Australians at War Film Archive

Good morning Kathy [interviewer].

That’s easy.

No. Well I was born in Cootamundra, Elsie and Joseph Barrett, on 8 May 1924. I have two brothers, I had two brothers, they’ve both gone now.

um, I went to the local Convent of Mercy School, and I was still at school when war broke out, I can remember coming home and hearing all the train whistles blowing, scared the daylights out of me, I didn’t know what was going on. And then I left school at nearly 16, and I got a job, a part time job waitressing in the

hotel because they were getting so many of the troops movements coming through, they needed extra help, and I stayed there then, until my Daddy was killed. Dad was killed in the brown-outs, remember they turned the lights down? And he was killed in a motor accident. And we moved to Willoughby. And it was at Willoughby that my aunt and I both joined the NES [National Emergency Services] and we had to go

to the army training place to learn all the first aid and gases and all that sort of thing. And at 17½

then you got the – you got your final call up, and all in civilians, and the first posting was to Toorak in Melbourne. We did our rookies [training] there, that was the first one. Victor Harbour, I was sent down there as a stewardess. I did finish that course, and I went from there to Benalla in Victoria, and from

Benalla, where did I go from Benalla? Oh, to Adelaide, Adelaide Technical College and did a tech course. And from that tech course I went to Hamilton in Victoria, and did the Armament School Course, and my first posting as an armourer was to Williamtown in New South Wales. From Williamtown finally to Rathmines where I was stationed when the war ended.

Forty-four. He said he’d watched me walking past his engineering section with my nose in a book, never taking any notice. So we met at the dance and we went out a few times, and then they were going to break our station up,

the Americans were coming in to take over. And he didn’t ask me to marry him, he said – ask the WAAAF [Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force] officer if we get married would we’d be posted together, that was his proposal. So I did, she said of course. Six weeks after that he was sent to the [Pacific] Islands and I was sent to Rathmines. Now we had 18 months apart then before he came home. So we were very lucky that it

was the success it is, under the circumstances.

We have four daughters. I wanted a son because Ted had the engineering business and wanted someone to take over from him, but every girl that came along, I think the third one, I said, oh, not again. But she was the biggest boy of the lot, she could ride the scooters and

throw stones better than any kid in the street, and she became a speech pathologist, knowing that my fourth daughter Janine had cerebral palsy, and she could see me going from Bankstown to Drummoyne for speech lessons for Jan, and knew what a need there was, I think. So I think that’s one of the good things that came of Jan having her problem.

In Bankstown, it was the borderline of Punchbowl and Bankstown actually, Lavender Avenue it was called, and it ended up I think we were about the only Aussie family in the street. We had some neighbours though, just lucky.

Right.

Carefree, I think I must have been one of the laziest kids out, I never learned to ride a horse, I hated horses. Being on a farm someone that didn’t ride a horse or didn’t milk a cow, I think my extent was to take the cows out of a morning and bring them back in the afternoon, and then read a book. But it was very

carefree, weekends you spent with your friends riding your bike, or climbing the mountains, the hills around the farm. And looking back on it now it was really a good childhood and the boys were settled as well and they enjoyed it as well. But they were the ones that were allowed to have a gun to shoot the cockies and the rabbits, and I wasn’t allowed to shoot and I think that’s what made me take up the armament.

It was only a mixed farm, very small, but it was – everything was there that you wanted. You had your fruit trees, your own vegetable patch, your own cows and chickens. Only had a few pigs that you wanted for your own use, we’d fatten those and then – that’s where I got my nickname Mickey, using our own bacon, lovely thick bacon sizzling,

and I always wanted the dripping on my toast, so grandfather called me Mickey Dripping, and that stuck ever since. But we never really – I can’t remember, evidently there was a Depression, I can’t remember that. My Mum made my clothing and I can’t even remember wanting for anything. We’d go to the matinees on the Saturday and ride our bikes, and have about sixpence, and

share our lollies, that was about it.

They were great, they were really great, yes. Dad, you know, he was so thoughtful. I can remember him bringing home a cinnamon stick, I didn’t know what a cinnamon stick was. “You taste that, and this is the sugar cane,” and he did all these sort of things and

special treats, Iced Vo-Vo biscuits, he’d come home from work and he’d have a packet of those to give us, and it was just little things that you I suppose – I don’t know whether they're still done today or not, but he was very thoughtful.

No, he had another job, he was an upholsterer, that was another thing we enjoyed, going to his workshop and delving

behind the cushions to find the buttons and the money. But he did some lovely things for us. One day a month was comic day, so he’d meet us down at the school gates and take us up to the newsagent and get us all a comic, and across the road to the Light Rose Café it was, and then you selected what you wanted to eat for lunch, and what did I have? Meringues, pink

meringues. And then he’d take the food back to his workshop, and we’d have lunch with Dad and he’d take us back to school. And little things like that stick in your memory and you realise just how good – you didn’t appreciate it at the time I don’t think. And I might go to a movie and see a dress I liked, and I’d draw it out and Mum would try and make if for me and things like that. On weekends sometimes you’d be able to go

um, to the river fishing, and you’d camp on the riverbank overnight, and no air beds then, you scraped a ditch in the sand, pulled the leaves off the willow trees and put those in and a blanket over the top, and that was your bed. I can’t remember ever – if you were lazy enough not to pull the boughs off, then you didn’t sleep well, so you pulled the leaves off. But there always seemed to be plenty of everything.

It was only about four miles, three or four miles. It always seems longer now. I’ve just been back up there on a school reunion, and I looked at the house and I said no, it was always bigger than that. They always seemed bigger.

Yes, there was the front verandah, full

length front verandah. On the right was the, what we call the lounge now, and an old gramophone, that was great, we loved that, and two bedrooms down on the left and one behind the lounge on the right hand side. Then you went into the dining area, down a step into the kitchen, big walk-in pantry and then across a little sheltered walkway to the laundry and the bathroom.

The bathroom, we were only laughing the other day, everyone used – the three kids used the same bath water, the copper had to be boiled up, and you topped it up to keep it hot. But nowadays that wouldn’t be very hygienic. I think we’ve got through this far and I don’t think it could have been that bad. Probably we’ve become immune to a lot of things.

Backyard. You had a roof march to get to it, and we also had an old magpie, he’d wait behind a tree, and when you came up he’d jump out and peck the back of your legs. So it was always a chore to go to the toilet. But it was one of the things they said in the rookies, don’t stand around like a lot of country dunnies, get back

on the parade ground. I nearly died.

A great pit, and that was disinfected and burnt every so often. But we’ve come a long way since then.

No, no, cold water. There was a big – we called it a fountain, a great big

receptacle on the stove all the time with a tap on it, and that was full of water all the time and that boiled all the time, so there was always plenty of water there. And the old fuel stove of course. I’d often go to get the cows of a morning, you take a bucket and pick mushrooms and bring them home, and there’d be mushrooms on toast for brekkie. So we had a lot of good things happening.

Grandfather did that. Grandfather did that, he’d retired from the railway and he’d never had a tooth out by a dentist, we saw him sitting on the woodpile with a pair of pliers, twisting a tooth to loosen it, enough to get it out. I think he was only in hospital at the end, you know, he had pneumonia or something. So he was a hardy old fellow,

he was quite a lad in his day, I believe.

My mother’s father, my mother’s father, yes.

Grandfather lived with us here. He was born in the Weddin Ranges, they call it, out towards Temora, and I believe the whole town was under police guard because they were harbouring bushrangers.

He used to tell us that they weren’t allowed to go out, you know, you had to stay within that area because the bushrangers were being sheltered by them. I’d love to have got to know these things in more detail, you’ve lost a lot, you know, when you don’t query these things. But I never knew my grandmother.

No, they were both gone by the time I came to realise, you know.

Mum and Dad, they’d be pretty equal, I don’t think one sort of stood out more than the other one. Yes,

so they both strove to give you what you needed, anyway, mightn’t overdo it, it might only be a bag of persimmons when they're in season, you know, lovely little things that stick in your memory, that you remember these things. But I remember Dad coming down to the school one day on my birthday and giving me a little prayer book, I’ve still got it actually. Well you had to have

some feeling, didn’t you, to do those sort of things? And he was sick and couldn’t drive me to church when I was making my first holy communion and Mum had to take me. That was a calamity, winter time, the car wouldn’t start and then the engine started to catch on fire, here am I all in a white dress with a white veil on, and we eventually got to the church, and I was a week later than the class because I’d had measles or something and couldn’t go

with the rest of the girls. And those days you couldn’t eat from 12 o'clock until you went to communion the next day, and I remember starting to feel whoozey, and a little nun that was in the cloister called me over and took me in with her. See, all these sort of things that really were a calamity in those days. And to have to sit in a great big refectory at the convent,

about four times as long as this room with a great long table, the only person there. Because the nuns couldn’t eat in front of you, and gave me bacon and eggs and a bag of sweets and, those things. I don’t know what they do now, it’s- –

I might have been about eight, eight I think. Usually it’s about seven, but

as I was saying, when we went down to this reunion I could remember as a child sitting in the church learning all the hymns in Latin, and how proud we were, you know, we could sing in Latin.

It played a lot,

I think I’ve got a lot of guidance, and a lot of things that are happening today appal me, and I know it’s just everyday life now, but it just wasn’t on then. It was probably the fire and brimstone we were taught those days too, if you do this you'll go to hell. But it really didn’t restrict us, there were no restrictions there.

Yes, a convent, the Convent of Mercy it was. I remember one old nun she’d come along, like a little dwarf she was almost, and she’d just stand in front of you. “How’s your mother, how’s your father?” And then she’d walk off. If it was raining she’d pick up her skirt and throw it up over her head and show you her red flannelette petticoat. She wasn’t going to get wet anyway.

But, well they all cared for you though, the girls, the friendships you made.

It was called the QC then [Qualifying Certificate in 6th Class], that was your – before you went on to leaving, well not very many out there went on to leaving actually, there was no prospects much to be gained by it, and

most of the girls I knew just went into shops. My girlfriend was a waitress in the café, and I envied her, she had a jazzy little apron and a cap on, I thought, I’d love to do that. But I was lucky, the hotel I worked for, Laura and Bob James, they owned it and they had twin daughters, Benita and Dorothy, and took me under their wing really.

And if the girls went out, I’d go with them, and if I did anything wrong Laura would haul me over the coals in the lounge room, so they were like a second Mum and Dad.

There was always the Catholic dog

sitting on the log, and they’d sing as you walked past, you know, I can’t think of some of the other about the Presbyterian kids, but we always went to the Presbyterian Sunday School picnic, they had better picnics. It didn’t really make any difference, it was all just kids and their bravado I think, there was no violence or anything attached to it, it’s just a lot of fun. We

had plenty of outlets anyway, the sports we had then, we had vigaro and basketball and we’d go to Gundagai and play the convent girls there, and then they’d come back to Coota and play us. So they were really good things to look forward to. And a couple of us at playtime, three of my particular friends, we’d go down and we’d put on a little play for the kids, the other kids,

we’d get behind the old ablution block, and we’d do green bottle, the old school skit, and they used to sit on the grass, and we thought we were great. And then we got selected to go in the play because there was a visiting bishop coming and it was at the Town Hall. I had the role of a man in this play, I was not allowed to wear men’s trousers, that was taboo, so

mummy made me false trouser legs with an elastic top, that went over my knees, Dad’s dust coat over the top of that, and his shirt and tie. All because I couldn’t wear trousers. The swimming pool opened, you must have a coverall as soon as you went from the dressing shed to the pool, put your coverall on, throw it over the rail, as soon as you get out, put that back on. Really prudish in a

way, but it worked.

It didn’t make any difference really. Actually it was the same as being in the air force. You had rules, you followed them, and if you followed the rules you didn’t get into any strife. And they weren’t outlandish, they were things that were saving you problems and from making further mistakes, I felt.

But I think it was good training really.

I thought if I’d have gone on, I would not have like the maths teacher, she was far too strict. But the final nun that I had was a real gem. If I couldn’t understand anything in maths, when I ran out of fingers and toes I was lost, and she’d say look, if you’d like to come in a little bit earlier,

I'll show you. Things like that. And I remember going back down there, it must have been when I was in the air force on leave, and she was in hospital, she’d become a Reverend Mother by that time, but she was in her final days with cancer, my girlfriend and I went up and saw her. I always figured I’d have liked to have shown them just how much we appreciated what they had done for us. But she was a pearl of a woman. I think she thought she was going to get me and

Mary into the convent, but it didn’t work.

With the males?

Well they were only over the fence, and there was a lot of hanging over fences I can tell you, and every so often the music teacher

would on a Saturday have a romp, not a dance, a romp, in the St Colombus hall, and the De La Salle boys would be invited over for that. Of course you had your pin up boys, the ones that you’d like to make an impression on, and even at this reunion I’ve just been to, this dear old man, and I thought, my God, do I look as old as that? And we were talking about the romp, he said, “Yes, you girls used to just stomp up and down.”

I said, “And you boys used to slide flat out up and down the hall, and that was the dance.” But it’s amazing to see the changes in people, but the memories still go back, they still go back. Then of course those boys grew up to be our younger set as we grew older at the local dances. When part of the feeling came that you had to

do something, they were all going away, that’s a part I don’t like thinking about.

Not really. I was a bit adventurous I suppose, and um,

um, I remember coming – there was one kid a class lower than us, and she was a holy terror, she just clung to the three of us that were so close, and we’d walk home together, and we had a secret tree in the park, we used to call it our hide out, and we could get up in this tree, it was a Japanese type tree, very thick foliage, and Marie would follow us there and this day we’d had her, so one of the girls told her to get lost and she didn’t, and threw a bit of mud at her.

We were called before the head nun the next day, and of course I could never do any wrong, and I was Imelda then, she said, “And what did you do Imelda?” I said I only put the mud on her face. “You only what?” So we got – and Marie became our best friend after that, this little kid. She came from a dysfunctional family I think, and she was looking for

companionship and we eventually relented, and she came with us. So you did rebel.

I can’t think what they did. I don’t think anyone ever got the cane, I don’t remember anyone getting the cane. I know we had one girl in our class that would pass money down to another little,

very shy little red-headed girl, and she’d ask to be excused and she’d run across the road and buy a bag of lollies and bring them back and give them to this girl, and she’d hand them around. And I’d always think, well that’s rebelling. But she had that streak anyway, this poor girl, she eventually married an American, went to America, divorced, came back, you know, she just didn’t have the

stability, I don’t know what it was, she was a rebel. You get one in every class, I think. And I think that makes you say gee, what’s she doing that for? Couldn’t understand it.

Yes, it has.

Well the common knowledge there is it’s

um, a dust bowl in the summer and freezing in the winter, which it was too, I saw snow there actually, only the once, but there was none of the fine roads and things, but the town itself had everything. But being back lately, very little, very little. I was amazed at the canola,

all these beautiful golden fields I’ve never seen before, I saw them in China I think, and they said well, there’s nothing in farming, in sheep farming now.

It was mostly a railway town, and there was a junction there, and you got all the people from Temora, Gundagai, Wagga, Young, all those places, that was the terminal there,

and I think they had their band Sundays when bands would come from the surrounding towns. And then of course the football, you never missed a football match, and everybody wore their ribbons and got on the special trains and decorated the trains with the club colours, and I think that was the mainstay, you know, the sporting days and the Saturday night dances and the woolshed dances. So there was plenty of

social life really. But of course as I said, when the kids grew up to about 18 there wasn’t anything for them. And the war stopped all of that, anyway, so it sort of killed the town.

Well as I said, I didn’t like the thought of going on to the maths teacher,

for a start, and I got my QC, I still don’t know what QC means, I must find out about that, that’s rankled with me for a long while. And I just went back onto the farm as I said, you know, and helped Mum around the place a bit. Never learned to cook much, to my disgust, I wish I had have. I couldn’t even boil water when I married Ted. I set a jelly, and it took three days, and when it didn’t I threw it out.

Well I wanted to draw, I wanted to be an artist, and read, I’d read anything that had print on it, I’d read. And I still do, it’s the bane of Ted’s life, he’s going to put a case of books in my coffin when I go, he said. I think the reading really,

um, was my main interest, and I used to make up kids' stories and things like that, never ever wrote anything down. But apart from that there was no burning ambition.

I think like most normal kids now, they wait for it to happen, suddenly there’s a clap of thunder and that’s what you want to do.

But I think the war was my clap of thunder, and it was decided for me instead of me having to make up my mind. All our younger set, the boys all joined at the same time, they were sort of a year older than we were, and the sad part was that they all went to Malaya, all POW [Prisoners of War]. My school boy-

friend, he had twin brothers, well three of them went together, and they saw Sandy killed on the railway, a Jap belted him to death, and those two boys came back, one was alcoholic, and the other one was just a great nervous wreck. So there wasn’t anybody that came back that wasn’t scarred badly. And we had to see this – you used to wait for the papers to come out, to see the lists, casualty lists.

I’ve still got a paper somewhere upstairs, I thought it was, thinking, making a lot of these things up, until I read in that, you know, I was thinking about the airmen that were lost, just flying from here to Brisbane and Darwin. And not very many people realised. They were under-trained, and it was just one big rush to get people.

I remember – like a garage, an empty garage down the town,

and Mum took me in there, there was all clothing and things in there, that must have been the Depression I think, because I bought three hats for sixpence each, I thought they were wonderful. But you very rarely wore hats then anyway, but gee, to buy a hat. That’s about the only thing there about the Depression I can think of. Because being on the farm you see you had everything, you had all your fruit trees, and the big grape

arbour outside the kitchen door with a big oak table. In the summertime you’d take your meals out there and just reach up and pull a grape. It was so – and gooseberries growing down one side fence that I hadn’t seen before, and I haven’t seen them growing since, I don’t think. Different things like that, you know. Even your own potatoes, I remember me and the two boys helping Dad planting this big plot of potatoes, he’d cut them and we’d put them in fine ash to stop them

bleeding, before he buried them in the soil. Grandfather had rhubarb and what’s that other – garlic, can always remember those sticking out in my mind. You had everything you wanted really on the farm. But you didn’t have to make a living out of it, you know. And I think they were 99-year leases or something, farms then weren’t they, from the First World War? I don’t think they had to pay a great amount, not as they do today, to survive on the land,

um.

Yes, used to love to get up in the hills, we had a secret valley, and all those little anemone things grew, and little bush orchids, and there was a little stream running through it, Cootamundra Wattle. I still think

of that often. We’d take a billy can and you take eggs, onions and potatoes and your bread and butter and no fear of – you know you had to set the fire safely anyway, so you’d cook all those things up, no fear of – you couldn’t let your kids do it today, but we were so free and easy. And those hills seemed like mountains, but looking back on them in the last months, they're only little mounds. Everything’s sort of amplified.

So that was one of our main – and there was another spot, the gap they used to call it I think, every town’s got a gap, where the water trickles over the rocks and forms little caves and that was another spot we used to love to go to. Just get on your bike and ride out there. But as I say, really carefree days they were. And you used to have to go early or you would miss the big cave, somebody else would pinch your cave.

I remember one pair Mum bought me, I thought they were lovely. Totally frivolous, a little satiny pair with a button on the front of them. I used to love those shoes. But our school shoes were mainly just a black heel, when you had sport you just

had old sandshoes, you know, you wore those sandshoes, and as Ted’s often said, he used to say to the kids, I didn’t wear school shoes, and they’d all play the violin, you know, da, da, da. Same old rhyme. But being in the city I think they got it a lot harder, there’s not a great deal of you know, provisions and things there for them to grow.

First boyfriend. He used to do the butcher boy deliveries after school, and when the basket was empty he’d meet me on the corner and put my school bag in there, and walk home with me. I suppose he’d be the first boyfriend

in a sense. And then the boy I was telling you about that was killed on the Burma Railway, he was the most important one, he was the first important one, he was a lovely chap.

I’d have been about 16, and he’d have been a couple of years older probably, or a year older at least. And it was mostly – most of your social life was the dances.

We’d go, on a Saturday morning meet them and go shopping – not shopping, go down to the milk bar and have a milkshake and go to the footy with them. That’s all it involved, you know? So that would be the first boyfriend, first real boyfriend.

Well you had time limits, you

had to be in and that was it, you know? There was no – if you had to be home by four o'clock in the afternoon if you went somewhere, you were home at four o'clock, and that’s all there was too it. Or you miss out on something else, they’d say well you're not going to the movies, you’ve got to stay away from the dance Saturday, and you’d stay away, if you were told. But you made sure you weren’t – you weren’t going to break the rules. There was no reason really to

get out of hand, because everything was so straightforward and there was never just two, there was always a group, at our age, always in the younger set group. And I think one of the things I dreaded most, we went to a dance in the local CWA [Country Women’s Association] hall, and they had a dance called the Cinderella Dance, and every girl had to take her shoe off and throw it in the middle of the floor. My one great fear was, will I be left without

a partner? It just – you know how you feel? And that worried me. And then I hated tap dances, when you went to a dance and another girl could come and tap you on the shoulder and say, I'm having this dance now, and you’d have to go and sit down. Well I never had the courage to tap anyone else, I used to stay put. But I don’t know whether they do that now, but I found it very demeaning to have to go and

do something like that. Either they wanted me or they didn’t.

We had push bikes mostly, we had push bikes mostly. We had an old Studebaker car, and that was for the weekend things, you know, you’d go away, go for a drive on the weekend or go to the river, and I just remember polishing the

top of that old car with black shoe polish. Can you imagine, the whole hood of the car? And I think about three or four times we had to run up to the shops to get another tin of shoe polish. But you made do, well you had to, I suppose. I don’t know what else he could have used.

