Australians at War Film Archive

For example where I was born and …

Well I was born at Inverell in 1920, 23rd of September 1920 and my

first school was Ross Hill Public School. From there I went to the Inverell High School. From there my father tried to put a bit of spit and polish to me and sent me for three years down to Shore, Sydney Church of England Grammar School, and that’s my schooling to start with.

Anything else?

When I left school I my father was a stock and station agent in partnership at Inverell. He was agent for Dalgety’s and his partner had a son approximately my age, a year or so older I think

from memory, and he and I his this son and I both went into Dalgety’s with the idea of coming back and taking over our fathers’ stock and station business in Inverell and that’s was my first job when I left school, in Dalgety’s. Dalgety’s was a very hard place to get into. You we got nineteen and sixpence a week. You had to always wear a tie and you had

to wear or carry a hat to secure a job in Dalgetys. The my first do you want to know this girl I she said, “What do you remember about Dalgetys?” and I said, “Well two things in particular.” Do you want to hear them again?

Okay.

And what else do you want to …

And from there I from while I was in Dalgety’s I joined the 12/24th Light Horse and did two camps with them. I did a fortnight camp at Inverell at the racecourse there and then a bit later I did a month’s camp with the 12/24th again on the Armidale showground.

After that my next, I joined, I think I joined a militia battalion. I think it was the 2/20th and we went into camp at Rutherford and from there I went to I joined the AIF [Australian Imperial Force]. I was talking about joining the AIF when the 6th and 7th Division were being formed and my father

told me not to do so. That he was going to join the AIF again and he said, “Wait for me.” Well I did wait for him and in the meantime I was sent to Greta and I’m not sure, I think I was in the AIF then but I was, I’d risen to the rank of sergeant and I was

training, we were training 6th, 7th reinforcements in a bull ring situation. The other girl didn’t know what a bull ring was but it’s a you have a group of instructors in a circle and the men learn about rifles from this group and then they move on to Bren guns in the next one and then the next is to trench warfare or

something until you they go ‘round in a whole circle. After that the next thing we, my father said that he’d been given a battalion in the 8th division. I said, “Good we’ll, I can come with you,” and he said, “Like hell.” He said, “You’re not coming with me. If you want to go in the 8th Division you’ll have to join some other unit.” So I rushed,

he’d just been putting me off and I joined the 2/19th Battalion and I think, I’m well at that time I was a sergeant and that, what’s the, that was it and before I joined the 19th Battalion when I was at

in the 6 training 6th, 7th reinforcements I was sent on a officers’ training school down to Liverpool and I did an officers’ training school and nothing came of it, so I gather I failed it but it that was it and then the we had the 19th Battalion. What,

what else? Keep going?

Well actually I left something out. The first experience I had in army anything to do with the army was in the cadets at Shore, at Sydney Church of England Grammar School, and the,

well there wasn’t in there wasn’t a great deal to in the in army life except a lot of beer drinking and a lot of good times and a fair bit of hard work and a bit of losing sweat and tears sort of thing but there was nothing particular

in those early days of army life.

Except wait on, there was one thing. When I became a lance corporal in the 2/20th Battalion I had men in my section of ten men who’d been to the First World War and here was I, a snotty nosed brat of nineteen telling fellas that had been in the First World War how to win the second

one. And that I found quite difficult in that that was the and I at that stage of the game I couldn’t grow a moustache and I grew my first moustache then and it’s been on ever since except once when we were POWs [Prisoners of War], the I shaved it off as a disguise when I was caught by the Japanese but

army life still?

Well we went, the, it’s, once I joined the 2/19th Battalion Ingleburn, Bathurst and then the Queen Mary. Port Dickson, Seremban, Kluang,

Jemaluang were the stations we were in before the war actually engulfed us. When the war started I was, my first position was Endau and then Muar and then Parit Sulong and then Singapore Island and that was it.

There we were caught.

Yes and the when we when we were captured we were all taken out to Changi and Changi by the way is nothing like the ABC presented it on that program of theirs where everyone was

in good condition and pressed shorts and pants and all the rest of it. That was a lot of bull and they just refused to accept the facts. A friend of mine wanted to tell his story. He had his jaw broken by a Japanese guard with his rifle butt and on three consecutive mornings this guard came ‘round and rebroke his jaw. Hit him again in the jaw with it and this, those

sort of facts the ABC said they weren’t interested in. They didn’t want, that was too provocative or something. Ah, where were we? There and then anyhow, when we got to Changi they called for a working party to go into the wharves to load and boats with rice. Well I went into, on that party into the wharves and it just about

killed us at that stage of the game because the change of diet from Japanese food to from European food to Japanese food, we all had dysentery and different other stomach complaints and we were all as weak as kittens and the only way we could load bags of rice which were a hundred and eighty pounds was to get a man on each corner

and swing it two men to two men. Well that made very, which meant that every man was handling every bag of rice and when we got used to it a bit we found that we could carry one man one bag of rice and then you could have a quite a spell before your turn came ‘round again and the work got much easier. Ah

while I was there, that’s the only time that I shaved off a moustache. The Japanese used to allow us to get a certain amount of sugar to put in our tea and that was all at smoko and lunch time and late in the day I went across to the go downs, another go down where they had stores and I got a bag of a bag of

sugar in a box but also in the sugar I put a five pound tin of malted milk, which I thought would be handy to take back to camp for the for our own use or use for the POWs anyhow and coming out of the go down the a Jap approached me and with my pidgin

Jap and English I was able to tell him that it was sugar for the smoko over the road and he said, “That’s okay,” but then just as I was about to depart he dipped his hand into the sugar and came across my five pound tin of malted milk and he whooped and cooeed. I thought, “Now it’s on now.” At he at the if you were caught pinching food like that you were knocked around with a

bit of squared timber or rifle butts or something but I knew there was a small door out of this go down. So I left the Jap yelled to his mates to come and join in the fun and I shot through and got back to my party. Well work party and we were just going home. The only difficulty was, we had to turn up there the next morning and being an officer I had we the officers

had to stand out in front of the men and I thought, “Well this is going to be dicey,” so I shaved off my moustache and wore long pants instead of shorts and a hat instead of a cap and the Japanese concerned, the next morning when we lined up for our work party he walked along all the officers and he came to me and he scratched his head and he walked ‘round and scratched his head again and then walked off. So I thought, “Well there’s some

benefit in having a moustache,” in any case. So that was the only time in my life my moustache has been cut off. What next? The next thing we went the my father was put in charge of a he’d risen to the rank of brigadier at that late in the piece and he was put in charge of A Force to go up somewhere on a boat with that’s all we knew and we

were loaded onto boats and we went up the Malayan coast to Thanbyuzayat and we had to that’s where we unloaded. We built an aerodrome there. We used to carry the dirt to the aerodrome was on a bamboo pole with a bag in between and a man on each end and he’d walk and dump his

load of earth and then go back and get another one sort of thing and that’s the way the Thanbyuzayat aerodrome was built that then from there on we started on the railway line.

Go?

Okay. Go.

Good.

We had, there were three of us in our family. My, I was the eldest

and born in 1920. My next was a brother, brother Bob, who was three years younger. He was born in 1923 and then he the sister and she was born in 1925. We used to the father and his partner had a property they bought and developed

out of Karmoo north of Inverell. We spent a lot of time there weekends and holidays and we I can particularly remember rabbits were profuse in those days and I know on this property, Karmoo, the they got a poisoner fella in to poison rabbits on one occasion and on the first night he poisoned a hundred a thousand

rabbits but as kids, rabbits were great fun. We had a fox terrier dog that we used to, he’d chase the rabbits into a log and we had a length of wire. We’d put the wire up the hollow of the log and tangle it in the rabbit’s fur, pull him out and kill him and we used to make a bit of pocket money out of rabbit skins. We also used to we thought, “Live off the land.” We used to eat

the rabbits, roast them over fires and things and we thought we were pretty good. What else?

Oh yes rabbits we thoroughly enjoyed when we were kids and we I still think rabbit meat is good. The only thing that stops people eating rabbit is myxomatosis. When it came in it made the rabbits a doubtful proposition but yes, I still eat if the opportunity presents

itself. When we were living down at Kenilworth I used to eat a hare odd hare at when we got it and I think they’re pretty good. What else? The, on this place, Karmoo, a lot of it lot of it was one thing that stuck in my mind very much in those days it was all axe work to clear the countryside and the

one, on one occasion they’d cut half way through all these trees up the slope of a hill and then the wind must have been in the right direction. But then on the top they cut down the cut down a big tree and it crashed into the others and it had a domino effect and all the way down the hill all these trees that were half cut crashed over

and that was a very impressive sight to me as a young fella. Another thing that sticks in my mind there was that there used to be a lot of kangaroos around and they used to have kangaroo shoots every now and again and some of the people on horseback would round up the kangaroos or drive them on the front and the other people’d get behind logs and trees and

with shotguns down in the thing and I can remember my first kangaroo shoot, a big kangaroo hopped straight towards me and I was on one side of the log and I was told not to shoot too soon and I went ‘bang’ at the kangaroo and the kangaroo dropped dead on one side of the log and I was on the other. Birds, my father built us three children a big aviary and we were

encouraged us to trap birds. We used to spend a lot of time trapping zebs and double bars and gold finches, you name it sort of thing, and the way you trap birds was that you had a caller in the middle of the trap and you had a trap at either end and the caller’d call the birds down and you’d have your seed in your trap areas and they’d you’d catch them and we had this big aviary full of full of

birds. Quail and top knot pigeons. We used to get top knot pigeons and rear them and they were it was quite an interest for us. We had also in our area that we were living in as when we were growing up we had plenty of space and we used to have pet kangaroos. We used to

have a pony that we had to share between the three of us which used to work me, being the eldest I was responsible for it but my brother and sister had equal rights to it to me and we had a cow, which being the eldest I had to milk, and it was with the cow I suppose the main thing that I can remember is the

fact that it used to, lucerne and clover bloats cows. They blow up so tight that they end up it ends up killing them and the only way to cure it is to make them belch and to make them belch you’ve got to put something in their mouth and in those days what you used to do is get a broom handle or a section of a broom handle, tie a bit of string to each end and then put that in the cow’s mouth and hold

it there. The cow naturally would move it to one side or the other and it’d come out. So you had to stand there holding that broom handle in while she belched out gas, which was not the best of occupations as a child we didn’t think anyhow, but it used to generally saved the cow. So but I can remember that. I can also remember the fact that this cow used to run down a the river bank at Inverell in a big paddock

there and on wet weather the only way to get up the thing was to start the cow up the track and then when she started to track run like hell at her and grab her by the tail and she’d pull you up the hill then but otherwise it was you used to have slide and slip a fair bit. That’s about all I think.

As a child I don’t we I don’t remember the Depression as a Depression, no. See ‘35 in the middle of the Depression my father somehow or other sent me down to school at Sydney. That was in 1935. ‘35, 6 and 7. I was there and I don’t remember the Depression to any great extent.

I know we used to our eating was not I can remember bread and milk as a dessert and bread and dripping was another thing that we used to eat but it didn’t it wasn’t of any great concern, no.

Well no we lived in town. We lived in Inverell. The property that they had was it was twenty miles out.

Yeah, but we used to we used to get a fair my father was also a very keen duck shooter. We used to get he used to shoot a lot of ducks. He was also a very keen quail shooter and he used to shoot a lot of quail to our disgust as kids because we used to have to pluck and clean them and he’d shoot them and but then he’d put them in the Inverell freezing works,

which we had in those days, and he they used to draw the ducks and quail out whenever they wanted them sort of thing and we lived quite well off our ducks his shooting ducks and quail.

Ha, I thought so in my limited experience in those days but we had we had well I had, and I think my brother and sister

did too, we had a very good childhood. The only child thing wrong with out childhood was the fact that our mother died when I was five years old and she died of food poisoning and when my sister was approximately six months old. My father was then left with three small kids under five years old and he had to remarry

quickly or do something and he remarried and the our step mother was a step parents and step kids have a difficult they’re in a difficult situation. I and the, my sister, the youngest, we could not get on with our step mother and she couldn’t get on with us.

The brother in the middle and the step mother were as thick as thieves. They got on very well and it was that made life a bit difficult I think.

I

think I guess I can’t remember a specific incidence. I can remember one instance when we all took cover under the house and when he came home from I don’t know why we took cover or what the punishment was, but it was all referred to the father but we all three ducked under the house and when the father came home he stuck his head under the house and the young brother said

“What, is she after you too Dad?” and much to something I can still remember but it I can’t remember, it was just a personality thing I think. It was but she had a difficult job and we had a difficult job and that applies to all step parents I think.

Ah yes. He well he was fairly strict

I guess. He we didn’t think he was I can remember getting a few beltings but I deserved ‘em I don’t doubt but the I can’t even remember what they were for, but they musta been we were always doing something or other. I can remember the height of our ambition was

that the or height of our larrikinism. We weren’t destructive I don’t I can’t remember be doing destructive things but we had to the Ross Hill Public School had a school bell out in the middle of a paddock. Well you had to go and ring the school bell a hundred times before someone came and kicked your backside and that was that but the bulk of our childhood was spelt

in spent the father directed it along such a line that within trapping birds and animals. He we were given a Daisy air rifle to start with and we were told what birds and what we couldn’t. Like sparrows and crows and things like that but

Well magpies, pee wees, rosellas and ground

parrots. You know, the non-destructive ones. The hawks and crows were the main baddies in the bird life in those well they still are but no, we had apart from that we I think we had a very good childhood.

Well I can remember that we used to we virtually knew everyone in town in those days. I couldn’t tell you what the population was. It wasn’t a bit town but it was a good country town and there were a lot of good people there. They all seemed to get together and pull together in the making of a sportsground and golf courses and I can remember going on numerous

working bees to build do up the cricket oval in Inverell, which was later on named in honour of my father. It still is Varley Oval there and I can remember spending a lot of time on the golf course when they were making the golf course, putting in the clearing the fairways and things like

that. We used to be always doing that and the Dad always seemed to be mixed up in those sort of things and we were dragged along to assist or keep us out of the road but the we didn’t have enough time on our hands to get into a great deal of trouble I don’t think. We were kept active.

Yes.

Yes I got on with my brother and my sister. The, we had a very good relationship. The brother was a bit of a pain in the neck. He was better than me at cricket. He was better than me at tennis and he was better than me at school but apart from that he was a good bloke but he was, the sister was five years younger than I was and she was a

bit beneath our dignity sort of thing. She was a mere little girl and she used to get in the road. The biggest things I can remember about her, as a child. Mm.

Oh well we played them all. Cricket, tennis and

football and I wouldn’t say, probably cricket I guess, but I enjoyed tennis. I’m a bit worried about this Heather [interviewer]. Did she, has she got a hangover? She’s doing a hell of a lot of drinking at the back there. She’s making me thirsty.

Oh that’s all right but I

don’t think the you know there wasn’t a favourite sport. I enjoyed them all as personally sort of.

I don’t know. We seemed to well school sport was something you indulged in pretty actively at school but I can remember

as kids we had WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s we used to have to look after and we had these pet kangaroos and pet birds and you know we didn’t and then we had a damn big lawn we had to mow with a push mower and it was not well very

pleasant growing up I suppose.

It was.

Mm.

Yeah. We had I had no bucks about growing up at all. I think we were lucky to have grow up under the circumstances we did.

My father spoke very little about World War

I and he was a very, oh well I think like most service people that have been mixed up in wars he wasn’t he didn’t talk about it. I’ve never talked about it to my family, World War II, because one I didn’t think they’d believe me when I explained some of the

circumstances in which we lived in any case and they wouldn’t believe the type of people that the nice Japanese are and it was something when we came home this is the first occasion that I’ve said had anything to do with reminiscing over this World War, World War II and I still think I’m a sucker for being here and doing it but the

it’s the in my opinion we’re losing, this is one of the reason I am doing it. To sort of try and bring back I don’t know if you want this brought up now but some figures I wrote here I was reading up there. In World War I there were eight thousand Australians killed in France over six weeks. In Gallipoli there

was another eight thousand Australians killed. That’s sixteen thousand. In World War II, I haven’t got the total figures but in our battalion alone we had ah seven hundred and eight, seven hundred and thirty eight casualties in about half, two-thirds of them was in action and one-third as POWs

and then today you’ve got Vietnam. They had forty thousand Australians went to Vietnam. Four hundred were killed. That’s one per cent and the big day as far as the Vietnam veterans are concerned is oh what’s the name of it? Yong Pan or something.

Long Tan. Now seventeen

Australians were killed at Long Tan. Now that’s a drop in a bucket and it today they make a big deal out of it and read more recently again a helicopter crashed and I think there were fifteen servicemen killed in it. Well it’s a national catastrophe when fifteen service it is, I quite agree, fifteen men being killed shouldn’t happen but still according to go back to

World War I with eight thousand in six weeks and eight thousand on Gallipoli it’s a mere drop in a bucket and I think we’ve got to keep our perspective. If we’re silly enough as a country to get mixed up in wars you’re going to have big casualties these days and any time I guess. What?

Yes. Yes I did.

You want to know what he did?

I’ve got

I’ve got a thing on in there that, yeah go on.

