of them were semi-precious. But most of them were precious.

Native style of huts they built. They just ran their huts up you know with any sort of

palm leaves and kunai grass and that sort of thing. They were in absolute poverty. They’d been for 3 and a half years under Japanese rule. He’d hidden some of his jewellery before the war and the Japs couldn’t find it. Now he was trying to get some money together and he was selling this jewellery. But if only I’d had some money.

That’s some decision from somebody in headquarters. God knows why.

We had a big problem with our blokes getting in and there was a lot of venereal disease. The Japs had been there for 3 and a half years. I didn’t look after the venereal disease ward at the hospital. John Worth my mate did that but he was telling me that he had had 500 men. A battalion had been sent down to Bandjermasin to you know take over from the Japanese

and then one of the blokes even the most careful blokes. The girls were all very excited and they’d just climb into your tent so they told me and climb into bed with you you see. And I think he had had 500 cases of gonorrhoea from the one battalion. So this is one of the reason why they ran barbed wire and round there. Well the blokes had had 5-odd years of war and still no prospect of going home. And we normally they had training and so on but you see we’d stopped training. The war was over there’s no point in training anymore.

I know the first contingent to the local brothel used to go past my RAP [Regimental Aid Post] about 8 o’clock every morning.

Well this is husband prostituting his wife. He’d got out of the compound somehow and he went into the hills and built up a quick little hut and he took outside and collected the money you see. And so eventually I was doing a short arm parade at least twice three

times a week.

I never found a case of venereal disease on my inspections would you believe. But in between they were trickling in with gonorrhoea you see. Never struck any syphilis fortunately.

Penicillin. Monkey magic. One shot of penicillin and you’d. I had one bloke who went to the same woman and came back with gonorrhoea. We treated him.

He went to the same woman the following week and got another dose and came back and we treated that. Then he came back with the third dose so we decided that we’d have to do something about it. We weren’t going to keep wasting time and penicillin if he keeps going back to the same infected woman.

No it wasn’t our particular job. At other places in the Middle East their medical officer in the battalion would look after the women in the local regimental brothel and would treat them

as best he could. Cause at that stage they didn’t have penicillin but we did. That was a marvellous. You’d go over night before the little gonococcus got resistant to penicillin. Any rate this is all inconsequential.

We issued them with condoms. There was any thousands of them in the RAP they’d just come and ask for them they’d take them. I think

most many of them did use it but others didn’t want to for one reason or another.

He just had the one hut there but she really infected quite a number of our blokes and I never see. Somewhere in the bush somewhere. Any rate what’s the next question?

Not to me but a lot amongst themselves yeah. The usual.

I’m blowed if I know. They were so trivial and not particularly interesting to me I haven’t recorded any of them. The usual line of dirty jokes of course.

On medical matters yes. But nobody ever tried to deny they’d got venereal disease or where they got it. There was not much point I spose. But it wasn’t a matter of confiding. They’d just report in with a pungent discharge and that was it you know.

Well put it this way I wasn’t with the battalion long. I hadn’t been through action with them and I hadn’t had a chance to build up a rapport but as medical officer often they would come and talk to him when they couldn’t come and talk to anybody else. But at this stage I mean

they were out of the line there was no fighting the war was over. And I spose somebody might’ve come occasionally to talk about problems. I don’t recall.

Frustrating. You’ve no idea how frustrating it was. But at one stage Lord Louis Mountbatten came to visit and it was the finest speech I have ever heard. And I’ll tell you this is an interesting thing. We had a brigade parade of the 2/9th Battalion, 2/10th Battalion, and the 2/12th Battalion and over here was a dais. So we’d been got there

two hours early and by this time it was about 11 o’clock. In the jungle. In summertime. Mid-summer and 70 miles below the equator you see. It was bloody hot to put it mildly and the troops came there and eventually Mountbatten arrives climbs up the dais and we’re there rigid stock still putting on a Brigade Parade you see. And our blokes were very proud of themselves. They were real soldiers real soldiers. They put on a remarkable show.

Then Mountbatten said, “Come. Come closer. I want to talk to you all.” So they stood stock still and three times he said that before they got the message. And then they all rushed forward you see. Now as I was in the middle of the battalion and standing in the front with all the other officers I only had to go about 6 feet and I was only about one or two row behind. I was looking at him about just about where the top of that lantern is if you can see on his dais. The most handsome man I’ve even seen in my life. Remarkable man.

