Australians at War Film Archive

You’re gonna get surprised at some of this and it’s gonna keep on coming back and do all these sorts of things.

Just give me a wave when we’re ready to roll.

[…]

G’day, my name’s Wal Pettersson. I was born at the Macaulay Gates just near Kensington in the very early hours of the 15th January 1925. The railway gates in the back of a yellow cab.

That was a very interesting experience because I met my mother for the first time. She then carried me into the women’s hospital saying “where do I go?”, which was fairly interesting. The midwife, if you could call her that, was her best friend, Nell Wallace. Hence my first name, Wallace. Not necessarily Scottish thought the

family is largely Scottish. Didn’t live long in Kensington. Shifted to Moonee Ponds, which was very much an outer suburb in outer Melbourne in those days. I lived there right through until I joined the air force. Went to the Moonee West state school and then to Essendon high school. Left there and got a job before getting any much in the way of

qualifications. That was a ridiculous thing to do because it gave me two years of night school for me to get the intermediate certificate, which was required to become and aircrew member in the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force]. I’d been fascinated with aeroplanes since very, very early on. Interested in them, read widely about them, knew

them intimately, visited the Essendon airport frequently. When I got a bicycle on my thirteenth birthday I visited it more often. I joined the Australia Air League, didn’t like that. Left the Air League, joined the Scouts, liked that. While in the Scouts, joined the Air Training Corps, liked that in the Air Training Corps.

Very early on I might say. I got promoted to a corporal. In that we visited Point Cook and Laverton and various other air force establishments so that when I got my intermediate certificate and I went through the medical, I joined the RAAF a fortnight after my eighteenth birthday in 1943. Summers with the Somers

initial training school, then I went to Western Junction for elementary flying training. Then I went to Point Cook for service flying training. Then I got posted to air gunnery school West Sale. That was interesting. I was a sergeant by that stage. Whilst at West Sale I got promoted to a flight sergeant. We were flying Avro Ansons, doing interesting flying though

routine, boring stuff. I eventually then got transferred to an attack fighter course at East Sale being then moved onto warrant officer and I was going to become a Beaufighter pilot. I did become a Beaufighter pilot and the war ended. I flew Beaufighters back

to various dumps in Australia, stayed in the air force, had a variety of jobs, some of them more interesting than others. One being grasshopper spraying in Beaufighters. Other one being a calibration pilot for radio direction finding. Then

I got into the communication business and I was flying various aircraft in the communications unit at Laverton. This introduced me to Dakota aircraft, C47s. I flew C47s with that outfit for quite some time, met some interesting people doing this job and then

went to Schofields outside Sydney. The interesting things about that was that because I was AWL [Absent Without Leave] for one day I ended up in Berlin. That’s a story. From Berlin I came back to Sydney and was met by a friend who said, “Why don’t you come to Canberra with us?

We’re flying the Governor General around.” I said, “That’ll do me.” So I spent quite a long time flying the Governor General around Australia and up to New Guinea. A most interesting period. Returned to Schofields when the Governor General’s flight was disbanded and took on general flying, which led me then to Kure in Japan where we were

flying across to Korea. Only stayed a couple of nights in Korea. Mostly we went back to Kure. Had some interesting flying in that time. Somewhere along the line I’ve missed out the Berlin airlift. We’ll get back to that. After Korea I came back to Australia and was flying paratroopers around, which was a very easy and interesting job. I then fell foul of

a sore back, which inevitable got worse and worse. I grounded myself and ended up being taken out of general service work and became a general service officer. So I then had a variety of jobs in the air force. The most interesting one was as a defence

officer. Because I had a sore back, difficulties that way, I was made an aerodrome defence officer. Well, it fitted my background of rover scouts and outdoor activities and I was with the national service training scheme for quite some time as flight commander and squadron commander. I then left the air force under

circumstances that I don’t particularly want to go into, but it was a cloud unwarranted. I left the air force and left 15 years of background to do something else. A variety of funny little civilian jobs led me into finding out what I could do. What I could do was learn. It was determined that I had a

capacity for university education. That was fine and dandy except that the best place to go for that was the Canberra College, which was a part of the University of Melbourne. That then became the Australian National University and I eventually got a BA from there. I went into the tourist bureau

as a job in the public service, and from there into various jobs around Canberra. These jobs in Canberra awakened in me a great desire to get out of Canberra. So I travelled around Australia on long service leave. Whilst on long service leave I decided

the best thing to do was to get out of Canberra entirely and headed off around Australia again, to find where to stay. Spent a year in Cairns. Looked closely at W.A. Spent a year in W.A. and eventually decided on Bundaberg. And here I am, 78, living on a 10 acre property, enjoying it.