Oh, no problem, no problem at all. Well the farm kids had to go into the schools anyway, and that’s where most of your socialising happened. And there are still memories of some of the further out kids that had to be driven in to school, or had to board in school to go, in town to go to school. That was the good part of this reunion we went to, the chap that was coordinating it,

I could just about remember all the girls in my class, and I gave him a list of the names and he wrote back and gave me addresses, and I contacted quite a few. Quite a lot had moved well out of the area, my personal girlfriend had been killed, and that was the main thing, you know, to get to see them again. But I got to see – her brother was there anyway, so that was something. And

some of the other brothers of the girls that I knew. So you more or less got first hand information through that.

Oh yes, yes.

Yes, they were terrific. They’d be way out, and it would only be a great big shed, with the seats right around the wall, and

I remember putting my handbag down and it fell and went into where they used to slide the sheep out. And there was no sheep dip in it, luckily, so someone got that out for me. But the dance band would probably be an old accordion and a piano and a violin, and the local farmer’s wife would put on a gorgeous supper, so that was something. That was one of the episodes we had where we got into trouble with

Laura and Bob James, Benita and myself, and Dorothy. We went out to the woolshed dance with the airmen, they were driving the car around for us, with us, and they got a puncture on the way home. They pinched that tyre three times putting it back on, that meant three more punctures, and we were so late getting home, I think it was three o'clock in the morning by the time we got back to Coota. And did we get into trouble over that?

It wasn’t our fault, they just didn’t know how to put a tube in a tyre. And going to a pub looking for a parking spot there, and they said, there’s a big clear spot over there, a sandy spot, and just as they were about to drive on they realised it was a dam with tumbleweed all over the top of it. We were all rookies, we didn’t know much about it. But we used to look forward to those woolshed dances though.

Some of them they would run, not a bus, it’d be a truck with seats in it, and you’d go out to the dance in those, and you’d go to a football match if it was out of the area in these old truck things, you know? A long cry from the buses we’ve got now.

You had the Town Hall was the main dance hall, then you had St Colomba’s which was in the Catholic school grounds, and the Railway Institute, that was like a union hall I suppose, but we weren’t allowed to go there because they said that was, what did they call it, the blood house. They said there were always fights there, you weren’t allowed to go there. So we went to the Town Hall, St Colomba’s. And then later

on they had a roller skating rink, and they’d utilise that on New Year’s Eve, so can you imagine dancing on cement? It kills you. But you’d go there and you’d dance until – or Christmas Eve at least, you’d go there until it was time to go to midnight mass, then you’d go to midnight mass. So we utilised all those things.

Two of the boys I mentioned, they were on the next farm down, Bob played piano, Ken played violin, and then they had a fellow on saxophone and a drummer. And those two boys, Ken and Bob, both went with that first intake and didn’t come back. Their sister Mona, she was a nursing sister, she went to the Middle East and

she came home terminally ill. So there was her whole family wiped out. So you know, you wonder why you do it. It affected us. It was too close to home.

Yes, well see that stretched into war years too, where you were affected by troops coming to the town and seeing them get off trains and march down the town and they were never there for dances, but then they opened the air force at Coota, the Observer’s School, and of course you had regulars

going to the dances, which was quite good. And my next big romance was with an airman from the local air base, and he lived near Temora, a little way away, and I was getting quite serious with him, and he was posted overseas. At the same time Ted was interested in a nurse, and he was really interested there, so we both had the same sort of experience there, both

our social lives were on a par at that stage. And it even got as far with this chap to go down to see the local priest, and at 17 he said take your time, wait until you're 18. Oh, I’ve thanked God ever since. You can be (UNCLEAR) as a teenager you know, every first boy is going to be the one, but you’ve got to learn along the way, I think.

Absolutely none, absolutely none. Mothers were too modest, nothing was told to you. Even about the ordinary functions. I had that explained at school by one girl. I was in dire need, I thought, what’s happening? So this girl went and saw the nuns, came out, she said, “I'm taking you home on my

bike,” she took her beret off, she said, “You mustn’t get your hair wet,” that was a fallacy, don’t get your hair wet, it’s got to stay dry.

I don’t know, but that was the thing then, you didn’t wet your hair over that period of time.

And you certainly didn’t let rain on it, I don’t know what happened, but I’ve always thought what a

wonderful person she was, to take me under her wing. She was a typical farm girl though, she did everything on the farm, where I was a real dumbcluck, you know? And it was she who explained things to me. So my mother never ever did. But I made sure my kids knew.

No, no, be like poor little Jan, she said,

“I want a Bandaid.” But I probably felt the same way then.

She had to tell me then, she had to tell me. And you just stayed home from school then. Not that there was ever any problem with me, no.

Ted had to tell me. I said to him, you realise what you’ve done, you’ve ruined me. But I don’t think he knew much more than I did. Some of the funny things the girls talked about you know, afterwards, oh dear.

Makes you wonder how you ever got through.

You didn’t seem to touch on sex at all, really. There was no – you were brought up that if a girl became pregnant that was the worst thing that could probably happen. She vanished,

she didn’t stay in the town, she was sent somewhere and that was the biggest disgrace you could bring on your family. So I think that sort of helped in a way too. Have respect for your family life. You weren’t going to disgrace them anyway, and of course the boys were all our own age too, so there wasn’t much more, I suppose there was a danger there, we didn’t realise it. But

But …

The attitudes, yes.

At 15-1/2, yes.

For a little while, yes. Because as I said as the war broke out, attitudes changed then. Didn’t make any difference on the farm, that still had to go on, still had to carry on there.

Only at the hotel waitressing in the dining room,

and then as I said, when Dad died we went to Willoughby, I got a job then as a collar machinist, and that used to scare me, it was a ramshackle old thing, you used to have to put collars on this machine and it had a hot roller, and you pedalled that and you got the shine on the collars. So I did that until I got my call up.

He and a friend, now I'm not sure if they had to go to Griffith, and going along the country road, and as I said all the lights were dimmed then, in wartime, they called it the brown-outs, the lights were at half power, and

um, they ran into the back of a timber jinker. And um, my father was impaled, he was in the passenger’s seat, and he just didn’t – killed him instantly almost. So that was a – and grandfather came to the fore then, he was a real good backstop, and I think that helped out a lot.

I still know the feeling of shock and – you can’t accept it, you don’t accept that – you sort of waved goodbye to him, going up there, I don’t know whether they were fishing or what, they used to go fishing, and occasionally he’d take a weekend and he and this chap would go, and

just to know that he wasn’t there anymore. And then to have to go and take any personal things out of his workshop. He used to play the accordion, and it was there for the boys, but apart from that there is very little else really.

At Griffith, Mum and I went up, and the boys,

and that was a horror too, you know? Having to go up like that on the train. Probably was, there may not have been the money to bring him back, I don’t know. It’s the first time I’ve thought of that, why? But yes, some

things you don’t think of at the time.

It took her a long while, it took a very long while. Because in the meantime after Daddy died, my younger brother had emphysema and he was in St Vincent’s Hospital, and as

I said, I’d moved up to Willoughby, and Mum came up with me, and we used to go to the hospital to see Gordon, and he’d had part of his lung taken. And then Mum took sick, we didn’t know, she was a diabetic, we came back from the hospital and she took her shoe off and her toes were absolutely black. And we took her over to the Mater Hospital,

and she died in a diabetic coma. And with Gordon in hospital, we didn’t know whether he was going to come out or not. And I remember saying to the doctor there, what do we do? Do we tell him Mum’s gone? He said, “Tell him now, because he’s so concerned about whether he’s going to come out or not, we don’t want him to pick up and shock him back in again by telling him. Tell him now, give him time to think about it.” So we did that.

What was I there? I must have been about 18, no, I couldn’t have been. No, I couldn’t have been 18 because I got called up at 18. Must have been about 17-1/2. Time just eludes me.

Yes, in a period of a – a very

short period of time, yes. But Daddy would have been – Dad would have been – ’39 though, when he died, because that’s when the war started and they started the brown-outs, and it was later than that that I went to Sydney and Gordon came up to the hospital.

Yes, it wasn’t easy, it wasn’t easy at all. You suddenly think, you know, there’s so many things you want to tell them and talk to them about, and there’s just no-one to talk to.

Yes, and the war was there, the war was there then.

I was going home, we were coming home from somewhere, could have been school,

could have been school at that stage, couldn’t it? And that’s when I heard all the train whistles blowing and all the car horns started to honk, and I remember racing home as fast as I could get there to find out what was going on. Then that horrible feeling, what’s going to happen now, you know? You think the worst thing, are they going to invade here, what are they going to do? Of course that was – the Japs weren’t in it then, that was the

German war, and all the posters started to appear about these monstrous German men killing babies and it all reflected on your mental image, I think, what was going on?

Can’t remember that, I suppose I would

have done, I expect you would have. It was the – a new movie theatre had been built at that stage, and the old one, that’s another one of the venues for the dances, that was the old-time dances held in the old theatre. And your Mum and Dad usually took you to those, you know, you learnt all the old-time dancing, or some of it.

They’d be posted up in the newsagents’ windows and things like that, you know, they were in the papers, they’d be in the newspapers, see them there. But they were almost grotesque, the German was like a great big ogre, you know, with arms stretched out, hands, and a little baby dripping blood in his hands, and I

shudder to think of it. But it turned out they weren’t the worst, were they?

Yes, yes. There was a tension, there was a tension there all the time, there seemed to be, a fear, sort of a fear

of, what’s going on, what’s going to stop them? What can we do? And you felt so, you know, useless in a sense, knowing what you could and what you couldn’t do. I thought I was lucky, my brothers were too young at that stage, and Keith only was old enough at the end of the war, you know, to join the army

then, but as luck would have it he didn’t get away, that was good.

Uncles, I’d uncles in World War I, grandfather’s brothers, one died in France,

and his twin brother was the one I knew most, he’d been – his arm was all distorted, you know, the elbow was sort of around here somewhere. Yet in the Second World War when his two sons joined, Uncle Seppy put his age down and he joined, and he went to the Middle East with them until they found out, sent him back home. But it happened to quite a few fathers I think, they

wanted to go away with the boys. And he was a real rogue, he’d come to the farm, you’d go to go to bed at night and he’d have shortsheeted your beds, or he’d have stinging nettles in your bed, oh, he was a rogue of a man (laughs). I think of the nice things he used to do. And grandfather was totally different to that, he always had his little waistcoat and his shirt on, sitting in his big armchair.

Had his own corner in the kitchen, he used to like to sit there and the kettle was always on the stove, as I said, that great big fountain was always there. How he ever lived with that black tea, I’ll never know. And his old cigarettes, he used to roll his own, and Mum and Dad and grandfather went to town, left me and Keith and Gordon at home, and we got some of pop’s bumpers, and rolled cigarettes and smoked them. That

made me so sick, they put me on the sofa and Mum didn’t know what was wrong with me, and when she came home she gave me castor oil. It was the worst thing she could have done, I was violently ill. I think that’s probably why I don’t smoke. So that was a good cure, smoke bumpers.

Yes, he seemed to, well he’d lost a lot of that, you know, sitting apart sort of feeling, he was more or less getting around more. He was a fairly good age then too, he was nearly 90 when he died. And I don’t know, they’re like old patriarchs aren’t they, in the old days? They more or

less rule the roost. I remember we visited the farm after the war, and Caroline the eldest girl picked him a bunch of flowers, the old dandelions, took him a bunch of those, and he said they were lovely.

The one that was in at Temora? That was just at the local dance, they’d just take you home from the dance. And then they’d take you to the next dance, and take you to the movies, that was it. And come down and visit and have a meal at the farm, you know?

I think they appreciated a bit of home life as well. But that got as far as me going for a weekend over to meet his parents, so it started off pretty serious then, and that’s when he got posted away. And after that, you know, boyfriends came and went, because they were never there for that long, really. And I think you learn, you learn a lot about human nature, the different types of

people you meet and the different ideas. And I remember one fellow was an atheist, didn’t believe in churches or anything. But yet he could say, why do you want to go to a church, look at this beautiful tree, look at the lovely flowers you grow around here, you know, what more do you want? By gee, you’ve got a lot to learn.

Sidney Charles. He always got Sidney Charles.

Well yes it was, of course they were much more glamorous, they all looked glamorous and you thought they were all going to win the war sort of thing. They were there to defend the country, they were big heroes. There were some real ratbags as well. But he was so very

thoughtful, you know, I think I’ve still got a little torch thing he gave me, and the bomb, he gave me the bomb. Actually there’s a story behind the bomb, he had a sister out at Strathfield somewhere, and he said, ‘I’ve got something for you,” so we went to Strathfield and he gave me the bomb. Now can you imagine a boyfriend giving you a bomb? That would be the last thing you’d want. A bunch of flowers, a box of chokkies, but not a bomb. (laughs). And it

had a little Joe painted on it, you know, Joe Stalin? And of course when I did my training, I remember it was only a practice bomb anyway, wasn’t going to kill any Russians or Germans. But we took that over the Harbour Bridge the night the Japs raided the harbour. By gosh, we’d have gone a million if they found us going across the bridge with that, looking back on it.

It really is, it really is. Probably influenced me in my future career in the air force, I’d say. But I don’t think he knew much about it anyway. Just a typical little bomb, about 11 pound I think it weighs, with a tail fin, and the

nose cap had been taken out of it, so it had been disarmed, there was no worry about it going off anywhere. But it makes a good doorstop.

Anything he gave me was wonderful. You know how – you’re madly in love, going to marry the boy and all this sort of thing, it’s all in your mind, he was the one. And

actually I ended up having to send him a Dear John letter, when I met Ted, and Ted had to do the same with his girlfriend. So the thing that I’ve always wondered about, the day we were married a letter arrived from him, and my girlfriend told me after, “I didn’t give it to you, I didn’t want you to get it on your wedding day, I’ll put it under your pillow.” I never got that letter. I’d

give anything to know what was in it. Whether he was blowing the billyo out of me, or what he was doing, I’ll never know. The mystery of life. He’ll never see this, will he?

Well I think they had the nicest uniform, the blue orchids they called them.

And yes, the soldiers looked more rugged, and more manly I suppose really, when you stop to think about it. And there was another local boy I went out with for a while, he joined the navy, and we saw him once when I was going into Newcastle, in his naval uniform. You saw them maybe when

they all were in uniform.

Well I think they thought they were God’s gift to women because they had a uniform on, and didn’t realise the girls could see through all this bravado and front they were putting on, they knew just what they were, you know? There was no stability. And you appreciated the ones who were more down to

earth and you could have a conversation with, really. There was a lot of difference there.

Not at

Coota I didn’t, no. I’ve seen it happen though on the stations, some of the stations I’ve been on. Ted and I were actually amazed, one pilot flew so low over the sea that the wave hit the prop and bent the prop back, and how he got back to the station we’ll never know, the prop was bent back like that instead of straight out. You know, a lot of incidents like that, and they

complained because they couldn’t read the signs on the railway stations when they did cross-country flights, they took the names off a lot of the stations, and the airmen would come back and say, “Well, we got lost, we couldn’t see the name on the railway station, we didn’t know where we were.” They weren’t supposed to read them anyway. So there was a bit of the low flying.

No, no. They had a base at Coota too, that’s where he was stationed, at Coota. They had the Air Observers, they were training there. I don’t think – there wasn’t a drone at Temora, it was at Coota, and he was stationed at

Coota. That’s when he took me home to meet his parents on the weekend.

They’ have a program, and it’d start off with the quick step, next one might be a jazz waltz, then a waltz, schottische, barn dance – the barn dances today are still popular, you know, when they’re changing partners and meet different ones. And that was the highlight. If you were in the progressive

barn dance and you met a fellow that you liked and he liked you, he’d take you into the middle of the floor and you’d dance there, you wouldn’t join up where you had to change partners. So that was one foil the boys had of getting you to dance with them. But yes, most of the girls stood on that side of the floor, most of the boys stood over there, and the music would start and there’d be a beeline straight across, and if you saw one coming you didn’t like you’d go, no,

engaged. But you used to enjoy, engage dances with fellows you liked, you know, can I have the next Waltze? So it was sort of a challenging thing, every dance was, you were sort of competing, and dancing with fellows that you admired or you wanted to talk to. But as Ted told me afterwards, some of them wouldn’t

take you home because you lived too far away. That’s his theory anyway. He’d ask the girls, where do you live? Too far away, he’s not going to go there.

Yes, sort of didn’t want to talk about it, you didn’t discuss it at all, everything was around about what had happened actually, you didn’t

dwell on it. But I think Gordon might have been less affected, the younger one, the younger boy, but Keith had depended on Dad a lot, you know, and I think that he and I suppose missed him more. Mum seemed to cope all right, she rallied round.

I don’t think I did much to help actually, looking back. I think you’re more – you’re selfish enough to think about what it’s doing to you, and I don’t think you – it got a little bit more difficult probably. But I think that’s probably the reason I went to Willoughby.

I was running away.

Yes.

Well that was pretty straight forward, you know, the dining room was mostly railway people coming through, it was a terminal there for a lot of the trains, and always glad to see them come because they gave good tips. But

it was more or less – and the cooks were yes, hard people to get along with, someone would complain their meal’s not hot enough or their toast’s too brown, and the cooks didn’t – they were usually grumpy old women.

It did, yes it did, because being a terminal see the train

stopped there, and if they were being posted in different directions they’d have to change trains, and it would be at meal time or something, they didn’t come to the hotel for meals, they usually went to a café, and we’d see them marching past, you know, hear the train come in and then there’d be a pounding of feet marching down the footpaths. But you know, you’re aware all the time

there’s a war on, where are they going, what’s going to happen? And there was a sort of a staging camp at Coota up on the showground, and if they had to wait for a time to catch another connection, they’d go to the staging camp. So I remember, they’d sometimes put on – on a weekend they put on a bit of a band, show or something, you’d go up there.

Still it was all – you didn’t make any connections because they’d be there today, gone tomorrow. And no lasting friendships were made.

I wanted to join up, and I thought I’d get in quicker if I went down to Sydney, I don’t know why, I don’t know why, but I did go and I tried to get in at seventeen and a

half, and they sent me back and said no, leave your application, we’ll call you up when you’re 18. And four months afterwards I got the call up. And I remember what a strain it was coming to Sydney, frightened I’d get out at the wrong station, I used to count the number of stations between Chatswood and Sydney, and I’d push a finger down as each one came up, and I got out on my little finger, so I was a real country

yokel.

Well all the people I knew had gone, all the boys in our younger group had gone, and by this time some of them had already been killed, you’d get the lists out in the paper, and you’d pour through that and you’d see the names, and yes, it was someone else. So I

think, you know, as I said earlier, the two boys that lived just down from us they both went and they were both killed on the Burma Railway. Their sister was the only other member of the family went to the Middle East nursing, and she died. And that was just one. And as I said, the first school boyfriend, he and his twin brothers went, the twin brothers saw Sandy killed, and they came back mental wrecks. And

there was a strangeness about knowing what to say and what to talk about with any of these boys when they did come back. And you felt sort of useless, you know, what am I doing here? There had to be something you could do. And I think that more or less pushed me along a bit.

Well you were scared, you were scared somebody had to try and help to stop the fray you know, it was getting so desperate at that stage, there were so many battles being lost and then of course when the Japs came in, that’s when you really started to worry. And as I said earlier, there were so many horror stories coming through, what had happened and posters about what they could do

if they came to Australia, and the reason the girls went in was to let someone else go, let a man – relieve him so that he could go and fight. Which wasn’t a good thought, the more you thought about it you thought gee, am I sending someone else over there. And you wondered whether you were doing the right thing or not, actually. But I think again too it was a bit of an adventure. It was something out of the ordinary and something

that you really thought you should do, and you could do.

That was about ’39, ’40.

Yes, yes, no, ’40, they hadn’t come in then.

Oh yes,

it was a change, so much hustle and bustle, you know, you couldn’t understand it. Of course again there were uniforms everywhere, and restrictions. You’d go to the Trocadero to a dance, and of course the Yanks then were taboo, and you didn’t wear ankle strap shoes because they were Yank catchers,

that was – aunty said, “You can’t have those ankle straps, they’re Yank catchers.” Well, where did that come from? Yet she’d come home, we lived at Willoughby, you know, close to the shops, and she’d bring an American home, she said the poor man was over there, he had nowhere to go, he’s come home for tea. She was the Yank catcher, she bought these – she could have bought – that’s when the fellow was murdering people in Melbourne, Irda la Goche [actually US Private Edward Leonski] or whatever his name was, and I don’t think she realised

the danger of just picking up a stranger and bringing him home for tea, to make him feel at home.

About the Yank catchers? The girls wore them to the dances I think. There’s nothing really in it at all. You’ll hear it even today, you don’t wear red shoes because red shoes are only worn by a certain type of woman. Blessed if I know where it comes

from.

It wasn’t that really, it wasn’t that really, it was only just that our Australian boys resented them, naturally, and if you were seen with a Yank, an Australian boy is not going to want to go out with you. But I didn’t have enough time really to get to know them, the little time I was there.

I never I never went out with a Yank, I only got to know the ones Aunty Ann brought home for tea.

Well as I said the travelling and wanting to know where you were, frightened you were going to get lost. But the shopping was wonderful, and I still remember buying this beautiful underwear I could get

up here, and the funny part of it was it was more trousseau things I was buying, and things that in the country you just didn’t buy these glamorous pyjamas and negligees, and I saw them and I wanted them. And that’s what I took in with me. Can you imagine going into the air force with a negligee? Lace? So I learnt early on that I just,

when I eventually had to make a winter dressing gown out of an old felt blanket, because you couldn’t buy anything, you had not coupons.

There was a lot, there was a lot. Yes, clothing was the worst. I don’t think there was as much of the food, as we found when we went into the air force, you know, if you came home on leave you were given coupons for your butter,

your tea, and that sort of thing, because you knew where you were going so they couldn’t give you theirs, so that was one point. And I know when we came up here, Ted and I when we got married, we couldn’t buy butter, couldn’t buy a box of matches, unless we bought half a pound of butter, he wanted the coupons. So that was a black market sort of thing that we were going through then. No matches, and we had a gas stove. Neither of us

smoked, so he’d give us a coupon and half a pound of butter and you can have a box of matches. So all sorts of things were being worked.