Tall fine looking man. And he started off saying that when the war was over he was suddenly told that we came under his command. And he didn’t never heard of us before but it was up to him to get us home. He started off in the vernaculars. He must’ve somebody must’ve coached him in the vernaculars. He said, “I hear you blokes are whingeing because you’re still here?” He

said, “Well,” he said, “blame me. I’m the bloke that’s responsible.” This is the way he’s talked to an Australian audience. Not in the Queens English that he normally spoke. And so he pointed out that he didn’t know anything about this and this was dumped on him and he just had no shipping and so that’s why we were waiting there. But then he gave a resume of the fight in Burma, the war in Burma and with a few whimsical digs at Whitehall and it was you could hear a pin drop.

Everybody was fascinated. He’s a superb orator and he told a wonderful story and it was the best. I would say I’ve heard many good orators but he would beat the lot. And when he’d finished, if he had said, “Well righto boys, let’s declare war again.” then hell, everybody would’ve followed him. As we’re trudging back a mile or two to barracks from this square in the jungle where we had this thing the digs in the ranks behind me they were all talking and chattering. And one bloke said, “That bloke

Mountbatten is bloody good.” He said, “I wish he’d be here,” he said, “I’d like to come and listen to him again tomorrow.” When a really browned-off Australian digger would go through those circumstances march through the jungle and all the temperature and listen to him again it must’ve been bloody good. But he made a tremendous impression. A remarkable man was Mountbatten.

Manner?

Very friendly. Friendly to everybody and

most great men are of course. He was so far up the scale so far up the social ladder you didn’t have to be rude to people. He was just his normal self. I know I’ve struck senior officers just because a little rank they get very rude but not so to people like Mountbatten.

Well the Japs had had 2 or 3 weeks to get some more food in and though they were lean only a couple had their ribs sticking out. The others they’d been fed up and Red Cross parcels when the war was over and the Japs realised they’d surrendered they produced Red Cross parcels that had never been delivered over the three years. So they had a bit of nourishment before we got them. We fed them up. We only had them for 3 or 4 days before we got Australian aircraft to fly them back home.

Well we medically check them and I’m not sure whether we checked everybody but most of them. And then we fed them and we gave them brand new uniforms and we issued them with 1939-45 Stars and the Pacific Star and all those sort of medals they’d missed out on. We had a stock there to give them and it was mainly a matter of feeding them. Anybody that needed. I can’t recall actually treating. Some of the other medical

officers may have had somebody to treat. But these blokes were generally in good health at this stage.

Received what food?

Oh yes they told us that. They’d been well fed the moment the war finished.

Their experiences in prisoner of war and then after that. A lot a these blokes speaking to them after the

war you take most prisoners of war won’t talk to you about their experiences. But these blokes for the first 3 days seeing fellow Australians not in barbed wire they just couldn’t stop them talking.

The usual horrible things about the barbaric treatment the Japs gave them.

Well we were aware

about a lot a these things. This was just more stories to confirm the same old thing. No particular emotion. We didn’t like the Jap much anyway.

About 3 days and then they shut up. Couldn’t get em to talk about anything. That was most of them. Not every one of them of course. I’m making sweeping statements.

It was unusual yes. Different batches were all the same. See we’d get a plane load at a time. And then next day we’d get another next following day you’d get another plane load. Usually late afternoon.

I’ve no idea.

I’ve no idea. Their psyche. I think there’s a well I’m guessing and I’m

wildly guessing. It’s just a thought that comes to mind. They’d been a prisoner of war for a long time which is a most humiliating experience and when they first see us you know our mates and so on they all chatted and then I think the sort of reality came. I’m only guessing. I have no idea. I didn’t psychoanalyse them. Even if I could I don’t think I’m capable of doing it.

Whatever subject they wanted to talk you’d talk to them. Talk, like which is the best whiskey or which is the best racehorse and whose gonna win the cricket or whatever topic of conversation they’d bring. They all had different interests. Like you get a dozen blokes here you’ll find a dozen blokes will have a dozen different interests.

We’d just chatted that was it.

We didn’t do anything to cry on their shoulder and say you know you’ve had a dreadful time or anything. We avoided that. We let them bring that up. We wouldn’t bring that up.

No I don’t. Apart from any of the ones that I medically examined. There was a medical form to fill in. I filled those in. Otherwise I didn’t write about anything else.

Any?

I was trying to remember about that. I don’t remember treating much at all actually. Some of the other boys might’ve had a few to treat. I think there were a few ulcers still not healed. But most of them the ones we got were in reasonably good health. But that’s what we were there to roughly screen them. I think anybody that was sick would’ve immediately gone to the AGH which I had left.