A couple of nosy neighbours came into this place on the first day I was here and said in broad Bundaberg-ian tones “G’day. What are you gonna grow?” I said, “O and C.” “Eh?” I said, “yes, O and C. Old and Contented.”

It was Nell Wallace who told me more about it. But that’s not a worry. My Dad was a railway train driver and as such he was somewhere up in the Woomera bringing in the wheat, it was harvest time, January. She was living in Kensington. Nell Wallace came over to hold her hand.

Then the signs and symptoms started to appear. There was a great rush to get to a telephone, which was some long distance away. The yellow cab arrived. Going from Kensington across Tennyson Street, Kensington, across to Carlton whilst crossing two railway lines. The first one wasn’t bad, the second one was closed. There was a long freight train

heading north. They waited and they waited, but I didn’t. I was born at the railway gates at Macaulay Gates. Because of the unhygienic conditions of yellow cabs in Melbourne in 1925 it was decided that I was most likely going to be blind and as such needed great medical attention for my eyes.

For the first 7 days of my life I saw no light, was bandaged and did no reading at all. I’ve been endeavouring to catch up ever since.

Because of the dirt and the dust and there was a certain amount of movement going on, which is inevitable in those occasions if you haven’t been there.

No, we never knew the name of the driver, we never knew the number of the cab and we never travelled in yellow cabs again.

Moonee Ponds? I went to school quite early and had a great time there,

mainly because I got on well with the teachers. During that time I was involved in amateur dramatics and art work. Went to Essendon high school and got on well there. Again involved in amateur dramatics, not so much art work, girls mainly.

Girls? Very interesting. Found they were quite different, delightfully so. And had no

problem in dealing with them either. While I was at the high school I joined the air training air league. I left that because I didn’t like the instruction. There wasn’t any, and I was an instructor at the age of 15. So that didn’t thrill me at all. I left that and went to the Moonee Ponds scouts.

Depression days was no great problem. Dad was on good work. He had a few spells of 4 day weeks. That was all. He was a good gardener, we had plenty of vegetable. We had a cooperative system operating around the neighbourhood. Mr Middleton across the road provided the onions and Mr Allan

over the back fence provided the lettuces and Dad grew everything else. So we had relatives in the country and we’d get eggs and the occasional bit of pork and a bit of lamb. So we did fairly well.

The sights I saw? Well, my Dad was a railway train driver and as such he went away on trips.

He took me up to Sydney immediately after the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which was my first railway trip. He was a traveller and as such used to travel up to Cairns. As soon as the Cairns railway opened up every second year he and Mum would go up to Cairns. This meant an interesting thing, Wallace was left alone for 5-6 weeks at a

time. That was quite good because I used to live around the corner with my grandmother occasionally. We’d have meals and go round there. I was generally independent and used to go round to the very good entertainment facilities of the local tip, which was just down the road. As such I grew to like rubbish dumps and acquiring things and generally adventurous. There was quite a gang of us who

used to go there.

Yes, my brother’s 11 or bit years older than me. He had a very active social life and he was also in the RAAF reserve. Se he used to be away at weekends and mid-week, going down to the north Melbourne drill hall. So in general I used to live at home with my books.

They could always give me books for presents. If they were taking me into town they’d leave me in a book shop or Myers’ book section and come back and pick me up a year, not a year and a half, an hour and a half later.

Absolutely no worries at all. We had a radio at that stage. I had plenty of books. I had a

lot of mates. Ma lived just around the corner so there was no worries.

Not particularly, because there were quite a few of the families had the father working up in the bush. That was quite common. But going away with Mum as well, that was a little less common. When Dad was home I used to get his binoculars

and lay on the garage roof and study the aircraft going by, or fly my kite. I built a kite which I could put out for about a mile. Absolutely fascinating.

Most likely from one of my, apart from the fact that Dad flew in an

aircraft in World War I. My brother being in the air force also helped it. At a very early age, I couldn’t have been more than about 5, I was taken for a picnic down the by beside Point Cook. I saw the aircraft taking off from Point Cook. They would have been the old Fairey [Battle] 3s in those days.

I

became a pedantic aircraft identifier. Read all sorts of things about aircraft. My brother was working in the Herald at the time, the Herald Sun newspaper office and as such he used to get gratis copies of aircraft magazines and Noon’s in England brought out a publication of aircraft of the world or some such and my father used to buy that every

month or weekly or whatever it was, and I had a great collection of those and could talk about World War I pilots as if they were friends of mine.