She wasn’t doing a thing. We both joined the NES, as air raid wardens, because I was too young to go in the air force at that stage, and she was very keen on that, with a little gas mask and a tin helmet, and a torch, supposed to

go around and make sure people had their curtains down after dark, and all this sort of thing. We had to learn, at the drill hall, that’s the name I was trying to think of, the army drill hall, we used to have to go down there and they’d teach you how to put arms in slings, bandages and what to do in an air raid, aircraft recognition, all that sort of stuff.

Yes, well that’s what they

did, I was junior, junior NES, Aunty Ann was senior, and in the case of an air raid you had to be prepared, and you also had to check to make sure that blinds were down, no lights were showing. In the case of a bomb attack you had to know how to put a peg in your mouth so that your lungs didn’t explode, and all this nitty gritty stuff.

Kept your mouth open. If your mouth was closed the compact would burst your lungs, or could burst your lungs, we were taught. And of course you were given a rattle, if it was a gas attack, you had to use the rattle and warn people they were dropping gas. And it was quite an eye-opener.

Down at the drill hall where the army used to go in peacetime.

The peacetime army used to go to these halls and have their drills and, usually at great big halls.

Well this is the same sort of thing, except

National Emergency Services, it stands for.

Well, what did you do? God, that’s a long while ago. If a siren went off? Well everyone was supposed to have heard the siren anyway, so like I said, when you went through your darkness, everyone indoors, and slit trenches if you had them. I got so energetic I dug a shelter at Willoughby, and I had a lovely well full of water, and Uncle Arthur could water his garden when no-one else could.

But we had no shelter.

You had to get under a table, put a mattress on your table, and that was supposed to stop any debris or anything falling on you. That’s about all you could do, and go into the safest part of the house, well, what would it be here? I think I’d go under the stairwell. You had to go where there was more support over the top.

A gas mask, a helmet and a gas rattle. That’s about all. And the whistle, we had a whistle.

Well you had to get out in the streets, and you had to advise people, that’s all there was. I think there was so much in the papers, people knew what to do anyway, they didn’t really need us. And when the Japs raided the harbour, I sat on the gas

box out the front of our house with my boyfriend, I said it’s only a false alarm. There they are and they’re bombing the harbour.

It did, but I mean we thought – we really did think it was only a practice run. As I was saying earlier, I came across the Harbour Bridge with that bomb.

I don’t know, but I know I’d gone out with a boyfriend that evening, in the afternoon sort of thing, and that’s when I went out to Stanmore to pick my bomb up.

Yes, there was a lot of noise, a lot of noise. You didn’t really know what was going on at all until after it was practically over, I don’t think.

Very nervous, very nervous. It was drummed into you how vulnerable we were, and all the precautions you had to take to – not to talk about anything military, loose lips sink ships, all these things, all

posters everywhere about that. You had to be very careful what you did. And I guess you tried to get on with your life as best you could, and cope with the rations that were imposed on you. I think we were lucky compared to what poor England had to go through with their rationing.

Ah, I became a collar machinist, that’s putting the wax polish on a collar machine, on collars. And I was lucky when I went in the air force I’d go back and they’d do my shirts for me. I had the nicest collars in the air force.

Yes, it was a laundry, and there’s one section with,

um, how can I explain it, how wide would it be? About half as wide as that again, and it was on rollers, and then across the top of that platform was a big heat roller, you had to put the collars flat, they’d already had the starch and the shine stuff on them, and press a pedal, and Murphy was the chap that owned the place, Murphy was teaching me how to use it. You put your

foot down too far and the damned thing would hit the floor and come back with a resounding bang. I hated it, the first couple of days, I thought I’m not going to do this any more, I can’t control it. I put my foot down and forgot to take it up and bang, there goes another one. But eventually I got quite good at it.

Oh, I can’t remember now, it wasn’t very much, it was better than the air force though, not three and fourpence a

day. I can’t remember how much I got there, I really can’t.

I went to Rushcutter’s Bay, they had their recruiting centre there. And they had people coming in and out all the time, both men and women.

Had I been smart I could have probably changed my birth certificate, but I didn’t think of that, I was too pure. But they said no, we’ll call you up for your medical, which they did do.

A complete physical check up, and then apart from that, you had to do an aptitude test, usually putting the round peg in a round hole, and a square peg in a square hole, I think, and

I think there was a little bit of maths involved, there couldn’t have been much because I’m a lousy mathematician. And then they sent you away, and they said they’d give you a call. That was only a matter of, actually it was four months, it was a long while. I had my birthday in May, and I went down and it was August before I got the call up. And

again you had to go back to Rushcutters Bay, and it must have only been early in the morning, in the morning, because they gave us our first leave pass. Now you can go home and bring your luggage back to Central [railway station] tonight. And I can still think of the excitement of that day. And then somebody gave a shout, “Quick, come and look out the window, there goes Kate Lee.” Remember the gangster woman? She was walking up the

street in a fur stole and a big hat, and we country kids, a lot of us were country, Queensland they came from, and we all raced over to have a look at old Kate Lee.

Oh, there was a mass of girls there, but I remember a couple of Tasmanians,

one particular one from Queensland, no, three from Queensland, and when they told us divide, one in one trailer and one on the other side, and I went over straight to the right side, and the girls on the other side, no, come over here, you’re a B, all the B’s are over here. So I went over, there was Baker, Bain, Barrett, then Coleman, we were all the

lower alphabet. That was lucky, because we were all sent to Melbourne. These girls only got to Bradfield Park. I didn’t see New South Wales again until just about the end of the war, I was down south most of the time.

Yes.

Barrett.

Yes. You should come over here with the B’s, she said, and they proved to be quite nice girls, too.

We had to go to the railway, Central, and they had the RTO, the railway transport officer, you had to report to him, he’d direct you to where the troop train was, and then we found there were military police and NCOs [Non Commissioned Officers] there to direct you where to go, and that’s what I said, I always laugh you know, here we are, all in our civvies, and our suitcases, and this little stringy Queensland girl came down,

just about ready to go, we were, and she had everything rolled up in like a swag, in a blanket. And the blanket fell and tears went everywhere and everybody’s trying to help her. Sykes her name was, never forgotten that. And we rolled her blankets before we got back on the train, and then we lost her at roll call, and they found her up in the luggage rack, she’d made her bed up there. So I’d love to know what happened to her. She was making the most of every situation, I’d say.

I’m not sure whether they told us or not. I’m not quite sure about that. But they just told us we had to be at the railway, and we ended up in Melbourne. And then tenders met us and we were billeted in Toorak Road, and they’d taken over the big mansions there. Some of the girls knew who had owned them before they’d moved in, I don’t know who owned ours. But a big two-storey

place with massive rooms, a fireplace in each room, but denuded, everything had been taken out, and wire gates, we called the beds, placed in all these rooms. And that was where we stayed till we did our rookies.

Yes, we were, well we didn’t get to go to town to see it very much because we were certainly slugging it out on the

drill courses. And I can’t remember, we went and had a photograph taken, I can remember that, yes. Our main WAAAFery there was St Catherine’s Girls School, and we had to march from – Oakdene was the name of our house, we had to march down there for all meals, and their two tennis courts were the drill squares,

so we had to do that, all the drills there.

A bit amazed for a while, then of course your aircraft recognition was one of the things we had to really swat up, we knew nothing about planes, and they were all silhouettes on ceilings, we had to recognise enemy aircraft from our own aircraft. Then you had to have your injections,

ah, they decided while we were in that instead of having one injection, they’d do a three-in-one, and falling down like flies. I don’t think there was anyone at breakfast the next morning, they were all too sick to go. So I don’t think they’d have kept that one going. But they certainly kept you going in the drill square. I remember I had a lovely little pair of suede low-heel shoes,

they told you to bring a low-heel pair, I wore the blessed things out in three weeks, marching around on that court.

They were very slow to issue them then, they weren’t getting the amounts they wanted. I was the only one in our flight that had to wear a drab uniform, all the others got navy, and they ran out by the time they got to me, so I had a summer uniform, and all the others had their

navies on. And you got your first issue then, you got two pair of bloomers blue, two pair of bloomers drab, no elastic, because that was used for the war efforts, you had buttons. And of course you always carried a safety pin. But that was your introduction, and then you eventually got a couple of drab shirts and a couple of blue shirts. Had to

be – we looked like Gestapo, that’d be on there; we soon learned to get the jaunty angle after a while.

Well with the drab uniform you wore the fur felt, and I’ve still got a fur felt upstairs somewhere, and the Maydays was the pork pie, the others was the navy cap. So that was winter uniform, you only wore that in.

winter time. And of course you got your greatcoat, and that was a whopping great thing, they were used quite often on the beds if it was cold.

You were doing quick marches, slow marches, change direction marches, it was in the summertime too, you know, August September, and I think I remember

oh, it was such a hot day and they said you can all fall out for a while, so we raced over under the trees and had a drink, and then this great raucous voice yelled out, “Come on you mob, don’t stand round like a lot of little country dunnies, get back on the parade ground.” I thought, lovely. So we got stuck into it again, marching, marching.

Corporal DI [Drill Instructor].

Well she turned out not to be too bad at all, you know, she had to do her job and that was all. And she’d come to the house of a morning, give shouts, you know, “On your feet, out of bed, roll call,” then you’d have to go and you’d have a duty before you even got down to St Catherine’s for breakfast, you’d either have to clean the lavs, clean the stairs, you had to do your rooms. So all that had to be done before you went down. And

she made sure you got it done. We had one further one, she’d come to the back of the hut and scream out, “Wakey wakey, rise and shine.” The girl’s favourite saying was, leave your horse and cart outside, she was making so much noise.

I think most of them were prepared for it, I think you knew you had to do it,

and then of course you got to know what you were doing because then they’d take you out on a, what do they call it, a recruiting march, and you’d have to march through the streets of wherever you were, hoping to stir up some more recruits to join up.

Nothing, nothing then. That was only – then you were

put in what they called pool, and I know I had (UNCLEAR) hoping I’d get into signals, and they said no, we’ve got enough signals, stewardesses we need. And of course having waited in the hotel before I went in, I was one that was sent down to Victor Harbour actually, just luckily, sent down to South Australia,

You knew nothing, you knew absolutely nothing, you were putting yourselves in their hands to use you where they wanted to use you, really. And they might have wanted you to be a tailoress, righto, we’ll teach you how to do that. Well the technical training hadn’t come into it then, so that was usually messing staff and office staff was the main – and

um, as I said, I ran out of fingers and toes, I couldn’t count after that, so I wasn’t in the office.

I was curious, I wanted to find out, I wanted to know everything, and I wanted to know how to do everything. Things that I hadn’t had the opportunity to do before, just to try myself, how good am I? What can I do?

And I think that’s why the catering didn’t appeal to me much, I couldn’t see how you could win a war just setting tables and knowing what wine to serve with what dish.

Very good, very good indeed. Yes, there was no class distinction, there was nothing. We were just all there to do the job, and you helped each other if you could.

I know one came out and asked if she could borrow my suit to go out. I’d have no more lent anyone my good suit, but you didn’t think anything of it, it’s not going to be much good when I get a uniform anyway. So you all sort of pulled together.

Well one of the funniest things was when we had our passing out parade in Melbourne and then you were taken to this bit of a do, and they put a sort of a show on for us, and remember I was saying there was Baker, Barrett and Coleman, and the fellow, the artist,

wanted someone to come up on stage to help him. So Coleman jumped up, and she went up on stage, and the next minute he’s got her fire eating. We found out later that she knew all about it, that she had been in a road show. So that’s just the different type of people. And she had done this fire eating, so here I was, “Don’t do it, don’t do it,” and she’s blowing flames out of her mouth. So that was one of the odd bods.

And the other girl trying to help us when we were going to have our injection, her name was Marcelle O’Reilly, isn’t it funny how you remember these names? Red hair, plastered with mascara, make-up, and Marcelle said, “Look, now don’t worry, it’s not going to hurt you, it’s quite easy to do, take your mind off it.” So they come to Marcelle get the needle in and she fainted. And in the heat of the day, everything,

mascara’s running down the poor girl’s face in one heck of a mess. But that’s a case of trying to help us. She needed help herself, I think.

Who was it then? Dulcie Nelson her name was. She eventually ended up being my bridesmaid. And we went through, from

then, we went to Victor Harbour together and back to Benalla, and we did our course together, and both went to Williamtown together. And she was the only one because air force you don’t get posted en masse as they do in the army, you’re individuals. I think that’s why it made it a bit lonely, you couldn’t make really firm friends.

She was a florist in civilian life, very gentle sort of person, a little plumpish blonde girl, honey-blonde hair and very nicely spoken. She, you know, nothing that grated.

We didn’t have much at all really. It was only about three weeks, and by the time you’d done all your training, your drilling, you were pretty tired by the time you got home. And that was about the limit really. Some of the girls went into Melbourne, I remember everybody going – we went in one weekend I think, and we had a look at a parkland or

something there, that’s about the extent of it.

I didn’t see enough to make a comparison really, just seemed to be the same mass of uniforms milling around everywhere.

Well they were pretty harsh really, you only had the, I forget what the official, I mean we used to call them wire gates were your beds, and you were given the parias to go down and fill that with straw, we soon learned that you didn’t fill it right up with straw, it was like sleeping on boards, you knew just – eventually – you only half filled it, you could wriggle your way into it then.

But there were no sheets, we only had old grey blankets and a pillow slip. It wasn’t the easiest thing.

Pretty lacklustre. It got worse as the war got on, of course. You got goldfish for breakfast, one of the most obnoxious meals, a little whitebait.

Can you imagine having whitebait in white sauce on toast for breakfast? Some of the girls said I cannot eat it with all those eyes watching me. And of course they had their original goldfish, that was a sardiney stuff in tomato sauce. Rubber eggs later on, they were dehydrated eggs, and you bounce the fork on them, you know, they were shockers.

Unbeknown to us we could have left at any time, because we were not enlisted personnel at that stage. That didn’t come till some time later, and we thought we were there and that’s it, you don’t get out. But we’ve only found out in the last couple of years that you were not enlisted at that stage. Later on they enlisted us. And one of the

hardships was calling us Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force. Auxiliary, cut the girls out of housing loans, they were only an auxiliary, until that was changed further along the line too. So there were a lot of taboos early on in the things you could and couldn’t do.

Yes, yes.

Yes, well the Mt Brecken club had been taken over by the air force, beautiful big country club, billeted the officers, and we had the dining rooms there that we had to learn our course. Our first introduction though to the

old corrugated iron sheds, and the ablution blocks and the trenches around about everywhere, and that was the funny thing, there were men on the course too, but they had slip trenches between our huts and theirs, but their ablution block was on our side. So some of the wags, the boys would go and have a shower and they’d pinch his clothes. Now how to get back to the men’s side?

Jump into the ditches and get across. But they were the sorts of things they were doing. But the food at Victor Harbour was atrocious, a complaint had to go in a couple of times. You’d get a salad and you’d have to look through to get the slugs and the yukky stuff out. So we didn’t like their food there at all.

We didn’t get down to the harbour much.

At the club? We just went through the course, you know, what wines you served with red meat, what you served with fish and how to set up and, you know, serve from the left or right, or whatever, and take away. We were taught all that sort of thing, then in the time we had off we were able to go down to

Victor Harbour and go out to Kangaroo Island, we did that one day. And another weekend we decided we’d go swimming, but we had no bathing suits, so we had to go down to the town to try to get a bathing suit. And it meant using up your precious coupons. And I saw the most gorgeous yellow, buttercup yellow bathing suit, and I bought that. I thought I looked a million. Got in the water and it all dropped. Imagine me in the surf?

So that was a waste of some lovely coupons. But that was our entertainment there really, just go down the beach.

No, it was a course, it was only a course.

Yes, yes.

About 30 I suppose.

I’m only guessing.

No, no, it wasn’t a lot.

Just to serve the officers and the sergeants, they were the only ones that had stewardesses, and you had to know exactly what to do and how to do it. I don’t know what the – they must have been just staff, I think, the officers

that we were looking after, I’d say. And then the other thing though, they showed you how to peg clothes on the line. Now I never struck anyone having to do their washing for them or anything, but I had the tidiest line after I came out of the air force, I knew exactly what had to go where.

Well you put all your folding things here, all your ironing things there, makes it easier when you take them off in the basket.

Yes, put your towels together and they can be folded, and …

I think I learnt more afterwards when I was sent away for a correspondence course on housekeeping, because I knew nothing about – that wasn’t going to help me in real life. I mean you knew your

types of wines and I still don’t know, it doesn’t make any difference, they’re just fluid as far as I’m concerned, I’m not a connoisseur. But you knew you just had to have a red wine with the red meat, and white – which has gone by the board now, you don’t do that. So you didn’t learn anything that lasted and helped you much.

In the hotel it was straightforward, you had a menu there, that’s what you’re going to have, and hope to God you remembered it when you got to the kitchen and brought it back. And everyone was so friendly, but you were on your guard all the time at Mt Brecken because you knew they were going to pick you up if you did anything wrong. And that would go on your report. So you were on your guard all the time to make sure you did it the right way. But I

still say, I didn’t learn anything that helped me after life.

Not there, but later on there was.

I’d like to have been in signals, I loved signals. As I said, I can’t imagine just serving food, you know,

how’s that going to help anyone? But looking back on it, it did, because when we went to the other station we had to get the early morning fliers off, the dawn fliers, and you had to be duty stewardess to make sure they got off on time, that sort of thing, so it did help, really it did. But of course you couldn’t see that training.

Some of them, well Dulcie didn’t enjoy it much

either, she wasn’t keen on it. The others just seemed to plod along, you know.

Well they did have men stewards, and they weren’t in our course, I mean they were kept separate. All the way through the men trained separately to the women, but I struck a few of them afterwards,

they were mostly in charge of the airmen’s mess, and the women did the officers and the sergeants.

Yes, that’s right, yes.

Yes, I don’t know what they did overseas, you know,

how they utilised their services there. Well they still had messes, didn’t they? They had to be fed. But I don’t know how they go with that.

Not at all, not at all. Well you didn’t get down often enough to mix with them, there was no – our own social outings we worked out

ourselves, we went out to the island and went swimming, that’s about all it extended to.

Not really, not there, we didn’t get much of a graduation there. We went to Benalla in Victoria again, that was an elementary flying training school, that’s where the boys went for their first flying lessons.

Um, they have old Tiger Moths, and it used to amaze you to get out of a morning and look and the slightest wind and there’d be one on its nose. See the boys didn’t know how to control them, if one ran into a fence or something, the inexperience of the boys who were going through. The duty stewardess there was the worst part of that.

You had to leave the WAAAFery because you couldn’t disturb the girls, you were getting out early, and there was a tiny shed attached to the recreation room out on the main drome, and then across the road from that was the mess, sergeants and officers’ mess. And the men seemed to glory in coming home off leave and rattling a stick along the corrugated iron

while you’re trying to sleep. I used to sit on the end of the bed most of the time looking out waiting for the light to go on in the mess and get over there. I’ve always been a bit of a scaredy cat, I hated being in there.

You’re out by yourself, you know? They called it the WAAAFery where we were, had a big fence around it, we were all in there, well protected and everything. And then all of a sudden you’re stuck out in the middle of nowhere in a little shed.

and your imagination ran riot, which was no need for it.

Some drunken airmen coming and rattling into the door or something. There was always that on the cards. Nothing ever happened, so …

No, no, that’s the amazing part, the respect that was

shown to the women. And the situations you’d be placed in, anything could have happened. But when you stop and think, we were all about the same age, and there weren’t any real old hardened blokes there, except an officer or two you had to watch out for.

Yes, this is when I hit the other station after I’d finished my course, and the armament officer sent word down to my section, he wanted me to go up to his office and help him tidy it. And I said to the warrant officer, “But you’ve got men assistants here,” “But no, he’s asked you to go.” And the old wretch chased me around the table, and I just raced out and said, “I’m not going back.”

And he said, “Why not? You’ve got to go back, it’s an order.” I said, “Right, I’ll go to my WAAAF officer and tell her what’s going on.” I didn’t have to go back. But just some amorous old officer, I suppose. But that’s the only time that I’ve had any harassment. Another fellow at Rathmines, as luck would have it I was getting a gun ready for storage putting graphite all over it, and he came up and he

went like this across my backside, and I swung round and hit him in the face, put a graphite mark on his face, and he slapped me back. And I didn’t tell any of the others about that until the Veterans’ Affairs asked me a similar question. He said, “He could have been court marshalled and thrown out.” I said, “Well I did handle it.” So he had the graphite hand mark on his face to show.

We were told where to kick. Yes, ankle and the groin. That was part of the training, I tell you.

Well that was in a – we used to have exercise classes on the stations, and I think it was – I don’t know whether you’ve heard of Gwen Stark, she was one of our top officers,

She came round all the stations, it was Gwen that told us what to do. She was a fantastic person, you wouldn’t think to cross Starky. But she’s only died the last few years too.

She was a real woman of the world, she knew what she was talking about, and she’d let you know. Even lately when we’d have reunions, Starky would get up and start singing Roll Me Over In The

Clover, and the waiters used to come all out to hear Starky’s song. But you know, she was really good, like she used to go round and she’d check on safety measures for her girls, and some of them used to sneak out at night, and some of them snuck out and they found Starky standing there where they were crawling under the wire.

She knew exactly where they – she knew everything. One of those women, she knew and she looked after all the girls.

Well that’s what it was, she was in charge of – our head one was Clair Stevenson, Starky came next, and she did the rounds of all the stations, she gave lectures and she heard grievances, righted anything that was wrong.

I don’t think there were, I can’t think of any, not that I could think of. But she knew all the lurks, so she was like one of the girls. A step ahead of them at times.