That’s right. Well every one of them had a medical

examination. Very quick run over just to make sure there was nothing that should be treated here and that they were fit enough to go all the long way back to Australia by plane.

Just an ordinary straight out quick medical examination. Listen to their heart. You take their blood pressure. Check their urine. You’d strip them and examine their whole skin or if there’s any unhealed wounds or whatever. And you’d examine their tummy. Make sure their

spleen wasn’t enlarged. Which it was in a number of instances but they were well enough to go home. And make sure they’ve got no lumps. Enlarged glands in the groin. Just the usual routine sort of quick rough quick scan we’d go over.

Malaria. Enlarged spleens are very common in malaria. Big danger of course the slightest bump’ll

rupture and it can kill you unless you can get an operation done in a hurry. Enlarged spleen. A very fragile and friable is a malarial spleen rather.

Well he’s got an enlarged spleen otherwise he’s quite healthy you’d treat his malaria and hope that when the malaria was gone the spleen would start shrinking up a bit. If he ruptured it well of course it’s a rushed trip to the

theatre to stop the bleeding.

No never. Thank goodness.

I think they had their own medical staff and after they surrendered I’ve no idea. Apart from this working party of Japs there I had no

idea where they were or what happened or what arrangements. I just don’t know. It is quite conceivable we might’ve put em in bed in hospital for something if needed. We looked after them quite well.

I think we’ve covered just about everything.

Well just eventually they decided at long last they decided they’d.

Troops had been going home by the tens of thousands but they kept every medical officer there. They wouldn’t release them. So eventually they decided it’s about time they did so about 5 or 6 of us went home on an American ship. The USS Stamford Victory and I think it was six of us went home in one hit. Cause this was January 1946 the war had been over 4 months of 5 months then.

Well can you imagine? You’re coming home after all that bloody jungle and swamp and it was a very uninteresting place to be and at last coming home to my family.

Quite uneventful.

The USS Stamford Victory also built as a troop ship and she bought us home. I remember one of my air force corporals when I was in the Recruiting Centre was going crook about he had been to Vietnam and how he came home and nobody made a fuss of him and they spat on him which is indefensible. But as I sort of thought he said, “You blokes came back as heroes.”

Well the war had been over for many months and there’d been hundreds of fruit ships coming back. The first might a got all the welcome but I’m not complaining but I’ve never thought about it in fact. Didn’t expect anything else. Ship pulled into Pinkenba there’s a knot of about half a dozen or 10 people there and I could see yes my wife was there to meet the ship. I didn’t have chance to do anything but wave to her and go on the back of a 5-ton truck. Just had to stand all the way in the back. There was no you know no sort of limousine. There was certainly

no ticker-tape parade or anything else. Just dumped in the back of a 5-tonne truck and carted off to Enoggera. But however that’s beside the point. So I was there for some months doing medical examinations prior to enlistment. Then I eventually went left the army was discharged and went to work for Repat for two years partly at Rosemount and partly at Greenslopes. And then after that I went up to

Kingaroy was full time Superintendent. The first they’d had a part time Superintendent before but now it was a full time Superintendent. And this is the time I hadn’t quite realised what I was in for running a country hospital. Didn’t bit naive I didn’t realise all these things so I had to teach myself how to be a surgeon. Things went very well generally. And then after a while in Kingaroy I went to Wondai which has a I was Superintendent

of a hospital. It was a fair size hospital actually. Wondai was only a little town of 1,250 people at that time but it had a hospital and it was the tail that wagged the dog. The hospital covered a district of 11 to 12,000-people which I did on my own part time. Part time only as far as the pay was concerned. Because they giving you the right of private practice so therefore even though you put in far more than normal hours in

the public hospital section you didn’t get paid for that. Because they allowed you the right of private practice they dropped the pay substantially you see. You supposed to make it up in other ways. But there again I was working 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. Cause it’s a huge population. I mean in Brisbane they tell me there’s an average one doctor per 400 people and those are GPs and anything looks important you send away to somebody else. But I mean here I was looking

after 11,000-odd. Doing all surgery. All obstetrics all everything. Nobody to refer to. There’s only me. I had to give my own anaesthetics there as well as do the surgery. And so I had that for some years. Then I went to Hervey Bay where I stayed 11 years. I just went into private practice. I tried to keep my hard one surgical skills together and go and do a few operations at Maryborough hospital. And then one day I’d confined a lady

and just got home and sister rings up and says, “Oh doctor, will you come up quickly. Baby so and so’s gone blue and stopped breathing.” So I asked her to put me onto John Graft the Superintendent at Maryborough so I told him. The baby’s not going stopped breathing and wait for me to drive 26 miles you see. So he had a look at the child and it was alright but I realised that I’d have to give all this up because remote-control obstetrics and surgery was just no good. Any rate I was very busy at Hervey Bay.