I knew a great deal of my father’s service because he was an exceedingly social man. He was involved in quite a few organisations. He was a unionist and when the war was

declared, let’s start back. He started off in his history sorts of things as being an athletic young fellow and joined the military cadets at school. He could run so fast that on one occasion he missed a train at one station, ran through the streets and ended up catching the train at the

next station. This was confirmed by the bloke who saw him on both occasions. He joined the Victorian Scottish regiment, kilts and all. When the war was declared, he was a fireman in the Victoria railways. He joined the light railway operating company, which had been a

request from the British government for Australian assistance, to form a light railway operating company. He was elected, mark you elected, to be a sergeant. That’s the way the army ran in some of the occasions. He knocked back being a sergeant, he didn’t want that responsibility, but he accepted being a corporal. He was a corporal driver with the light railway operating company. On one occasion there must

have been a desperate shortage of ammunition because he was driving this funny little train across the countryside of France to the artillery batteries at the front in daylight. Usually they travelled at night because of the operations of German aircraft. A German aircraft did see him, ran over and dropped a stick of incendiary bombs.

These were a very interesting aircraft. They were the all metal armoured aircraft built by Junkers, flown by corporal pilots close behind the lines. They used to throw grenades over the sides into the trenches flying very low. They could also drop incendiary bombs. You couldn’t drop explosive bombs because they were so low they’d get their own damage.

He dropped the incendiaries and one of them got into one of the trucks of explosives, started a bit of a fire. Dad got out off his engine, ran back, disconnected the truck on fire, pushed it away, got back in the engine, delivered the rest of the ammunition to the artillery base.

The God Almighty exceedingly loud noise that resulted from half the train blowing up attracted a lot of attention and Dad got a Military Medal for it. So it was a bit unusual for a railway man operating behind the lines to get military awards. So he became something of a hero. He was popular as well. He used to

march at the head of the railway unit, he was the drum major in the railway institute’s military band, he was the secretary of the survivors of the Ballarat – oh I must tell you about that. The Ballarat troopship that he went to England on was the one and only Australian troopship to be torpedoed without loss of life. So

all of these things and his history and the stories told to me by his mates, gave me a full indication that war was not bad if you weren’t in the blood and guts department of it and certainly not in the army. So the air force got another attraction.

A little of each.

He was a nice bloke. He was also into amateur dramatics.

For crying out loud, it was most likely a discussion over weeding the garden.

Again, a nice fellow. We went to the same school, so that I know something of his scholastic background. We were quite closely associated as I was growing up to the betterment of my education in many things. When he was in the navy, as he eventually got into the navy, we would occasionally meet when our leaves coincided.

I said he’d been a reservist in the air force. The job that he got in the Herald then shifted and he got into a different job which was such that he couldn’t get away at weekends, so he resigned from the citizen air force. That didn’t mean much, but when the war started he went down to the air force and said, “I want to join up.”

He had this very, very mild stutter, which didn’t affect him terribly much, but they used that as an excuse and didn’t take him. There were so many people applying for the air force. So because he’d also heard form my father about conditions in the army he decided to go into the navy where you always had a bed and you always had a meal. So he became a stoker in the navy.

He went away on the HMAS Goulburn, the small Australian corvette, which went up to Singapore. That made a bed and a meal a little bit hazardous. He was then lucky to get out of Singapore, came out as the Japs were coming in. Got down the Western Australian coast, got to Perth and told

us where he’d been. That was interesting. His next posting was the Gascoyne, an Australian built frigate, which was interesting work and he got promoted again and up onto the Australia cruiser. Here he was very much involved in amateur dramatics and deck firing an Oerlikon gun the anti-aircraft gun, which was

fairly handy when the kamikaze aircraft came around. Later on, not so much later on, he got back to Australia and the war was over and he stayed in the navy for a little while, while he sorted out personal affairs and we were again very close together.

We didn’t know the news. Everything was up in the air. Everything was secret and confused. We knew he’d been in Singapore. We knew he was in Singapore at one stage, but until he got back to Fremantle we didn’t know what he was doing. Relief, but that was the same as with everybody else. For goodness sake, school mates of mine and everybody else, there were all sorts of people. Bloke next door was

in the signals and he stayed in Singapore.

Rover scouts? I was in the scouts and then because of my size and age and I suppose my maturity I got into the rover scouts. Rover scouts is a very good organisation. This gave me the outdoor living that I liked.