No, no, we were instructed, in more or less self defence, what you had to do to look after yourself, because you didn’t have anyone else to do it for you, you had to know what to do. And you know, vital points in the neck and all those sort of things. I’ve forgotten them now, too old to worry anyway.

Anyone. Anyone that threatened you, anyone that threatened you. Not that, as I said before, I mean we got so much respect. It was amazing.

No, not really, not really.

Can’t think of anything.

I threatened it, I threatened it, yes.

She was in charge, your WAAAF officer was in charge of all WAAAF on that station. She was your section officer, they called her, or assistant section officer, whichever,

and all grievances were taken to her, if you had any. I can’t think of us ever having anything to complain about, really. Not there.

Starky? Yes, she was in charge of all that though. She was the head of the whole works, under Clair Stevenson. That was another incident, Claire Stevenson was,

worked for Berlei, you know, the ladies’ foundations, and I went from, I think it was about nine stone, to 10 stone in the air force with the food, and someone loaned me a bone corset. So you can imagine, every so often there’d be a high ranking officer come and have a kit inspection, you’d have to get your kit bag and tip it on your bed, and these bone corsets came out, and this WAAAF officer that worked for Berlei said, “Oh my

God, ACW, what are they?” She’d only been used to the flimsy underthings. So I didn’t wear them anyway, they were too uncomfortable.

Yes, yes.

The entire organisation.

In my whole career, only about four or five times, no more often. Starky was more on the ball, she’d have to report back to Claire

though.

Yes, they were just a series of corrugated iron sheds. I’m not sure now how many there would be in there, there’d be about 12 I suppose, six or eight down either side anyway. And then you’d have an ablution block at the bottom of that

again, and that would cater for about three or four huts. You had the old donkey man, he was from the air force, he’d come and stoke up the donkey to keep the water hot.

The donkey man, he was called, because that was a big heater, water heater thing, and he used to have to keep that fed, to heat up the pipes through to the showers.

So you had to forget a lot about modesty there, the showers only came a certain way up, you know, and you had to walk through a Condies Crystal bath every time you walked through it to try and keep the tinea and stuff at bay. So you know, they took a lot of precautions.

Well that’s why they were taking precautions that you

didn’t get it. And of course you had to let them know, if you did get it you’d have to go and – and it’d be your own fault really in a sense, if you had the Condies crystal pool to go through – then again I suppose if you had sweaty feet you’d get it anyway, wouldn’t you?

It was quite a big place, I kind of think of the hangars, but they were only Tiger

Moth planes, they were only small planes. As I said they went from there to an operational training unit, that was their initial introduction to aircraft really. And it was while I was there at Benalla that they decided they’d take the women in technical training, so I applied for that and got that.

Similar to ours, but they were in a separate section. Yes, it was there, yes it was at Benalla that they suddenly decided that they were going to move the WAAAF into the sergeants’ quarters because they were better huts, and

the airmen would go down to ours. Well that caused a bit of a controversy because some of the pilots would come back into the camp and think they could still go up into their block. Some of the girls said they heard this scream, “My God, there’s women in the shower,” and he’d gone back at night, you know, and he thought he was going to his old quarters. But it caused a lot of confusion for a while.

Yes, they were all separate, yes. The sergeants’ mess, the officers’ mess, they were just sort of adjoining, they’d shoot you to either one of those. We thought we looked quite smart, we had white jackets with epaulets and so on. And I think their meals were ahead of what

the airmen got, they got more a served up meal, where we had our tin plates and our pannikins, used to put them on your back, on your belt, and we had to go on parade whether you wanted to eat or not, it was a parade, and if the meal was too bad you’d just put your plate away and kept walking, and go over to the canteen and get some bikkies and a bottle of milk. We did that a few

times.

Mostly stewy things, you know, you never got a roast or anything like that, they were always stews, they left a lot to be desired.

I was in the sergeants’ mess and the officers’ mess, so wherever I was needed most. They’d have a menu, and they’d decide which one they wanted, not a

lot, but you were asking whether there were any boo boos, Dulcie was carrying a bowl of soup and her thumb went in it and was burning, so she sat it on the officer’s shoulder. He said, “You wouldn’t, you wouldn’t drop that, would you?” So she managed to get it down on the table. That’s why I think we might have got our change of course, we weren’t very good stewardesses.

Well that wasn’t too bad, they could have a grill, they could have a bit of a roast, but we still got the old stew back in the ordinary mess, just a line up.

They were attached, they were attached to the mess, so there was no distance to walk to get their meals and to serve them, so all that had been thought out pretty well.

No, they were great big, four times the size of a normal garage, with great stewing pots and things everywhere, and a typical cook’s – you know, some of them grimy old looking things, they weren’t really, but they looked it. And slap, slap, mashed potato, pumpkin, whatever the other thing was, and

bang, it’d all go on the plate.

You could sometimes be delegated to go over and make some beds in someone’s hut that had gone, and you had to renew them, you’d have to do that. But yes, it was Benalla. Ted laughs at me, he said the,

the dentist there. I said, “Well I went to the dentist, and he kept saying to me, ‘say prunes, say prunes.” And he said, “Didn’t you wake up?” I said, “No, what would he want, he was getting closer and closer, “Prunes and prisms.” But I told him about him trying to keep me a seat on the train when we were going on leave, he said, “You didn’t go, did you?” I said, “No, I ran flat out.”

That was at Benalla.

Yes. I suppose they try, but I was too green to know what he was doing.

Getting me to pucker up for him. He said, “Open wide, pucker up, prunes.” You can look back and laugh on those silly things.

At the dances, it was a lot of fun because there were so many at the dances, and they were really a variety. As I said, you got to know personalities, different types of people. I went there for about three months or so and time was limited to get to know anyone really, because one batch would move out and the next lot would come in.

In the rec hall, they had a big rec hall, and I don’t think we ever had any pictures, we had pictures on other stations, I don’t remember having that at Benalla. But our main recreation was to go down – the Broken River flows through Benalla, it’s broken, you’d have a pool of water here, a trickle, a pool of water there, full of leeches, so it wasn’t very pleasant.

Yes, you certainly were. Absolutely spoiled with dancing partners. It was Benalla too, we were too far away to go home on weekend leave and there were a group of us, a couple of fellows who played piano, and we’d go down to the rec hut, and they’d play piano and we’d dance. You know, there wouldn’t be that many of us, but that was quite a lot of fun.

And that was another thing, I don’t know whether I should tell you that one (laughs). One of the chaps was a dance instructor, one of the young players, and he used to teach me different steps, you know, and then he was posted to Canada to finish his course, and it was after I was demobbed, I got a

letter from the customs in Sydney, and there was a parcel for me. And of course you had to identify what was in it. I said, “I’ve got no idea.” Then he told me the name of the person who sent it, and it was this dance instructor fellow. Ted was with me to come and collect it, he said, “Well we’ve got to open it.” The most amazing set of lingerie fell out, from Macy’s, in America.

“How does he know your size?” I said, “I haven’t got a clue.” I had nowhere to send it, didn’t know his address, really, only he just had his name on it, so I got a lovely set of lingerie and no-one to give it to. He must have been a very lonely man.

With Ted. I dropped one

fellow I was going with to go with Ted, and we were at the dance this Saturday night and this girl came and she said, “You’d better go back, Frank said he’s going to shoot you.” And I didn’t intend to tell Ted until afterwards. He said, “You put me in danger and didn’t tell me about it.” I said, “Well it was either shoot me or he was going to walk into an aircraft prop.” A couple more weeks and he had another girlfriend anyway. So that was the sign of the times.

That was at Williamtown.

You had a great admiration for them, because they were coming in with no training at all, and they’ve got to get up there and – when you first try to drive a motor car how hard that is, but they had to get up

there and the aircraft, in the early stages as I said, were only little Tiger Moths in the initial training, and when they got up to the bigger aircraft you really worried about them. You knew nothing much could happen with the dual controls in the little ones. They didn’t have any fatalities while I was down there, not at Benalla. That happened at the next station, quite a few.

They had programs, because they couldn’t all just take off willy nilly, so many would go off at a certain time. It was the same on the other stations I was on, they always had flight patterns they had to be on.

Yes, they were mostly instructors, yes,

or they were all instructors actually, of course the other fellows were in the airmen’s mess. But they used to call them sprogs, for some reason, I don’t know. They were the new blokes in for flying. Never found out what sprogs meant, it could be rude, I don’t know.

No, the new recruits.

Um,

the electrician, they called him Yehoudi, I don’t know why. Yehoudi. What’s the SPs name? Foo. Foo was here, you know the old – they used to draw a half face looking over the wall, Foo was here. And that used to relate to old Foo the SP.

I don’t know what his real name was, but we all called him Foo.

He used to have to

go down and make sure lights were out and no-one was lingering around the station and get rid of them all, took them back to barracks. Off the station they’d pick you up for misdemeanours or whatever. I was caught once for having my hair too long, touched my collar. You weren’t allowed to let your hair touch your collar, and that was on Central Station, the SP came over and

gave me a warning. But it wasn’t hard to do because you wore, we called them invisible hair nets. If we had long hair we rolled it up, put an invisible hair net on and tied it up on the top of your head, keep you hot. Mine must have slipped.

Concessions. I don’t thinks so. I was hauled up for long fingernails at another stage, I tried to

explain that I was using them in my work, which I was doing really, you know, you dismantle a gun and you get a little fine spring to release and you’d get a long fingernail and pull it out. But it didn’t jell, she made me cut them.

No problem there, no. No worries with make-up.

Mostly, mostly.

Only warnings, really only warnings. They stopped your weekend leave if it was serious enough, that’s about all. Confined to barracks. But I didn’t know of anyone that that had happened to really.

Well we weren’t supposed to make those things, those foreigners, that was a no-no.

Well they make them all through the war, you know, you didn’t – whenever you had time, but that was at the end of the war.

The which?

Well the bootmaker was making wooden clogs, selling them to the women. He was also getting – I don’t know where he got them from, but he was getting sheets and tablecloths, you couldn’t get them outside, I don’t know where he got them, but we could buy them off him, that’s the only way I got sheets, because I didn’t have a glory box when I went in, and they’d say go down to the shoemaker, he’ll get them for you. So he must have been making a bit on the side. And then some of the boys were running their

own two-up schools, and we had one fellow in our – they used to call him the mouse, he was running the local two-up and one of the boys found a great wad of notes in our section. Took them to our warrant officer and he said, “I think they belong to the mouse. Don’t say anything, see how long it takes him to find out he’s lost it.” They had to give it back to him, the mouse was making so much money he didn’t even miss that wad.

There were a lot of things though, that different people would try and make money out of.

No, none that I knew of anyway. Never even saw one with a pack of cards.

Getting things. At Rathmines they were getting a lot of Yankee aircraft in, and

they were bringing nylon stockings, and they’d be in a waterproof bag, and then they’d just drop them in the bay and there’d be a boat there. So the girls were getting those, and until they started to issue them, the WAACs [Women’s Australian Army Corps] had beautiful underwear, like little corsetty things, and they’d bring a few of those in. But I don’t know what happened but we started to get issued with them, when the

war was over I suppose. But those were the sort of things that they were doing. Well Ted was developing photos on Bougainville, and he got some very interesting ones, taken off the Japs, you know, Geisha girls, and he’d make up a collection and he’d sell them to the Yanks. Never a dull moment.

Well

I found I used to buy the Salvital, because filling the bombs, my stomach used to get upset, and I used to – instead of going to the doctor I’d go and get Salvital. So you could buy that and you could buy Aspros and soft drinks. I don’t know whether you could get ice creams or not, but it was mostly the biscuits and the soft drinks, things like that.

No, I don’t think I ever saw a newspaper there. Of course you didn’t have the radios the way we do today blaring out the news. I don’t know, you had to rely on people coming from outside, you know, to tell you these things.

Well you knew, you knew what was going on, it must have been on movie screens in the,

in the rec hall, we used to have movies there. And one of the main things that used to get all the airmen screaming, they’d be telling you something about the war, so and so, and then the Americans came in, and the airmen would yell, “Whahoo for the Yanks,” you know. They hated that, because every American

film had the Yanks coming in as the winners of the war, our boys didn’t appreciate that.

Of pregnancy, yes, yes, she did.

And she was a local girl too.

Um, well there were a group of about four girls, and they were, I don’t know, more worldly than we were, and they were going down to the orderly room, that was the local pub, and whatever they did there, evidently wasn’t the right thing. But we were quite surprised when we found that she was discharged. And being a local girl too, you know, didn’t make it any the

better for her. But they were in a different group than what we were moving in. There was another girl in Adelaide, there’s a group, they used to call them the dead-end kids, and they used to do all stupid things. They got a key made for the fire escape, went down to Adelaide, bought a bottle of wine, no glasses, they couldn’t get glasses, everything was shut, so they bought eye-

droppers from the chemist, eye glasses. And I remember once we were all together at a reunion and we were laughing about this, and one of the girls boasted, “Well I was one of those girls.” I said, “Well, you’ve got to keep quiet. But you did get rebels like that, a few would gang up and really go out and do their own thing, more or less what it was.

Well they seemed to know what life was about, they’d tasted things that we hadn’t tasted, and as a matter of fact, one of them said to me, called me a goodie-goodie or something, I wouldn’t go out and I wouldn’t do something, and I must have howled. The next day she came back and she had a little holy picture for me and apologised. So they’re the things that did happen.

But she was one that got around with these four. Most of the other girls steered clear.

In a sense that I felt a bit embarrassed about it, because I didn’t think I was such a goodie-goodie, I was just an every-day person, but I just didn’t know what they were doing. One of them locked

herself – by that stage they’d put us into a hut that had two bedrooms in each division, that was when we were in the sergeants’ quarters. And she got so drunk in the hut, and they got the DI to come down, and she’s shouting out, “If you want me, come and get me.” They had to climb over the top of the petition sort of thing, you know. But I don’t know whether that was the one that really got into strife, but it was one of that gang.

So you did find them.

That was at Benalla, yes, it most probably was.

You didn’t. You didn’t really, you had to go looking, I’d say. You’d do what they did, I suppose, go down to the local hotel, and there’d be plenty of airmen there that would be willing to take them in, or whatever. So I think they were just

a misguided group.

No, we were never told, never told. More or less, whether they expected us to know that 18-year-old girls

then knew nothing, absolutely nothing. And I don’t know how they expected us to know these sort of things. Probably thinking a girl off a farm would know everything. But I think we were more isolated then than you were in a town really.

I don’t really know, no. The messing staff really were not as elevated as office staff and other people, because people that had no training, and you were just put in there, I think that’s what annoyed me mostly, you know, you’re just put in that little niche,

you’d had no training, and that’s where you belonged. That’s why we grabbed at the chance then to do a technical course and do something worthwhile, I thought.

Still only reading I think, there was nothing else you could do, really. Just the company of the other girls, and you did swap stories, as we’re talking now, you know, you’d have little experiences where you’d been, and sort of everyone was finding their way with the other people

as well as well, we were all in the same boat. None of us were too sure what was ahead, and we were only groping in the dark, I think it would be really. Didn’t know what the future was.

They had libraries, they had libraries. You’d go and get your library books. I’m still trying to get through The Lord of the Rings, I’ve only just started the first book, it’s

heavy going. It’s a challenge.

ACW all the way through, and that was explained to me through Veterans’ Affairs actually, it was, what do you call it, when your rights aren’t upheld? I had – from Benalla

I had a recommendation from the chappy in charge for promotion, and he said – when my news came through that I could transfer to the other course, he said, “Look, if you stay here I can get you promoted.” And I said, “Well I just don’t want that, you know, I just don’t want it.” And then in my freedom for information there were three occasions I was recommended, the

third occasion was highly recommended. But being the only WAAAF amongst all the men, discrimination came into it. They won’t give promotion to a woman in this section over a man, and that’s what the chap, the advocate said, he said that’s definitely discrimination. What could you do about it? Nothing. So I found that anyone that did get a promotion, some of the girls became corporals, but they were placed into the storeroom

in their section, which the major said to me when I went – he said, “Look you can go in there, you know all the tools.” I said, “No way,” I said, “I’ve done the same course as those men out there.” I said, “You’ve got fellows here that are assistants, haven’t done the course,” I said, “Why aren’t they in there handing tools out to the men?” So he saw my point and he let me go out. So I was lucky. But the ones that decided that they would stay in and just do that,

they would get promoted. So they’d be in charge of a little tool room. I couldn’t see that as being any criteria as far as I was concerned.

I think we’d only been there about three months, and that’s when they – the government brought out the offering women to do a technical course, again to help men, out of other trades. And by doing that though, they opened up to allow women to

on work on aircraft engines, on the fuselages, electricians, instrument repairers, armourists, as I was, and they were left open to us, if you could pass the courses at the tech college. So that seemed like more of the opportunity of something to do that was challenging and worthwhile.

I think it was more a recommendation to – you’d get a recommendation from the section you were in, and if they didn’t think you could do it, well they would say no, there’s no opening.

Not that I knew of, no, we just asked for

the chance to go and re-muster. It depended on whether there were openings to enough cases, you could probably re-muster to become a stenographer or something. But that’s not what I wanted, anyway.

Well they sent us down to Adelaide to the technical college, and our billet there was a city

parking garage, you know how the cars drive up around the ramps and park on the levels? And where the cars parked, the markings, that’s where our beds would go. And they had three ply to stop the wind whistling in from the outside, it would still come up the ramp though, and you had your ablution block up on the top floor – up on the roof. So rain, hail or shine you had to run across there to go to the lav

or to have a shower. And then again you had to march from there down to the Exhibition Building, and you had your meals there, and you marched back up The Terrace to the technical college, where we were doing our courses then.

Train, went by train.

How many would be there then? I’ve got a photo in one of those books that shows the number of people on the course. It’d be close to 20 or 30, probably. I’m not quite sure of just how many were there.

You had to find out yourself, had to know what you were going to do. It was an elementary course to start with, and that weeded you

out. First of all you had to do elementary electrician, then you had to do a fitters course, and then they offered you different categories, and they said, “Which one would you prefer?” So I put down armament and they said, “Look, you’d better put another one because I don’t think they’ll take women into that section.” I said, “Well, it’s been offered on the sheet so I’m giving it a go anyway.” And I was lucky enough to

get it. But with the training they had male teachers at tech college, and they taught you how to file and how to drill and uses a lathe, and all these sorts of things. And the electricians, you had to learn the points and the amps and the ohms and the resistances and all that sort of stuff. And with all the books we were given, the text books, we’d sometimes hire a

boat out on the Torrens River, and we’d study as we were just floating down the river, pull into the bank and have a bit of a study there.

Yes, these were only rowboats, I don’t know whether they had paddle boats then. They did, they had one called Popeye, I think, yes.

Oh, Excitement, something new is happening. I’ve got something opening up, I want to get into it straight away and see what’s going on. But there was always someone there to meet you, so you weren’t confused, they always had an air force tender waiting to take you where you had to go. That was, you know, quite pleasing.

It was called City Car Park, a parking station.

Yes, just off. There was a little corner carnival thing, not very far from the Exhibition Building. We could sort of more or less look down to the right and there was the Exhibition, down

that way. And then on our little corner, only very small, a little carnival, and on the opposite corner there was a church. I can’t remember the name of the street.

We could hear the lions roaring from the zoo, we saw that on TV last night.

Yes, that’d be right.

Could have been a bit further apart from that, you know, you could still get in and out. We had one little girl there, she was a schoolteacher, and she had a problem and she couldn’t march. If her right leg went out, her

right arm went, poor little Jeannie. But she was a brilliant mathematician, and failed her course there because she could do all the theories, couldn’t do the manual. I felt so sorry for her. And she found a boyfriend on the course, and we all worried about her. And she was late coming home one night, and while we were sitting up waiting on the side of the bed for Jeannie to come in, she said, “I’ve done

something terrible with Kelvin.” “God Jeannie, what did you do?” “I let him kiss me goodnight.” Oh, relief, poor little thing, you know, she did so want to go on with it. But she was in the wrong place, the wrong calling.

No, no, it was just all open, it was all open, just taken it over as the car park itself. But as I said, they may not have been in individual car – it might have been a bit of a wardrobe thing, a wardrobe in between, it

could have been that, I’m not terribly sure on that. But I just remember how uncomfortable it was.

We had cold weather there too. I remember going on a route march, and the sleet and the rain was shocking. And we sheltered under a bridge out in the country somewhere,

and one of the girls – looking back it must have been hyperthermia I think, and the WAAAF officer raced up onto the road to try and get a vehicle to take her back, and the only one she could get was the old farmer on a cart. And one of the wags sketched it up, and madam’s sitting next to the farmer with the poor WAAAFey drooping in her arms. They got her back to her station all right. Those

sort of things did happen, so you were so damnably cold. A first cousin of mine was in the army and they’d issued him with long johns, the neck to knee ones sort of thing, and I told him how cold I was and he sent them down. That was another thing, one of the WAAAF officers said, “Where did you get these?” I said, “I’ve got to send them back to him because he’s having a kit inspection too, and they’ve got to go back to him.”

Only very irregular, very irregular. Monday nights was always called panic night, and that’s when you had to get the squeegee and a mop and you had to mop around your bed and dust around your ceilings and around your beds, and everyone had to do that. So it wasn’t real good, and I can still smell the wet boards, floorboards,

with the dust in them.

That’s everywhere. Monday was always panic night. There was no relief granted on a Monday night, you had to stay and clean wherever you were, wherever you were living at.

Anywhere, yes. In the huts. Some of the stations had competitions for the cleanest hut, and it was a penny. You could

win a penny if you were (UNCLEAR). And I remember getting the nose off – nose cones off flakes, you know, they put on all the distress signals, and painted those green and then we went out and we picked wild flowers, and all down the middle of our hut we had flowers in pots.