I was there 1one years. Did all sorts of things. Then I decided by this time I wanted getting tired of working these long hours so I thought I’d get a 9 to 5 government job to give me more time with my children. They didn’t see much of me. I was always in a tearing hurry and a bad temper. And so we came down to Brisbane and got a job at quarantine. I could tell you a lot of interesting things happens to a quarantine medical officer in the port of Brisbane. Or it did to me at that stage but we’re a bit short of time.

So then I got the job at the Workers Compensation Board which I had for another 12 years. I’d only been in Brisbane a short time when the army got onto me and I came back from the reserve list onto the active list. Mainly did cadet camps medical officer for cadet camps. It was the most soulless unthankless job that you could ever imagine. Sometimes these kids had never been away from home or an army camp and they’re used to

have a quaint mixture of condensed milk and coco cola and that used to make them very sick. Took me quite a while to work out what the hell was causing this. But that was that favourite. But yes every time you’d look out your RAP tent there’d be a long line of kids in great coats and the conga line never ended you know. Most of them were just homesick and wanted

home. But however I did that for a number of years. And then they retired me at the age of 55 I went on the retired list. Retired from the Workers Compensation crowd when I was 60. That was five years later. And then got this job as I mentioned before examining recruits for the army, navy, air force which I did for the next 22 years. Twenty-two and a half years. Up til I was 82 and a half so I’ve sort of been connected with the

services one way or another for a long time. The only hobby was boat building and boats and sailing. I’m only going a short distance.

These here. These are some pictures of the boat. It’s still down Manly Bay’s I built my son.

That might be an advantage. Sick and tired of my face

all day.

Yes she is a lovely boat. Built that from absolutely from scratch. That boat did 30,000 kilometres across the Pacific going to just south of Hawaii was his furthest distance. These are all much the same anyway. But

She’s a lovely boat. Beautiful design.

Bill Lofter that drew out her lines full size on the floor and from that I made the mould and made the boat. (interruption) Those photos were only taken a few months ago the boat’s still down there. He’s painting it and doing it up to sell it. So that’s about it.

It was tremendous. Well I just saw her. I didn’t get within 50 yards of her of course. A quick wave

and blowing a kiss and that was it.

Well my young son at this stage of course he was over a year old and he had never seen me before. Well he had but he didn’t remember it. Here was a strange man came along and he was most unhappy. That of course was very common. Eventually things settled down very quickly. In a week or so of course he got used to the new

routine.

Must the same as I’d done in the AGH. We were treating the wreckage of war. There was still a tremendous lot of malaria. There was a tremendous lot of. This is where I did do some operative surgery. I was offsider to Phil MacIndoe who was Australia’s top plastic surgeon. And also to Tom Stubbs-Brown in

the Orthopaedic side about 6 or 12 months. About 12 months between the two and there was a tremendous lot of reconstruction. People with you know gun shot wound ankles of the joints that were stiff and we had to go through and do reparative surgery. All sorts of there was a lot of. Actually did a lot of surgery or assisted with a lot of surgery there. That helped me in the bush. But still that was orthopaedic and plastic surgeons.

And when I get in the bush and have to do caesareans that was a different story. But however that worked out quite well. But it was quite interesting in Repat for a couple of years there.

No George McDonald. George went through in my year actually. He was one of the very few psychiatrists in those days but George did do psychiatry and he looked after all of these. We’d just refer em along to

George. I think whether he had another psychiatrist coming in part time to help him or not I don’t know. But he coped with a lot on his own.

All these were wounds you’d treat the normal way. You’d do a debridement which you’d clean up mutilated tissue and tissue that’s devitalised and deprived of blood supply. You get back to good

clean tissue. You remove foreign bodies where you can find them. If necessary leave a drain in if you think there’s going to be infection you’ve got to leave somewhere for it to drain instead of forming an abscess. If it’s clean enough and you’re lucky enough well you sew everything up layer by layer and try and restore the normal anatomy. I mean the same principals applied all the time. But when it came to the orthopaedic surgeon Tom Stubbs-Brown we were doing all sorts of things like bone grafts and things to correct abnormalities and correct

deformities and that was a rather different ballgame.