Hiking, canoeing, I’d been rowing at the local rowing club at the Maribyrnong River so I liked the canoeing. Also I went skiing. That was fairly interesting because by this stage it’s 1941, there weren’t that many people skiing in those days. I always tell the story that I was there the week after they invented snow, which

isn’t quite true, but the skiing done with the rover scouts was up on the Bogong High Plains. I was able to say in my RAAF experience that I could ski, which is true.

The Bogong High Plains is a very interesting area. It’s a 50 square mile plateau surrounded by

6,000 feet hills. The rover scouts still have a hut built on Middle Creek. I went up there with the commissioner for rovery, Bill Waters and a local scoutmaster Gordon Nutall, not Gordon Nutall, but a name like that. The three of us, two elderly men and one bloke not yet 18, went skiing all around the High

Plains. Absolutely fascinating. Bill was a very good skier, very safe skier and he taught me how to stem christie and do the turns that get you out of trouble. From there on, as many years as I could, I would go skiing for a week, fortnight or even a month at one stage, up to the High Plains.

The first pair of skis that I had were borrowed from the Mount Buffalo hotel because I was working in the Victoria railways tourist bureau and the Victoria railways around Mount Buffalo. So because I was an employee they loaned me a pair of skis and boots and that was good. The next time I went skiing I wasn’t employed by anybody. By that stage

I had made a pair of skis for myself. I made another pair of skis later on. So I’ve made two pairs of skis from plans that were produced by the Victoria rover scouts.

Independence, independence and capacity for independence. That’s the main thing. Although the motto is service.

We were helping the scoutmasters and scout people at the time, but in general it’s a group of young men who have grown beyond boy scouts.

You learn to be comfortable sleeping on the ground. You learn to be

accepting of being cold and tired and weary. It means that you can go up to places like the Bogong High Plains where you had to carry in the food that you were going to eat for the next fortnight. It meant that you could walk up through the bush carrying two pairs of skis. It meant that you could get up to the snow and then

trudge through the snow with your skis with rope around them to give you traction climbing the hills with a pack of about 60 to 70 pounds. It meant that you had all the training required to become a commando. Sadly, that training was put to the test because a great number of rover scouts ended

up as commandos and ended up dead.

Yes, very much so. Keith Richards in Timor, one of the ones who was there who sent the message back about they were still going on Sparrow Force. He was a rover scout.

Geoff Willersdorf, whose name is recalled in Willersdorf Road in Exmouth in Western Australia. He was on the second Krait. He got back to as far as Timor with a sergeant who was warrant officer. He had a mate, Livingston I think,

Sergeant Livingston, the pair of them got back as far as Timor when the boat started to give them a bit of trouble and they tried to get it repaired. One of the Timorese put him in to the Japs. They were captured and wire was pushed through his wrists and he was left to starve to death after some beatings. I don’t like the Japs.

Because the people in Timor told the story afterwards. They didn’t like them either.

By this stage I was about 23. Well after the,

I think I’d even been in Japan. No, I hadn’t been in Japan then. I knew all about the atrocities that were going. Snowy Burr, another mate of mine, can tell some disastrous stories of Japanese. I was flying, had a lovely job, I was telling you how I had all these jobs, when I was with the communications unit in Laverton I had the job of taking flight lieutenant

Cy Greenwood flying for the first time when he returned from being a POW [Prisoner of War]. Cy Greenwood had been flying Beaufighters. Because I’d been flying Beaufighters we could talk the same language and I took him out in this Anson of all things, from Laverton and we did a bit of flying around. We did a bit of low flying and then I took him through a few circuits and bumps and said, “Off you go.”

Cy Greenwood was shot down in a Beaufighter in Timor. He was taken ashore, or captured when ashore. He was then tied to a post in Dili Town. He was fed well, sufficient that he could keep going, but they did nothing about his wounds and nothing about what was starting to accumulate

around his feet. Luckily they did nothing about his wounds. His shoulder in particular became fly-blown. So the maggots ate all the dead flesh away and he literally had a natural debridment. Yes, I know about the Japs.

It helps, yeah, quite truly.

I don’t know whether it was Cy or somebody else, but he was a nice bloke. I ended up flying with him again later on.