Yeah. Well he never told us a great deal about them. He told us what they were and the fact that his MC [Military Cross] and bar were given to him for bravery but what the bravery was we never knew. He never told us and as I explained

to Chris [interviewer] a minute ago, it was only just recently something came up when I started reading our battalion history and what not the wife said, “What did you get your MC for?” and I said, “Well,” and we’ve been married for fifty six years, and I said, “Well it’s in the battalion book there.” I said, “If you’re interested you could go and have a look at it,” and she said, “But you never told me,” and I said, “No, I didn’t think you were interested,” and I said, “it’s a bit personal in any case.” So why

would my father be go into great detail or anything when it’s just not done but we never knew what his, we knew what the medals he had were for you know what different campaigns and all the rest of it, but specific details and the strife he was in

we never knew. The same as my family don’t know what because as I said before, you wouldn’t believe it and nice people don’t do thing nasty things to one another in this world.

No. No. Should have I s’pose but when we were growing up I guess we were too

busy doing other things with sport and then girls came along and that. You had no time for and I think he that my father had, well I hope I’ve got something similar in the outlook that he had, but it was you turned a page. There’s no good looking back. You want

to look forward. You can go and, if you want to look back, you could go to the RSL Clubs [Returned and Services League] and get some old ex-serviceman when he gets full of beer and rum and what not and they’ll fight the war again but the sober people just don’t do it. Mm.

It brings back memories and you’ve got to put the memories behind you what I mean. Memories crop up on the least at the drop of a hat. I still have odd nightmares about particular instances that in my limited experience and but

people that had in the First World War that had continued thing, well we had continual starvation, ill-treatment I s’pose on the railway line but it wasn’t to the same death and destruction type of thing as World War I.

No,

but Dad’s brother he was in the First World War. He got wounded in India and it crippled him for life but the grandfather no, I don’t think he was in the army, no. There’s more of a well in the wife’s side when I met my wife, the wife’s father was a Gallipoli

veteran and she had three brothers that were in the two of them were Rats at Tobruk and one of them was too said too young to be anything but he was still in the services and the wife was also in the services as a in Australia here but

Oh God.

Here we go. You’ll get me into trouble.

Yes. I got her to write this down. AAWAS [AWAS – Australian Women’s Army Service].

Yeah.

No. No. The, I didn’t meet we didn’t meet ‘til after the war. The

girl I was going with when I went to the war, she married she married someone else, a choco, and we but she did she did a sterling service for us because it was when we were jailbirds you had to look forward to things and we used to look forward to our wives and our sweethearts and a you know steak and eggs and

a good feed and a brick house and all those sort of solid things but the but no, I didn’t meet the wife ‘til after the war.

On the way home. It wasn’t a Dear John letter. It was a telegram to say that she’d changed, “Have changed my name.” She didn’t say ‘Dear John’. She said, “Have changed my

name,” and that was understandably a bit of a shock but it the shock to me when I came home was apart from anything else I knew that my father had been was on the boat and reportedly killed going from Singapore up to Japan but when my

train pulled into Central Station in Sydney the step mother and the sister were there and I the first thing I said isthought, “Where’s Bob?” the brother, and Bob had been killed up in the Kokoda Trail and he that’s why he wasn’t there but he was supposed to stay out of the army with the father and I both in it but he didn’t do it.

Yeah, disobedient. No well naturally I could understand his sentiment sort of thing that he thought well he had to do something and unfortunately he was in he got to the rank of lieutenant and reinforcement to the 2/3rd Battalion, which was a Middle East 6th Division battalion, and

new officers, the first thing they had to do was prove themself with because you had old soldiers in the were the rest of the group sorta thing and they naturally had to try and do a bit more than they should have and it was his undoing.

No. I’ve got it

here if you, should I read it to you?

No, not exactly.

Well the battalion was chasing Japs up on the top of the Kokoda Trail and there was a, they snuck up on some Jap headquarters where a Japanese general was supposed to be billeted and he did

escape but in the assault on these huts and things the brother was shot. Shot in the stomach, which’d be a very slow and painful death and that in that situation.

No, shot in the stomach’s not quick. It’s and but a man in that battalion told me

that that was what has happened had happened so but and so far from medical assistance and drugs and things it would be a painful death.

Yeah. Well see we didn’t have that when we were jailbirds too. We drugs medical drugs were

in very short supply.

Yeah.

In the 30s I believe it was. The 30s see that was what I was telling Chris. Somehow or other my father must have been doing well in those days because we he sent me to

Shore in ‘35, 6 and 7. Well that to my way of thinking was the plumb in the middle of the Depression but I as I said, I can’t remember the Depression specifically. It didn’t hit us in any specific manner.

Well SCEGGS was our sister school and a big used to be a big do when the SCEGGS girls came over or we went over at the end of our dancing lessons or something. You had thought it was a wonderful occasion.

Dancing, yes. Well I don’t know. We probably

did it in our spare time or something, I don’t know, but I can remember having dancing lessons. Not that I it ever succeeded in teaching me a great deal but we I can remember dancing lessons at Shore and I can remember going over to SCEGGS on I think it was a once a year thing and they came the SCEGGS girls used to come over to Shore once a year too. I believe that is correct.

Yes, that’s right.

Well we used to look down I suppose on the day boys. Shore had a lot of day boys and SCEGGS would have had a lot of day girls that we didn’t think they were within the same category as us

boarders. I suppose that was just something that we got but I thoroughly enjoyed my boarding at Shore. It was a bit traumatic to start with leaving home for the first occasion but then I as I said I would was keen on sport and once you get to a place like that and you join in the cricket club and the do reasonably good you’re

you soon make friends and becomes I thoroughly enjoyed my three years at Shore anyhow. Sorry to leave.

No, I left because the young brother I left I only got my intermediate at Shore. I wasn’t a brilliant

scholar in any shape or form. The one prize I got, I was determined to get one prize, and I got a prize eventually in divinity of all things and it but the brother was a good scholar and he his it was his turn. When I left Shore and got my Intermediate that was all you were required to have to join Dalgety’s, your Intermediate Certificate. The

brother went there in 30 oh ‘38, ‘39 or ‘40. Somewhere there he went but

Not a great deal, no. No we I can’t remember much about it at all in those days. I think we

were in on the whole too self-centred and too tied up with our sport and our odd girlfriends that we had. They were of considerable importance in those days when you were growing up and about they still are I guess when you’re in your late teens the opposite sex have some

great attraction that mm but no, we didn’t and I don’t remember a great deal about world politics or anything else like that, no.

Well I was in the cadets at Shore and it was the reason we joined

the light horse, the cousin and I, was that we came from Inverell both of us and the we read in the paper that the 12th 24th light horse were forming a signal unit and that signal unit was being formed in Sydney and it would go from Sydney up to the camps that they had in the future. Well we thought that was a pretty good idea so we joined

the 12th/24th Signals Corps in Sydney at Paddington and then we went from there up to Inverell but we at that stage of the game we knew that the world was becoming unsettled and we thought we should join in something.

Yeah I believe so, mm.

‘39. I was in the Light Horse.

To the 2/20th Battalion

Militia battalion? I’ve got it here. I’ve the, I don’t know what date the army their records are pretty complete but they’re not that complete. A mate

of mine got a long service medal which he told me I should get and I said, “Oh well,” and I put in for it and the army records came back and said that I had no they had no record of me before I joined the 2/19th Battalion and so that went on for years and then some years later we a sister sent me we had a fire back in

1957 the wife and I and we lost all our possessions and photos and everything else but my young sister sent me a photo of myself in light horse uniform that she and signed 22nd in September ’39 I think it was and also there was another photo of me in a uniform of the 2/20th Battalion. So for the hell of it I sent this back down to war records and said,

“Now you have no claim in the records of me being in any services apart from the 2/19th Battalion.” I said, “Now there are photos of me in light horse uniform and 2/20th Battalion I suggest if you I should be sued or prosecuted for wearing the king’s uniform unofficially,” and anyhow the next thing I got the long service medal and they but they

didn’t but once again as I said, their records are terrific but in the another example is there the father he’s not given his MC bar and he’s not given his MID [Mentioned in Despatches]. So their record’s not that good.

No. Well that’s it. Yeah.

Yes, I s’pose so, but on nineteen and sixpence a week with board and lodging

coming out of it you didn’t have a great deal of spare money and a big occasion used to be to and the girlfriend that I had, the cousin and I were living in a sharing a room in a boarding house at Rose Bay and the girl that I was attached to came from Balmoral and it was the a big occasion was to meet somewhere and go to the one of the pictures in

Sydney but clothes were, oh I don’t know, not important. This girl that I’m speaking of, she her family had a cottage at Palm Beach and we used to spend a fair bit of time there on weekends and holidays and that sort of thing and if we weren’t and the cousin

and I the Dad’s partner’s son, Hal Parker, he used he and I used to go camping on the we had a little two man tent and we’d go to one of the beach areas and camp in this tent and buy a bit of food and that sort of thing but we used to be very keen on surfing and swimming in those days. He was a very good athlete and I was a

an also-ran.

In those days it was. You paid you paid for the seat in the picture show and you paid the tram fare to get them home etcetera, yes.

Well you

wouldn’t have anything to do with her. It was it was a what, what was the term? I think the well you weren’t gonna become a gigolo. That was the, you had your self-respect to think of and unless you could pay for the outing well you didn’t go out. That was the

and if you didn’t go out you lost the girl I suppose. So it was a vicious circle.

Only if I wanted money. I think from well he used to assist with cash. I know when the

in paying the board at this boarding house that we were in. It was sort of full board. You got two meals a day, breakfast and dinner at night and weekends you got free meals and Dalgety’s in those days you were given lunch by Dalgety’s in any case, so you were but no I don’t remember a great deal of correspondence

between my parents and myself as a in my working days, no.

Well two things stick out about Dalgety’s.

The first, my father was a very strict person in regard to cash and honesty was one of the big things in life. You had to be truthful and honest and the and then that was again brought home to us at when we went in the three years at Shore. You didn’t cheat, you didn’t lie and you didn’t

thieve and you didn’t do any of the other nasty things in life and I remember I went when I got the job in Dalgety’s I went ‘round to the stock department and the stock department in those days they used to send out market reports on Monday after the Monday sale at Homebush and the Thursday sale at Homebush. We used to send out so many hundred at a penny ha’penny and so many hundred at

tuppence ha’penny stamps and then so many telegrams at a shilling and at the end of the first day the head rat told me to put it in the petty cash box that a book that we’d done so much and I said, “No that’s not so. I’m not gonna put that in there,” and he said, “Well it is. That’s what’s going in the book,” and he put it in and I worked out that he was bashing petty cash to the extent of thirty

five shillings a week when the weekly wage was nineteen and sixpence. That fella stayed in Dalgety’s and be the last I heard was after the war he was going up in the ranks. He didn’t go to the war. He excelled in Dalgety’s but and the second thing that I remember vividly about Dalgety’s was after the war finished I went back to see if I

was able to get my job back with the firm and I had to front up to the general manager and, a Mr Barnett it was. A very capable man too but he told me when I walked in to see him that he said, “You fellas are a bloody nuisance.” He said, “You leave to go to the war and you’re earning nineteen and sixpence and now we’ve got to pay you ten pounds and as far as Dalgety’s are concerned you don’t know more,” and

I had to agree with him that we knew no more as far as Dalgety’s was concerned but still that was he I suppose he wanted to put our feet back on the ground with a bang sorta thing and he did but I was a bit lucky. I was lucky and unlucky. I was given a job as wool and stock traveller covering north and northern New South Wales

and I was given car and a Dalgety chequebook and a list of some five or six hundred clients and I was told to keep them happy and look for new clients for the wool and stock department and I was told that all expenses were paid away from home, hotel and all that sorta thing, and all drinks with clients and prospective clients and I thought, “Boy oh boy. How long has this been going

on and I didn’t know about it?” and for the first twelve months I it was wonderful but then I met the wife and we got married and I’d be at the bottom end of the state and we were living built a home in Inverell and I’d ring up to see how things were half way through the week and the baby’d be sick or the

some something else’d be wrong and I thought, “Oh this is no good.” So I gave it away. Left Dalgety’s.

Okay.

Okay.

No. I think if we’d taken any note if I’d taken any notice of my father

I woulda stayed the hell out of the road out of the army. He knew what it was like but he joined went back a second time but I don’t know.

I’ve got an answer but I don’t know that I should tell you.

You’re trying to understand. To get away from my step mother.

They my step mother was a difficult woman. She married a early in life she married a Malayan rubber plantation owner

and she went to Malaya and in Malaya women and well all people get spoilt. They you’ve got a servant to pick up your hat and a servant to open the door and a servant to do your washing and your cooking and your ironing and a gardening and all the rest of it and all you do is go to the club and drink and drink and socialise and sort of what not

and that’s not a very good ah background for a hard working and Australian person sort of thing but I the father and the step mother did not get on very well in latter life as I can remember it, but they that was

that was unfortunate from both their points of view but I don’t know the, see the father was when they formed a militia battalion in northern New South Wales based at Inverell, 35th Battalion, and he was given that battalion before the war. I couldn’t tell you what year that was, but it must have been when the war was looming

that they were forming these militia battalions but he had he must have had in mind doing something about it.

He would, yes. Well he was the CO in charge of the he was the commanding the 2/30th, the 30th Battalion militia, yes,

but I couldn’t tell you when the when they had their parades or what not but a lot of the 35th Battalion were went into the his when he was given the 2/18th Battalion they went into the 2/18th Battalion with him. So

Prob, it coulda been. I’m not sure of that fact but I it was probably just to do with age I think. See when nineteen and sixpence would have been the ‘35, 6 and 7 that woulda been a seventeen year old’s wage and then coming back five years later sort of thing I the basic

wage I it was probably just the basic wage. I I’m not sure of that fact.

Mm.

As far as, yes that

That’s absolutely correct and that it that was so, yes. For sure.

Damned if I know. Can’t remember. I was just trying to think but I don’t know where the heck I was but no, can’t, can’t say I’m sorry. Mm.

Yes.

It’d have to be in the when we were in the boarding house. A paper or a wireless or something because the cousin and I discussed what we were going to join and he said he was thinking of joining the navy and I said, “No. To hell with that.” I said, “I I’d like to keep my feet somewhere

near the ground,” and he said, “Well if it’s not the navy I’m going to join the air force,” and I said, “Well in that case we’re gonna split up because,” I said, “I’m going to stay with the army,” but it must have been a must we must have heard of the war when we were at Rose Bay in the boarding house there somewhere. Mm.

No.

Not at that stage, no. It wasn’t ‘til we were after the when I was in the 2/20th Battalion. I’m not sure it was the 2/20th Battalion. There were three battalions at Rutherford at the time and for the life of me I can’t remember. It’s 53rd I think was one but it came from the Riverina and

somewhere else. The 20th was a Sydney battalion. I think it had to be that one but no, we didn’t did it was when I was in the 2/20th Battalion I mentioned to him that I was going to join the 6 7th division when they were forming it, one of them, and that’s when he told me to wait.

No. No. Before I joined the army. No, I used to see him when we were in the see, the 2/18th Battalion. I joined the 2/19th Battalion when he wouldn’t have me and the 2/19th and was part of the

22nd Brigade and so was his battalion, the 2/18th, and we were in the same areas and occasionally we’d run across one another or I’d go over to the officers’ mess at the 2/18th Battalion or so on like that but no, we saw him quite a bit.

Well it’s a very bad thing for any kin to be in the

same unit because it’s if something happens to Bill, Joe thinks he’s got to he goes berserk or does something equally silly and you quite often find that if one per one member of a family get falls off the perch that the other one does too and it was

but he what I mean I could see his point. He reckoned we had to just sort of just wait a bit and sort of not and I was pretty young I suppose in those days.

I’m sure so, yes. Nineteen or twenty. I could tell you exactly. I’ve got it on the thing.

Where I enlisted? Paddington. I’m sure it was Paddington.

No, no. My cousin had deserted me. I’m sure I went on my own. He’d joined the air force and

it was unfortunate for him. He got shot down over the English Channel. So

Air force was, yes. Terrific. Number of pilots that got killed was just too silly for words.

Oh I think we were all given a rough sort of a

medical but it was pretty rough and they I don’t remember any great do about the medical, no. It was a pushover. Well for anyone that was a bit young and reasonably fit I think you had no trouble getting in the army.

Enlistment day?

Well that’s it and I had the medical and I was told I’d be notified I think and I’m not sure. I think I must have enlisted in the AIF or volunteered for the AIF when I was at Rutherford.

In camp with the 2/20th Battalion. I’m pretty sure that’s when it but I’ve got Paddington I think I’m sure on my certificate it’s got Paddington as my place of enlistment but whether or not we had to don’t know. I forget.

Yep. Drink and smoke.

You had to be a, you had to join in the drinking and smoking to be

I don’t know, it seemed to be just part of the you weren’t with the push unless you drank and smoke. Foolish as it may seem.