To me yes. Particularly working with Phil MacIndoe on the plastic surgery. I’d never had anything to do with that and that was fascinating. I learnt a lot from Phil.

Well plastic surgery was in it’s infancy in those days. The Australian Army had three plastic surgery units or facio- maxillary units.

Dave Officer Brown came out of one of one. I’ve forgotten who came out of the other and Phil MacIndoe was a major who commanded the third one but then he carried on. He was not in the army at this stage. This was all Repat but he carried on doing that there. He left Brisbane the best facial plastic surgeon in Australia. He left Brisbane because he couldn’t earn a living. Nobody can afford the fees and he’s all done in public hospitals and public hospitals paid him a mere pittance.

You know the government was always everything on the cheap. The cheap. They paid which he did as sort of a good citizen. But eventually he just said to me he said, “Frank, I can’t make a living in Brisbane.” And so Queensland loses one of the best plastic surgeons of all time. Nobody wants to pay for it.

Yeah there were a lot of people you know particularly air force people who’d been badly burnt you know when their engine

machine went on fire and a lot of army people of course that had had gunshot wounds and severe deformities and so on. We had a lot of this reparation repair work going on and you know taking bone from here to reconstitute a shattered jaw bone. And we’d take bone from the fibula and we’d do all sorts of things. But he did remarkable work. But it’s slow tedious work. Operation after operation after operation.

I was assisting him yes. He’d let me do some of the little bits here and there. But no I learnt a lot of Phil MacIndoe.

Well as I said once before I was an expert in malaria and dysentery and knew bugger all about anything else. At least that’s the way it seemed to

me.

No.

I do have a small disability pension for hearing loss yes.

Because I don’t to this day know how or why I was there. At Cowan Cowan the 6-inch naval gun there it was in a concrete completely enclosed with concrete case. You know concrete about that bloody

thick and inside the breech of the gun of course and these things here were huge charge of high explosive went into this as I say it’s a massive gun. The gun would be from here to the kitchen sink long. They were big guns. 6-inch doesn’t sound very big but that’s the diameter. But anyway I was in there when they were doing a practice shoot and there was no. We didn’t know anything about deafness in those days and the

sides were all just raw concrete. Nothing to absorb sound and when that thing. We had no ear muffs in those days and that damn thing went on and my ears rang for weeks. And it was only about 20 years later that I started to have say, “I beg your pardon. I beg your pardon.” Saw an Ear Nose and Throatalist and he decided that and this was a his decision but also I’d done a huge amount of

rifle shooting both in cadets and in Cowan I did a lot of rifle shooting. But between the lot I probably had an ear that was rather more sensitive than others. But however he was quite adamant. I’d had no other noise experience. This was due a noise-induced deafness you see and the only noise I’d been

subject to was during the war. But they accepted it. I thought they’d argue but they didn’t they accepted it.

I had a wonderful holiday there.

Real sharp end.

I don’t know. We never thought about responsibility. This is a job and you did it. We were never conscious of being in a great responsibility or not. Fortunately there was

they were pretty healthy and nothing much happened and I didn’t have much to do. It was marvellous after the Brisbane General cause I could get some sleep.

I think that the story’s in there. In the early ‘40s the panic stricken days and they started to try and build up a fortress there somebody went and dug a whole lot of holes riveted them. It’s all sand the island’s all

sand you see. Riveted it with native timber posts. Covered it all over and nobody took a mud map of where these things had been put. And here some three years afterwards a bloke’d be walking down and he’d suddenly disappear into a pit. And it’d be full of ammo. And they got the ordinance out and they checked it out and they condemned it and it was supposed to be taken out to sea to be dumped. But the CO decided that it was still working. It was just alright I mean it was a technicality that decided

that it was you know it’d be dangerous to use but we used it on the. We had a rough and ready rifle range there and so the troops were training and it was used you know we got our money’s worth to train. But they had an officers versus Sergeants shooting match every weekend. And nobody bothered me. I was a mere medical officer. So any rate one day they were one short. I spose they thought even if I got one shot on the target it’d be better than being one totally short.