Didn’t know much about Melbourne before war was declared other than going in for trips with Mum

and occasionally Dad going to the cricket. I got a job in Melbourne. I left school early and went to work in Snow’s Menswear in Moonee Ponds. I wanted the money. The Snow’s Menswear job was only a holiday job and they then sent me off into town to work in the despatch department where people would buy clothes, perhaps have the altered

and have them parcelled up to sent out to their suburban or country addresses. So I was there parcelling up and tying up parcels and typing address labels. You get your skills in funny places, but they can all last. I still use the same knotting system and I still can type. So all of those things, by this stage I’m about 16.

That was fairly interesting. Apart from the fact that I had to go to work in the morning with two lunches. One to have at lunchtime and one to have at night because I was going to night school. I would not recommend that to anybody at all.

I was 16 and going to work at 9 in the morning and not getting home till half past nine at night.

Not good for a young fellow. I had no adolescence.

Moonee Ponds West state school was a largish school with an asphalt surround. There was no grass, there was very little of anything that was natural. When I first went there it was deep

Depression days and the first intimation that this was a school and an institution was that there was vomit all over the place and that there was a standard situation of sawdust and kerosene, buckets of it, were kept in all the corridors in the play areas. Children were eating whatever they could and vomiting was a standard situation. Children did not necessarily go to school

well dressed. Children frequently went to school in bare feet, holey shoes were common, holey socks were common and hair conditions were fairly disgraceful. There was a lot of poverty or low income in the area. There was a degree of crime in the area. House

breaking. We had our house broken into. So there was an atmosphere of instability throughout a lot of the society. Puckle Street Moonee Ponds, which is the shopping centre of the district was a centre for shoplifting. It was an interesting situation. Snow

dropping or stealing clothes off clothes lines was common, not necessarily women’s underwear, but children’s clothes as well. It was a difficult time. Food was difficult. There were people travelling around selling things. One of my uncles used to sell a cockroach repellent which he made

by shattering bricks and pounding them with a hammer until he got down to a fine clay powder which he then added some pepper to and folded up into packets of paper.

We never bought it because we knew what was in it. There were old soldiers copying out poems and

selling them as though they had written them themselves. There were a lot of dodges through all of that. It didn’t affect us terribly much because my Dad had a good job with the Victoria railways. He had a better job than most because he was a hero. He was selected as the personal driver to Harold Clapp, the commissioner of Victoria railways.

As such he used to drive the commissioner around Victoria in a Dodge motorcar without a steering wheel. It was a rail motor. A personal rail motor for the commissioner. There he would be in his smart green uniform, tall, be-medalled, be-ribboned anyhow,

driving his commissioner around. It was quite a good job.

Oh no. I did have photographs of it and he’d tell us the stories about where he went and all these things. Most the railway lines in Victoria are single track and as such he had to be a qualified engine driver to know when to go and when to get into sidings and how to get the commissioner through to where he wanted to go.

Same deal of clutch, breaks and gear changing except he couldn’t steer. So travel was an interesting process and I’ve been involved in travel a lot of my life.

Oh my goodness sake, wherever there were relatives. A very interesting situation, we

went to relatives and old soldier mates of his all over Victoria. We went, because Dad always had a motorcar while I was alive. He started off with an old Willys and then he got an new Willys and then he got a bigger Willys and then he went back to another older Willys and we had a Willys under a canvas cover out in the garden and then a shed was built, a garage was built

and there was a beaut Willys Overland tourer. We went all over the place. Particularly we used to go our to his mother’s place, which was out on the Wellington Road in Clayton. An interesting bit of country. It’s the university now. I can’t think of the name of it.

The same site as where the university is. Monash. Monash University was built on the place. I went out there one time by train and then by a horse drawn coach from the railway station. The house that grandma lived in had no nothing, or all of nothing.

No power, no toilets, no water supply, it was a house with a paddock, a couple of horse drawn vehicles, a mixed farm and a deaf husband.

No. Other than for the wandering around that I could do. By this stage my maternal grandmother

had bought for me a microscope. I could go and find curious little animals in drops of water in the damn and in the run-off from the dairy and growing out of rotten apples and all of these things. So magnifying glasses and microscopes gave me great interest in the world.

Yes. It was quite early on that I was going to be a flyer if at all possible. Please understand, a boy from Moonee Ponds is way down in the

social structure. Way, way down.

We had, the family had, everybody had, there was a place in the world for everybody. Moonee Ponds was not to be confused with Toorak and South Yarra or any of those places. You stay where you are and you’ll be happy where you are and that’ll be fine.

Just the whole atmosphere

of everybody around the place was that, that kept the ship on an even keel. If you didn’t have terribly ridiculous ambitions you weren’t going to be frustrated. That was the way it was. I didn’t quite believe them and certainly when the air force started to recruit for the wartime, the way ahead was fairly clear.