That’s where I started both, yeah mm, and kept going

until well I stopped smoking when I was eighty and I had a an attack of cellulitis and, which I get because I had a melanoma cut off my just above my left knee and in the course of the operation they cut from my knee to my groin and took the glands out of the top of my leg,

which they did in those days. Drastic surgery was, this is about twenty eight years ago, to stop the spread of anything. Well it stopped the spread of anything as far as I’m concerned but it left me with a weak leg that I’ve only got to get a cut or a scratch there and it turns to cellulitis and you get yourself pumped full of antibiotics and what not and threatened by the local doctor. Your leg gets,

swells up and gets red and blotchy and what not and you’re told to do what you’re take your antibiotics and keep your leg in the air or we’ll put you back into hospital and cut your leg off, which is what my doctor threatened me with and I thought, “Well that’s good enough to start obeying instructions in that case.”

I haven’t the slightest doubt

it did. It all prepared me for army life. It’s like anything in life. The well even your job. You you’ve you the more you do it the more proficient you become at it sort of thing. Put it that way.

Light Horse? The we were learning signalling and the thing I can remember more than anything else, I musta been not a very good responsive person in those days because the punishment for a misdemeanours

in the light horse was to clean up the horse lines and that meant raking up the horse manure, putting it into a pile and then shoving it onto a truck and then going ‘round the streets of Armidale ‘til you to some person’s backyard where they wanted a truckload of horse manure and you shovel it off and then you came back and got another one but that’s one of the things that sticks in my mind. I must that

was the punishment for in the light horse camp to someone had to do it and the people that were misbehaving were first in line but I can remember going on route marches with our horses and you know going twenty miles or something and then doing a military exercise and we had to send signals to the troops in the light horse

and then come back and but I can’t remember a great deal extra ‘bout it, except Colonel Salmon was the man in charge of the 12th/24th Light Horse and I can remember he wanted to buy my horse. Dad had sent a very good horse chestnut horse over to with

from Inverell to Armidale and Colonel Salmon thought he was pretty good too and he wanted me to put a price on him, which I couldn’t do.

Yes.

Well everyone had their own horse in the light horse days and the fact that the troops came across from Inverell, they rode across

from Inverell, well it was no great difficulties for our fathers, the cousin’s father and my father, to arrange for them to bring our horses across. The signal unit from Sydney, they were supplied with remounts from the depot in Sydney and they were a lot of city slickers that didn’t know one end of a horse from another and they

used to cause us quite a bit of amusement and I think we caused quite a bit of chaos with them. We’d get on you’re told to mount up and we’d pretend that our horses were out of control and we’d go along the line bumping the horses that these city slickers were making efforts to get on and before we knew the whole signal unit was in a course of chaos but

that’s not preparing anyone for a good training for the army I suppose but that’s what larrikins we used to do as larrikins and louts I suppose.

Yeah.

Well they I guess they asked for it in the fact that they joined the 12th/24th Light Horse. They weren’t all non-riders but they all wished to learn to ride and they wished to take part

in such a thing and it was not our job to we should have encouraged them, not discouraged them, but I think as a whole they had a very enjoyable time. I think. I hope.

You’re expected to know how to ride at in the case of the signal unit they made exceptions of them,

because I can remember some of the old horse people giving us lectures on horses and what to look for and you it stuck in my mind and I still remember it. This old fella told us you judge a horse the same way as you judge a woman. You start at the ankles and work up and if they’ve got no feet and no legs you’ve got no horse

and you’ve got no woman and that sort of stuck in my mind and you and conformation you’d just a horse on the same basis. They’ve gotta be round and in sort of a symmetric sort of thing and it but that was the rest of the troop except for the signal unit they had to supply their own horses and they had to be

capable riders to start with.

Well we had to send signals from one si one hill to another with torches or mirrors and you you’ve got the sun the sun reflecting on a mirror and you said dash that dash dot dash sort of thing and in the

Morse code and if it was applicable with a torch you did your Morse code in dot dash dash and you had to be able to sort of endeavour to keep in touch with one another in such a manner. On a cloudy dull day well you just had to the other thing we had to do, if there was no method of communication in such a way, we had to gallop

from A to B to deliver messages sort of thing. That was our basic in those days.

It has. It did. Yes.

In those days? No, only the one that I went to that I was thought we were going to get married when the war finished sort of thing. That she was that was that was the big girl in my life in those days.

Meet her?

Ah

I met her on the beach at Balmoral and I don’t know, we and another fella and I we I don’t know what the heck we were doing over at Balmoral. We must have been there for a weekend leave or something from Shore. We used to get weekends off occasionally and this girl and another girl rowed in a in a rowing boat off the when we were on the beach and that’s where I met her

but she and her mother lived not far from Balmoral and the back from the beach there.

Well as much as I could on nineteen and sixpence and then on the she came up to we used to spend time down at Palm Beach of course and the

when we were given our send off they had a ball for the 22nd Brigade officers at Bathurst and she came up to that too but yeah.

Joined the 19th Battalion?

I couldn’t tell you. It’s probably six months. That’d be a guess. I wouldn’t have a clue but it was some months

I know. We were at this training 6th, 7th reinforcements business at Rutherford or Greta there.

Ah I think they were quite tolerant considering but they

I don’t I can’t remember any specific things but I think their basic feeling was on my part that the hide of me to be telling these mature men as a growing pipsqueak lance corporal how to

win a war when I didn’t hardly knew that one and one made two.

No. I can’t remember him giving any advice. I can’t remember asking for it. I

think that from memory a lot of a lot of my generation, and I hope it’s improved considerably since then but it probably hasn’t, I didn’t think my father was a well I didn’t appreciate him ‘til I was about twenty five

and that you know in my teens and twenties I thought he was oh I don’t know. I don’t know what but I guess I admired him or looked up to him but I thought I’d be better off without him but until I

got to twenty five and I appreciated the I started to appreciate the value of him and mm.

I was home from the war.

Yes. Well I guess it was before that but at that stage of the game it was sort of you know sort of really sunk in I guess.

I think so. I think with my own family they my we’ve got four girls and two boys and I think that they, the boys in particular, it’s only just latter years that they’ve you know well it’s quite surprised me they’ve the youngest son was who he was always a bit of a rebel

and a red ragger and but he’s suddenly started calling me ‘Dad’ and I much to my surprise. I was just the cranky old man before that but mm but he’s, going back a while ago you said something about or I said something about giving up smoking when I was eighty. When I was eighty I gave up smoking

and I told this youngest son of mine, I said, “You now,” I said, “any silly bugger can give up smoking if I can,” and he said, “Listen old man, when I get to eighty I’ll start to think about it too.” So he stumped me in one.

That’s digressing a bit, but never mind.

My responsibilities?

Well I was a at that stage of the game I was a sergeant and I was drafted to Don

company of the 2/19th Battalion and I was also drafted to 17th Platoon as platoon sergeant and they we had a, Lieutenant Walker was the platoon commander, who was a snob and a drip as far as I and most

of the men were concerned and he became he didn’t stay there a great length of time. He became adjutant to someone at brigade or Bennett’s headquarters or something but anyhow how does that go? That’s a derogatory thing to say.

Yes but from my point of view as a platoon sergeant,

a sergeant gets to know the men in that platoon. You know you’re not an officer’s supposed to stay a bit aloof and sort of not be one of the boys sort of thing but a sergeant can be one of the boys and he can go out on the town with the troops and all the rest of it but an officer can’t do that and as a sergeant I got to know the men in 17th platoon and

it was they were a terrific bunch of fellas and as it was a great delight to me when I got a couple of pips to have the opportunity to go back to 17 Platoon as platoon commander. It doesn’t happen that often because the you’ve gotta be oh you’ve gotta be with ‘em but not

one of them sort of thing and it was a bit difficult to start with but they accepted me and I was tickled pink to have them sort of thing and

Particularly good, we were a we made

17 Platoon became one of the leading platoons in the 19th Battalion I feel. I’m probably prejudiced but when you were coming back into camp you could talk to these fellas and when you came in the camp gate I’d just tell the blokes, I’d say, “Righto fellas, turn it on now,” and they’d you know all start to lift their arms a bit higher and

stand up a bit straighter and all the rest of it and we had a good association. I did anyhow. Mm.

Better.

The militia and the light horse

was very slack and you know it there’s a oh just a well nothing serious about it sort of thing but when you joined the AIF you sort of you’re there for a purpose and therefore you put your tongue in your cheek a lot more and tried to make something of yourself and it was totally

it was much better in the AIF I thought, because everyone was there for a purpose and mm.

Hard time?

I can’t remember. There were a hell of a lot of good blokes in 17 platoon. You’d sort of they’d all be in a

hut together and you’d and I can’t remember anyone having a hard time out of it at all. I think that they’d see there’s why would they? There’s a it’s not like cadets or militia. You’re there for a purpose and you’re not going to sort of make anyone uncomfortable. The thing that

people a gotta remember that in the unit like the AIF, they’re all men that joined the AIF to for a purpose. How they were going to react in doing that purpose no one knows. No one knows just what how you’re gonna behave when someone starts shooting at you or dropping bombs on you and that sort of thing but they were prepared, all these

men, to have a go and test themselves and I think that you know there was no no putting making one another feel uncomfortable. God I’ll never I won’t be able to talk for a month after this.

Yes we didn’t like them. We didn’t like chocos, we didn’t like Yanks and we didn’t like anyone that wasn’t army really. We didn’t like the navy, we didn’t like the air force and it was the

air force had life too they were too comfortable. They had comfortable beds and what not and all the rest of it and they but we weren’t we I can’t remember any incident in a well we I was never involved in any dispute in a pub or a club or anything else with any other service but you shouldn’t be and

once again, they’re all there for the same reason that you are sort of thing. Except the Yanks, they were an exception. Overpaid and oversexed and apart from that they were good blokes.

I don’t know, they’re a necessary evil in our life these days anyhow. They’re the only big brother we’ve got and they’re these people

that say anything else are I think they’re very short sighted and when you take the millions of people you’ve got in Indonesia and well in the last war you can’t Japan when you’ve got they’re got so many millions and the whole of Japan, as they said on TV the other day, approximate the same size as Victoria well naturally people

get land hungry and we’re in the same boat with closer neighbours. The Indonesians I think are the biggest problem we’ve got coming up in the future and if we didn’t have America as a back big brother well we’d be a push over. John Howard might be think he’s gonna send his two fighter planes over and do wreck havoc with them but I think he’s

doing a good job but he still reminds me of a bantam rooster and all the strutting and posturing and what not that he’s doing but he’s still doing a good job keeping in with America in my book.

Oh they had too much comfort.

The, Chris one of the penalties of getting old as my wife keeps on telling me, you also get deaf and I’m having a little bit of difficulty in

If

If you wouldn’t mind, yes.

Well they had comfortable beds and what not.

They were always back in at home port on leave and if they weren’t on leave in home port they were somewhere else on leave and us poor army fellas were sent overseas and we did get local leave but that wasn’t anything like home leave. Mm.

Ah well we used to do a lot of route marching. I suppose the biggest thing was to get fit and I can remember specifically we one of the biggest thing in your route marches people used to get sore feet with army boots and I can remember sitting ‘round with our feet in condies crystals to after route

marches to toughen up your feet and I can remember bush exercises you know and camping out in the bush and that sort of thing and tactics and but I think that was the basic preparation we had. The mm.

Well you attacked dummy positions sort of thing. You had A Company was had to do this, come up that side of the hill and B Company up the other side of the hill and you had someone either a company from your battalion or some other battalion that were acting as the enemy sort of thing and you had to sneak up on them and surprise them and you had to have lines of fire

and all this sort of business but to stop things happening.

No. We did think that we’d be sent to the Middle to you know Africa sort of thing and that was what we thought but

we didn’t know where we were being sent, not even when we were on The Queen Mary we didn’t know where we were being sent. We didn’t know we were being sent to Malaya until at the last minute when The Queen Mary pulled out of the convoy and shot off in a different direction sort of thing that we realised we were being sent to Malaya. Mm.

I think we would have had to been in Malaya. Not sure of that, but I think so.

Mm. Were we?

We were there something like twelve months.

Yeah.

I’m not I’m not sure but I think we would have had to be in Malaya.

I can’t remember them doing so. See

no I can’t remember being anything specific. We were but we were being trained in Australian bush country and that was a mixture I guess. Coulda been part jungle part open country sort of thing and it I don’t think there was

anything specific. It certainly wasn’t jungle warfare we were taught. Later on they came up into Queensland, north up here and did jungle training but we certainly didn’t do that but, no.

Well that’s difficult because I wasn’t in city street. See I was in units from before the war started until the war all the way through sort of thing and we were my life consisted of

Rutherford and Greta and after the light horse business and it was

Well

Yes we used to drink too much and smoke too much and spend whatever money we had on

taking these confounded girls here and there and it was but we never had any money. We spent it as we got it sort of thing that’s either drank it or socialised with it or smoked it. Mm but I can’t remember we used to from Greta we used to come down from

there to I don’t know that we got a great deal of leave. I can’t remember any great time spent down in Sydney once we were in this we used to get weekend leave and that sort of thing. The job we were doing I suppose that had something to do with it. The training these reinforcements. They didn’t we were non

well we were just a non-descript unit sort of thing. We didn’t have any great standing I guess. You know there was no we I can’t remember having anyone in charge of us that said, “Righto you fellas an have a week off this time,” and a lot of for the life of me I can’t

even remember who was in control of us but someone musta been.

Don’t know what it was. Yeah.

All right?

No. No. Not much of him at all. See he was

in northern New South Wales and we were in Rutherford and Rutherford and Greta.

No. No. At that

that age girls were more important than brothers. You and sisters and you know you had your I don’t know your you didn’t seem to have a great deal of time for the left over.

With a bit of sport and a bit of drinking and socialising and that sort of thing you were pretty busy.

Well I can’t remember what we did when I was at Greta and Rutherford. I can’t, as I said, I can’t

remember going down to Sydney for any great splurges to at Palm Beach or anywhere else and I guess we just hoped that absence’d make the heart grow fonder but in those days you this drinking and being one of the boys was that took up a fair bit of time you know

and

I think so. I think so. We you know we thought the world was full of mates and friendship and all the rest of it, which you do when you’re in a in a drinking situation and it’s how far from the truth it is you don’t realise ‘til later on in life but it’s

you do make a lot of friends but in a drinking relationship, friendship is a pretty shallow basis for friendship. It’s not I think. Mm.

I think it’s basically age. It I wear glasses the glasses I have on now these are reading glasses and I can’t read distinctly with my driving glasses on.

The other glasses they’re long range glasses. I think that any of us that survived what we did survive and are lucky because well for argument’s sake, at eighty three what sort of state do you expect to be in?

And everything starts to deteriorate including your hearing, your eyesight you name it. Your joints and all the rest of it but I don’t think that what we put up with, the through the Japanese improved our well being in any shape or form and I suppose that includes glasses ah eyes as

well but I’m not sure. Mm.

Yes, my shoulders. I’ve got no power but out to the side in any shape or form. The my

right shoulder the tendons are completely disintegrated. In the left shoulder they’re partly disintegrated and that means that you’ve got they’re considerably weakened. I did the doctor sent me to a shoulder specialist at Buderim and he said, “Yes we can operate on your shoulders”, which is quite confusing actually but he told me that

there is a fifty/fifty chance of success and I said, “Yes and?” and he said, “Well your arm’d be in a sling for three months and you wouldn’t be able to use it for another three months,” and I said, “Well in that case forget it,” but what I said it’s confusing, there on the TV I saw Petria Thomas, who’s had both shoulders reconstructed, win a butterfly race. So and that was since the Olympic Games.

So whether our Queensland doctors don’t know what they’re talking about or what, I haven’t got a clue.

And no well see, also I’ve got I’ve got a crook back. My back gets out of plumb and it’s the discs are oh I don’t know what the hell but I know the doctor told me that I

said when I was having back trouble, which I do periodically, I said, “I’ll go and see one of these psychiatrist ah broke cracker fellas,” and he said, “Well don’t you do that.” He said, “If someone does the wrong thing with your back you’ll end up in a wheelchair,” and that that said, “All right well I won’t touch him in that case,” but see my knee my right knee is a problem again. That’s

because the gristle in between the bone is worn out, is not non-existent and you’ve got a bone on bone situation which means you’ve got discomfort when you and restrictions when you’re walking and but that can happen and has happened with people of my age that weren’t in the services too sort of thing but it’s not

but once again, people tell me that the physiotherapist told me that I was going to told me, she said, “Don’t have anything done with knees or hips until you get to the stage that you’re on painkillers day and night to put up with the pain,” and that was her sounded like good commonsense because in her case, she said well the what’s the name

of the thing you get in hospitals these days?

No, no, no. A complaint you catch in hospital. Ah

Oh no the no that’s legionnaires disease. No, this is just a germ that gets into your system. Oh what the hell? You should know that. Our daughter had an

appendicitis at Brisbane and she went into Brisbane Hospital and she got it, and it just about killed her. Oh streptococcal or one of those things anyhow. You get it. It’s quite common in hospitals. You’ve got it in all your Brisbane hospitals and it’s in our two local hospitals.

Yes I couldn’t tell you, but anyhow that it that’s not something I should know what the heck I’m talking about but I can’t remember because but as I said, the daughter had it and it was it was pretty severe as far as

she was concerned.

Mm, think of it tonight.

No.

Yes. Well on The Queen Mary?