Well, you’ve arrived, you’re

going to drive your car up onto the first floor. Well there was nothing there but beds, and little tin lockers were the usual thing to have. That’s all there was, nothing else. Then if you wanted to go to the ablution block you got up onto the top of the roof.

Nothing. Cement. Just the cement.

The old wire gates again, with the palliasse,

the straw. And we had the same number of blankets, three blankets, and as it got colder you did what the tramps do, you put paper under your mattress, throw your great coat over the top. And if it was really cold you’d leave your pyjamas on under your jeans, during the daytime to keep your legs warm.

Yes, yes it does.

It wasn’t a lot of problems actually, because you had to study, you’d be laying on your bed studying or sitting – get some privacy, sitting up on the roof in the sun studying. So there wasn’t time to do anything else, to go anywhere and occupy yourself. Because you had no radio, no TV, of course then,

and um, but again the dead-end kids there, the ones that got the eye-dropper, dropped a penny in a piece of paper and threw it down into the amusement park, and there were soldiers and sailors down in that little place, making dates. Well that’s just what they were, you know, there was always something they were trying to do to break the monotony. I don’t know whether any of them got through or what happened to them.

Just ordinary – if I can remember it, it was never dull, it was always lit up all right, we had no problem there. It was as comfortable as a hut really, when you stop to think, as long as you had the bed with the palliasse, that’s the main thing, you’ve got your comfort there. But the local priest used

to laugh at us, he said, “Oh, you see all these girls marching down The Terrace with pannikins hung on their backs, on their belts,” and I said, “Yes, and we always look at the padre riding his bike with his hat all pushed up at the front, in the wind, riding along,” so we got back at padre because of that.

I can’t think of his name now, I think I can only think of the one at –

um, Ted Jordan, the one that married me and Ted.

Yes, down at the tech college there. Well you had lectures first of all, you had to recognise all the different

tools that you were going to use, had to learn to read a micrometer, and different types of steel, you’d have to learn about the basic electricity, about the currents and the colours you had to join together for positives and negatives, all those sorts of things. And I think I said one of those – we had a lecturer, he used to love to ask me what this certain file was, and I used to say it’s

the swearing file. And he said, “It’s the bastard file.” I couldn’t say it, you know? Stupid.

Well, that is the file, it’s the right name. It’s a very coarse file, and the cut is very sharp, so that is a bastard file. And what was the other one we had trouble with? The hermaphrodite callipers. Inside and outside

So some of the instructors found it quite hard putting up with us and our little foibles.

Civilian. They were civilian instructors. There was one fellow, he fancied himself, I remember, he came up and he said to me one day, “Come down to the storage, I want to get a couple of sheets of steel, get you to help me.” And when we went down there he

came over and he said, “I can think of something better we could be doing than this.” I said, “Let’s go to the movies.” And shot through again. And I told the girls about it, they said, “Well, we’ll fix him.” We went to Mt Lofty Ranges, yes, we went out there towards the end of the course, and he came with us in the tender, and we got our heads together. We said, he did take one of the girls, they just vanished,

and she was a little bit of a worry, and we decided when he came back, well we’re going to make him pay for this fooling around. So we all put extra lipstick on, went over to kiss him goodbye, put it all over his face, on his shirt, down his front, so now let him explain that to his wife when he gets home. So we were a bit vengeful too, I’m afraid. But I don’t know what,

how far he would have gone or what, but I just didn’t like the suggestion.

Well, it was a job, they had to do it, they had to get results as well or they were out of a job, weren’t they? So they – I don’t think they failed very many on that course really, I know two that they did, little Jeannie, and another lass, she missed out,

um, I know the one – she was in Sydney, at Auburn, I met her again and she went back as a cook, I think. So when they found that you couldn’t do – it depended on your passes in the course what they’d recommend, whether you – you might not have the ability to do electricity or, what do you call it, instrument repairing, you’d have to be pretty astute you know, to do these sort of things, and pretty trustworthy.

So they wouldn’t have let you take the other course if you weren’t equipped for it.

Yes, ours was. The men were doing a course, I don’t know where they did theirs, they must have been there somewhere, but we never saw them. We were the only ones there in that section anyway.

I don’t know where they did theirs. It must have been another section of the college probably.

I think they did, I think they did. I think they were sort of average people, that knew that the work needed to be done anyway. And he did, you know, he was a good instructor. He did help us a lot in the workload.

So yes, in all fairness I’d say he did a good job, really.

Like a new trade? It was pretty basic really, I mean it got down to the nitty gritty, you know, I think

using the micrometer you had to file a little square of metal and the tolerance was almost zero, you had to get that absolutely level, and that was a trial to start. You’d think, well I’ve got it right this time and you’d put the blue die down, no, there’s a high spot, got to get that off. And so it went on, you know, you got marks on the projects you did, so you had to make a little vice,

a little vice you could hold, tiny little thing, that had to work. They tried us out on a few things.

I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it very much. As I said to Ted, when I first learn the car I want to know what’s under the boot, under the hood, I want to know what I’m doing when I press a button. So I think that followed through there, I wanted to know what I was doing and why I was doing it. It must have driven them mad, some of the questions we asked.

They tolerated it.

Well, when you came out you could almost repair your iron – things you wouldn’t worry about, your light globes, different things like

that, if your jug blew you knew how to rewire your little thingo in that, different things like that around the house you could learn to do, which wasn’t so bad, I don’t suppose. But that’s about all, that’s about all that would apply to anything afterwards. We weren’t going to become lady engineers or anything, which they are now actually.

Only jeans, you had your old button-through jeans. Some of the girls had to wear the men’s jeans because they didn’t have the supplies. See supplies were running out with the war, to get a lot of the things that were needed. And that’s the other thing, we decided to make our jeans look very feminine, we took the belt and split it open, opened the seams, the pants at the top, and inserted that.

But by doing that we got a watch waist, but we also got a crutch down behind our knees, we didn’t know you had to take a bit of material out to lift the crutch up, when you put that in. So we must have looked a bit weirdo I’d say. But at least we had watch waists. I remember walking across the tarmac one day and an airman yelled out, “ACW, you could put a parachute in the seat of those jeans.” It didn’t help my

vanity much.

If you went to the movies, and you put them on if you went to church, that’s about all. We wore them in the boats too, you know, if we went down to the boat we’d have a new uniform on, you had to, it was imperative that you did wear them, not like today, they’re told not to wear them out.

And our granddaughter, she said they’d been abused and spat on, because they’ve got a uniform on. So different to what – we had to wear whether or no.

They were issued to you, basic issue. And they faded, and the more faded they were, the more they showed you’d been in longer than the newies.

It was new, it was new.

I enjoyed it, I enjoyed ever minute of it.

It makes me laugh sometimes, now you say, “This lass is a plumber,” and I think, big deal, you know, we did all these things and nobody said anything about it, it wasn’t so outstanding then. But to see the girls working out on the aircraft, we had an English girl, she was a lovely lady, and she was working in the cockpit, and

the men were working on the fuselage, and they’d made some blue language, and Gabby just put her head out and she said, “You boys can come home any time you like and scratch your name on my piano.” So there’s dead silence now, and the shout would go, “WAAAF coming.” And they’d all keep quiet.

Well there was a sense of – a strangeness about most of it being so totally new to us, we found quite a lot of it – you wondered if you were going to make the implements they gave you, you know, the little things, am I going to put the screw thread on this right, and you felt like trial and error a lot of times. And that’s where your instructor

came in, and they were very good, helped you through those times. But you had a certain pride in being able to do it, I suppose.

You had to make these things that I mentioned before, you had to have a definite level on this block, the micrometer tolerance, I forget what it was, it was so faint,

um, well if you didn’t do it, you’d have to do it again. When you made the other little vice thing, it had to work, it was no good if you went to screw it onto an object and it didn’t hold, no, it had to be correct. So if you didn’t do it right, do it again.

Yes, it was elementary, yes.

That’s right yes, in electricity and even in the engineering section now, it’s all elementary. And that gave you the clue to what you could handle, to what extent your abilities went after that. It was a proving ground, really, and then they direct you to your other choice.

No, that was it. That was the elementary fitter and electricians course, yes. It was after that we were sent to our either – as I went to an armament school …

Well not a great deal, we went to the zoo, had a look there, and of course we were

down the Yarra River as I said, and we went to the movies, that was about it. And then we went up the Mt Lofty Ranges. There was a holiday house up there owned by Mr and Mrs Andreson, and that was for service people, and it was, oh, after the other army foods and the air force foods, to go up there and have all this beautiful home cooked meals, and they really went out of their way. There was

nothing to do but to wander the countryside, you know, the lovely lanes and – that was a lovely break away, it was good.

It’s lovely, it was beautiful, yes, we loved it there. Didn’t get enough time there.

The main shopping ones? We went to

see a movie, it was something about aircraft, and they issued everybody with a set of lens, and I remember we all put our wings on our uniform and walking back, and a couple of ladies said, “They’re not making women pilots now are they?” We only had the cardboard things on our uniforms.

No, I think I’d be too scared. I don’t want to go very far on a ship

either, I hate travelling now, and flights, you know. You see too much, you know, the things that could happen.

Well they didn’t worry us at all really. We had another recruiting march through Adelaide too.

All the WAAAF were part of that, and I think people were quite used to it, it wasn’t out of the ordinary to see people in uniform then. It particularly didn’t worry people, I don’t think.

Well you felt proud to be wearing it, you were proud to wear a uniform, and I don’t think anyone felt otherwise.

And we were always taught to respect the uniform, because I was picked up once for not saluting an officer, and I said I didn’t think I had to salute your back sir. He said, “You salute my front, my side and my backside.” That was only the CO of the station I was on, so I was chastened.

Um, well if you went out in civvies you just blended in with the crowd. If you had your uniform on you stood out, you signified, something, you know, that you were doing something just a bit different. And I think you acted accordingly. You didn’t draw any undue attention, but you just behaved yourself.

Well I didn’t get a lot because I was out of New South Wales most of the time. And the amount of leave you’d get didn’t cover the travelling time in the old trains then, and it was a big event when I did get time off to come home. But then it was always too short a time, there was not enough time.

I’d go back to Willoughby, go back to aunty there. There was nothing of the country town left anyway, everybody had gone, that I knew. And it seemed pointless, even now it’s pretty much the same, you know, you hardly know a soul there. But

um, there was nothing for young people there.

Gordon died with emphysema, the young one, and Keith had a heart attack. And was relatively young, how old was Keith? Keith was about 45, and he did get into the army at the end of the war, he was old enough to go then, and then he was on roller after that as

a fireman, going for his drivers…

Yes.

He was down in Moe in Victoria. He’d had a break up in his marriage, and I don’t know what it was, but he just got right away from everything,

you know?

Well he was still at Coota then, he was married then, in Coota.

Well when you say in contact, not with Coota people actually, because as I said most of the boys in my age group had gone

overseas anyway, and you lost contact straight away with them, there was no contact made there. Occasionally I’d meet some in the air force, one young bloke got his wings and he brought his coat up, “Sew my wings on, I can’t sew,” and yes, you’d meet a few of them along the way like that, who were still going into the force, and more or less that was the limit of it, really. Because you can understand, the population was moving all the time,

nobody was stabilised. And there was so much going on that I don’t think a lot of personal friendships were left at that stage, they were all disrupted. And you made friends wherever you were.

Well, I was very serious about Sidney Charles, so much so we went to priest as I

think I told you, and he said, “I don’t think so, no consent yet, you’re too young. Wait until you’re 18.” And just as well I did because it was only a matter of about a month or so that he was posted to Goodenough Island, and there was still a lot of letter writing going on. Then I met Ted, and of course I had to write him a Dear John letter then.

Yes, it was.

Well, as I say again, you were scanning lists, they’d come out in the papers, the casualty lists, and you’re seeing it, you’d go to the movies and you’d see what was happening in the islands, it was just an unknown quantity, it was just a feeling of – a vacuum almost, didn’t know what was going to happen next.

What, in the actual war itself, overseas? Well as I said, I saw in the paper about the boys that lived down from us, I saw their deaths, and I saw my old school mate, old boyfriend from school and his brothers, I saw them there, that they’d lost another couple of people

that were that were taken POW. Because they didn’t just tell you casualties, they told you who’d been taken as well, they got the list of POWs. I think most of the young blokes from Coota, not very many went to the Middle East, they all joined the – well my group, seemed to all join up at the same time they were all taken at the same time. So it more or less wiped out a younger set in a country town.

They were all POWs,

taken on the [Thai-Burma] Railway. And the strangest thing, since we’ve been up here a couple of girls from the bowling club and I went overseas, and we did the usual, Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong, Philippines, and we went to Kranji War Cemetery. We’d had a trip and it took us up the river, what’s the name of the river there?

You know what I’m talking about anyway. We went up the river and they had sort of billets on stilts and you stayed overnight, and they had singsongs with all the other tourists, and we came back again and they stopped at Kranji Cemetery, and I only walked as far as from here to the front gate, and I stood right in front of Sandy’s stone, commemorative stone. And I didn’t go any further, I stood there. But I don’t know

whether actually the remains are there or whether they’ve just put the commemorative stones. But it seemed so out of the ordinary, just to walk in there and go about three rows down, and there was his stone. So I just had a good howl and got back on the bus and sat and waited for everybody else.

There were some pretty vivid write-ups about it. As I say, Sandy, the boy I knew, his twin brothers saw him belted with a shovel and killed. I mean how they could come home and live with those thoughts, bring it back to the rest of the family? And another one had been belted around the head too, and he came home,

he just was twitching all over, you know? Even this girl Sylvia, the girl that was a POW, she never talked very much about what happened in Bangka Island, and we went to the War Memorial in Canberra, an ex-service group, and we were watching Vivian Bullwinkel, you know, the girl that – she died not very long ago, the bullet had gone through her uniform. The uniform’s there,

and Sylvia and I were standing looking at it, and a group of Japs came along, put their elbow in her stomach and pushed to get in front of her, and she screamed, “Don’t touch me, don’t ever touch me again, don’t you come near me.” So I had to get out pretty quickly and get her over for a coffee or something. But I tried to explain, I said, “Look, they’re only kids, they didn’t even know.” They wouldn’t have known what happened, but you don’t tell that to a POW.

Little short men, wear glasses and not very good eyesight. And they were not. That was a fallacy. Some of the tales the men tell you.

They did, yes they did, they looked it, didn’t they? They had the jungle craft that our boys didn’t have, and they had bicycles, that was a wonderful innovation, just a bicycle. And as Ted was saying, you’d see them when they’d come over the (UNCLEAR) you could see their faces, they were so low down over

the dromes. And the hatred grew. Then again, they’re brought up that way, aren’t they?

Very much so, very much so.

You didn’t bring them up in a conversation or

you’d get a mouthful. And the names that they had, they just weren’t tolerated in any way. I still think there’s a lot of the old fellows still feel the same way.

Well they always seemed to think that the Japanese were almost

sub-human, that they were degenerate say, sub-human, little monkeys, they’d draw them as little monkeys. Not knowing the spirit that they had that had been bred into them. And they had nothing to lose, they were told to do it, they did it no matter what. But I don’t think there was much cowardice on their part, although in one of the books we’ve got

here, the Aussie was talking about this raid, and he said, ‘And I was racing through the jungle, and I turned around and I said to the bloke next to me, we’d better get out of here pretty quick, I don’t want these slant-eyes coming with me.” So he was getting away from the bomb as well.

Well not as, no, the Italians, they just felt sorry for the Italians, they were pushed in. They said they’re just pawns, they’re just not that type of person. The Germans, they knew were pretty rugged fighters, and they only had to read the details about Rommel in the desert, to know what a fighter he was, and what a great joy it was when he was beaten.

So, there was always that fear that they were a superior race, which they tried to be.

When they found out later there was more, they didn’t realise just what was going on, I don’t think the German people knew half the things, the atrocities that were being wrought then.

We liked Roden Cutler of course, we thought Sir Roden was brilliant. But Australian? I’m losing my mind now, I know some of our Aussie generals weren’t top notch, they left a lot to be desired, but

I think Thomas Blamey was one that they could have kicked out. I remember getting a letter from Sidney Charles, he said, I can’t tell you, we’ve had a very important visitor to the island. Don’t blame me if I can’t think who it was. So of course you knew straight away it was General Blamey. But you couldn’t write anything. I wrote and told him about having my first flight on a dive bomber. Well, you should have seen my letter, it was like

net, they’d cut the whole – all bits and pieces out all over, and I had to go up to the WAAAF officer, and some adjutant was there, you don’t say any of these things, they’ll know our station’s got dive bombers, they know we’re training – so you learnt the hard way.

No, that was Williamtown.

[Douglas] Bader, the chap that lost his legs. But he was English, wasn’t he? He still got back to flying with tin legs. Tin Legs Bader. Truscott, Bluey Truscott, he was a hero.

Who was the other one? Memories. I know, Ted’s baby sister wrote to the other chap and told him that – pretended that she was his older sister, and Sadie got a lovely letter back from him, but (UNCLEAR) had written a letter.

In flying, yes.

Were going over there, yes. You didn’t hear a great deal about what they did, unless they joined squadrons in England, and they did the flights in England from England across, which they did here. You didn’t

hear a great deal about that. We heard more about the boys training in Canada, because we knew a few of those coming from the schools that we’d been on. But the Battle for Britain and all those sort of things, they were just newspaper stories that we could read up and think how bad things were there for them. You could always visualise what could happen here if they didn’t stop it.

You only visited relatives. Everyone had a dinner party for you, and it was never more than a week, you were lucky if you got a – by the time you travel up and back – lucky if you had a week, which wasn’t a great deal of time. But that would have been all it was, just family get togethers.

Yes, we’d go to the Trocadero, that was the main dance, and there was a little hall over in North Sydney, we’d go and have a dance there. But that was before I joined up.

Yanks, Yanks, and more Yanks. And jitterbugs. I could never jitterbug, I was just a straight dancer.

But they were relegated to one corner of the ballroom, up near the stage, and that was interesting, just to watch them. The Americans were pastmasters, at the jitterbugging. And there were some that – they weren’t allowed to perform out here, like shoulder throws and all this sort of thing, they were told they had to calm down a bit, none of that stuff.

Only a couple of girls from where I was working. One was a dancing instructor, she was a very good dancer. As I said, the little bit of dancing that I did, it’s what I missed, because of the war.

No, it was just a daytime job, and you did your job and then you went back to the WAAAF. My only problem was that I was almost a loner because I was the only one. All the other sections had numbers of women, but I was the only one among all the men. And I ended up with the name, Wanda the war winner, they still call me Wanda. And you’d be walking

across a hangar with a machine gun on your hip and lay that pistol down and they’d start to think. But you got used to it after a while, you know it was all in fun.

That was a comic strip. She was a girl in uniform and she won all sorts of things.

To armament school, yes.

Well, you can select, you could select, and if they thought that your passes were good enough to send you, well you went, there was nothing much to it apart from that. It depended on what your passes were, what they thought you were able to

do, and then they’d pass that on and send you to armament school.

Electrician, instrument repairers, fitters, engine fitters, they were 2E engineers, fitters to air frames, they could do the outside of the aircraft, that’s about it, I think.

Well most of them got air frames, I think there was least responsibility, because a lot of the old aircraft then only had fabrics, and they’d repair the fabrics on them and the wheel mechanisms and things like that they could do. Whereas the fitters, engineers, they could get up into the aircraft, the engines, and work on engines, with the

men. But the instrument repairers I think even they were very – had to be a bit clever, I suppose, because so much depended on all those instruments, that was a responsibility.

I always wanted to fire a gun, and my brothers could. I was never allowed. And there were so many opportun-

ities on the farm, you know, cockies would come in onto the crops, you know, and the boys would get the guns out, the cockies would see them coming anyway, and then the rabbits used to come down from the hills across the property to get to the dam, and they’d shoot rabbits. And I wasn’t allowed to do that, so I wanted to have a go at it. In one interview they did up here, my local newspapers, I told them about when we

moved into a home at Bankstown, a rat ran across our backyard, and of course you had little outside toilets, and it went towards the back of the toilet, and I raced in and got the 22, put it through the blinds, and shot. And Teddy, he went crook, he said, “You shouldn’t fire a gun. What happened?” It just lay on the ground, kicked its legs in the air. “Yes,” he said, “It was laughing itself to death, was it?” He went down and did find I had shot it.

But they reported in the paper I was an armourer, and the only thing I ever shot was a rat. My God, bad reporting, this lot.

I knew nothing until I got there. And then we learnt everything. Started from the Smith & Wesson pistols, right up through .303s, canons,

you know, you had to be able to strip them all, reassemble them, and if there were any repairs they’d show you what repairs you would have to do, and then you got from there onto bombs and comps they called it, bombs and component parts. You had to learn the inside outside of a bomb, different fillings, pistols, and how to put them on the racks on the aircraft, had to learn all those

sort of things.

Well the men didn’t want to accept that a woman could go onto a station and do what they could do. As I said earlier, you know, they tried to put me into the tool room to issue the tools out to the other armourers, and I said no, you’ve got armourers’ assistants that haven’t done the course,

get them to do it, I want to go out and do my work, which I did do. So I won my point.

I think I’ve got a sense of what’s right and that was wrong. If I was taught to be a cook I wasn’t going to be sent to wash dishes. If I was an armourer I was going to repair guns and work on the aircraft. That’s what I’d gone into

it for, so I won that one.

One hundred percent. When I first went in, I’d open a locker door and get undressed in there. Or I’d try to get undressed in bed so that no-one could see me. But it certainly boosted a lot. Your tolerance, you become very tolerant, and you accept people.

And I suppose a lot of psychology, you see a lot of different people and their reactions, and you find out what’s doing that, and that has held me in good stead.

Excited, really excited. Again it was all unknown territories, you didn’t know, as you said, anything

about armament at all, nothing. And it seemed so vital, that it had to be done properly.