So they said, “Have you ever fired a rifle, Doc?” I said, “Yep. And they said, “Well would you like to come and have a shot?” And I said, “OK.” And very fortunately I don’t know how I could’ve been so fortunate but I got a rifle that was correctly zeroed. Normally you’ve got to get a rifle and fiddle with it for a while up and down keep adjusting your sights til you get it zeroed in correctly. But this was the only rifle and it was correctly zeroed. So I got the highest score by quite a fair way and the next

was an Engineer Sergeant then the Infantry blokes were a long way behind and they were most upset about this. A medical officer and an engineer Sergeant. And so they said, “You ever fired a rifle before?” I said, “Not much.” I played dumb for a while and kept them going for a week or so for a while anyway and they were most persistent and he said, “You must’ve done a lot of shooting?” Somebody was watching me and I eventually told them that I had been for 6 months of the year I had every Saturday afternoon I used to go down. This was when I was in the Cadet

Corps with the army warrant officer class 1 we had attached to he ran our Cadet Corps and he would lie on the mound you see and he would clamp a mirror onto my. He’d lie beside me. We were really being hand-taught. Because normally the tendency is to twist as you pull the rifle to twist it slightly and of course that throws it off centre and the slightest movement he’ll see in the mirror you see. So he’d keep me steadily.

And fortunately my right eye was the good eye. You only use one eye to shoot. And I got some very good scores. But I probably had far more training on a rifle than any a the blokes in the Infantry. Because I’d had a specialised coach for months on end for this blessed world-wide shoot you see that we were involved in. And I dunno where we came. I never did hear the results. The school probably did but it didn’t filter down to me.

We didn’t win it anyway. This is British Empire wide. There were hundreds of teams in it. But you see for two years I was for about 5 months anyway before the event every Saturday I was down at the Enoggera Rifle Range with this Sergeant Major coaching me you see. So I had had individual coaching these blokes never had. And of course I was then stuck in the team but unfortunately I had a different rifle every time and they were all out and by. The shoot was half way through by the

time I’d zeroed or got the rifle anything like zeroed but I got a different rifle next Saturday. Cause I didn’t own a rifle. I wasn’t issued with one you see. And that’s why I did a huge. And then of course I did three years in the Militia where we did quite a lot of rifle range stuff there too and machine gun. I was even instructor on a Lewis gun at one stage of me life.

Very much so yes. Always used to go. Started off in the Cadet Corps of course we’d march very proudly and then again when I was in Hervey Bay and Kingaroy and Wondai I’d always providing the patients let me I’d always attend the Anzac Day service and then I started and ran a C-Scout troupe

which of course you we always used to the whole troupe paraded on Anzac Day and it’s. For the middle years for a few years I missed out but I go there at the moment. My son is head of Science at Churchie. Anglican Church Grammar School and they have their own. See that’s my old school of course and they put on quite a show with their Cadets and I go there it’s handy. Bill my son picks me up and takes me out there and helps me with

my wheelie walker and feel a really decrepit old soldier. But I’m always no Anzac Day means a tremendous amount to me.

I think the companionship which is very strong in the Australian Army and you’re good mates with everybody. And merely the fact that I did very little

really but at least it was I did go and do something or tried to and there’s certain feeling of achievement in that. Then of course my father’s service in World War I was always in front of me to do just as well or one better.

Nothing stands out

particularly. No I don’t think there’s any particular worst I’d say. See wartime service is periods of intense activity and excitement followed by long periods of utter boredom. You can sort of sum it up that way. Though mind you compared with infantry who are just doing the same routine training. Day in week in week out at least as a medical

officer well I was practicing my profession and I just saw thousands and thousands of patients. At least I never counted them but I saw an awful lot of people.

Not really except that as I said before you could find a lot of people that had a lot more active service than I had.

You’d get more interesting stories. People

whose line was a bit more on the line. Well I spose every one of us our life was on the line. We could’ve been bombed or torpedoed or upset. Anything could a happened but I don’t feel that you know I feel my service was quite unremarkable.

I wouldn’t say it was remarkable. But still I’m very proud to have served. Particularly the short time even though we were out of the line at the time of the 10th Battalion.

These blokes had been through the Western Desert Campaign in North Africa. They’d been through Tobruk. They’d been through Milne Bay. They took the first shot, the 18th Brigade and a Militia battalion stopped the Jap. The first defeat the Japanese suffered on land was at the hands of my old Brigade at Milne Bay. They went over the Owen Stanley Mountains. They were at Buna and Gona where as I said that I hadn’t realised their casualties were so appalling there. Then they went through the Markham Valley and several other

places there and then they landed up in Borneo against the Imperial Japanese Marines who defended the place. That’s about all I think.

Thank you for putting up with me.