We didn’t know where we were going. We were just being trained and we

well we had to go somewhere, we knew that, but it wasn’t ‘til I don’t know. It’d be in our battalion history there that when we found out we were going on The Queen Mary that it was but it was a very terrific experience you know. It’s very crowded and

but as far as we officers were concerned, we had beer was cheap. You could get oh I don’t know, they had an officers’ mess and you could we spent a lot of time drinking again and the men spent a lot of time drinking. They had free access to beer too but

No, oh well there were some women aboard for sure I think.

The nursing staff for the hospitals, they were they were going on board, but when I say “the men” in that that’s an army term for officers and men sort of thing you know. Not men were by that’s not it’s not a derogatory term. It’s just a

distinction. See the once you became an officer you got you jumped from five bob a day to ten bob a day sort of thing and that was a big step upwards. Mm.

No. Not ‘til I became a POW. When I became a POW I when I got out of the army I had two thousand pounds in my pay book

and that was a small fortune in those days but in the first six months I was home I drank a thousand pounds of it plus my pay and then I had a thousand pounds to when we got married for two thousand pounds I built a small house in the middle of Inverell and it was

that was the going price then. Two thousand pounds for a new two-bedroomed house but

I didn’t save any money but any not as a when I became an officer. We drank it and acted the goat.

Mm.

No. No. I can’t remember. I can remember it was very hot and we were not used to such humidity and heat at the time but it didn’t take

long. I know there was a Woman’s Weekly reporter came over there at one stage of the game and she said we were having a whale of a time just drinking and [(UNCLEAR)] and she caused quite a stir actually amongst the people that were there because we had we were we didn’t have anything to do with where

we were sent or what we were doing. We were just there sort of thing and but I can’t remember what time of the year it was. I can remember it was damned hot and very humid but human beings are very adaptable if they try.

The food was pretty good, yes. I can’t remember. Food was sort of a food has never been any great big deal as far as I’m concerned because as I said earlier, we as kids we used to endeavour to live off the land sorta thing. The only thing that’s ever worried me about food is the lack

thereof but that that’s a bit of a concern but types of food has never been something that has been of any concern to me at all. It still isn’t. The wife’ll ask me do I want this or do I want that sort of thing and it’s not - unimportant.

Ha ha. Well you you’ve

got to you’ve got to be careful in that case.

Yes.

We well I’m

pretty sure one of the boats was The Arawatta. There were four in the convoy I know and The Queen Mary and The Arawatta were two and The Queen Mary we The Queen Mary had to keep its pace down to what the other ships could do and we had one lousy destroyer, which was, well something. It wasn’t very much but something, and it wasn’t ‘til we were out on the Indian Ocean

that one morning or one day The Queen Mary suddenly put on you could feel the revs being built up and it started going. I think it’s full speed in those days was twenty five knots and it got to full speed and it pulled out of the convoy and did a half circle and came up and roared through the middle of the convoy and then shot off to the right towards Malaya. The other

ships kept on going more to the left to the Middle East but that was when we knew that the it was really a sight for sore eyes. In my ignorance, when The Queen Mary took off everyone went up on the deck to have a look and, especially the top deck, and when it went that way everyone’d go to the left hand deck and The

Queen Mary had a bit of a list on owing to the speed that it was going and the fact it was turning that way and my thoughts, I can still remember, I thought, “These silly buggers are gonna tip this ship over,” and running from one side of the top deck to the other I that was how little I knew about ships in my early days but it was it was really something to see this great ship leaving the rest

of the convoy for dead. Mm.

No, no. I haven’t been anywhere since I got out of the army. I’ve I haven’t been back to Malaya. I haven’t been back to Burma/Thailand or anywhere else. As I think I said earlier, I’ve endeavoured in my to the best of my ability

to turn the page and I think it this applies to life in general. You can’t start looking backwards. You otherwise you’ve had the bait. You’ve got to look forward and I’ve to well for argument’s sake, I recently had a, or some twelve months ago, I had a letter from the widow of one of the blokes in my platoon and she,

a particularly nice woman she’s sounds and is I don’t doubt, but she was wanting to reminisce on the past and you know what I knew of her husband and all this sort of thing and I told her, I said, “Look, I don’t want to be in such a racket because every time your husband’s name come up that brings memories

back,” and I said, “You start looking back like that and you’ll be a,” you’ve got to look forward I think and so I just stopped writing to her and stopped corresponding because, not that I didn’t want to and shouldn’t have should have, but it’s like when I came home and I got off the train and I found my brother was had been

killed in the, I was full of good intentions when I came home. I was going to go ‘round and saw see each and every one of the mothers or widows of the blokes in my platoon that were killed but I just couldn’t face it. I you know I and I so I went and got drunk instead and I stayed drunk for six months and that was didn’t help them or didn’t help me

but the end of six months I thought, “Well if this is gonna go on it’s going to you’ve gotta pull yourself together or drop out of the race altogether,” but that’s that was irrespective.

Well, it was a lovely country. The jungle was terrific and the birds were a hazard. The birds used to camp on the, it might sound quite silly in what you reminisce about a country, but the swallows and those sort of things used to camp on all the telephone and electricity lines by the

millions and you could not walk under a line without being bombed by dozens or hundreds of blooming swallows and what not and it was that was one of the things. Their food was another thing that impressed me. I think the we went to a Chinese millionaire used to shout some of us a meal and we had twenty eight different dishes in the course of this meal and

but the those sort of people don’t eat the way we do, one great big dish of steak and eggs or fish and chips. They have a small dish with just like a an entrée how it’s half an entrée type of thing and then you have another small dish and they and another thing that in that meal that impressed me was the liqueur that we were given. It had

four different colours in the glass and the liqueurs were different consistency and they separated and the sat in the glass in their respective colours. I couldn’t tell you for the life of me what they were but they were I can still remember this glass with the four different coloured liqueurs in it. Mm.

Well we were told to get used to the country and get used to the jungle and to we had to rethink the British line of thought. They would tell you that

a bit of a swamp on one side of the road was impregnable jungle and a mangrove swamp was an impregnable mangrove swamp and we we’ve couldn’t understand that. The other big thing was we had to, and we found it wasn’t correct when the Japanese started shooting at us. No such thing as impregnable jungle or impregnable mangrove

swamps but another thing we had to get used to was the British claim that no white man could live in the heat of the tropics unless he had a sleep in the afternoon from two and four. So every afternoon we used to knock off at two o’clock and we’d stay retire to our tents and come out of the tents at four o’clock. That’s a that’s when we weren’t on exercises or

something but ‘round camp life you had a two hour break at between two and four every day.

Yeah. Very, very sensible. Very good but not the Japanese didn’t contribute to such thinking so, which was unfortunate for us.

We used to do what we could. You had five thousand men on The Queen Mary and it was the space was limited but we used to do PT [physical training] and they had a big deal was the they had a boxing tournament, I can remember, but that was limited to certain people but two up

was the biggest form of exercise I think on The Queen Mary. There was a lot of two up played and gambling yeah, but that didn’t get anyone fit but we used to do it. There were just too many people on the boat to be able to do any great deal of physical activities really.

No. No you had to have your shirt and your shorts on for sure. I can’t remember seeing any bare short shirtless people anywhere. Oh yes I can damn it. At that why the hell?

I’ve got the there’s a photo of me on a book that Janet Err wrote and on the front of the book there’s a picture of me with my shirt off in Malaya holding a coconut and some of my men are in the same area there but I was just going to tell you, “No, never.”

Yeah. Big trouble.

Boxing. It was. It there was a lot of boxing and there was a lot of football. Everything you know when we were in Malaya boxing was a big thing. Rugby Union was a big thing. We had five of our players got in

the brigade boxing, the brigade union team to play the English and we used to water polo was another. You name it, it was on. We used to and I can remember the officers and the sergeants used to play rugby union against one another. I distinguished myself greatly in the first officers/sergeants match. Someone kicked off and I charged down the field

and ran into my platoon sergeant and wrecked my knee and I limped off the field and I’d spent two minutes playing rugby union against the sergeants I guess and in about a fortnight but it a lot of it was played you know sport wise but

Course they did. I hope so. I think so.

We never did no. No. We it was purely selfish and the self acclimatisation I guess you could call it but we I can’t remember any doing anything specifically

for the good of the country. Huts. I suppose we built huts for at certain places for accommodation but not, I can’t think of anything else, no.

If we’d gone up later you mean?

No I yes I think it would have made quite a bit of difference. You were, as I think I said earlier, I think human beings are very human body is very adaptable. We can get used to heat and cold if we try and I think the fact that we had approximately

twelve months to get used to the heat and humidity. It’s the same with Queensland here. You get you I think your blood gets probably gets thinner but it’s you feel the cold more here. Well for argument’s sake, last winter we had an eiderdown a thick eiderdown on our bed and I told the wife I said, “Dammit this is all we had on our bed at Glen Innes”

and Glen Innes is a cold spot but I think your body does regulate to and get used to certain climates if you encourage it a bit.

Brothels? Yeah.

Yes. The there were well there are always have been and always will be brothels and there’ll always be people that frequent the brothels but we were given definite talks about the amount of VD was the big no-no

in those days, in Second World War days, and oh VD and there was one gonorrhoea I think was the other one. That’s right and the brothels were at the entrance to every camp you had a blue light tent and the people coming back from the that had frequented brothels were advised to go and

have what they called a wash out and what the hell it was I never knew because I’d I never had it but I gather they washed out the your internal penis tubes to try and make sure that there were no VD or gonorrhoea that got left behind but it there were brothels everywhere in every area that we were in and in Singapore of course

and it’s you can’t it’s the people that are silly enough to use them or without taking the precautions but I’ve since met, well at the gym we go to there’s a man that’s sort of married to a Filipino and he said that, “Thankfully my wife was not a bar girl,” but he said, “The bar

girls,” he said, “they’ve really got no option when you think about it. They’ve got no money. No nothing to support themselves except their own body and they it becomes a necessity with them sort of thing,” and he but the men that used them well they’re paying for it even more so today I think with this

new culling business that we’ve got with the AIDS. It’s the big no-no today, not our VD and what not. VD and gonorrhoea are treatable but AID is evidently not. So

Well yes, I guess so. That had

a big that put a big no-no on it and the oh self-respect was another reason. I think that, dunno.

I don’t know that the men would have worried much about it but it would have been

a quick trip home for an officer if he got VD. The there were the were treat you know treat the blokes were treated with VD in the hospitals but as far as I know, if an officer got it well he was he was on the boat home sort of thing and it was

an officer and a gentleman didn’t do such thing as frequent brothels but they did, that’s for sure.

Yes and

They did.

Yes. Yes I’ve seen it happening. We used to have we used to have to an officers’ picket and and you we the blokes were supposed to be home at ten o’clock every night and they if they weren’t home they used to we used

to have to pick them up and bring them home or if it was too late we had to put them on a charge sheet and charge them from being out of camp after ten o’clock and it I know on one occasion we were told that there were blokes in a brothel somewhere. So we went in to shake them out or chase them out or pick them up and take them

home or whatever you like, and we came ‘round a corner and there were several of the Malayan prostitutes washing themselves with condies crystals there when we actually saw it happening. Ooh

No, they were just squatting over a bowl of condies crystals splashing their crutch with condies crystals sort of thing and

yeah.

Well it was it was well I guess they had that was the cheapest preventative or protective thing that they had to do sort of thing and it was better than nothing.

Yes.

That was a good influence for sure yeah. Mm.

Well I corresponded regularly and she corresponded regularly with me on but you couldn’t be specific in army terms as

even in those days you had to the men’s letters were supposed to be vetted by an officer before they could be posted home. If and you if you thought that something was being too specific as to where you were or what you were doing well you had to blot it out with a pen or cut it out with a pair of scissors or something and send that mutilated letter put it back

in the envelope and send it back home, which I never did but

No.

I was supposed to, yes.

I can’t remember doing so. I suppose I must have but it was like this, it was an invasion of privacy.

Well you had to read it to see what the heck they were talking about sort of thing because to see whether it was you didn’t read it completely but you know if it was talking about how beautiful they were or something well there was no need to read that. But if you got down to somewhere else and they started to say, “We are now doing this or doing that,” sort of thing that you

you’d had to take a bit of notice of it to see if it was but I never thought that they did anything specific you know. They could say we were in Port Swettenham and or [(UNCLEAR)] and we were at Seremban or Port Dickson or what not. As far as I was concerned it was pretty general knowledge with I mean all the Malays knew it, so what the hell sorta thing and can’t remember vetting anything out.

Yes.

Yes that did happen but that was that was just human nature. You know it happened sort of thing and it you thought, “No it won’t happen to me”

but it it’s like everything else in life. It these some of these things do happen to people so you’ve got

Tell him to go and get drunk and there are plenty more fish in the sea and there was an old saying that about that went around on those sort of occasions that

you and when people were talking about getting married. “You don’t buy a cow if you want a milkshake,” and it was

No I guess not. Hope not.

Right.

It’d have to be I think when we were in Kluang in a rubber,

in a rubber plantation camp. I’m sure that’s where it was. Pretty sure anyhow. Not certain and what were our reactions? Well we’d been expecting it and now it’s happened.

We were expecting them to do the right thing and come in by sea off Singapore Island and the Jap the English

naval guns on Singapore Island were gonna sink everything before they even got to land. They had these great big artillery pieces on Singapore Island and every square of the ocean to the east and south of Singapore Island were plotted and they could drop a shell on anything. But they forgot that the Japanese were go might come down the land and the guns wouldn’t turn ‘round that far

so they couldn’t they were useless but we didn’t know where the Japanese were coming at that stage of the game naturally and we just had to wait and see but …

The propaganda had it at that stage of the game that the Japanese were a hopeless lot of soldiers. That one Australian was

worth ten Japanese and that the Japanese air force was hopeless. They were colour blind and they couldn’t do this and they couldn’t do that. You know the propaganda they spread over the multitude at that stage of the game but we viewed it with a certain amount of doubt.

Doing out of the camp?

We were do doing training in jungle warfare and that included going out into the jungle and forming company or battalion positions and then one of the main things they used to stress was that seeing that the visibility was probably five or ten yards,

that you had to clear a line of fire and you had a machine gun or a Bren gun firing along a certain line sort of thing and you tried to cover all aspects of the approaches to your position but we did that sort of training and also living out in the living out in the jungle itself was part and parcel of our training.

Route marches another thing. Patrols along roads. No one on the road. One section each side of the road and so on and then to start with and scouts out to the side in a just general jungle warfare training, as they thought it should be at that stage of the game.

Yeah. It did.

Well we didn’t see a great deal of them and we thought that they were you know the information they fed us we thought they must be pretty hopeless and that wasn’t the British

soldier’s point of view, it was the hierarchy that was responsible for that. They it came down right down from the top and the top was pretty hopeless evidently. A lot of the British army was rank was purchased still, we thought anyhow, we and we thought that was pretty right. Not earned but anyhow.

That was just our opinion. Mm.

We all were, yeah. Mm. How hopeless they were and how good we were and we hoped it was true, but it wasn’t.

It the brigade or division that we ran into, the 2/19th Battalion, were seasoned troops that had been right through China and therefore and they were they as far as soldiers were concerned, they were terrific soldiers. Very

we thought.

Prince of Wales and Repulse?

Disbelief. You know we couldn’t believe that such a thing’d happen and it or it had been allowed to happen and it that was that was

our general I would say that was the general reaction. Mm.

These two big ships?

Well we knew they were coming down through Thailand and it was, there was I know there was quite a bit of talk at one stage of the game about the fact that the British troops should be go into Thailand and create, make a checkpoint out of it but that wasn’t allowed because we weren’t at war with Thailand or something and

mm.

Ah well

Well the first thing the 19th Battalion were up to, we were told to put in a dig a defensive situation

at Seremban, which we did. We dug trenches and had trenches all ‘round the village of Seremban and that kept us occupied for quite a bit but that was the first thing and then the next thing that was changed, the orders seemed to be changing quite a bit in Malaya, was but the next thing our company, Don company the

2/19th Battalion, was sent to Endau and that’s where we first, continue on?

Well when we

went to Endau, the Endau village is on the southern side of the Endau River. The Endau River’s quite a big river. My estimate was it was a mile wide at the at the mouth and two platoons of Don company were kept on the southern side of the Endau River, that’s near Endau village, and my platoon was sent across the river to

keep an eye on the beach between An the mouth of the Endau River and what the hell’s the name of the next river up, which was twelve miles up. P-A-H-A-N-A, Pahana River and we had twelve miles of beach to keep an eye on and notify if there were any Japanese landings on that. Well they it’s a bit like Australian

beaches. They could have landed anywhere and my thirty five men were not gonna make a the world of difference in any case but we were told not to get ourselves committed but just to report on enemy activity, which we endeavoured to do. Keep going?