We had our first flight there, they put us in an old DC3 and gave us our first flight after joining up. And I had to sit on the front of the DC3 with a screwdriver, and in the Melbourne paper, ACW

Barrett installing a gun. I didn’t know where the guns went, I had no idea. But that was for the paper, I was putting an aircraft gun in it. We got our passes from there and went to Williamtown, and that was an operational training unit.

Yes, yes.

They were, it was all recruiting, a lot of it was trying to promote the service of the women, and that was a new – I think it was (UNCLEAR) us very proud, and just showed the old black and white photo of an aircraft.

No, sat me there and gave me a

screwdriver, pointed to a panel on the aircraft, and that must have been where the gun went, I still don’t know where it went on that one. And that’s how it came out.

Propaganda, yes.

Yes.

What did we do there? We

had an old house there, and it was an old rambling country house, there must have been about a dozen of us in that I think, we all fitted into this one house, and to have a bath you went out to an old shed that was rickety and falling down with panels, and you had to boil a copper to have a bath down there. That was a bit rugged. The meals were good, we marched down town, we were going to the Town Hall and the locals supplied our meals. It wasn’t army cooks, we got some lovely meals there.

And that’s the first time I saw the Italian POWs. You’d see them out in the field with the cerisey coloured shirts on. And go to mass on Sunday, they were allowed to go to mass, sat in the back row with their guards. Then we’d stop at a café to have a milkshake, and the guard has them in there giving them a milkshake, so they weren’t really badly done by. But I believe they were really respected at Hamilton, looking at some of the

things that have come out on TV since, how the farmers they worked for said they respected them so much, they married some of daughters, came back. So that was another phase that we didn’t know about.

No.

Only seeing them in the café having a milkshake.

They respected them, they really did. And as I said, you know, they weren’t heavily guarded, there’d be one guard with quite a few, and I think that they were – as I said before, I think they were pushed into something they didn’t want to do.

I suppose a bit, yes. A good tyke’s a good tyke,

Well, you’d have a parade and the call would come out, Catholics and Protestants, no, Catholics and Jews fall out to the rear end of the parade, and we’d have to fall out, we’re not allowed to take part in the other denominations service. And then after they had their service we could come back.

Well, it was held in friendship really, but looking back it was discriminatory, very much so. I mean we’ve got a clearer understanding now, and I think we’re merging closer and closer not to worry about these divisions.

Yes, for everything, for everything, yes.

Which, the …?

I couldn’t see any sense in it, because we had our days when we were allowed to go to mass, nobody worried about that, they left them there safe and – so that we could go and have a meal after mass was over. Everybody got treated in a similar manner I think, I don’t think there was much discrimination really. I couldn’t tell you what the bloke next to me, what his

religion was. I don’t think he’d know what mine was.

Yes, yes.

I never saw them. I saw plenty of Salvation Army, we had a Salvation Army welfare officer at Rathmines. She was an outstanding woman, she came from Newcastle, and Teddy wrote to her on our first wedding anniversary, and I don’t know how much money he sent for her to buy flowers for me, and

until the end of my stay, it was what, about six or eight months, every time the flowers would die, she’d put new ones in. So I don’t know how much – she did say afterwards her brother had a garden, a florist garden, so I think Madge got them there.

It was all welfare. It was she that taught me how to make a skirt, you know, you’d go down to the rec hut, Madge would be

there, and she’d have bought – you could buy a little supper cloth without having coupons, so you’d order a couple of supper cloths from Madge and she’d show you how to make a skirt. She came in well like that.

Ted always talks about them, he said they were always there no matter where you were. He said, I don’t know whether I’m letting the cat out, but he said the Red Cross, he said,

nothing. Each got a pair of socks, he said, over all the – he was in six years all told, you know for the war and after, and he said one pair of socks, he said they didn’t fit you from the Red Cross, and all the lovely big cars they were riding round Sydney in. So a lot of the air force think the same thing, I don’t know the extent of the help they do give, but …

Yes, 100%. If anyone comes to the front door, if it’s a Salvo,

give him a donation.

This is where we learnt all our armament, we learnt everything from A to Z there, and you just had to go and put it in practical when you were at the station, you had to actually do the proper work on the

– what you’d repaired you had to take the rangers off and test, no-one else would do your gun, you had to do it all yourself.

To firing?

As soon as we arrived, that was – you got straight into it, yes. They gave you a

Smith & Wesson pistol and he’d strip one down, and he’d say righto now, there and there, so and so, and lay all the pieces out and you were so careful. If you forgot, I’ll never get all those bits back again. And we eventually got it right.

Still with women at Hamilton. The men were in – there was another class of men there,

um, but we found the male instructors were all air force fellows, and they didn’t tolerate the women a great deal. We’d been swatting up, so I was so tired, and I could feel – you know how you feel your eyes are closing during a lecture, and my eyes started to go down, and he barked out something, “Are you asleep ACW?” I said, “No sir, just resting my eyes.” And I was out.

Well, it was a 303 actually, and the boys thought it was a great joke. Hold it firmly, you’re supposed to, and of course I just held it – I had the biggest blister, from there to there, that was only one firing, you had to do several of them. And it whipped back and hit you on the shoulder. Dulcie and I were saying, who had the biggest bruise? It was just like a big red plum after a while, and

they told us then that you hold it firmly and don’t let the recoil hit back at you.

You had a great big mound and you were just firing into the mound. The boys were more adventurous, they put an old peach tin can at the bottom. It was better with machine guns though, with a machine gun you could chase it up the mound. So we got to do that

eventually. But you’re only just shooting to make sure that they fired properly, and then you’d have to examine afterwards the bullet to see if your firing pin had struck correctly, or if it needed to be honed a bit more, that’s how you got your repairs.

We went to a 303 and then went from there to a

.3 machine gun, then a .5 machine gun to a canon. Now the canon was the highest we had, so we learnt how to strip all of those down. We didn’t fire the canons, they were put on the aircraft, and they worked.

Well you had to – you had different recoils, and different guns, and you had different pressures you had to have on different springs, they were the sort of things, you had the manual that gave you all those details, like tensions you had to have, then you had to check the bore of the barrels to make sure that there was no corrosion or rust or anything, and you learnt how to do the cleaning and

all that sort of stuff.

Nothing that really struck me as outstanding about it, you just – Dulcie was still with me at this stage, she went through the course, and of course if you had any problems you’d talk it over amongst your

closer associates. As I said, you couldn’t call them friends, because you weren’t sure how long you were going to be there. And as it was when we hit a station, Dulcie was only with me for a couple of months and she was posted, and I was there by myself again.

I think Nancy Wake [spy during World War II] was an outstanding example, I don’t know if you know of Nancy Wake, she did astounding things during the war, and got no recognition, nothing from Australia. Other countries have given her decorations, but I think she’s just about dying now, she’s in a nursing

home in England, practically destitute, out of the goodness of their soul people are paying her way. Now if they do that to a national hero, leaves a lot to be desired.

Well I look back on that

now and I’m very pleased that I did have the experience, there’s nothing I would prefer to what I did. I think it’s exactly what I wanted, didn’t really know I wanted it, but I found it. And it’s a – you never lose the feeling of the things that you have been through, the experiences you’ve had. And it’s remarkable how they come back, they keep coming back all the time.

And this today, you know, you’re talking today, there’s so much I’ve forgotten, it’s bringing it back.

You felt superior for some reason, now why, don’t ask me why, I don’t know, but you did. You felt that

this is the only service, you know? It really is. I’ve heard of other girls, you know, being in the army, yes, but – well actually we were with the equipment that was being used and so badly needed. Another girl, I’ve spoken to her to see if – one of her girls said, is there anyone else you know? And I said I know a lass that was in the navy and she was the first one to go down in a diving bell. She said, “Can you get her to talk to us?” But she won’t be in

it. But you’ve got to have things like that happening, you can’t be just run of the mill like going to the store each day. There’s something happening all the time. And as we got on later to the operational training, it was really something out of the ordinary, to be there helping and doing the things we were doing. So what is it? A sense of achievement, a pride of

doing something that you really think was out of the ordinary. And that’s not just boosting ego, it’s a feeling of, well I’ve done that, and I’m pleased I did it.

Well you had to know what you were working with to start, and this was like doing a dressmakers’ course, you’ve got to know how to do the seams and the shaping. This shaped us up for the actual work we were going to have to do, these were jobs that we were going to strike on stations, and you had to

know what made it work, what could go wrong, how did you repair it if it did go wrong? And that was all the basic preparation to prepare you for the real thing. And without that training I couldn’t have done it. You had to have those instructions.

The canons,

yes.

I think it might have been the canon, because everything seemed to be a bit more magnified, and you’d get to a stage where you’re gauging things,

you’d gauge the tension on this, and the canon, that’s different, I’ve got to do something different here. And you had to work your way through from a smaller edition to a much larger one, and the result if you did anything wrong, it’d be that much worse.

Oh yes.

Can I say it? A Modess pad, (laughs) called horse feathers. That was their name, horse feathers. So you’d put a horse feather over your shoulder,

it worked.

It did work. But then, we had to do it, you couldn’t stand the pain of the ricochet, you know, the rebound I should say. So it did work. But that was only the 303, because the others were on stands, you didn’t get that kickback from the other guns. It wasn’t as if you were holding them up to your shoulders.

Ingenuity, you had to find things all the way, didn’t you, to overcome a lot of these things?

I did, I had to think of something, we had nothing else that you could really put there, and it seemed the ideal solution, and it did work. Should have told some of the others, although there was no-one else to tell, you couldn’t tell a man.

So – but they all laughed, they said, “We’ve had bruises too when we started, until we learnt the right way to hold them.” But they thought it was a joke, a woman – let her find out.

She wasn’t there long enough, she was – I don’t think I ever got that – when Dulcie was there, they’d send us out to the bombing and the gunnery ranges because

um, you had to be there all day, there had to be other men there, you were out in the middle of nowhere, and the nicest part was you could go to the mess and get steaks, and you could grill a steak, a barbecue steak. But she and I mostly did the ranges. It was after she left that I did more of the repair work. I suppose they thought one WAAAF alone. So I still had to go out though, it didn’t make any

difference.

I don’t know, that’s just one of those stupid things that women think up. I suppose when I was talking in front of the men you couldn’t say the other word, so that’s probably what it was. Have the horse feathers arrived yet? Yes. And you’d go up to the little prefab hut, that’s where you got your straw,

and they were there too. So you could get your issue.

You could always get them, there was always a corporal or someone in charge, you could always get them. These things are sent to try us.

We never

got a rating, we just enjoyed doing it. As I was saying to Chris, you know, put a jam tin down, particularly with the machine gun, and you had to fire underneath it to keep it moving up the top. But you couldn’t go too far or you’d go over the top onto the farm next door. I believe the sergeant shot a cow at one stage. I wasn’t there when that happened, but they said he did. Whether they said that to frighten us, don’t take it up too far, it’ll go over in the cow paddock.

So –

That wasn’t the shooting, no shooting there, that was all with the lessons in how to work them, what to do and what not to do. Our first shooting was on Williamtown,

Williamtown, where you had to test your guns. I suppose the instructors thought, well they’re all right, we don’t have to test these. But when you hit a station you had to because they were probably needing repairs.

No, we didn’t fire, no, we just learnt all the ins and outs of the guns and the bombs.

No, you didn’t have time to get lonely, it was challenging all the time, you know, it was something absolutely new, and you were learning from day one to go right through.

Well there wasn’t any danger there really, it was when you got to the stations, you got the danger.

If you didn’t fix the firing pin properly it could hit the side of the bullet instead of dead centre, and that would blow out, blow back at you. So that could have been quite dangerous. Never had it happen, luckily. And of course the bombing, you had to make sure you had your safety pins in so that the pistol didn’t fall out and go off on you. Things like that. On the actual station you got the nitty gritty then,

the other at Hamilton was only basic training.

I forget now, I think about three months, I think. Yes, it would have been, I’m not quite sure. I’ve got it all written down there, somewhere.

Well there must have been need for one at Williamtown, another armourer, or one had gone overseas, they wanted a replacement. And so it went on. You’d have to – you were replacing men that had left to go over. Or whether they sent us there before the man went and made sure you got your proper training there on the actual operational training

unit.

Well that was another train trip, and again – that’s where – Dulcie was there for a little while with me at Williamtown, and then she got her

posting away and I lost track of her too then. You were put straight into the armament section there and you were given – the boys to start would try to, “I’ll carry that for you,” and I’d say, “No, it’s all right, I’ll carry it.” And I thought well that’s the stupid part of it, they reckon the men neglect their own duty to try and help women in the case of war, which would happen if they were soldiers I suppose, they’d try to protect a woman soldier.

So I don’t agree with women soldiers in the field. But it was all work from then on, you had no, nothing to put over your ears for the noises, there was none of that even when you were firing the guns. You’d go out on the range and they had little blockhouses, only be about half the size of that toilet there, and the aircraft,

coming over in details, they called them, so far apart so that they weren’t going to crash, and you had the big targets and then you had to get the number of hits they had, and phone them back to the section so that when they got back to the drome they’d know how accurate they were. And the same on the bombing range, you had the quadrants there, and you had to operate – when the bomb burst you had to – on the left hand quadrant and the right hand

quadrant, so they intersected, you’d know that that’s where your bomb blast was. So you draw that up on a chart and they’d know exactly how accurate they were there.

I don’t know how many at

Hamilton – can I have a drink now? Sixty nine passed through all together during the war. I only learnt that by reading, you know, Joyce Matthews, she got the account of the numbers. And I don’t know why others didn’t go through.

I don’t think there’d be much more than about a dozen or so, because we only had the one house, the one old country house, and that was the only residence we had there. So I’d say about a dozen there.

They were very nice girls, a couple of Queensland girls, I think that was where the little Tasmanian girl was there too,

and one girl was a real farm girl, all she wanted to do was ride horses every chance she got, you know, they were totally different people, the whole lot of us, we were all different. We all got on very well.

Well they got through, they didn’t fail any on our course, so we all got through all right. It was good. But

then you all swapped knowledge, you know, you’d sit around at night and you’d all have a quiz and work things out. So everybody worked together, which was great.

No, not really, not really, enjoyed every minute of it, well there was

something new every day, you’re not doing the same old thing, repetition, you were learning something new and advancing all the time, so that worked well.

At Williamtown, yes. Well that was totally different because that was real, everything else before that didn’t seem real,

but you knew that that was, it meant something there. And what brought it home so much was how many aircraft we lost, just while we were on that station. I think 13 courses went through while I was there. The 13th course was the only one that we didn’t lose, an aircraft and crew. They were pushing them through so quickly. I remember one fellow coming

in, and he was a stutterer. He said, “I don’t know, b-b-b-but the fellow c-c-c-came in right across my nose.” And I thought, well whose fault was that? You know, whose details should have been on course, that would have caused that crash? And the aircraft they had there, they called them the flying coffins, they were Vultee Vengeance engines,

they were almost an obsolete American bomber. And they found out later that they’d go into a dive and they’d pull the joystick and it wouldn’t work properly. Well they’d just go straight in. So if they were lucky enough to pull out at the right altitude, they were safe, but if they didn’t they went in. And I hated that part of it, you know, when they just didn’t come back to get their details.

The – you’d see the pall of black smoke coming from over the dump. Ted got it worse than me, being an engineer. He had to go out and get the wreckages and help with the bodies. So he had the worst part, worse than I had. But that was one of the worst experiences. Taking a short cut I think I said before, going behind the hospital to go over the WAAAFery for something, I don’t know what it was,

and the tarpaulin was still there that they brought the remains in on, and they were hosing it off. I just stood there and threw up straight away. And it was just happening, you know, you got a list, and it’d be so and so should be coming back, but he didn’t come back, he was dead.

It’s a useless loss of life.

Looking at that and seeing the remains of the body, still on the tarpaulin they brought in, and I don’t know whether I knew who he was at that stage or not, I probably did I suppose, but it was just such a hell of a shock. I think that’s one of the worst days

Sid and I had, he saw me getting out of one, we’d been on a test flight, and that was on the multi vengeance, and he said, “I won’t go on those,” and he said, “And I don’t want you to go on any more.” These things were great, you know, you repaired the things, OK, let’s see how it works. And the boys liked to go, so you didn’t get to go as often as you wanted to go. And

I remember the first time I went, one of the other flight lieueys said – I was walking across to the aircraft, “Is that all you’re wearing ACW? You’re going to get cold.” And he took his fur-lined jacket off and gave it to me to wear. And I’ve never forgotten his name, Vic Scandrett, you know, he saved my life, I could have been frozen stiff that day if I hadn’t had that on. Well that was all right, but then the canopy came unstuck and slipped back, lost that.

And my hair came out of the invisible hair net, you can imagine the slip stream, and I had to cut it, had to cut all the knots out of my hair when I got back. Couldn’t comb it, they were just all messed up and tangled up. But still an adventure.

I’d go down to the

section and if an aircraft had come in that someone had been on duty and something wasn’t quite right with the machine gun, right, we want this checked. So you’d have to check that. You’d repair what – find out what you thought was wrong with it, take it down and fire it and see what was going on there, if that was OK, or you might have to – the bane of my life,

fit practice bombs. That was the thing you hated most of all because they were filled with acid, and you had no masks, you put a hanky across your nose, but you were obliged to drink so many – such a quantity of milk, that must have been to line our stomachs, I suppose, but if you dropped it on your jeans, it’d bleach your jeans, and the handkerchiefs you have across your nose, after breathing the fumes in, you’d

wash them and they’d fall to bits. So I don’t know what it did to my – that’s probably why my sinuses are so crook. But there were no safety measures, like ear plugs, or if you went down the range and didn’t have anything over your ears, so you did it really the hard way. It could have been easier, I suppose.

It could have been any member of the armament section, it could have been a couple of leading aircraftsmen or it could have been a corporal, a sergeant, it could have been any of those. You weren’t teamed, you weren’t in a team, you all worked together, and if you had to bomb up an aircraft, that was put on a trolley, you

had to go right across to the dispersal area. In case something went wrong, the aircraft would be over there, so you’re not going to blow anybody else up. If anybody blew up, it was going to be you. So you made sure you put your bombs on properly.

Yes, well you could – say on that little old one there, each one has a lug on it,

a hook thing on the top, that’s the part that goes onto the bomb rack, and that cradles it, it’s in a sort of a cradle, fits in there, and then you’ve got a prong at the nose of the – that goes down there before you put the pistol in. You can’t put the pistol in without that, that stops the pistol striking the detonator, so you must

not fiddle around with that thing once it’s on the aircraft. That’s controlled from the cockpit when they do the bombs away, it pulls that out, and it goes down, when it hits the ground it naturally explodes, pierces the detonator, that’s where you get your explosion. It’s the same with the flame float, you know, they use on the water? As soon as the water hits that

um, mixture of acids, all the white smoke comes up and that marks where the flame float is. All the different things like that. I’m not sure if we had the bomb dump there too, and all the bush fires were raging. The bomb dump was up on the hill, excavated and then the dirt thrown over the top to make it like a dug-out thing. You had to go up there and examine those,

ah, and they called it exudation. If you saw a syrupy mess coming out of the bomb, that had to be taken away, and it had to be exploded at a safe distance. I never ever found one, thank God. But they sent us down when the bush fire was raging, and oh gosh, what’s fire going to do? But it didn’t get near them.

There were bush fires all around us,

and they sent us down to check the bomb dump, and to make sure everything was OK there, thank goodness it was OK, we didn’t have to worry. But they’re things that could have gone wrong, you know?

That’d be about only once a month, didn’t do it very often. And it was mostly a sergeant or a corporal would go down and do that.

Wouldn’t be released, yes. Yes, they – we’ve seen them, you know, they go out to sea and try and release them and drop them

out in the sea, or if they couldn’t get the wheels down, this has happened a few times, they have the bomb on, couldn’t get the wheels down to land, so then they’d take it out and drop it out at sea. But if they couldn’t release it at all, the whole station would stop, and everybody would come to make sure he’s got to get in even, you know, without it going off, which they did do.

Not very often, not very often. There’d be a malfunction from the cockpit, probably, that wouldn’t let it release.

Only one, as I was just saying, you know, where they had to come in and land with it on.

Just a lot of cheering and shouting, somebody must have got hauled over the coals

though, for not doing the electrical parts properly, it was electrical that operated that. And that’s probably what that was.

Yes, there’s nothing really that they could do, if they couldn’t release it.

If they can release it – say if they – we called them the legs, if the wheels didn’t come down, and they had the load still on, they couldn’t do a belly landing, because the bomb’s under there. So they’d just have to try and get it out to sea and they could still release their bomb but they couldn’t get the wheels down, so they had to have a belly landing when they got back. So that’s happened a couple of times there.

I tell you, you can

imagine the joy when the joy when they got in safely. I was telling you about the fellow that – they used to see how low they could go over the sea, I think I told you, he was so low the big wave hit his prop, and bent it back like that. And Ted said in his section they wondered how he managed to get in with it. But that was an embarrassing situation, I was in a flight and we were going over the sea and I said,

“I can see a submarine, I can see a submarine,” “Where, where?” “It’s a shag,” you could see the black head of the shag sticking out of the water, and I thought it was a periscope. I didn’t know it then, but you know, the subs were right up around Newcastle, and none of us knew at the time, that they’d actually bombed Fort Scratchley, wasn’t it? The Jap sub tried to bomb up there.

But a bad imagination I had.

Only as I said on the operating quadrants on the range, and going out to the gunnery range and counting up their hits there. That’s all it involved really, it was working the two ranges,

um, repairing, maintenance on the guns, test firing them, and then putting them on the aircraft. That was the whole story, really.

Well at Williamtown they didn’t go any higher than the .5, 0.5s there. The main one was the 303 one, they used them more than anything.

um, they were more of a dive bomber, the Vultee Vengeance. So they seemed to be more interested in the bombing than the other.