The Australian Air League is a curious organisation moulded very loosely on the boy scouts and equally loosely on the Air Training Corps, which is very loosely organised on a regular air

force. The whole thing was that the junior section of the Air League had a uniform which involved short pants and short sleeved shirts and a little silly side sling hat and all of the things that didn’t really attract me, because I saw myself at that stage as being, well I

was big. I was a tall fellow. But I got into it because it was the only thing available. We used to meet at the Ascot Vale theatre and in general the instruction was poor. The one thing that was of interest was there was an ex Austrian or German character there who was building an aircraft. This was an interesting

aircraft because it wasn’t intended to fly. It was a Penguin aircraft. It can roll around the ground, you can do all sorts of things with it, but you can’t get it off the ground. I helped build that. Whether it ever went off the ground or got completed I don’t know.

You learn the function of the controls. It rolled along on one wheel.

Quite interesting.

The mission statement was to imbue kids with the idea of flying and becoming a member of the air force and the defence forces and as such it’s sort of a boy’s brigade deal without any religious overtones.

How aeroplanes flew, the theory of flight.

Well, I used to be the instructor in flight theory and this was a ridiculous thing. My brother used to send home offcuts of newsprint. So I was able to make flipcharts of

the design and practise or the workings of an aircraft propeller or what an aerofoil section was like and how it worked and what it did and why the Clark Y aerofoil was different to an RAF and why the Gonegin [?] and some of the reflex tail airfoils were different and all of those things and nobody could understand

where I was going to start. This is I’m trying to instruct people, kids, most of them older than me, in stuff that I barely knew because I only read it up and had never worked with a propeller.

Cos I had books. I’d go up to Essendon aerodrome and muck about with a lovely little red aeroplane called a Porterfield,

which was Reg Ansett’s aeroplane. I’d run my hands all over it so that I could get the feel of what things were and what they were doing and all of this. I was never rushed away, never pushed away. I don’t think I ever saw Reg, but that didn’t matter. That was the other thing. I could see them in the air, I’d follow them with Dad’s binoculars and I knew how they worked, what they were, but my air experience at that stage was limited to

one flight.

That was in a very funny old Avro-Fokker 10 aircraft, build by Avro because Australia could only buy British aircraft in those days. The Avro 10 was flown by the Australian National Airways and I flew in this thing called the Southern Moon, which had two rows of wickerwork seats.

I must have been very young because I sat on my mother’s knee and this aircraft trundled across the ground, took off, the wheels stopped turning. That was the big impression on me. There was nothing and the wheels just hung there. So I’m under the wing looking at this wheel and I’m looking at all the people down below and trying to pick out our house, which I don’t’ think we ever got near because

it was a cheap 5 shilling flight and we didn’t get down quite as far as our house. Our house is easy to pick out because it has a big L shaped veranda. I flew over it many times later. So that was my first flight. Then we used to go up to see aircraft come in and land and take off and get covered with dusk and muck. So I was fostered in this aircraft interest.

It certainly wasn’t stopped. I used to walk around aircraft, but they could see the religious devotion that I was offering to them and there was no worries. I wasn’t going to anywhere near the propellers. That’s where I found difficulties. You don’t go near propellers because they bite. All in all there was no great problems.

They’d most likely say, “That bloody kid is here again”, but other than that no. No. I’d watch them take off and land and watch the Victoria aero club people with their fancy striped tails.

A boy from Moonee Ponds was, no nothing had got into that area. I’d tried for the air force, but see, the pilots were officers. That had a barrier as well, mental. All that stuff was there. Perhaps imbued with the Moonee West state school condition.

Yes. I hadn’t even got to high school at that stage.

No, I was one out. Nobody, oh, there was a bloke next door who was interested in model aeroplanes, but unless he could pick them up he wasn’t interested.

Stayed with the Air League a very short time.

I eventually got out of the short pants deal and got into the long pants uniform, which was more fitting for standing in front of a class and explaining Bernoulli’s theorem on bloody flight. So that was fairly awkward, except all of that cost money and it was made

known to me that it was not growing on trees or in the back garden. So I left school, went to Snow’s Menswear, got paid and gave back to Mum all the money that she’d laid out for the uniforms for the Air League.

What was the job like?

Not particularly hard. I walked in and said, “G’day.”

I think they might have had a notice in the window or something like that. It was quite common for lads to go and take holiday jobs except I’d left before the school had finished the year. I didn’t finish the year.