Right. The on my platoon’s section there was one

section at the mouth of the river and then there was another section six miles up along the beach and another section twelve miles up along the beach. According to ‘The Japanese Thrust’ I had a, which is the official history of the campaign in Malaya, I had a hundred and fifty men. I had thirty five. According to the battalion history I had a truck to drive up and down the beach with. We had neither of those,

nor did we have a motorbike. We had our flat feet to walk up and down the beach and the third section was right up at the at the on this next river up twelve miles up. Pahana River or whatever it is. P-A-H-A-N

Pahana River I think that’s it and the eldest of my section commanders, Corporal Oag, and his men were up at up on the river there. We had approximately

I don’t know, a week there I suppose, and on the 13th, I know these dates are correct, on the 13th we got a message from company headquarters to withdraw from across the river and we’d I sent a runner up to Corporal Oag. The only contact we had with Corporal Oag was in the day time. We used to get a boat come across with rations once

a day and we used to trek twelve miles up the beach to give him rations or he’d meet us half way or something. Anyhow when Corporal Oag got back he reported that Japanese on bikes were just starting to arrive on the far side of the Pahana this river, twelve miles up. When we reported that to company headquarters they reported it to battalion and so on and

we were told to go back on the night of the 13th and keep an eye on these Japs and just give them something to make them hesitate or something but once again we were told not to get ourselves heavily involved. Anyhow we did that and I established a, put the one section at the mouth

of the Endau River and the second section started off up to the six mile section and Alan Oag and his section went up to the twelve mile. When we reported in at when we got established on the Endau River I set sail up to see what I told ‘em I’d come up and see what was happening where as soon as I could. I got to the six mile section and firing started up

at the twelve mile section. Obviously .303 firing and there was quite a bit of it and then Corporal Oag was supposed to stir the Japs up a bit and then withdraw back down to along the beach to six mile and then back to the river. So we sat down at the six mile, that was as far as I got, and we were in a good situation

to cross the cross a clearing and nothing happened for quite a bit. We were hoping and looking for Alan Oag and his ten men to come back to us but out of the blue figures started to appear on the far side of the clearing and one of my blokes in his enthusiasm, a chap called George Leader I believe it was,

sang out, “Yoohoo Oagy,” and yoohoo Oagy wasn’t fact, it was Japs, so they dropped to the ground and started shooting at us, and that we were in a sort of a situation where we had quite a nice little ambush waiting for them there but that was non-existent then. We then we exchanged a bit of fire then with one another and then we went back down to the

mouth of the Endau River and we stayed there all day doing little damage, well no damage was done to us, but we hoped and we had done some damage to the Japanese. At late in the afternoon the two sections that were then at the Endau River we,

I decided we were in a sort of a situation where we were not gonna be picked up where we were. That we had to get further down the river into a more likely place to pick us up but we started off, but one thing that’s worth mentioning, when we went back to the on the night of the 13th I had a Tommy gunner, one Tommy gun

per platoon, and this was a bloke called Maurie Nimmo. So we were all on this boat and when we were going across I told Nimmo I said, “Now listen, as soon as the boat hits the bank of the river there you go like hell fifty yards up there into the and cover the rest of the platoon getting off.” So Maurie Nimmo sat up the front of the boat. The boat hit the river bank and quite often

happens it bumped back. Put Maurie off balance. Maurie jumped over into the water and all we could see was his head sticking up out of the water. Our protection was under water so but I can’t not that was one of the things that sort of sticks in my mind quite well but anyhow we started back down along the river and along the river there it was all mangrove swamps and we were all

oh knee deep or better in mud and slush I suppose and in the Endau River there were two boats, gun boats. They were patrolling up and down. They were British gunboats we knew and then all of a sudden out of the blue one started shooting at us. They hadn’t been told quite obviously that we’d been sent back across the river and one of these blokes of mine, Alan Ferguson, he had the Tommy gun

at this stage of the game, I don’t know why, but foolishly he had the safety catch off and he was blown off his feet and Tommy guns are forty five calibre and they’re soft nose and he put a row of bullets right down his leg starting at his hip and right down and made a just shattered everything and we, this is one of my big

nightmares, but as a platoon commander I had to make the decision to what we could do with Ferguson. We couldn’t he was virtually he couldn’t move and he wasn’t carryable, I didn’t think, so he had to be left and we left him there and it was his life or twenty five others because the we had to report that there was something like a hundred and fifty or two hundred Japs on the bikes

that Yoohoo Oagy fella had told us were crossing the river there. Anyhow we went down along this in this mangrove swamp. We just got started and this fella Ferguson yelled out, “Go for your life. The bastards are here already,” and the next thing there was an ungodly yell and one of our one of the blokes turned ‘round, the fella had had his Tommy gun now,

turned ‘round and he saw this Jap slashing at him with a sword and so he gave him a full drum of Tommy gun bullets before he left. Virtually cut him in half I suppose but that was the end of Ferguson and we went kept on along the bank of the river and we had no communication with company headquarters across the river

and I could see that the only way we were gonna get out was to get the boats were shooting at us so they thought we were Japs and that had to be communicated and I was a pretty strong swimmer in those days and I thought, “Well there’s only one thing to do. I someone’s gotta swim this damn river and it’s probably me.” So I did. I managed to find a bit of a log that I put my shorts and my boots on. I thought well I was no good without any boots and

socks if I got when I got across to contact someone and I had a couple of grenades in the pockets. Well it just held those things lightly and I pushed that in front of me and swam across the river. It on the lighter side I all the way across I was thinking of sharks and crocodiles, which there were supposed to be plenty of in those areas. When I got to the other side I was a bit tired and I was hanging onto a mangrove branch and I took my clothes and

boots off the log and pushed it away from me and I pushed it upstream and the next thing it floated back and hit me in the middle of the back and I thought, “Well a crocodile’s got me or a shark’s got me,” and it’s the old story are you tired or do you only think you are? I flew up that mangrove tree as though it was non-existent but anyhow these boats chugged down the river again

on my side of the river as it was then and I yelled and whooped and cooeed at them and finally convinced them that I wasn’t a Jap, that I was a goodie, and they understood what I was on about so we went across and picked these blokes of mine up. What’s that? That’s build a, fired on, Ferguson, swamp, knee deep, swamp, river,

twelve men missing. See there were twelve men missing. A section a platoon consists normally of ten men and a corporal, three sections. That’s thirty three and then platoon headquarters you’ve got an officer and a sergeant and a runner as a that’s normal platoon strength.

I to this day I don’t know. I gather they were or I can only assume

that they were the, they went up and they started to engage Japs coming across the river, but there musta been some across already and they got cut off or surrounded or something but that was the end of them as we never saw them again, any of those fellas. So they were just kaput and that was on the 14th of January and that was I thought the, it was two days before the 30th

Battalion had action with the Japanese, which has never been sort of acknowledged but …

Yes.

Yes. Mm. One of my blokes, the two fellas went were at the back

watching out the back of us as we went down along the river and one fella said he’d driven his sword into him and the other fella said he was slashing at him but they was he was dead. What next? Right. The next thing, 17 platoon did, the platoon, the company was then Don company rejoined the battalion

and the whole battalion was going up to Muar to, on the opposite side of Malaya and my two sections, I only had two sections out of the three, that’s two-thirds my normal strength, and there was one platoon of Don company left at Endau for some reason. I don’t know, it’s in the battalion history there somewhere, that when we started going up to Muar that was in a bit of a

mess. We got to this place Parit Sulong and Parit, at Parit Sulong River had a big concrete bridge across it and it came up rather high and then sloped down the side and our colonel, Colonel Anderson who later got a VC [Victoria Cross], he thought that this was a weakness. If the Japanese got ‘round at the back of us and got control of this bridge we’d be cut off completely.

So he thought he’d do something about it and he left my platoon, that’s two sections of us, to guard this bridge and the rest of the battalion went up to Muar and ran into this Japanese special force there and they had tanks and goodness knows what. The after I’d been there at

Parit Sulong Bridge for a certain length of time a British company, the Norfolks, turned up and they said they’d been sent by Malaya command to look after this bridge and they said, “You can buzz off now,” and I said, “Well I can’t very well buzz off until my colonel tells me I can,” sort of thing. So I waited there until I sent word up that the Norfolks were at the bridge and should I rejoin the battalion.

They, I got word back, “Yes,” and the truck got as far as Beechelong, which is some what distance behind battalion, where the trouble was and battalion and Beechelong was surrounded by Japs. The Japs had a great habit of engaging at the front and then sending troops ‘round to encircle the whatever they were engaging and they did that there and they came ‘round and they

found Beechelong and they encircled it and we were doing a bit of inner, well we were shooting at one another. They were trying to get established and what not.

Go on.

When we got to Beechelong.

That was our first, our first thing. It’s oh well it’s a sort of normal thing to do actually and I know when we were at Endau and were retreating back along the beach, one thing I made a point of doing is having one fella way out to the on the flank to just keep an eye on in case they

got up to such tactics sort of thing but they didn’t really have time to do so. Beechelong yes. We were there and then the commander of Beechelong, Major Reg Newton, he said, “Well you’ve got the only platoon or part thereof of platoon here.” He said, “I want you to break your way out across the road there.” We were on the southern

side of the road and on the northern side of the road was a swamp area again. Impregnable swamp the British woulda called it and he said, “I want you to break your way out there and distract them,” and he said, “We’ll have to head off the other direction”, which we did, and we got across the road with no casualties. There was a Japanese machine gun trying to set itself

up just near where we crossed and my Maurie Nimmo disposed of them with his Tommy gun before we sort of got into the into the swamp again. We spent a day, what was that? We spent a night and a day. That was late in the afternoon. We spent a night and the rest of the day and a night and then the

following day, we only spent one night there. The following day we were still out to the side of this road. We reckoned the battalion’d get back somewhere. We’d have to find them along the road back toward Parit Sulong somewhere and the day after the night after this, we had one night in the swamp, and then the next night we were told that the battalion, the natives

told us that the troops were on the road. So we went back and joined the battalion, reported in, and Colonel Anderson said, “Well you stay at the back and act as a rear guard for the battalion coming along the road.” There were trucks with wounded and ambulances and that sort of thing there and then when we got to Parit Sulong the bridge was blocked by the Japanese. They’d,

the Norfolks had been there for several days evidently and they had no communication with their battalion and they thought they’d been neglected and deserted and everything else, so they pulled out. Left the bridge unguarded and what happened with them I don’t know. It was a catastrophe from our battalion’s point of view and the 29th Battalion and the Indians that were the remains of the Indians that were there.

When we got to Parit Sulong the battalion in the, up the front were trying to force the a way across this bridge but the Japanese had machine guns set up and as soon as you got to the top of the bridge you met a high and they suffered a lot of casualties there. The remains of 17 platoon, we were left at the road as a rear guard again where the on the northern

side of the road that is, and we had from the road in for about oh I don’t know a hundred yards, something like that, and what? We were there for a day and a night and I’m not sure just how many days there, long time, but the Japanese were building up and attacking along the you know in front

of us and we were pretty well protected and we at this stage of the game we had sort of half slit trenches and half rubber trees and things but they didn’t it wasn’t anything major in their assault. Their main task was along the road. They were endeavouring to send tanks in and the it I think it was the 2/10th field artillery had

twenty five pound guns there and they were sort of had them pointing back along the road point blank sort of thing and they were blowing, I saw them blow at night time, they blew three tanks up. The 2/10th blokes, artillery blokes weren’t, didn’t stay at the guns. When something happened they’d rush up out of cover and load their gun and fire it and then get the hell out of the road again. The

2IC of the section that I was in, Keith Westbrook, he was, he spent a certain amount of time behind my rubber tree with me, and he organised, when there was a lull and tanks were coming down the road, he organised some blokes to go and drop grenades on these things, blow the tracks off them, which he did, and ah what else? We,

the second night, we were there, we got a fool of an order from someone that didn’t know that one and one made two and he said that every second man had to go forward five yards. Well anyone with any commonsense could see that that’s stupid as one thing but anyhow I passed it on and not many of my blokes did. One fella did do it, a fella called Eric Faulkner, and you can just imagine

five yards out in front and you’re sitting here and the Japs are sort of attacking from there and you think they’re going to sneak up on you and cut your throat any tick of the clock. Anyhow Faulkner went out and he the next thing there’s a grenade exploded out in front and I can only assume that one of his mates threw a grenade. They heard the noise out there, didn’t know he was there and threw

him out and sort of made a hell of a mess of him with their friendly fire again and just after that the Japs attacked again and, this is another one of my nightmares, Eric Faulkner screaming out to me, “Mr Varley shoot me. Shoot me. Mr Varley, shoot me,” and there was nothing we could do about it at stage of the game

because there was a big push on. We were sort of firing everything we could. The when it all finished over one of his mates went up to Faulkner to see what could be done with him, but he was dead anyhow, but two things happened in that night. One was a fella called Bluey Dale, who was a sleeper cutter in civilian life.

Out of the blue he yelled out, “Mr Varley I can’t hold them any longer,” and I said, “What’s the matter Blue?” and he Blue evidently had two grenades and he’d pull the pin out of each one and he had one in each hand. Well he couldn’t put the pins back and if he let them go he was gonna blow himself up and I said, “Well chuck the bloody things to hell out of the road Blue,” and, which he did. There was a ‘bang bang’ and he didn’t do any harm.

The other thing was, Nimmo is the platoon Tommy gunner was alongside me behind this rubber tree. Keith Westbrook and myself and Nimmo behind the one rubber tree and when this big blue was on I told Nimmo, for the sake of saying something, I said, “Nimmo if we, if you know any prayers you’d better say them now,” and he in all seriousness

said, “I’m not frightened to meet my maker.” Well he’d hardly said it and there was a bit of a twitch alongside me and he was dead. It musta hit him, bullet must have hit him straight in the heart or something, but I was quite concerned at that stage of the game. I was, looked as though I and everyone else was gonna be killed and I thought, “This war’s a very unfair sort of a thing. Here I am. It looked like

being killed at any tick of the clock and I have never slept with a woman,” and that was my one of my thoughts believe it or not, just when I thought that it was crook. Things were crook. What? Finally that night the no, they couldn’t force the bridge,

the colonel couldn’t, and we, it was just an impossibility and we got an order that every man was to go for himself. Well that was a chaotic move. We took off to the north side of the bridge, the side that I was on, or the battalion did and we were told to stay put for a certain length of time and then pull half the platoon out and then after ten minutes pull the other half out. Well

we pulled, that happened but we got to a gully and it was panic. There were fellas, there was a bit of a creek there, and there were fellas that foolishly that couldn’t swim and some of them were drowning and their mates were trying to pull them across and I don’t know, it was an unpleasant situation,

but anyhow we got out of that and we got back along the river and we went back to got back to Singapore Island and we were what? We were re-formed at base then.

All right.

Re-formed as a battalion there. We got a lot of reinforcements from Australia arrived and poor blokes that had been in the army a week and they were put on a boat and sent over to Singapore Island and told to rush out and stop the Japanese but we that’s where we re-formed, yes. Do you want me to continue on then?

The battalion were then sent out to Singapore Island to stop the Japanese from landing on Singapore Island. Now I was my platoon was in the left the 2/19th Battalion were the on the left of the Australians and my platoon was, there were two

platoons forward in Don company anyhow, and my platoon was on the left and we went on to the edge of the S-B-E-N-K Cove on Singapore Island. That’s the left. We had another platoon of Don company on to my right, which I never saw. Company headquarters was about a mile or so back behind us. We were connected with

a bit of wire for a telephone and that worked sometimes and we had nothing except the island to there was no barb wire, nothing there to assist us, which we had to endeavour to do something about. We dug trenches and to give us some protection and so on and

but I never saw the platoon on my right. That’s how far away they were. They were further away. We were strung out like brown’s cows. We had didn’t have a hope in hell of stopping anyone from landing. We after a few days a machine gun crowd came and mounted a machine gun and my forward section, I had two sections forward and one back in reserve

with the way we were situated. That’s two on the coast of the island and one back behind. Where? What the hell? The after we’d been there all day, I don’t know how many days, but quite a few days we they started shelling. The Japanese started shelling us and in our platoon area we counted or one of the blokes on platoon

headquarters counted a hundred shells in five minutes. That’s just landing in our particular area. They didn’t do anything but because shells don’t hurt you unless you get a direct hit. You know you’ve got to one’s got to land on you to anyhow. We then that night the we were told that if we saw activity in the around the island at night we had to fire a flare and

artillery guns from at the back of us were going to blow them out of the water and all the rest of it. We did that. The, that night there was activity in the front of us. Not a great deal. The bulk of it was further back to towards the thing. There was some activity in the platoon that was on my right but then there was no landings on my platoon area at all.