If the – you didn’t get your ammunition belted up properly, you had to be careful or you’d get a twisted

ammunition line. You had canisters, and when you did the ammunition up, belted it up, it had to lay in rows like that in the canister, so that it fed up into the gun, but if you hadn’t lined it up properly it would twist and jam, they couldn’t fire the guns. So that could be a very dangerous place to put the old pilot in, really.

Replace a spring, if the spring had lost its elasticity, type of thing. You’d have to repair those, or as I said before, if they weren’t firing properly you’d have to look at the firing mechanism and see that that was working and that the firing pin was honed down the right

way. If it was off key it’d hit the side of the bullet, be no good. It would cause a blow back. And you just have to make to sure after each, you tested your guns, that that hole, as you see on one of those foreigners, the hole is right in the centre of the cap. And there was no precaution you could take really, you just had to be careful and make sure it was measured up

right.

A gun? You’d probably only do two or three a day if you did that many, depending on the demand for them. Other times you were hanging round and you’re doing stuff out of the storeroom, degreasing and examining ones that were in storage, and checking

those, and you had to put them back in store. They were the jobs you didn’t want. But I think the nearest time I nearly got caught, towards the end of the war it was hard to try and work, to find work to do, and this particular day the boss said, “Look Wanda, there’s nothing to do, get out in the ammo room and have a sleep.” That meant there were a series of shells, so you pulled the ammo bins out

and you went in there and had a sleep. I’m in there having a sleep and my armament officer came in with our boss. Oh, I’ve never been so terror stricken. But he only wanted to look at one canister. Oh, never again. I’m not going to be sneaky any more. The other time we had a sleep on the Catalina, nothing to do so we just got a boat out to the Catalina at Rathmines and had a snooze on the bunk there until I

started to get seasick with the lap, lap, lap and the smell coming from the bilge. So they weren’t very happy with me, they had to go back to shore.

Yes, you were really only testing the spigots

and things on your guns, the movements of your guns, you couldn’t do anything with the bombing because that was, well that was all up to the pilot, he had to do that. But we had to make sure that our mountings were correct, that’s all it was. We didn’t do any firing from there. We just had to make sure that when the gunner came, he could do it, that it was working properly.

Oh,

could have been anyone, really. There were always pilots there, hanging around, doing nothing, and they’d commandeer them, you know, (UNCLEAR) tested it out. But as I said before, you didn’t get as many as you’d like to go on, because the boys wanted to do it. And we were just lucky being at Rathmines, you know, going on the crash boat, I was

lucky. We called him the major, he was a WO [Warrant Officer], he asked me if I wanted to go, they got a report that a bomb had washed up on one of the islands in Lake Macquarie, so we went out in the crash boat and it was only a flame float, it wasn’t a bomb at all. But they were the things they had to do, you know, reclaim if there were any reports of a bomb washing up or anything.

The main one,

yes.

I don’t know whether I could do it now. You’d have to remove the back plate first, to get at the innards, and then you pull the workings through, and you’ve got springs that have got to be pulled out of the way as well. But I don’t know how you could explain it really, I’m not quite sure, I’m blessed if I know how you would. I think they’re all on the same par no matter which

ones you use.

Well, you’d pull out your back plate and then you’d get out the firing pins further down, and like it’s in a cradle you pull the cradle out and you get the firing pin out of that. And of course you’ve got your length of barrel with the ferules running through, and

ah, you have trouble if you don’t keep those clean and rust-free. So part of the cleaning of that is using a bit of steel wool on the pull through was one way we did that. And then you put what they call a four by two, flannelette stuff, put it on the end of the pull through and put grease on that, and then clean it out with that. And that was pretty much all there was to it. You had to test your recoil

springs and make sure that they were the right strength, and if they weren’t they might have to be replaced, they’d seen their better days. You find on the seaplanes, because you’ve got rust a lot, and a lot of graphite was used on those to keep them working.

Just smear it all over, smear it all over, particularly in storage, they were covered in it.

But to handle it you couldn’t put it where they were handling. But it was the oil mostly, like a lubricating oil you put on them. And before you did any repairs you had to have put it in a great big trough of petrol, to clean any other impurities away, before you start working on it, and then strip it down and wash your parts. Of course the sights were

very important, to make sure that they were in tact and accurate, or they could fire any old where.

Well some it was just a ball sight, a narrow piece with a little ball on the top. The other one was just a vee on the front of the barrel, you had to get your sight onto there, to get the ball through the vee.

It’s such a long while ago, I don’t think I’d know how to dismantle anything now. Well they're not used anyway, are they?

They had a bracket, like a stand type of thing, and they had a pivot, you had to fit them into that so that they can be manoeuvred around. That same

stand was used on the gunnery ranges for your testing, you had to put them on that and get the stability for your gun.

Not that I know, no. The ones that always intrigued me, and I never had any dealings with them was the ones that synchronised the fire between the propellers. I believe quite a few props were sheared off before they got that right.

got that right.

I think it was the cleaning fluids were a problem, and you're inhaling the fumes too,

petrol fumes while you were cleaning the guns, which wasn’t really good, made you feel a bit nauseous, and there was nothing you could do about it, you could just – they’d send milk up every so often of a morning tea time. But say getting back, if you were filling bombs you were compelled to drink a certain amount of milk. So that was a discomfort.

In what way?

Yes, yes.

Just in – if you didn’t assemble the gun properly, that was a pretty big boo boo. And again another thing that could go wrong, if you didn’t put your ammo in the bin sight, that could really foul

up the whole working of the gun, apart from the gun not working. But I think that’s about all, I can’t think of anything else that would go wrong. If you did your maintenance right you were pretty safe.

Very much, very much, because I had to prove myself against the men. If I

got a headache or a bit of nausea, I couldn’t say I'm going back to the hut, I'm feeling sick, you were a bit of a wimp. You had to stick to your guns, and as I said, race down to the canteen and get a bit of Salvital and settle your stomach down, that sort of thing, you know. You couldn’t show any weakness really. And I thought they were there under sufferance a lot of the time. Some of the men, they’d come up and say,

“I'll do that for you.” I’d say, “No, I'm capable of doing it myself.” Even that photo you’ve taken, you see the sergeant’s leaning over as if he’s doing the job on the gun, on my gun. And when the photographer was coming, he said, “I'll help you with that Wanda,” so he comes over and he poses there in front too, and all you see is my backside. So they all thought that I was out of my element, I suppose.

Well we didn’t even know they were coming. As you can see there’s very few people in the armament section, most of them are out doing jobs somewhere else. And he just came in out of the blue, and that was it. I don’t think they warned us even, didn’t even know he was coming. I didn’t know what he was going to do about the photos or…

I think again, I think as you said, about a propaganda sort of thing, that the whole nation was pulling its weight and

nothing was too hard for anyone to do, we all had to do our utmost.

Well, you did really, you got a fair bit of attention really. But you couldn’t let them get away with it, because it just wasn’t true, it wasn’t right.

You were no different to anyone else, so I couldn’t – there was no fuss made about it.

When you were given – you were given a job to do, and you had to go out in front of everyone,

I mean your aircraft might be on the – as you said, that was an amphibian, you might have to go out to that by yourself and do a job on that aircraft. Like you might have to take your gun out and you had to walk, like running the gauntlet, right through the hangar, through all the men, working on the other aircraft, and that’s when they’d start singing Lay That Pistol Down Babe, Pistol Packing Momma, and you felt like turning round and running the other way. But you got used to it after a while, it didn’t make much difference.

I think it was the pressure of everyone, can she do it, what’s she going to do? But if it had been a man there would have been no notice taken at all.

I think the most rewarding was being accepted and being allowed to do the job, with no questions

asked, they’d just come up as they would to a man, and I want so-and-so down now, and you go and do it. So I was equal. I think feeling equal was one of the main feelings.

I think so,

I think a few times, you know, that you’d be sent out alone, sent to do a job and there’s no corporal or sergeant looking over your shoulder to see if you did it properly. And you did, and that was it, you came back, no questions were asked. They knew you could do it so they accepted you, which was good, it was really good.

Only the one that I

hit in the face with a graphite hand.

We always thought he looked like a German spy. His name was Schultz and he had like a sabre mark, real sinister, you know? Imagination again. And he was whoozey, slimy, no, I’d better not say slimy, but he would never

call me Mickey, it was always, Wannee. And he came up, said, “Wannee, can I come up to the musical at the WAAAFery tonight?” And he went like that, and that’s when I went flick, across the face. He wanted an invitation for me to take him up to the WAAAFery, there was a musical on or something, and he would have been the last card in the pack anyway. But then he reflexed I suppose, he slapped me back.

And he just walked off in disgust.

Nothing happened really. I just sort of steered clear and didn’t have any conversation with him, just – you didn’t have to. And I think he got the message anyway. I suppose they think you're there, being a married woman too I suppose he thought, oh dear, an easy mark.

I used to walk past his section, I had to go past it to come from the mess back to mine, but I don’t think I ever noticed him, but just sort of sideways, but I always had my head in a book, I’d walk along – that’s how I got into trouble with the CO, walking along with my head in a book and I didn’t see anyone really,

but I saw him at the dance and he made an impression, and that was it. But he’d just take me to the movies, we didn’t have a lot of time, didn’t have very much time. And we found out that the station was breaking up, and the Americans were bringing a squadron in, and we would all be posted willy nilly, and that’s when he said, he didn’t ask me to marry him, he said ask your WAAAF officer if we get married, will we go together?

And she said yes, of course you will. And of course we didn’t. And we managed to get a flat for a couple of weeks out off the station, come back to the base in the mornings, which wasn’t a regular thing to do then, and his posting came through and he was gone.

Yes, well he was a flight sergeant in the engineering section in the workshops, and as I say, one of his duties was, you know, with crashes, bring them in, find out what had caused the crashes, and repairing any aircraft that needed attention

that was – he was engineering really. And I think he was one of the youngest engineers, flight sergeants. He was certainly a good worker and he proved himself.

Fairly common, I remember being in the shower and the girl in the next shower said to me, “Well we're both getting

married, I love my bloke, but I wish I was getting your name.” Her fellow’s name was Cruikshanks. She didn’t want to be Mrs Cruikshanks. But a few of the girls, even earlier on in the piece, where were we then? Adelaide or Melbourne, I'm not sure, one of the girls got married. She stayed in, but they didn’t, definitely didn’t post you together, you were kept apart. So

we were lucky after all that time and all the temptations, even when I was on Rathmines, Ted was on Bougainville and I was at the station dance and I could smell the fresh bread cooking in the mess. I said, “It’d be lovely to have a fresh sandwich with onion on it.” The next thing I know he came back with an onion sandwich. Now that was Saturday night, either Monday or Tuesday

a letter came down from Bougainville from Ted, “How’d you like the onion sandwich?” The bloke had gone back the next day, flown back to Bougainville and he told Ted where he came from and Ted said, “My wife’s there,” and he said, “What’s her name?” He said, “Micky Parker.” “I got her an onion sandwich last night.” How could you go wrong?

Yes, really. Another fellow came down and he said, “Now Ted said if there’s a show or a movie you want to see, it'll be OK, I can take you,” and I said, “All right, I'll think about it.” So I wrote to Ted and I got the letter, “Don’t go out with him under conditions.” So you know, they were coming backwards and forwards through our station all the time, you’d get a bit of a news break.

About six weeks I think,

that’s about all, before we were split up, and then 18 months before we saw each other again.

No, we knew each other, when I say knew, didn’t really know, we just started to go out and we got married. And then it was the six weeks. But apart from that, I told him he always dumped me over Christmas because he saw me getting into a naval tender. I’d broken a date with him,

and they wanted the girls to go out to the base at Nelson Bay, and they sent the tender for us, and he saw me getting on it, so I didn’t hear from him for a couple of weeks, and as I said, that was only over Christmas, he didn’t want to buy a present.

There wasn’t any really, there wasn’t any really. We were talking earlier about nicknames of some of the fellows. The SP’s name, we called him Foo, and I remember our favourite parking spot was in his mate’s car, so we’d duck away and sit in the back seat of his car, and if it got close to time to leave, old Foo would rap, “Come on you two, out, out, out.” Well that’s what you got you know, he broke up our lovely romance.

Not around the station, no. We’d go into – just outside Williamtown there’s a little town of, can’t think of the name of it now, it was like a union hall, and you could go to a dance there. That’s about the only time. We didn’t have that much time together anyway, really. And if we got a weekend leave we could get from there back to his Mum’s place at Lidcombe,

just for the weekend, go back again.

Well it was a very hard decision to make. What could you do? You just can’t suddenly get married and say look, I'm married. I had to make the decision to say I’d met someone else, and

that’s all it was. The letter I got back I think I told you, I never read it, it vanished. I’d love to have read it.

I didn’t know, it took me days, I didn’t know how to write it, didn’t know how to sign off at the end, you know, I didn’t know how to address him,

to start. Well you can’t write the way you would if you were still going with the chap, and you can’t sign off the same way. And he used to call me Scat, because I was a bit scatty, well I can’t sign that, I have to sign my right name at the bottom. Yes, little things like that. But Dulcie the other girl I told you about, she made a bigger boo boo than I did. She was writing to two fellows,

put them in the wrong envelopes, so she’s left high and dry with both of them.

Well she just lost track of those two, and she got posted in the meantime, I don’t know what happened to her after that, I’d love to have found out.

Just that I’d met someone else, and unfair to keep writing to him in that way in that

vein, wished him all the best of luck, and that was it.

No, no, it’s a mystery, isn’t it?

Yes. And look for a Sidney Charles somewhere.

Well we knew, Ted not being a Catholic it wasn’t going to be in the church, and the

priest, the padre on the station, we’d become quite friendly because another girl and I used to go to him when mass was on the station and do the altar for him, and when he was in hospital we visited him in hospital and he gave me a very long talk, fatherly advice about mixed marriages, they just don’t work, and there’s no tolerance. But it didn’t work out like that at all. So I was one of the lucky ones, I think.

We were still hoping to go together, so it was really a shock when he did go away. And when he did go, I came down to Sydney, he was on pre-embarkation leave, and we stayed with his Mum, waiting for him to get the troop train. I went down to Central to see him off, and

I said to him, “Whatever you do, now you're not to gamble while you're away.” “No, I'm not gambling.” So the train pulled out, and a friend and I raced and we got another train up to Hornsby. We thought, we'll catch him up there. He’s playing cards. The first thing I said, “I told you not gamble.” But that was the extent of his gambling, I think. And of course we didn’t see him again after –

until he came back, and that was another shemozzle, because I was demobbed then when he came back, and he rang up the shipping, and his boat would be in at a certain time, and the same lass and I, we went in, and got down to the wharf, and I broke through the cordon and the policeman said, “Where do you think you're going?” I said, “I'm looking for the air force.” “They’ve already gone, they’ve gone to Bradfield Park.” They came in early.

Hopped on a train out to Bradfield Park, got to the gates, and a guard says, “No, they’ve already gone on leave.” So here I am trying to catch him, I got on the train to go back to Lidcombe, and he’s waiting on the platform for me. He said, “I knew you must have gone in,” and he just sat there, I don’t know how he knew, must have had a premonition or something. So that was our romance over the year.

It was at Stockton in the presbytery, on the day before April Fool’s Day, 31 March. So our first day of wedded bliss was on April Fool’s Day. And Ted had rung up, and we were only allowed a certain radius from the station because the postings were coming through, and they wanted to get in touch with you and get you on your way. So he booked us into a flat on

Ettalong, the point at Ettalong, it was called The Pines, looked out over the water, over the rip. So he booked that for us. Unbeknown to us the train from Newcastle didn’t stop at Woy Woy. We had to get from Woy Woy to Ettalong, how are we going to do this, you know, didn’t have taxis in this part of the war years, sort of thing? So the train stopped at Gosford and we hopped out there, and there was

a RAAF ambulance across the road. He went over, and he said, “Where are you boys going?” “Going to Sydney.” “How about dropping my wife and I off at Ettalong?” So we had our honeymoon journey in an ambulance, which was quite unique.

We ended up with six days, which was quite good.

His sergeant from his quarter, his wife,

another friend, Dulcie, she was my bridesmaid, and another lass. And then we went back to his mate’s place and we had our little party thing there, and headed off.

Uniform.

Well I didn’t have much choice, we didn’t have coupons, you couldn’t buy a wedding dress anyway, and the nearest thing I ever got to an evening gown was at –

that was at that was at Rathmines, the adjutant Sally, got me a length of mosquito net. I made that into a ball dress. So you made do with what you could get.

Well, you were worried, because you know the possibility was there that he was going. And

you didn’t really feel married, you felt that, oh gee, I'm alone, I'm by myself, and you couldn’t do a thing about it. But we wrote letter after letter after letter, you know, which was good. And what made me laugh, he took up photography, I think I told you, and any of the captured photos they took off the Japs, and different ones he’d make it a series and the Yanks would buy them, and he’d send the Yankee dollars

back to back to me. So I’d get this envelope with a big red cross on it, you know, air force issue thing, and when I’d go down to the post office they’d say, “Not you again, we haven’t got the exchange rate in.” So I said, we should have called our first home Bougainvillea, because our deposit came from his photographic stints.

Well he'll probably tell you about that.

Yes, well our section was right on the waterfront, which is now the bowling club, I think at Rathmines Station. And the WAAAFery was up on the hill, outside the grounds. And still no different to any other hut we’d been in before, just that you had to go down the hill to get to the mess. And

then a bit further down to get to your section. But that’s all the difference it was. And every station was pretty similar. The thing that astounded us, when the Japs broke out at Hay, they doubled the guard round the station, and the WAAAFs up on the hill – no-one, we were up there on our own. And the girls used to laugh about that, you're looking after your own, don’t worry about the women.

Well they're totally different, yes. At Williamtown we had, they call them the flying coffins, the Vultee Vengeance, that was the staggered wing, and they a were very unstable aircraft, as was proved later on you know, that there was a malfunction in the joystick, and if they went in too deep they couldn’t pull out, they just kept going. That was the worst one there, and

that was supposed to be a bomber. Then to get onto the old Catalina, the most steadiest going old craft you’d ever wish to be on, the safest one, proved to be one of the safest. It did some sorties during the war and I remember reading up some of the articles on what they did. And of course they were the ones that saw the Japs coming down through the seas, you know, put the alarm through.

And they did a lot of the depth charge dropping, that type of thing. But we didn’t have the depth charge in our duties, that was done mostly in the islands themselves, not down here.

Just the .5 and the blisters, that’s all we worked on really, there wasn’t much

else we needed to do. As I say, the war was nearly over anyway, and it was phasing down, you know? There wasn’t a lot of action up in the islands at that stage. We were still getting crews and men back down from there. Some of them you’d see, you’d pick them out, they were so yellow with adabrun, and one fellow in our section, he had a sleeping sickness, he’d be talking like we are now, and he’d suddenly go to sleep. I don’t know what they called that, but it’s a sort of a sickness.

So he wouldn’t have been any good on a duty anyway, he got that. And we used to get other aircraft, we had an old Walrus, you know, the engine looks as if it’s going backwards, and Sikorskys used to come in sometimes, the old float planes. We saw one of them in the bay one day, and we went out and the pilot had to get out of the crash boat, step on the float, to get up in the cockpit. But the float had sprung a leak and it was top heavy, and

when you stepped on that the whole plane went on its nose. So that caused a stir in the section.

I think it was easier, I think it was easier and more relaxed, because we worked on them out on the bay, you took a boat out and you did your work then and you had a rest

before you came back in again. It was a good opportunity to have a rest. The big English flying boat, it’s lost to me now, we got those in a few times, but …

Sunderlands, yes. We didn’t have much work on those. They were big enough, you had to climb into the wing to put your armament in there, get out the window, out the front of the

main plane.

A girl called Olive Lavender, she was a fabric worker. Yes, she did the fabric on the planes and folded the parachutes, a parachute worker. And I think mainly because her section was just behind mine. Up the

one side there were all men, in the sea rescue unit, she was the closest one. And then you had to go down and there were all the officers down the other side, so Olive’s section was closest to mine. And it meant a lot too, you know, you’d have to walk down to the mess by yourself and line up with all the men, and if you had someone with you, you felt more confident.

No, they were quite good.

One fellow in our section, they called him Pop, he was the eldest one, and he’d do anything for you. Even when I came out of the air force, just up here, it was up here I think, I ran into him in the street, and I gave him the phone number, I said, “Look Pop, you’ve got to come down, meet Ted and have dinner with us.” Unbeknown to me, the phone rang, I wasn’t home, and

this person asked for Wanda. Ted said, “You’ve got the wrong name mate, got the wrong phone number.” And I’ve lost track of poor old Pop, so I don’t know what happened to him.

Jack Birch, JB, he never got anything else but JB or The Major, and he’s only recently passed away too, about 18 months ago I

think. And Ted was astounded, we were up the beach with all the kids here, years after the war, and he said, “You suddenly flew to your feet and raced out and threw your arms around a man and kissed him.” He said, “I didn’t know what was going on,” and I said, “It was only The Major.” “It’s so good to see you.” He was a very good boss, but you didn’t let him touch your guns, he knew everything by theory, but he could jigger up the works as quick as look at you, so we kept

JB away from what we were working on.

Well, he kept the men in check very well, and he ran the whole show on oiled wheels, you know, nothing went wrong, everything was going well. And the only time he had a difference with me was when I was making a foreigner, and I clogged up the emery wheel. What you do, you’d get a 20 – it was two bob then, drill a hole in the

middle, put a round thing in it, a round object, and pound it and make a ring, flatten it and make a ring. Then you’d cut a dovetail and you’d get an old toothbrush handle, the colour you wanted, polish it up on the emery wheel. I didn’t know it was going to clog the thing up, you know, all the bone went into it, oh boy. It took me about an hour to clean all the stuff out of the emery wheel.