Yes. Quite good, quite a lot. I had good marks, no worries. Up in the top 8 to 10 of the class.

Yes. To get the money. You’ve got to realise there was so little money around with everybody that nobody looked down upon me for this thing. It was looked upon as “Wallace has a good initiative.”

I dressed better. I had to dress better because I was selling clothes.

Menswear. Snow’s Menswear. You’d sell a shirt and then you’d sell a tie to go with the shirt. All that sort of stuff.

There were so many

men leaving to go into the services that you immediately took up adult positions. Not adult pay, but adult positions. So when I left school and went to Snow’s Menswear and then went into the head officer in Flinders Street, Dad said, “This isn’t good

enough for you. You’re gonna have to get this Intermediate Certificate and as such you want to get a better job. Give you some more money.” So Dad organised a job for me in Victorian Railways. A ridiculous crazy job, but you learn out of all of them. I was working in the Victorian Railways printing works in North Melbourne. You learn a lot of things in North Melbourne. Lots of

things go on.

There’s lots of girls around the place. The industrial work was quite different and the blokes I was working with were quite different and the printing works, I got fascinated with printing and the idea of ink on paper. So that was quite good.

Let us say I was seeing another side of girls. Leave it at that.

That was quite ridiculous. I was tied up with night school. I was tied up with practically no money at all, enough to get the

periodical ticket. There was no future in girls so that was out. True. Interesting educational, but not personal relationships. No way.

I wouldn’t. Cos

I had no place to take her, nothing to take her with. I didn’t have a bike to go and visit her, I didn’t have any money to take her to the pictures, we were, I was comparatively poor.

Yes. Keeping in touch was something that happened much later.

Yes.

The night school was a commercial enterprise in Elizabeth Street. Reed’s I think it was. There was a range of topics for the intermediate. For reasons that I hate to, can’t even think of these days, I

got a topic of commercial principles and practise bookkeeping by a fancy name. History, geography, mathematics, no great problems. But this ridiculous bookkeeping was something alien to me. It could have been Chinese or Uzbekistani or some

damn thing. I could get by in some areas, but then I’d fouled it up because it is all connected., I never did get, no, I got it after the second year. The first year I failed it and that meant I failed the certificate so I couldn’t’ carry and I had to go through it all again. That was a bit rough.

This would have been 1940.

Yeah, 1940 or 1941. I didn’t stay awfully long in the printing works. I got a better job at the tourist bureau.

That was an interesting one. I was on the telephone. They had a telephone answering service for people who wanted to know where to go and when to get off. You could literally tell people where to go and where to get off

in trains. That meant that you had to be able to read railway timetables backwards, forwards and all over the place. My knowledge of Victoria was fairly good because Dad would take me all over the place. He talked about the Wimmera and he'd talk about Gippsland and he’d talk about western districts. I knew where he had been and what the things were like and there was a railway map around the place

so I had no great problems with Victorian Railways. That was fairly good. Then I got put out on the counter. That was even more interesting. Again the men had left to go to war, so the boys were working men’s jobs. That put me into face to face with the public, which was fairly interesting because eventually you’d get to

know a lot of the information straight off without reference to books or anything at all. “What time does the train go to the Ferntree Gully on a Saturday about lunchtime?” and I’d say, “twenty-two to two from platform 2” and that’s quite true, or it was. All of these things you could do. So that was the way. From there, along with a couple of other jobs that I had in

railway head office, I went into the air force.

I was out in the garden. Dad told me.

“War’s been declared,” very straight forward.

Well, I’d say, that’s that and we talked about it and that sorted out. Nothing else.

Vague, distant tradition. That’s about as deep as I would say. Despite the fact that my father referred to England as the old country whereas for him the old country would have either been Sweden

or Ulster. My great grandmother came from Ulster and my great, great grandfather, no great grandfather, one of those way backs, came from Sweden. So forget the royal religion. Not on.

Only when they threw pennies in the air. You wouldn’t

have ever heard of that. A horrible, horrible, disgusting display of patriotism for kids at school. They would have a penny scramble.

Somebody would stand in the middle of a circle with a handful of pennies and throw them in the air and the kids would rush in and scrabble on the ground for a penny.

Because they had no bloody money.

The coins had the king’s head on it. That was it. I don’t know, it was done, that was all. Unbelievably demeaning in retrospect.

It just meant that I didn’t have to stand up in the pictures.

It was accepted that Australia would be in it. The mellifluous tones of Menzies did not echo around our house at all. It was just a case of, “Oh well, it’s on.” That was all.