We did have Japanese boats endeavour to come there but the machine gun got stuck into them and the fellas fired their rifle at them and what not but there were no, there was no artillery anyhow. That went on. We were there then all day. The activity had all gone from in front of us and we could hear a hell of a lot of activity at the back of us and we had no contact with company

headquarters. A bloke went I one of the fellas I sent back to see what was happening at company headquarters and he came back and he said, “You can’t get through there. There are Japs everywhere up there,” and the Japanese had gone through and take and overrun company headquarters as well. So I thought, “Well there’s not much point in us sitting here like shags on a rock.” I said, “We’ve gotta

try and get back and join the battalion somewhere back along the line.” So we left our position on the edge of Singapore Island and went through another one of our mates, the mangrove swamps, to get ‘round the hill where we knew the Japanese were and we got back to finally we got back to we en we got to brigade headquarters and

then we looked for the battalion headquarters had gone when we got look for it. We did find it eventually and then we had minor skirmishing until towards the end. Towards the end my father, who was a brigadier at this stage of the game, sent word up that I had to report to brigade headquarters, which I did,

and he told me that they had then a case for capitulation. They he and some of his mates had a plan to escape up the west coast of Malaya to India and he said he wanted me to be in it. So that’s where I was and that’s where I was when the war when they war broke out. When the escape

plan was shelved when it was reported to them that General Bennett had deserted the sinking ship and gone back to Australia. The Dad and his other senior officers reckoned that they couldn’t all shoot through or endeavour to shoot through, which was probably a doubtful thing in any case but Singapore at that stage of the game was,

well I put here ‘hell’. There was smoke and fires and explosions you know burning petrol and Japanese planes just doing what they liked, buzzing around treetop heights and if you fired a rifle at them they’d come back and machine you gun you and the Japs had been shelling Singapore for some time and there were a lot of corpses lying around the place and they were starting to get on the nose

and it we thought if we we’d struck hell in first degree and it was at that stage of the game that I personally decided that, I’d been brought up in a religious situation and always went to Sunday school then always went to church and at Shore you had church chapel three times a

week, twice on Sunday, but at this stage of the game I decided that if there was such a bloke as god up there that the RSPCA should get onto him for cruelty to dumb animals and anyhow that was my thing. That was resolved further when I became a POW. Right? That’s the war.

Good. Okay.

Well see that was it. We, the powers that be said we had to surrender and that was it. We, the next we knew we had to throw all our guns and rifles and revolvers into a heap and form up and march out to Changi and that was it.

The indignity of marching for miles with Japanese lining both sides of the road ah jeering at you and what not was not good.

No.

We knew we’d lost the war but we didn’t think that Australia had lost the war. We, I don’t know what we think. We didn’t think a great deal about things in general generalising like that. I think we had personal problems and they sort of seemed to take bigger priority. Like surviving and

finding out what was gonna happen to everyone, the big things. Go on.

No. No. We

well we certainly weren’t a defeated force at all. It was just that you know we just well I suppose it was inevitable with the mess that Singapore itself was in and the damage that had been done to Singapore and the Singapore population in a concentrated area and it I guess it had to be done. There was no but see

it’s from the common person’s point of view it shouldn’t have happened, we didn’t think, but it did.

Yes and walking past these Japanese and also the civilian population and being jeered at by the Japanese was

a bit undignified.

Pardon? Jemaluang.

Where we dug the trenches.

Yes.

At Endau was the first time we struck the Japanese, my platoon struck the Japanese. Nothing happened at Jemaluang

except there was talk about a Japanese landing paratroopers and one night some silly coot fired a rifle off and the next thing there were rifles being fired off. They could see paratroopers flying out of the sky everywhere and there wasn’t a damn thing but there was a heck of a lot of wasted ammunition but that’s the only thing that happened at Jemaluang.

No it was a fact. We knew they were coming down because the powers that be were talking about going into Thailand and the they wouldn’t have it because it that would have been an act of war as far as Thailand was concerned to send armed troops into their country. Yeah.

That’s right. Mm.

Well we didn’t pat him on the back or anything. He got a bit of personal abuse and all the rest of it but it was a see they were a it was a pretty close knit platoon sort of thing and it

was a reaction that we could understand. He saw these blokes coming down the river there and around the beach and he naturally thought that it’d have to be, and we hoped it’d have to be, this Alan Oge and his section a men.

Yeah.

Well I don’t remember I told him

anything. The see he was a responsible or supposedly responsible, well-trained soldier and his mates were coming down the beach and he was welcoming them back into the fold sort of thing but he would have got some epithet hurled at him. “You dumb bastard,” or something like that.

That would have been the strength of it.

No. I don’t think we never smelt them. No. We’re not like that dog of mine.

It always was self-preservation to there was no need to tell these blokes that I had in the platoon. They were a decent, self-respecting

lot of blokes.

Well the ones that we ran into were dedicated and

they were prepared to they kept on behind the 19th Battalion they kept on going round the back of the 19th Battalion and falling rubber trees and then setting up road blocks to stop us getting out and they’d you had to kill them be you couldn’t get past them sort of thing without killing them. They were terrific I thought, from my limited experience with them anyhow.

The shark and the alligator, yeah.

They were waiting on the bank just a bit further up. I didn’t tell them I was doing it. I thought the only one thing to do is do it because they were there woulda been a great argument about not possible and all the rest of it

sort of thing and they, they were just sitting waiting for something to happen. I thought I’d better try and make something happen.

The boats.

Well they were shooting at us. It was a fairly wide river about a mile wide and they thought obviously thought we were Japs because they were firing their little two pounder shells at us and they were sticking to the far side of the bank. They weren’t coming over our side at all, because if they had, these Japs that they were firing on would have started to shoot them up. So that was the

line of thought there.

The Indians. Oh we didn’t have much to do with them. The Indians were, could make and did make, terrific troops I understand but the Indians that we had in Malaya were all newcomers and they reckoned the

powers that be reckoned it took three years or four years or something to make an Indian solder, soldier, and these fellas when they the Japanese came into the war they were taking all the old soldiers out of the units in Malaya back to India to re-form new battalions and replacing them with raw recruits. Well they had a the bulk of the Indians I understand,

and according to the history books about the Japanese rush and what not, they were basically raw recruits and untrained and not disciplined in any shape or form and when the shooting and Japanese business started they panicked and headed for the hills. The Japanese had one very, had a very good

psych, oh bit of psychology. They had some sort of a mortar shell or something that used to they used to fire over to the back of a position they were occupying and it was full of crackers and it’d lob at the back of you. You thought you were going ‘bang bang bang’ at Japanese up there and then all of a sudden at the back of you there was a heap of double bungers going off, ‘bang bang bang’ sort of

thing and it was that type of thing took quite a bit getting a bit of getting used to.

Well that’s right but it’d have a effect on your you know a psychiatric effect on you sort of thing and for untrained troops it was it could be devastating. You know

they’d cause panic. You’d think, “No I’m right there. They’re all out in front of you,” and all of a sudden all of this shooting starts at the back of you and you think, “Oh well they’re at the back of me too,” but that was a that was one of their

No,

no you’re, you’re behind yourself.

The colonel, Colonel Anderson, who was in charge of our battalion at Parit Sulong Bridge, when we got back as far as Parit Sulong Bridge he was in charge of the force at that stage of the game, the 2/19th, the remainder of the 2/29th and some Indians and he, he’d

made the decision that or with the Malayan command might have helped him I don’t know, but that we couldn’t break out we had to get out otherwise everyone there would be slaughtered and as it turned out the people that were left behind, the people in the ambulances, were slaughtered. They were the wounded and sick and what not were herded into huts and had petrol

poured onto them and set on fire and god knows what else but that at that stage of the game we all thought that we were still our foe, the Japanese, was a normal civilised nation sort of thing and we found they weren’t. They weren’t that not so.

We didn’t know

that these atrocities had happened at Parit Sulong Bridge see and it was when Colonel Anderson discovered that he, that we couldn’t fight our way out we had to get out or all be killed. That was at Parit Sulong Bridge. That was before. After that we got back to base and then we were re-formed.

Debatable.

Well ‘every man for himself’ is a sort of cha it’s not a strategic withdrawal, it’s a [(UNCLEAR)] panic thing sort of thing and we did think that it should have been done as a strategic withdrawal not a

that well we probably got no right to even say such things because the colonel was a was a very brave soldier and he must have got his instructions from higher up to do it and they were told to do it that way so that was it but after we got away from Parit Sulong Bridge we got back to Singapore Island

and that’s when we were re-formed into with recruits to a unit again.

Yes. Quite a few. Mm. We were given we were made on our colonel’s recommendation instead of three sections to a platoon we were made into four sections for a platoon. That was forty five

men instead of thirty five.

Twelve at Endau and I couldn’t tell you how many. I think there were about seventeen or eighteen men altogether of out of my thirty five.

No. They were unsure of one another to some extent I s’pose but they were pleased to have any assistance that could be given I believe.

Mm.

There were some I suppose fifty/fifty. Some about the same age and fifty per cent of them would be

you know probably eight, ten years older.

Yes.

No. We had our own Tokyo Rose, the 19th Battalion. We had

Captain Cousens, who was a terrific soldier. We thought he was. When he became a, he was an ABC announcer or something but he went to Japan and he was our Tokyo Rose. He was giving sending messages across the, but we knew of Tokyo

Rose. We’d never heard of her. You know never heard her I mean and we’d never heard Bill Cousens when we were POWs because radios were not permitted. We weren’t allowed to have them. They were secreted around the place but they weren’t, we were not, according to the Japanese they were a no-no.

No, not actually. I think that’s part and parcel of

military training I suppose and military training and mateship sort of thing. It’s like you saying that you’re going to in everyday life for argument’s sake you’re gonna leave your husband with the baby and shoot through or leave the baby and the two of you shoot through, that sort of thing. It’s a sort of a moral

dilemma that you, especially with army training, you over a period of time you don’t you just don’t consider. Like marriage I suppose. I’ve been married for fifty four years and or fifty six, I’m not sure, but I can’t say there weren’t times when I thought it’d be a good idea to shoot through and get the hell outta the road but it was only a thought, it

wasn’t an act.

Mm.

Yes it is. Mm and I think that applies to army life too. Yeah.

No. We

knew it sort of thing when they overran Singapore Island when we were out on the on the tryin’ to defend an undefendable situation sort of thing. With troops strung out over such a large area you can’t you’re on the back foot to start with. Mm.

Oh god. Fortnight, week, somewhere there. Length of time anyhow.

Something like that. Approximately a week I suppose.

No. He had enough problems of his own without worrying about, I was a drop in the bucket. My troubles. He had ah what at

that stage, as brigadier he had three thousand-odd men that he was worrying about, not just one lousy son.

Didn’t occur to me actually. He, his, well as an ex-soldier he’d expect things like that to happen. Why wouldn’t he? What I mean is,

you join the army you don’t expect to be it’s like these wives that are going crook about their husbands being sent over to Timor and that sort of thing. If you join the army, you get sent where the government tell you to go and that’s the beginning and the end of it sort of thing. It’s not just because your dear little wife wants you to stay home and put the kettle on,

that’s foolish thinking in my book.

No there wasn’t a majority of men that drowned. There were some that drowned but see you don’t

panic is panic and it that was my platoon was one of the last out and we saw what had happened sort of thing I suppose and it wasn’t but if you’ve never been in a panic you don’t know what you’re talking about sort of thing. That’s

the, it that’s just it. We had the same thing when the Americans were bombing us on the railway line when there were five thousand of us in a small square countryside about a hundred yards square sort of thing all in native huts and the American planes came over and bombed and machine gunned us because we were on the approach to the Tamarkan Bridge sort of

thing and that. You get a wave of people sort of from one side of camp to the other sort of thing and that’s panic and you get it’s the same as if a grandstand collapses at a sports meeting or something. You get panic. People no longer act like human beings. They’re just animals all tryna get out sort of thing and that that’s it.

Mm.

Yeah but people do panic and they tread on one another and push one another over and all that sort of thing. You it’s you see it happen sort of thing. That’s the thing.

By Colonel Anderson to, for every man for himself.

Well it wasn’t given to me by Colonel Anderson. It was from the company commander. He sent word up and he told me that half the platoon was to go out first in x number of minutes, fifteen or something, and then the other half was to go out in another fifteen minutes and I stayed with the second half and we were, well probably quite lucky to get out.

There were a number of bullets zipping around the place but they as it happens in wars there are probably a million bullets fired for every one that hits someone and that’s what happened. God I wish bloomin’ interviewers’d let you sit in a comfortable chair be to be interviewed.

Must be.

No, that was the only case I could see of it. The friendly fire it’s a problem. The when we were

pulling out of Singapore Island getting back, we got onto solid land and we saw troops up in front of us that we thought were Japanese and we got stuck into them and we learnt later they were Chinese troops from Malaya that had formed a special unit to act as a guerrilla force behind Japanese behind the Japanese lines and we were behind the Japanese lines and they were behind the

Japanese lines and we thought they were baddies, not goodies, and we got stuck into them with rifle fire. What damage we did I don’t know. I hope we didn’t do much but that was the only those are the only two cases that I can think of. Well in the, you’re got Alan Ferguson at Endau. Blown off his feet but according to the, according to the history of the

battalion that, lord love a duck you never want to read histories, I don’t think because the Ferguson was not blown off his feet by the British. He was I think well he tripped or something but he didn’t, he was blown luckily the, only this particular shell that hit him that blew him off his feet was just went into the

mud and exploded deep down in the mud sort of thing and just ‘plop’. The only damage they woulda done with their two pounders would have been a direct hit on someone but in his case they blew him off his feet.

I think that’s a good idea. Have you got time?

Righto.

Yes.

Well we didn’t have a clue what was gonna happen. We thought we were probably all gonna be shot to start with and as soon as they got us in a confined area we thought that

that was a good possibility and we were lined up in the square of Changi Barracks and we seemed to spend a quite a lot of time there and got very thirsty and very hungry and then we were allocated barracks to go and sleep in and then we had it pointed out to us where the toilet were toilets were

and they were a bit antiquated, even in those days, but not so bad at Changi but there was a hell of a rush on them because of the change of diet that we had gone through and it upset everyone’s stomach and we also had seemed to collect dysentery and diarrhoea was the name of the game sort of thing and your

life wasn’t very restful at that stage of the game until our stomachs settled down and we didn’t have a or the doctor didn’t have a great deal of medicine to do anything about it at that stage.

Well we suddenly got from steak and eggs and bully beef and biscuits down to rice and very little else and at that stage of the game the Australian cooks

couldn’t cook rice. Rice was not separated and as we know it and like it today. It just used to come out in a great gluggy mess or a watery sort of stew sort of thing and a heck of a lot of it was white rice and white rice has the Vitamin B polished off it and it was little or no good for us and it wasn’t long before Beri Beri started to rear it’s head and

things were not, not good but as I said, we I wasn’t there a great length of time and I went into this working bee on the wharves and

We were unloading ships of, shiploads of rice and taking it off the ships and putting it into the go downs.

Before we went from Changi to the wharves? Well personally I had no contact whatsoever with the Japs and it was just all our own administration. The Japs were outside Changi Barracks and gaol and we were inside and our own people were virtually in control.

Still.

Well see.

Chris I don’t know because I went from the wharves straight onto the boat to go up to Thanbyuzayat and I had little or no time in Changi

itself to so I don’t know very much about it.

A Force, yes.

Well we didn’t. We knew we were going somewhere on a very crowded boat sort of thing and it from the experts on the place

and the direction we were travelling we knew we were going up the west coast of Malaya somewhere and that was we knew we couldn’t keep on going to India, otherwise we’d be home and home out of the out of trouble but we anyhow we stopped off at Thanbyuzayat.

We [(UNCLEAR)]

an aerodrome hangar on what used to be or was. It was something big shed anyhow and something like three thousand of us in there. We were like sardines in a thing and that’s where we were spent our first couple of days until they built I don’t know who built the huts. They had these atap huts that they built and

our fellas might have built them. I can’t remember or the natives built them, but we were then put into these huts that atap huts and atap roofs and walls and bamboo bedding sort of raised a couple of feet off three two or three feet off the ground sort of thing and you slept on that.

Yes. He was in charge of A Force, yes.

Not at that stage of the game, no. He was later on when we got onto the railway, he was very helpful as far as I was concerned

in that he, the, as the camp commandant or force commandant he was allotted an adjutant to get work parties going and a, what they called a buppin kakari, that was a camp’s officer to

dig latrines and bury the dead and that sort of thing and I was he gave me the job as camp’s officer, which was very helpful, and I had about six men that we had to we spent all our days digging trenches. Toilets in those days were just a length a drain dug in the ground and everyone

to go to the toilet you just went and squatted over the top of this drain and when you could you filled it in with a bit of dirt or something and we had to keep these supplied. When it was full it had to be covered up and another one dug sort of thing and also the people were dying rather rapidly and they had to be buried and anything else that had to be done ‘round the camp I and these six

men of mine did it. The he the Dad had a couple of other people that had to assist him in turning out work parties and doing things like that but it was a difficult job but not as stressful as

working on the railway line, put it that way.

Well we were told by the Japanese that we were told a lot of things by the Japanese. They were always coming ‘round the huts and telling us that, “Sydney boom boom boom. No more,” sort of thing. “Melbourne boom boom boom. No

more,” and it was our great thing. We’d say, “What about Timbuktu?” “Oh Timbuktu boom boom. No more,” and we’d, everything in the that we could imagine was blown off the face of the earth in Australia [(UNCLEAR)] according to the Japanese guards but we didn’t we tried to keep our sense of

humour I suppose. Mm.