It was going to be a

ring, it was going to be a ring, you made, like a wedding ring, and then you’d cut a dovetail til you could slip a stone, but we didn’t have stones of course, so you used a bit of toothbrush handle polished up.

They were the only other things, just the butter knife.

That’s right, yes. The boys had the sketch, the

pattern, and all you got was a bit of brass, and you cut that out with a file and smoothed it all down. Then you got the bullet, put that in a vice, wiggled it around until you loosened the nose part of the bullet, the lead part, and then when that came out you could empty all the cordite out, there was no inflammable business there. But you still had the cap on the end of the bullet, so

you put that back in the vice and you got a centre punch, punched it with that and it went off like a Christmas cracker, bang, and that was it. Then you just assembled it all again together and took it over to the plating section, and they were in on the deal, and you got it plated.

Just to see if you could do it? And you had time, because as I said, you know, it was phasing down, all our work was phasing down, and that’s the hardest part, trying to look

busy. If there’s no work to do, how do you look busy? So we found that very hard.

The time the first leave Ted got, when they had him on pre-embarkation leave, he was to meet me on Toronto Station, and I was to get the launch across, and

we were going down to his mother’s for the weekend. I got over all right, and he’s leaning over the hotel balcony waiting for me, and the train was coming in, and I said, “Sorry I’ve got to go, my train’s coming in.” I forgot I was married to the guy. So he said, “Wait for me, we're both going.” So you really had to learn to accept, yes, you’ve got a partner now you’ve got to consider,

and well here’s the train, I know I’ve got to get on it,” and he was down post-haste.

Well that’s right, yes, you’ve suddenly become an isolated person from everything else around you, even Ted at that stage, as much as I wanted to see him.

Being married did stop you from going to a lot of functions. You were the one man out, sort of thing. And this is where the comradeship comes into it. Some of the other girls that were instrument repairers, sort of took me under their wing, so they’d say, “Look, we're going for a picnic, a couple of the boys are coming, would you like to come?” Well there was no-one pairing off with

anyone, only a couple of their instrument repairers were coming, so we’d just get a little boat and go up the bay somewhere. So that was – that happened a few times, which helped me a lot. And then there were a couple of girls that used to come from Teralba, and they were, what do you call them now, like pink ladies in hospitals, what do you call them? Social – a social group. One girl had a beautiful voice, she’d sing, and the other girl would just take

the cakes around, and I got to know them. And a couple of times they came and picked me up and took me into a show in Newcastle. And you sort of found your way out of it to still mix socially. But there definitely was a difference.

And an armourer.

You’d only be using a plier or a screwdriver. It wasn’t a great deal if you needed a screwdriver or as I said,

fingernails, I could pull screws and springs out with the fingernails. And then the pliers if anything was a bit hard, you’d loosen it off with that. But apart from that there wasn’t anything. And of course you had to use files and emery paper to do your finishing jobs off, to do them – to smooth them all over. So they were the main things you’d use. And pull-throughs, to clean your barrels.

No, no. You had all that – towards the end I ended up making a shadow board to put the tools from the back, we had nothing to do, so The Major and I made a, I still say green shadow board, sketched all the things and it was so much easier. I don’t know why it wasn’t done earlier.

What would it be – I think the – one of the main things was that you had to make sure those barrels were clean, and a pull-through, you had to put the steel wool on, if you weren’t careful you could plug up the whole barrel, if you didn’t pull it the right way, you know how things

bank up when you're pulling them? And you had to make sure that didn’t happen, you had to get another instrument that would unplug the barrel.

Yes, it’s – imagine a steel bar about so long, about the length of the barrel, with a little round circle on the end, and through that circle you’d thread through whatever you're going to clean it with, if you're going to clean it with four by two, which was

a flannelette, it was four inches by two inches, you’d thread that through and you’d put it in oil and do the barrel with that. Or if you found rust on that then you would get a piece of steel wool and thread that through, and you would work on the barrel to make sure it came out clean. So that was one of the easier jobs though.

Well there was nothing really, they were all pretty easy, they were all more or less every day tools that you’d see in any tool box. Wasn’t anything special. Because you had to have your micrometers too, to make sure you had the right – that was easy though, you knew how to read micrometers to get your right readings, that wasn’t hard. But I think it all became pretty

easy, because you’d been taught to use all the tools, and I can’t think of one that was any harder than the other, really. I thought they were all just part of the kit.

Well, not really, because my finger-

nails are very short now, they're usually twice that length. I found that I got the grease under my fingernails, even my wedding ring, that was the wedding ring Ted bought for me, but it’s an eternity ring, I was too shy to go into the shop to buy the wedding ring, he said no, someone might see me going in with you. So he bought an eternity ring, of all things, and the diamonds went right around, the studs went right around, and I found that the grease was getting in under

the settings, and I ended up wrapping four by two around that to try and stop it getting in there. And another girl said, “Look, I’ve got an old wedding ring you can wear,” and I wondered why she had an old wedding ring. And, “Wear that when you're working.” So I had a little jewel box with a scroll round the end and padded with satin, and I took the ring off and put it in there. Do you think I could find it? It took me about

a week, I couldn’t find that blessed ring, and I was panic stricken. What do I do? How do I buy another one? I was still wearing this old one that his girl gave me, and it’s got to be in that box. I looked up and I heard a rattle. It had gone down under the lining. What a relief, I can still think of the joy of finding it again. But you didn’t have any barrier creams or anything to put on your hands then, you just

made sure you had a bit of Vaseline or something when you got back up to the hut, and rubbed them in, try and keep it going. But it’s a wonder you didn’t get an eczema or something from the petrol and the greases, but you didn’t.

Nothing, absolutely nothing. That’s why they had to try and get you through to Veterans' Affairs,

we had nothing. You’d stand over it, now you can’t stand close to open petrol, you're sniffing petrol, well the trough was there, and there was a wall that high and I'm working here, my bench, as you saw in the photo. And that’s the fumes really, and there wasn’t a lot of windows you could open, they were all right up high, so you didn’t get much help there. And we certainly didn’t get any –

no earplugs or anything on the bombing ranges and the gunnery ranges. I think we're just lucky we’ve got our hearing, as good as it is.

Well you did actually, you put yourself on their level, and you had to hold yourself away a bit from some of the things they did, but you more or less held yourself a bit aloof from them, and you got a lot of respect from them. I couldn’t complain about working with them really, they were very good to me. One fellow used to bring me in grapefruit about

that big, he was a local from up here. And another chap used to give me and Olive jams and Fogworth Jones had a factory then of fruits and jams, and he was keen on Olive, so he used to bring her the jams and the sweets, and the other fellow used to bring me the grapefruit. So we used to swap over and have half each.

You had no knowledge

that you were being recommended. I didn’t know until I got my friend from Information, how many times I’d been recommended and highly recommended, and nothing came of it. So you're left to your own thoughts, because I was a woman, in a mans' world, and I think that’s all it was. Not that I couldn’t have done the job, I could do the job as well as they could. And I tried to make sure that I did do it, to

prove yourself, more or less.

No, not really, not really. They couldn’t really, we were sort of busy all the time and you couldn’t fool around too much. The only time I

got shouted at was the corporal and I were sent down to the stores to get some spare parts we had to get, and I'm carrying one section, and he had another one, and he said to me, “I'll carry that one,” and he went like that and I said, “Leave it alone, it’s mine.” And this voice from the top office yelled out, “ACW, LAC, none of that conduct here.” It was the CO from the flying boat repair

depot. And they used to call him The Little King. He would scream at everyone, you know? On parade, when the parade was dismissed he’d walk through the hangar and the boys over this side would yell out, “Little King,” and he’d race over there, by the time he got there, “Little King,” came from the other side of the hangar. He never found out who was harassing him, but he never got the message either. The little fellows were the worst, they were

always trying to prove themselves, I think. The poor old CO, his name was, they called him Christmas Creek, Easterbrook, his name was Easterbrook, so they called him Christmas Creek. So you know, they made their fun where they could.

That was at Rathmines, yes.

Oh, it was great, it was lovely. As I was saying earlier on, we went on one and the fellow – they call it circuits and bumps, and they go, do a circle and they come in and then they had to hit the water and take off straight away, if there was an emergency, you know, if they had to get away quickly. And there was a terrible clanging noise when he went down,

and we got back to base pretty smartly, but someone had left a portion of the mooring rope on the hull, and when he hit the water that flew up and hit the hull of the boat. He didn’t know what it was, and I think he was as scared as I was. But I still don’t know how they could do it, because they were supposed to be taken off completely, there was supposed to be no mooring chain left on that boat. So someone’s made a bit of a hash of it.

But as I said, they were very reliable old boats, you always felt safe in them.

It was quite easy, you just got a boat out, they had a marine section, you’d

get a boat from marine section and row out to the Cat and put your guns in, or take them out, whichever you had to do, and all work was done in the section, it wasn’t done on the aircraft, it was brought back to base and you worked on them there. But it was quite easy.

Yes, .5s. Yes, well

they were fairly heavy, they’d have a – the base would be about that wide, that high, and about that long, I suppose. They were quite heavy really, that’s why the boys would say, “Let me take your gun for you,” and I’d say, “Well, I’ve got to learn to do it myself, you know, I’ve got to carry it.” It wasn’t that bad, it wasn’t that heavy. Youth, you know, nothing’s too hard really, you want to try everything and do everything.

Everything’s a big adventure and a challenge.

Yes, well that’s when you did have to take them back and you had to put them in the petrol and give them a really good scouring over, and you found out then if there was any rust visible. There wasn’t always a great deal

deal because they were oiled up fairly well, and of course before you put them on the aircraft they’d already been covered in grease, graphite grease. There wasn’t a lot of problems with them, really. But if they’d been in the islands for too long, perhaps then you would have trouble.

We only had one in each bubble, each bubble on each side, we just had one each on there, that’s the only ones we had at that stage. And

um, then of course you had your bomb racks to drop the depth charges and flame floats and things like that. But again, there was very little use for those at that time of the war, you know. Because they’d driven the Japs mostly out of the waters by that stage.

There wasn’t a great deal you could do, you could just – repetition, go and make sure the guns are cleaned in the storeroom, that was tedious, you know, it was just making work, carrying bricks from here to there, sort of thing, and back again.

You knew darned well they’d been repaired and they were greased up, and you had nothing to do on them but you had to look busy, and that was the hardest part, just stand there and do these things you knew didn’t need doing. But you couldn’t slink off, only that time I could, under the bench, and went to sleep, and I didn’t do that again, that was too scary. But you couldn’t even go back to the WAAAFery or anything like that, you had to be

there.

I was at Rathmines when the war ended, and you know, there were a couple of false alarms. About three times I think they said the war was over, and then it finally did come to an end, no-one went to get a leave pass, we all just went and got our kit bags and said we were going home for the weekend. And

the tenders were there to take us, no-one worried, you were just going home for the weekend or whatever it was. I forget what day it was now. But some of the boys from our section decided they’d celebrate, they took a couple of Very pistols, you know, the signal guns, and they got hauled over the coals when they got back, because they were firing out the train window going through Hawkesbury, and someone reported it. And that was just one of the things, kicking up

their heels, it was over and done with, they didn’t have to care any more. It was a wonderful feeling. But it was also a feeling of loss, you’d been told what to do for so many years, when to do it, how to do it. All of a sudden, what am I going to do, you know? How do I fill in my time now, what do I do? And I found that really hard to do, to get back into city life.

But I was lucky, Ted still wasn’t back, he had to stay back on Bougainville, he was doing the mopping up there sort of thing of the aircraft and stuff. And so many times, we’re definitely leaving on such and such a date, and that song, I’m Waiting For Ships That Never Return, every time I heard that I thought, oh dear I wish they’d set a date and let us know exactly when.

But he eventually got back. I told you, didn’t I, about going down to meet him and he eventually met me?

In Hiroshima, yes. But you didn’t realise the shocking side of that, all you thought of,

there’ll be no more of our boys killed, you know? They’ve stopped this now, there’ll be no more of those sort of things happening. We didn’t think of the poor Japanese that went through that. I don’t think until years later you didn’t get the full horror of that. And then you’ve got that fear, well you can’t let it happen again. And it could happen at any time, I think. I think we should all be

scared. I don’t like the things that are going on at the moment.

What did we do? Oh, they just had a little party thing up in the WAAAFery, and that’s when everybody said well, we’re going now, and the WAAAF officer said right, I’ll be back Monday, whatever time it was. So everybody streamed off, and that was it.

But we felt so glad, you know, just to get back, and of course Ted’s Mum was so excited about the boys coming home, the two boys who were left, coming home. And it was just a feeling that it’s over, what do we do now? You had another life you had to start then.

About September, I can’t think, it was almost Christmas time anyway, I was demobbed. And then Ted got back before Christmas too, I think, yes. So we were together then and we straight away went into organising where we were going to live, and housing almost nil.

We got onto a spec builder and he built the house at Bankstown for us. Not before we had to pay him key money, black market. And that’s the only way you could get into a house. I had to go, catch a bus to Lidcombe, and 300 pound to us was a lot of money, 300 pound wrapped up in brown paper, and I had to sit on the seat outside the railway station, he would come and

sit there, and I’d leave the package, and I’d get up and walk away. So that’s how the black market key money was taken care of. And that’s how we eventually got into our little fibro cottage.

Well I stayed with Ted’s Mum then, until we knew he was on his way pretty soon, and I had already got my correspondence course on how housekeeping should be done, all this sort of thing, and it used to make me so niggly, I’d make a bed and I’d tuck it in and do it the right way, and Nan would come in and flick that, no, not that way, this way. And I thought, oh, you know? And

different things I did, no, this way. And it was awfully hard, you know? Living with someone like that you couldn’t do anything, and when we got in our own home, I could work things out for myself. I had a notebook and I didn’t know where the money was going so quickly. I bought a powder puff for threepence, it had to go in that notebook. Now that’s all the money I’ve spent, where could I have cut things out, you know? You had to educate yourself, really,

to learn how to do things and I didn’t know cuts of meat, I had the price of half a pound of butter written down, and so much sugar cost, and I don’t know now.

Well I did think the control

that was there before. You weren’t pressured to do anything, it was natural you did it, but you came out, nobody’s telling you to do this, what will the repercussions be if I do it this way? You had to find out yourself how to do things. And a lot of it was trial and error. But I remember trying to make a cake when I came out,

I was going to make a chocolate cake, and Ted said, “Quick come, there’s a disturbance out the front, come and see what’s going on.” So I was halfway through mixing a chocolate cake, I raced out and I had a look, and by the time I got there the disturbance was over, I went back and continued to make my chocolate cake. But, when I opened the door of the oven it warped out like honeycomb. I put twice as much of one ingredient in it. So I think our garbage can found a lot of leftovers in there,

until I could find out what I was doing wrong.

It gave you a fair bit of what we thought was freedom. There were restrictions, sure, but they were restrictions that had to be placed, for the place to run the way it was run, and for the authorities

to know exactly what they were doing, for the people under their command. They had to know what we were doing, and they had to make sure that we weren’t being held under too much, to disrupt the flow of work. So I think they were pretty clever, some of those officers, the way they treated us.

I think again, didn’t learn a lot from the skills, but you learned confidence to have a go at things, and I thought, well I can do that, I can go, I can do this as well. And it was determination, I think, a new challenge that you had to face, and you just – you couldn’t be

left behind. If you didn’t do it you were the only one to suffer, weren’t you? So you had to make sure that you understood what you were doing, and do it to the best of your ability. And we didn’t have many problems really, Ted and I. We – I remember we didn’t have a lot of money, and every so often a group of about six couples, we’d have the penny poker night, and if it was your house you supplied the

supper. And I found after – you couldn’t buy chickens then, so what you did, you bought a rabbit and cooked it in chicken noodle soup, cut it into bite-sized pieces, put it in egg and breadcrumb, and no-one knew the difference. And we learnt shortcuts how to manage, it seemed to come, came with the times, you know? Probably we were lucky, Ted’s brother was a butcher and he would bring our weekly meat supply round, he

worked for exporters, and I still didn’t know what cuts he was bringing round. And I was mincing up this meat one day to make rissoles, and the neighbour said, “What are you mincing that up for?” “Oh, we’re having rissoles tonight.” “That’s fillet steak, Micky.” I didn’t know. Because whatever Bob brought was good anyway. But it didn’t help me in my choice of recognising meats and things.

Oh yes, it can be to start, yes. It can be, I always say, it’s so much trial and error. And as I said, the garbage can had a lot of cakes and cookies. Because then you made your own ice cream, you had to learn to make your own ice cream, you couldn’t afford to buy a lot of ice cream for the kids. Made all their clothes for them, that was a great saver. I was

lucky, my neighbour on the other side would come and help me make their clothes and make mine. So once again it was friendship, you know? Whether it was tolerance because of the training I’d had, but you accepted people for what they were, you helped them and they helped you. So there’s a heck of a lot of difference. I still wouldn’t like to live those years over.

Post-war? Well yes, yes I suppose so, but then again the post-war, the freedom and your choices were more or less sprung on you and you had to do it then, you had to face it, didn’t you? Yes. So you couldn’t go and say to the WAAAF officer, “Can I do this?” No, you do it yourself.

I think the work done by the women, coming, as I did, came from

nothing, no experience whatsoever, and it’s more or less thrust upon you to do something that you’re totally unaware of having any knowledge of at all. You’ve got to find out how it’s done, why it’s done, why are you doing it? And once you find out why you’re doing it, you’re home and hosed. You know, I’ve got to do it, and I’m going to make a good job of it. And I think it’s all based

on knowing that you’ve got to do it and you’re going to do a good job. If it’s not worth doing, you just don’t do it, do you? But that was worth doing.

I think from the armament section I was most satisfied with doing an

interesting job, you know, something that kept me interested instead of a humdrum existence, there was something happening all the time. And you could see other people, you know, doing the same thing as you’re doing and coping with it, and being happy about doing it. And I think that – half the thing was the satisfaction of knowing you’re doing the best job you could do, and hoping to God it worked properly.

You mean from other sections that …?

Well most of the others were mixed WAAAF

and RAAF, I don’t think there were any that weren’t mixed. Ours was about the only one that you didn’t have the number of women to take on the armament, and you still got along, you still mixed with the other women, you still had the mixing with them at meal time, and then after you got back to your hut, that’s when you sort of mixed around, when you go back to the hut, and

you’d have your shower, put your nightclothes on, and then walk just over to the little hut that was there for shift workers and you could make yourself a cup of coffee or cocoa. And then you have your talks then and someone would probably play the piano in the rec hall. And it was very relaxed and friendly. I don’t think we ever had any – no arguments that I can think of, anyway. Not really.

Yes, I think we were all pretty well clued up.

I think so, I think the more we, we

girls get together and talk about these things, the more you realise the importance of what you did and what they did. You swap experiences and you think, yes, well that was pretty good, yes. And then I did so and so, yes, you’re not bragging, you’re just in a group of women that have shared the same experience, and you’re still swapping them, you’re still swapping, not the stories – I feel,

talking today I feel as if I’m bragging really, about things that I did, but all the other women, honestly, the things those girls did. And I look back and I think, I envied Sylvia being a nurse, and being able to go overseas. We weren’t, we signed that we would go, but WAAAF were never allowed outside. And a couple of the nurses

went, they might have got as far as Morotai or somewhere. But you know, listening to the experiences some of these nurses had, that’s really something. They did a terrific job. I don’t know whether you’ve read any of the White Coolies books or any of those things, they’re fascinating, the things those women went through, and they survived, if you’ve got to do it, you’ve got to do it, I suppose.

Meeting Ted (laughs). It has been since. No, just determination. Determination and, you’re going to do it and that’s it.

A lot of ways. I’m not shy any more. I’m tolerant, I’m more tolerant, I’ve had a couple of sessions, I’ve been president of different clubs, and I hear the women saying, “Don’t go near her, she’s a shocker.” And I say, hold on, that girl

has done so and so, she’s lost this, she’s had a terrible life.” But this is what’s happening, you’ve go to consider what that girl’s been through. You’ll always find an answer, and it’s nothing that you should shun the girl for, you should be trying to help. And it happens over and over again, you probably see people that you say, “She’s a shocker, I don’t like her.” And one particular girl up here,

“No, we don’t want to invite her.” That girl was up in the Thursday Islands, her father was something to do with shipping and the war broke out. He died, and she and the three boys were left there with the mother, the mother left her and came down to Sydney to try and get a flat or something for them, she had to stay at her age, and try and

sell up the family home and all the things in it, and then had to get all the boys down. I said, “Look at what the girl’s been through, no wonder she’s making sure she knows what she’s doing, she’d had to do it all her life.” But they don’t tolerate anyone that they think’s trying to tell them what to do and how to do it. The girl’s had a – that’s her life. You find that in a lot of cases I think, something stemming from some horrible sadness

or accident that’s happened to them. But you can learn to live with people.

Oh, to do – my first thing, I’d like to see

everyone to have an idea of a defence for their own country. They’re here, and the country depends on them. For goodness sake don’t stand back and let Joe Blow do it, have a go yourself. And I’d like to see national service come back for men and women, so that there’s nothing like the last war, give them a broomstick and send them overseas. Let them know

the beauty of own country, and be proud of it. And try and protect it, what we’ve got. There are so many pitfalls. I can’t think of what else I would tell them. Just be proud of your country and, who was it, [US President Bill] Clinton or someone said, “What can your country do for me?” or something, what did he say? “Don’t ask what can your country do for me, what can you do for your

country.” And I think they were the truest words I’ve ever heard.

There’s not really, I think that I appreciate what you’re doing, because I think it’s something that’s got to be done. But people have got to understand

what has gone before, and the extent of the, not just people like me, but people that actually went and gave their lives, just ordinary people, you see them in the street every day, and they’re still doing it. So please respect them.

Thank you very much Kathy, it’s been a pleasure for me too. Thanks Chris.