Yeah but in those days I used to make a bit of money. For some reason the Japanese could not take our watches and they had a great desire to own these watches with floating second hands, which were comparatively new in that time, and I was sitting there one day

and a fella called John Horden, he was related to the Hordens in Sydney actually, a Jap saw his watch and wanted to give him fifty rupees for it and he wouldn’t take it and no, the Jap wouldn’t pay him the fifty rupees. John Horden wanted fifty rupees for it, that’s right, and about a day later a Jap came up to me and said he’d give me seventy five dollars for my watch with a floating second

hand and I thought, “Boy this is all right.” So I gave him the my watch and took the seventy five rupees and then I went ‘round to John Horden and I said, “Listen I’ll give you fifty rupees for that watch a yours,” and he took it and I’d only had it for a couple of days and Jap came along and I told him he could have it for a hundred rupees, which he gave me and John Horden just about had kittens. He wanted me to give him half the difference

between fifty and a hundred but in that way, if anyone was tryna to sell a watch to a Jap and I’d tell him to let me have a look at it and if I thought I could get so much for it, I’d give it to him and I, which I did, and I once sold a watch for fifty rupees and a case of condensed milk, which was a big treasure. The Jap had pinched the case of condensed milk I’m sure but

the case of condensed milk was a real luxury in those days but anyhow that, those sort of things helped a bit. When the Dad went to Japan I sent him away and at that stage of the game I gave he had I gave him two watches and a silver cigarette case that he’d he took to Japan with that to trade and

I had two watches and a silver cigarette case as well that I’d acquired, which was made me according to POW rights quite a wealthy man in those at that stage of the game. What else?

No we didn’t know it was on at that stage of the game. That wasn’t ‘til quite a bit later and then that was when we got up to Tamarkan and that was virtually right through, the railway line was virtually finished at that stage of the game and he, the Japs said that all officers, brigadiers and above had to go to Japan. They were frightened that they might organise a

camp break out or something like that, which they could have done any time but we had you had nowhere to go except jungle and if you broke out of camp there was possibly a quarter of the numbers in the camp that were down with malaria or dysentery or Beri Beri and you had you had what do you do? Leave them behind and let them pour petrol over them as they did with our people at Parit Sulong or

not sort of thing. So we were virtually stuck there. We had odd groups of men that did try to escape. The natives there were pretty poor and there was a bonus on every POW’s head. If you reported where one was, you got fifty rupees or a hundred or something and even though the ones that did break out were quickly rounded up and when they were rounded up they had their heads chopped off with a sword or something that

or they were shot but when the Dad was going to Japan I told him, I said, “Oh well at this you can organise so that I’m on the same party that you’re on,” and he said, “No. No way.” He said, “At this stage of the game you we’re not putting all our eggs in one basket. You stay here and I’ll go to Japan,” and it’s sometimes

I think like that Morris Nimmo I was talkin’ about behind the rubber tree. He said he wasn’t frightened to meet his maker. I think people sometimes do have a premonition that things are gonna go wrong and I’m sure that my father had a big doubt in his mind that things would go wrong on this trip to Japan that that’s just my way of I don’t know if that’s a fact or not but I it happens as a

coincidence quite often.

He was looking out for me?

Oh I guess so but well I guess he was

but you know what young fellas are like. You think, these days I’ve got a twelve year old grandson. He reckons that he can look after himself very well now thank you and in those days after you’ve been in the army and for awhile you thought you were you know a big boy and quite capable of running your own life sort of thing but I don’t doubt

my father did was very helpful.

Probably. Probably that would be so but

That’s hard to say.

What? Say that again?

Did he what?

I, I’m

Oh he kept a diary.

Yes. Yes.

No. No.

He I’m sorry I did I’m just a bit hard of hearing.

Yeah.

Yeah it’s in the war diaries there and I the,

I haven’t read it. The daughter at Tamworth she’s got a copy of it, which they will do, so give you a copy of it but and she brought it up and showed it to me and it’s basically, as with every other diary that was kept in those days, about food. You know the lack of rations and this sort of thing happens. Everything is food

or the lack therefore sort of thing and the, mm.

No I don’t know they were buried in different places and I didn’t know where. Someone musta known.

A number of people did it. I’ve got a brother-in-law down at Wagga. He married the sister and he kept a diary and he is now rewriting it but which is a good thing for him to do because he’s one of these fellas that let himself go.

He became an alcoholic and he still is and he’s got sugar diabetes and he loves Mars Bars. Apart from that he’s leading a healthy life. He can starts drinking wine at about ten o’clock in the morning and knocks off at night when he can’t stand up sort of thing but he’s that I think a lot of fellas were tempted or had the excuse to do that. I

considered I had the excuse to do that until I sort of woke up to myself a bit.

Oh well it was all around us sort of thing. You first up you landed up on came on parade and you had

to number off and it was learning the Japanese language in numerically was not that easy or that quick and it was a bit complicated and it if you got your number wrong you got a slap, a kick or a hit with a rifle butt sort of thing. That was the first taste I got of

Japanese brutality and then we had what’s his name, Bill Drayer, one of our interpreters, an English chap. A terrific man. He used to always buck the Japanese and he was buried in a hole in the ground with a bit of tin over the top of it and he was given a bit of water and a bit of rice once a day

sort of thing and he survived it and came out recently and I had a taste of it when the, some of the blokes that in the hospital were well when they died, they had gold chains and bits of gold and that sort of thing and the powers that be thought that it’d be a good idea to get some money for the camp to buy something for the

hospitals. We could occasionally have contact with the natives outside and an odd Jap’d let you do so and anyhow I was put in to sell this to the Japanese, these gold chains and what not, which I did, and to a Jap called Kato and he eventually was, you had to say how much you wanted for these

chains and he’d give it to you or you had to come down or he’d go up or something. He was caught eventually and he said I was the bloke that was selling him these bits a gold and that was forbidden as far as the Japanese were concerned but under the circumstances they thought that it wasn’t such a bad idea but they still gave me a touch of water to make sure the Kempei Tai as they

were called used to like to make sure that people were telling the truth.

They they’d put you on a table and a man holds your legs and another fella you one each side of your arms and they put a towel over your face and pour water on it and it’s an unpleasant sensation but it’s not, well it can could be life-threatening I suppose, but

it’s frightening and it’s a bit like I suppose, if you could say it’s a bit like drowning in water or something but they decided I was telling the truth and I came back to camp and I was confined to the hut for oh I don’t know, ten days or something. A nominal punishment. Told not to be a bad boy and sell gold

chains to Japanese any more but brutality was the name of the game but they were brutal to themselves you know. A colonel would walk up on parade and, I didn’t see a colonel but I’ve seen a major slap a captain. If I was a major and you were a captain I could walk up to you if I didn’t like the way your hair was cut or your type of t-shirt you had on or

something I could give you a slap as hard as I liked across the face and you had to stand there and take it. I could give you more than one slap and you’d have your nose out of joint and you’d go looking for a lieutenant or something that you didn’t like the look of and he’d get slapped up too and this used to go all the way down. A three star private could slap a two star private. A two star, a one star and the guards that we had were Koreans. They were the bottom of the pecking order. They

used to get bashed up quite a bit by the Japanese NCOs and it didn’t it didn’t end with slaps. It was a kick or a any sort of punishment you felt like dishing out you could give to anyone that was lower on the pecking order than you were sort of thing and it, it was brutality was their discipline and we had

at one camp we were in we had they had a tower and these Japs were climbing up this tower and giving a great yell and a Cooee and jumping off and there’s several of them broke their legs but that didn’t stop them doing it sort of thing. They had to keep on doing it and they were coolies I guess and the another thing that was the

they had Korean women that they used to bring around to the outskirts of the camp at times and for the gratification of these Japanese or the Korean guards we had and that was incredible the number of troops that used to line up and go up each set of stairs sort of thing and it they would just

what we’d reckoned was funny to a Japanese was cruelty. If they got a or had a pet monkey and they dipped his tail in petrol and lit it and the monkey took off with his tail on fire that was funny as one thing and if POWs were caught and they were being beheaded or something like that, well that was a great turn out for the books. That was as good as

one of our top comedians but that was their from a European standard I don’t think you could I don’t think you can trust ‘em and I don’t think you could understand them. They’re there’s my interpretation of it. They’re like snakes. There’s no such thing as a good one.

Yeah.

Discipline I we took it to be. You know they were just, I don’t know what they were doing, but they were just sort of climbing up and, “Banzai,” or, “Heil Hitler,” or you know or, “Heil Hitler,” or something they were yelling as they jumped and down into a sandpit but it was quite high you know. I’d say oh as an estimate

twenty foot at least but and when we saw these two fellas break their legs we thought, “This is a wonderful game. They should all do this,” and it’s but it wasn’t the wasn’t the hierarchy that were doing it. The, it’s like in that bit of new newspaper cutting that I had out there. It

said of something about my brother’s death on the Kokoda Trail. They were chasing a Japanese general. Now this Japanese general never walked anywhere on the Kokoda Trail, he was carried in a litter and that was, well I suppose their idea of democracy. If you were high enough up the ladder you didn’t do anything sort of thing and it was only

well I suppose it’s like society anywhere really.

Well he that’s what wherever they went that’s the general and the headquarters they were chasing. The general escaped but he was that was the thing but I raise

that point to try and give an insight into Japanese mentality and the way they think and act but the basic soldier I think the Japanese soldier that we struck was he was a coolie and he knew no better to start with.

That’s right.

Well you had to make up your mind early in the piece you were either gonna survive or you weren’t gonna survive. If you were at wanted to if a Japanese came and slapped you and you did the European thing and punched him in return, you could say, “Right that’s finished for me.” You’d be you’d be bashed up with a bit a

four be four or bashed unconscious with a rifle butt or and then when you came conscious you’d have to stand in front of the guard house holding a brick above your head or holding something else above your head and if your, when your arm was, could hold it no longer and it dropped down you’d be kicked and bashed until you put it back up again and either that or you ended up just unconscious in any case, which we had happen on numerous occasions

for men that overstepped the mark. But we decided early in the piece that we were going, to survive we had to develop the mentality of a cow and just chew your cud and sort of let the let things go over your head. That was if you were if you were gonna come back to Australia and survive the thing

but I’ve got something, friends of mine wrote out a thing on a computer and one of the things they asked was why we didn’t retaliate when we were released as POWs. You want an answer to that one?

Because in the camp I was in, there were six American paratroopers landed in the camp

alongside an air drop of bed pans, which was we thought the height of indignity. Here we were hungry and thirsty and these big Liberators flew over and dropped two parachutes full of bed pans for us and we couldn’t see the humour in that one but the we had six American paratroopers in the camp and we

probably had a hundred or two hundred Japanese guards still with their rifles in the, on the outskirts of the camp and under those circumstances, after surviving for three and a half years, you’re not gonna stick your neck out and start bashing up odd Japanese when they’ve got all the fire power and you’ve got none and the six Americans couldn’t be everywhere and protect everyone. And even if it came

to a showdown, they were wouldn’t have a ghost of a chance of doing any protecting in any case sort of thing and but and also we were under the understanding that there was a good possibility, and I think it was so, that all POWs were to be slaughtered in any case when if it came to when Japan was invaded or something like

that happened but, what else?

Yes

and that that’s what happened to them. They were belted up with a bit a four be four or rifle butts and knocked unconscious and then taken over the over to the guard house and stood in front of the guard house holding bricks above their head until they could hold it no longer and then bashed unconscious again sort of thing and …

Not executed. They were executed for trying to escape but not for,

I think that was the only thing that I believe they were executed for.

What else? Bombing. One of the big thrills of our life was in the camps I was in there were three bombings we had at Thanbyuzayat. One along the line somewhere and four at Tamarkan and that was a hair raising experience when these big American Liberators come down at

tree top level with cannons and machine guns spitting in all directions and dropping short bombs into the camp because we were slap up against a railway bridge and what else?

They caused a lot of casualty amongst the POWs because these five hundred pound bombs dropped in our camps and on our huts and

it was big problem. The bugs were another one of our big things in on the railway line. We …

Bed bugs. Have you ever struck bed bugs?

We …

Oh they were little like cockroach-type things that were quite tiny really but

we struck them once in Australia actually. We the wife and I were down at what’s the suburb this on the north side of Manly and we rented a flat there and we went in and the next morning I woke up and I had these blooming bites over all me and Meryl had bites all over me too and I said, “Lord love a duck. That looks a bit familiar,” and I had a look in the mattress at the side of the mattress and it, “They’re bloomin’ bed bugs”

were in the thing and it, I thought it was not possible in Australia, but it was, but they were there was nothing you, we could do about them except kill the damn things and you used to go along with your thumb and thumb nail and what not and squash these damn things, but that was about it. See there were another thing I wrote down here that I thought I should mention, we had no

medicine. One of the big bug bears that we had along the railway line were tropical ulcers. In Australia you can get old people get ulcers and they sort of spread but with the drugs and things they keep it under control. In our situation there was no control and no drugs and the you would have seen in the book there, there are people with ulcers that go from one side of their leg ‘round the other. Well quite a lot of the time they had no way of treating that

except with you had to scrape the edge of the spoon edge of the ulcer out with a spoon and put charcoal on it. Well that was the whoops and cooees that went on when that was happening were just unimaginable but it was and then the next thing was that if that failed or it got any worse they had to cut their legs off. Another thing that, and that happened to a lot of men and that killed a quite a few of them, and

quite a number of them survived it of course too despite the circumstances. Another thing was that was that of notice to us was the we had cholera at different times through the camp and the powers that be in one place, there was a bad outbreak of cholera. I can’t tell you which one it was. It might have been Tamarkan but it might not

and every man in the camp had to kill a hundred flies every day because flies with the open toilet trenches and what not, flies were the big carriers and there’s nothing and it was sort of quite funny to see these men sitting around with a home made fly swat killing their, and there was no by guess or by god. Every camp every hut commander had to

inspect your hundred flies to see that you’d killed them every day but it did control cholera to or help control cholera. Another thing that the powers that be brought in was men had to shave once a week and they had to get a haircut every month or two and you had to have baths when possible and you found that like in everyday life a person that stops

bathing and stops shaving, the next thing he’s crook and then in our circumstances the next thing he was dead. So you had to that was one of the another thing they brought in but

Well we had safety razors and it’s amazing how long you can make a safety razor blade last if you’ve got a glass. You get the safety razor blade and you run rub it

endlessly on the inside of a round glass and you put an edge on it. When you get a bit of an edge on that side you turn it over and you do the same thing again and we used to get blooming months out of a safety razor blade and then

No, we were allowed to have a razor. Well see everyone had razor to start with and a certain amount of blades and blades,

I think we mighta got some in a Red Cross issue at one stage of the game. I’m not sure of that but they seemed to turn up or you could probably buy them through the natives I suppose.

Thank you.

No we were talking about the mateship to one another more than towards the Japanese. See the fact that we were all stuck there together, if you wanted to survive you had to form what we call a congsi. That would be two or four or

six men and if you got sick and I was fit, well I’d endeavour to get you extra rations or buy something for you or bring something in when I was coming back from a work party for you and if I was sick you’d do the same for me sort of thing and we had these, what I was telling Chris what we call congsis and but the difficulty was that the Japanese’d keep on asking for another party to go

further ahead and if there were you started off with a thousand men. The Japs’d then say, “Well we want five hundred to go ten kilometres up the railway line to build a new camp.” Well if you were sick and I was fit, I’d go or I had to go and you had to stay otherwise if you went when you had dysentery or malaria or one of those things you’d be a dead duck too and that way it was difficult

for mates to stay together, very difficult, but the in the hospital areas if anyone was sick or dying with ulcers or malaria or Beri Beri or something there was a definite strong idea of you no one was allowed to die on his sorta thing you know. He had to have someone to put a sponge on his forehead

or with fever and all that sort of thing. It was and comfort him but mateship was strong amongst the Australians I’m sure.

No, none. No.

Well the way they’d separate mates on their different

working parties. They if you said, “No if they called for a working party and you and I were mates and I said, “No I can’t go. My mate’s got malaria,” or something like that, that was didn’t matter one little iota. That was you were left there and I went sort of thing that was they I don’t think they knew what mateship was.

Well in my case we were put on a train and sent up to Bangkok.

Damned if I know. Probably our Australian the head POW in the camp and that would have been organised by the paratroopers and we were entrained

back up to Bangkok and we were put in a luxury situation as far as we were concerned alongside the canal.

Ah not for sure but it was rumoured that the ship had been sunk that he was on

and that the fact that there were very few survivors was I don’t know but I know when I came home that it I had more or less accepted the fact that he was you know had been killed. He did get off the boat when it sunk and the, according to the survivors, he was in a lifeboat

with the, in or several there were quite a number of lifeboats. Seven actually I think they said that were drifting somewhere and they the survivors that were picked up by American submarine said they heard gunfire and a Japanese destroyer or gunboat came past. We gathered that they must have just been shot up with these this Japanese gun boat as it saw them drifting around the ocean

there or something and that was what I think happened to him.

Until I got on the railway station at Central. I arrived off the train coming home and the

As a POW?

When the war finished I was reasonably fit. We were cutting sleepers wood somewhere I thought it was on the Burma-Thailand railway line, Burma-Thailand border. Somewhere close to it. I couldn’t tell you exactly where it was and by looking at the maps I still haven’t been able to work it out but wherever we were you’d have one Jap take fifty men out into the jungle to cut

wood. Now you couldn’t escape or you could escape any time you liked but you you’d just get shot and be a bonus to some native and we had the Jap’d camp he’d put himself under a tree and you had tell him when you if you were going somewhere and you’d just say go up to him and say, “One man banjo.” That one man toilet and away you’d go out into the scrub. Well we discovered

there was a Japanese food dump there not far away and you’d go like hell and get into this food dump and get some cans of food or something and eat one. You had to be careful not to leave the tins lying around the place but you then you’d probably put one in your pocket or behind your belt to take back to camp and you’d come back and then another fella’d say, “One man banjo,” or you’d probably

have two men going banjo in different directions. You I’d say, “One man banjo,” and then go that way and go to where the store was. Someone else’d go, “One man banjo,” and go that way. In the meantime the Jap had no he couldn’t go and chase everyone that sort of went out to go a toilet because he had fifty men under his charge and at that’s where we were. There were quite a bit of wild fruit there as well,

bananas and mangoes and I I’m sure, I think they were the two things that we were onto but between the Jap stores and the odd native fruit, when the war actually finished I was in reasonable condition but no thanks to the Japs. The ration was just a sort of drop in the bucket but

the worst I was physically was somewhere along the railway line when I got yellow jaundice or what do you call it, the hepatitis these days I think, and I got down to oh don’t know what the hell, we didn’t have any scales, but I was pretty skinny I know.

Yes. To Bangkok.

Yes.

Well I don’t know the name of the camp. I we’d have to be on the railway line somewhere. See the train goes from the train the line goes from Bangkok down to Singapore or Johore at least. I haven’t got my map here anyhow but it was somewhere and the

railway line went from Yay across to Bangkok and it was, we, anyhow we got on the railway line. When we got to, when we got to Bangkok someone told me that, I don’t know how it came about, but a couple of us they told us that a plane was going to India

and if we wanted to get out quick, an old two-engined, ah what the heck was the name of the plane they had there? I forget but anyhow we got on this and we went over to Calcutta and when we got to Calcutta they told us that if we wanted to get to Australia to get on this little plane, a single-engine plane, and go down to Ceylon as it was called then

and we did. When we got down to Ceylon we got the fright of our life because the little plane started to buzz ‘round and ‘round the aerodrome. Wouldn’t go in and land. Finally the pilot told us he said, “Look I’m sorry to say that the light that comes on to show the landing gear’s down won’t come on,” and he said, “It’s probably all right but it’s there’s a bit of doubt about it,” and we said, “Thanks very much. Here we’ve been on the railway line for three and a half

years and we get in a damn fool aeroplane and the wheels won’t go down,” but anyhow they were down and we got on that and we went from Colombo we caught a big four-engine plane that was flying across to Perth. This was all illegal and not no paper about it. We just talked our way into it and said we had to get home urgently and we did

and when we got to Perth we got on another plane that took us down to Melbourne and when we got to Melbourne we got on a train that took longer than the flight from Bangkok to Melbourne. The train took us that long to get up to Sydney that we it wasn’t funny but on the train coming up to Sydney we were all sort of stir crazy I s’pose

but on the train coming up to Sydney I met a man that was in the New Guinea army and he wanted to know if I’d thought of joining the army again and going up to New Guinea and I told him it was food for thought and he said, “What are you doing when you get to Sydney?” and I said, “I haven’t got a clue.” I said, “I’ve,” he said, “Well what about we go out, have a night out?” and I said, “Oh that’d be good.” I said

“I don’t know any girls in Sydney.” I said, “The girl I was going with she’s changed her name,” and he said, “Oh well that’s all right,” he said, “I can soon fix that,” and we met two girls outside a nightclub in Sydney at half past eight. At half past ten I proposed to the girl that I was going to going with. I thought she was the most wonderful creature this side of the black stump after looking at

black women for three and a half years and I thought she was wonderful but she, luckily she had more sense than me and we formed a good friendship but that was it.

Yes.

There were illegal wirelesses and we you know we heard it sort of thing from the illegal wirelesses but the people with the illegal wireless had to be very careful. If you were caught with an illegal wireless you were, you got the father of all bashings and you were not very popular sort of thing. They didn’t like information getting out to the POWs in that regard but yes, we

and then the next thing the rumours were about that the war was over and then the next thing these six paratroopers arrived and then we knew it was over for sure.

We had nothing to celebrate with.

We, except two parachutes full of bed pans. We couldn’t create a great

deal of havoc with our first air drop but we were warned by our medicos that we had to be very careful when we got back onto European diet otherwise we could be in serious trouble after such a length of time on rice. We, if you suddenly started to have a few meals of steak and eggs you could be in serious trouble and we were

also told that when we got home to Australia, if any of us thought of getting married that we’d be infertile after so long on rice and a good mate of mine, the first he came home and the first thing he did is had twins and he said, “There, I knew the old gun was no good. It’s startin’ to scatter,” but

that was just fallacy, because we had six children and we’re not Catholic. So.

I guess so, yeah. Yeah.

Yes. I spent a thousand

pounds in six months going to nightclubs and drinking all day and nightclubs at night and we did that was our peculiar way, and foolish way, of celebrating but we we’d come into the Australian hotel at, when the beer came on at ten o’clock or eleven o’clock and we’d stay there ‘til the beer went off at lunch time

and then we’d go and have something to eat and come back when the beer went on came on at four o’clock and we’d stay there ‘til it went off at six. We’d go home and change and come back to a nightclub and we thought we were having a whale of a time but we thought, foolishly, that we had an excuse and it was an unfortunate decision.

No. I think that those that came home to, see we looked forward to stability and those that came home to wives and girlfriends and families they had a better chance of leading a stable life. There was a hell of a lot of

well we were a bit peculiar, put it that way. We it took and took so many years to sort of get it out of our system and in my case why the hell the wife put up with me on so many different occasions I don’t know but we

you know we were well we were all given a pension for having nerves and we have got nerves sorta thing you know. That that’s for sure and you get nightmares and it’s a dreams. I can remember on one occasion I grabbed the wife by the neck and threw her out of bed sort of thing and it was just one mad nightmare sort of thing and that

was sort of quite a common occurrence in our early married life to have a wife led a very haphazard life.

Oh approximately. I met

Meryl in Armidale approximately when I it was just after I got the job at Dalgety’s and would have been approximately twelve months after the war finished I think. Mm.

No I didn’t. I couldn’t imagine

that. I’d in my six months at home I’d met and gone out with a lot of girls after the first one and some of them were inclined to be serious and I wasn’t sort of I felt I wasn’t stable enough at that stage of the game to pit to make a definite commitment but

when, I don’t know they say well when people meet their husbands they think it’s that, “That’s the person for me,” sort of thing and you I don’t know what it is. It’s not physical attraction or mental attraction, or both I suppose, it’s mm

but she’s my wife’s been very tolerant as far as I’m concerned and I’ve endeavoured to be tolerant as far as she’s concerned. She’s a very keen horse woman and has been all her life until she busted her back up and she can’t ride a horse anymore but she got to the stage here that, oh down when we were down at Kenilworth that she were doing crossword puzzles and

reading, watching television and I thought, “Strewth there’s no future in this.” So I said, “I’ll buy you another horse,” and she said, “Well you know I can’t ride it,” and I said, “Yeah I know you can’t ride it but I’ve got twenty cows and a bull down the paddock and I don’t ride any of them either,” and anyhow the horse’s been a good psychological effect and then Meryl jumps out of bed these mornings at half past four or five o’clock.

She’s gotta go down and feed Willy and take his rug off at five o’clock at night she’s gotta go down and put his rug on and feed him again. It’s he’s just like a big dog. He comes when he’s called and whinnies at you when you put your nose out the door or what not and he’s a the psychological effect I think is people have got to have something to look forward to and

but I wish someone else’d feed him. Lucerne chaff’s thirty three dollars a bag and hay’s nineteen dollars a bale and it’s, but he’s a real pet ‘round the place.

Well another foolish expense too and I’ve also got some birds out there that eat

mince and sugar and bread and water and it’s but we don’t apart from our animals we don’t waste a great deal of time. We’ve made our lifestyle and one thing about having pets like a horse and dogs in particular, it ties you down. We can’t both go away at the one time and we virtually have no desire to do so. I well I haven’t and it’s I’m quite happy leaving

the my family tell us we’re in a rut but it’s a fairly comfortable rut and it’s you can’t it’s a big thing as far as I’m concerned to you go to town to do some shopping and you come back and the dogs meet you at the gate and wag their tail at you and bark at you and the go down a bit of bit further then the horse whinnies at you and you know you know someone welcomes

you even if you’ve got a cranky husband or a cranky wife just ‘round the corner. It’s someone’s pleased to see you home and it suits both of us. I think Meryl’d like to travel a bit more but she’s I’ve endeavoured to get her to go visiting family and what not but she tells me that I would allow the house and what not to get in too big a mess if

she left me to it.

Only one. I’ve got a particular mate down at Caloundra who’s the dead opposite to me.

We were sergeants in the 19th Battalion in Don Company at the same time and he got his commission not long after I got mine and he’s three years older than me but he’s lives in a retirement village and is set up. They’ve got their own house and they’re very comfortable set up. He’s got he’s a very keen

he dislikes animals of any shape and form or birds and what not. He’s a very religious man. He believes in he’s an elder of the Presbyterian Church and he, which is strange to me because under my circumstances I reckon I’d should call in the RSPCA and his situation he he’s the exact opposite sort of thing and he’s still

in exactly the same circumstances that I was in, which is rather confusing but it’s just I believe religion and politics are two things that are personal and he hasn’t tried to convince me or he half-heartedly he has occasionally but he gets out of bed in the morning and

gets the local paper and reads it from back to front and then goes sits down in his lounge chair and oh I don’t know plays with the computer and what not and he goes to Probus and some of those things and he goes to church things and he’s a he used to play bowls, but he’s given that up. He can’t walk very far and he’s quite happy with that. If I can’t walk far but I’m trying to increase the distance

all the time that I’m not ready to succumb to it yet but if there were ever two opposites, this particular mate of mine and I but talk about Darby and Joan, we’re it.

Odd couple that’s right, but he’s happy and he’s reasonably fit but he does everything that we don’t do.

Travel

No I was just gonna say he’s travelled. He’s been back to the railway line on two occasions and he’s been over to Singapore and he’s just got a different set of values. On one occasion he and his wife went to England and I asked him when he came back I said, “What did that cost you?” and he said, “Oh there wasn’t any change out of twenty thousand dollars I suppose,” and I said, “Look if I had a spare twenty thousand dollars I’d have the best little herd of cattle in the Obie

Valley and I’d look at them every day of the year.” I said, “You go to England and you come back and three months later and all you’ve got to do is got to show for it is a wake of photos,” and I said, “That’s just totally you’re totally different to what your outlook is to mine,” sort of thing. Yeah.

We used to when we

were down at Kenilworth. Kenilworth had a small branch down there and we go there. That’s the one exception we make. Since we’ve been here we’ve gone up for when we left Kenilworth we’ve gone up to Mapleton and it’s a small thing. The one of the difficulties when you start to get old is finding a parking space and Nambour have a very good dawn service and

which Meryl and one of the daughters went to last year. I didn’t and when they came home we Meryl and I went up to Mapleton but we make an exception of Anzac Day, yes, but not in a big way, no. We’re a couple of times we’ve gone down to Caloundra where this mate of mine is and been to the Caloundra RSL with his family and what not

but the older you get travelling becomes more of a problem, especially in an area such as this where there’s a great deal of traffic when you go over towards the coast. We get out of practice and out of you avoid it to a big extent I think.

I think we were just completely unstable basically I think. I think that I was. I was not rational. Violent.

Difficulty controlling a very bad temper and you know you couldn’t everything in life became a problem, which it hasn’t for some years now but for argument’s sake if I were dropping if I was sitting here and I dropped my case over the off the knocked it off the table, “Oh bugger and blast it,” you know. It’d become a big hassle sort of thing instead of just something that is gonna happen in any case

but I would say that that was the long and the short of us. We were completely unstable.

I don’t know. Old age I suppose. You realise eventually the futility of it and it’s now the thing that used to worry me and annoy me I just

couldn’t care less about sort of thing if I drop something. Even though as I said last Thursday when I fell over the blooming brick out there instead of it would have been a you know it would have when I got up I would have been cursing and swearing and all the rest of it but nowdays it’s just a worrying, oh I don’t know, worrying thing or something. A

worrying problem I suppose you could call it.

I’m sure it did. It gave you, with a large family you’ve got so much to think of all the time that you haven’t got that you know you haven’t you can’t worry about a great lot of personal things and particularly in my case where I’ve had a number of different jobs

and I had difficulty in holding jobs down and I had to do different things through my through our married life to feed six hungry kids and a starving wife. It definitely was an asset I’d say, yes.

Dalgety’s?

Ah another young fellow and I decided that, or I decided and I was looking for a partner and he was it, to buy out a stock and station agent at Inverell and the because my father was a successful stock and station agent

and we did but after six months we were in our office, was in a publican in a hotel situation next door to a hotel and country people when they come to town once a week or once a fortnight and the first thing they’re looking for is to do is someone to have a beer with sort of thing and I thought this was pretty

good and we used to do a certain amount of business over the pub counter, but not as much as you’d think. But anyhow after we’d been there for about six months I found that if someone didn’t come and ask me to have a drink by eleven o’clock in the morning I’d be standing on the doorstep ask looking for someone I could ask to come and have a drink with me and this went on and when at the end of the day you’d probably go and you wouldn’t

go home at six o’clock, you’d probably go home at eight o’clock with quite a bit the worse for wear and anyhow, no that wasn’t the first job damn it. The first job was secretary of the Inverell P&A Association, that’s the show society people, and I did that for eighteen months or two years and they you had fifty men on the committee, men and women, and each one used to think that they was the boss and

that got too much for me. I couldn’t take that and then we became the stock and station agents and after the stock and station agents I got the opportunity to lease four hundred acres north of Inverell on a property, which I jumped at. I reckoned that’d get me away from pubs and clubs and it did, but I still used to drink a bit and that

and then in 1957 while we were on this four hundred acres I burnt the house down and I’d been away playing cricket and there was a Christmas party on at the hall just not far away from where we lived and in those days we had kerosene lights and a home lighting plant and the home lighting plant was playing up and we had kerosene lights and I’m sure that what happened is I came in at late and Meryl and

the kids were ready to go to the Christmas party and I rushed ‘round blowing out all the lights and I’m sure what I did is blow the flame down into the bowl of the kerosene light and not blow it out and in my hurry I didn’t notice what I’d done because we’d only just got to the hall, which was oh probably a mile or so away, and a fella I knew quite well said, “There’s a fire down at your place,” and I said, “Yes I know,” and he said, “You

silly b,” he looked, “Have a look.” And I looked down there and there was a fire all right and the whole place was gone and we were so much in debt at that stage of the game that all the unpaid bills were going up on top of the refrigerator and that included the unfilled in form for the insurance on the house and effects and quite happily I rang Dalgety’s and told them I’d had a fire and lost all

our possession. The house wasn’t in our name. It belonged to the people I leased the thing. They got insurance but I didn’t for the things inside the house and they said, “No, sorry you you’re not covered. You didn’t fill in the form,” sort of thing. What else? Then, god. Do you want to hear all this nonsense?

Probably in willpower I suppose. It I’d been see when I was with Dal when I came home from the war we, I was virtually an alcoholic I suppose and then when I got the job with Dalgety’s I was virtually an alcoholic and then when I became a stock and station agent I was that close to being an alcoholic it didn’t matter and then

I don’t know. Since then necessity I suppose. If you’ve got no money it’s a bit hard to and you’ve got a family. You’ve got to pull your head in some time or other and I think it finally dawned on me. Dunno but see, apart from that after the fire we got a I got a job as a

overseer on Baculla Station, which was next door to the place that I’d leased, when the bottom fell out of the wool market that was, and I used to be an overseer on Baculla Station and then run the four hundred acres at after work and at weekends and holidays sort of thing. After that we got we got a bit of a we got a

settlement on the Dad’s estate. The stepmother fell of the perch and she went down to Sydney but she had the last laugh too. She didn’t she didn’t leave any money to the sister and I in her will. She left it to a niece. The niece we used to go and visit her and they became very friendly and she

had the last laugh, as I said, there. She didn’t cut us didn’t leave us any money, which was sort of would teach us for not getting on with her. So but then

Any regrets? No.

Under the circumstances we had no option. When we were you know young fellas in the as far as the AIF was concerned you couldn’t you didn’t have any option. Well we didn’t think we had. The average young fella that we knew in those days. You right there’s a war on, you’ve gotta be in it sort of thing and it was a jump up financially and

lifestyle and all the rest of it, on a temporary basis. You didn’t think of the consequences. You no, I’ve got no regrets I don’t think. I’ve got my big regret is the amount of money and what not I spent on drinking. I s’pose that’s my big regret, yes, but

I think so. I

I think we’re I consider that we’re well I’m eighty three and the wife’s seventy eight. I think we’re reasonably you know we’re quite lucky to be in the situation we are now. That anyone that says that the government doesn’t look after us people well they don’t know what they’re talkin’ about.

I think we’re with our yellow cards and our pension that we get we’re it’s I find it embarrassing actually to be sitting here and people say, “You deserve it.” Well I don’t think anyone deserves anything. We no one twisted our arm to join the army and it’s a when you do something you gotta be prepared to take the consequences otherwise you shouldn’t be doing

it in the first place but

Oh that’s all right.