About the same. But he didn’t want me anywhere near the army.

“All right,

wait a while and get into the air force.” A lot of the boys in my age were upping their age and joining the army, because they weren’t very particular. The air force was particular. So it meant that I had to get my Intermediate Certificate. Meant that I had to be physically fit. It meant that I had to be coordinated my muscle coordination. And I had to be fairly well educated

in air force topics. Navigation and Morse and things like that.

Not long after that the Australian Air Training Corps was started. The Air Training Corps was a part of the air force. Within each

squadron it had a regular air force or an air force NCO [Non Commissioned Officer], usually a corporal and an ex air force member was in as the squadron commander. So there was a reality in it. You wore and RAAF uniform, you followed RAAF procedures, you visited RAAF’s establishments and the

instruction was given by RAAF members who knew what they were bloody talking about. So I joined up for that. It was very early on. My number was 232. You don’t get much lower than that.

They counted the arms and legs and if the numbers became even that was all right.

No, that was it. Anything over about 14 or 15. I was about 15. Just on 16.

Saturday afternoons and one weekend a month was the general deal. Occasionally there’d be something at night as well. So I could fit it all in with a bit of moving around.

This is 1942. I can remember back that far? Careful, Naomi [interviewer]. There’d be a parade. That meant standing in lines and doing the air force ritual things. There’d be a bit of marching around.

You would

do an emu parade. There’s one that you wouldn’t know about. An emu parade is where you form up in a line and you walk slowly across an area like a parade ground or tarmac in front of a hangar and you pick up everything that is there which would be picked up. If you’ve seen emus walking around it’s,

and that’s an emu parade. So you’d do that so that when you got to training school, you knew what the procedures were. That was the main thing. You were imbued, and nothing came terribly strange. When you went down to Laverton you slept 42 a hut, you lined up for your meals, you marched around

the place in groups, you didn’t walk around in ones and twos. All of the procedures of the air force. And you’d sweep out hangars and sweep out aircraft and occasionally you’d get a flight in an aircraft, some of those things.

It was great, because again, you could wander around on the airfield. They knew who you were and knew what you were doing. Laverton at that stage had most interesting aeroplanes.

A Republic Lancer, the one and only aircraft of its type that ever came to Australia. All sorts of funny aeroplanes were there at Laverton and you could see them and see aircraft taking off, landing, doing all these things. An old Wapiti was still effective and flying at that stage. We’d go down to Point Cook and you’d see

the flying boat or the Walrus down there, or the Seagull 5, see them down there. You were getting closer to the types of aircraft that were service aircraft. The ones I used to see flying out of Essendon were civilian and private aircraft.

I became a corporal. For crying out loud, if you’re gonna become a corporal you’ve gotta accept it. In the Air Training Corps you applied for promotion and I applied for promotion and got promoted to a corporal, which meant that when the group was moving around the airfields, you walked beside them. Called the step and called them into saluting

if there was a salute required. All of the ridiculous mob creation situations.

If it was standard, it was the routine, it was the way it was done. Accept it. If you accepted the air force, you accepted the way it was done.

Yes, when in Rome.

Later on, when you got to operational areas, particularly in the Australian air force, lots and lots and lots of things relaxed, slowed down, became more humane, became more individual.

Yes, quite important.

If you’re going to be part of a team you must play with the team. That’s the whole thing. Although there were elements of bulldust in it, when you got into the air there were commands and you had to be within the idea that a command was a command. That was it.

The attitudes of some of the officers were far from respectful in recognition that we were doing the best we could. Only some, not all. Some of the NCOs were a bit off because they saw their role and their role as being much more adult and they weren’t concerned in the least with these 16 and

17 year olds who were mucking about the place. But very few, very rare. It only showed you that the world was made up of good and bad.

That was way back air training corps days. For goodness sake, I was a kid. Yes, no problems.

The distance is only that far.

No. Not in the least. I was still Wal. I had dropped the lace by that stage that made me feel effeminate.

I dropped it at about the same time as I dropped Wally,

which I didn’t like either.

I had all sorts of nicknames according to the group I was with. I won’t worry about them, they are past, gone, disappeared, forgotten. As far as what I can recall and what I know, there’s nobody alive from any of the groups that I was with

that would know them. So that solves that one, doesn’t it, Naomi?

No. Not that I knew of. That was so long ago, forget that bit. The air force was just around the corner.

They didn’t have one. That’s the whole point of it. Dad had been brought up by a very biased Methodist mother from Ulster. The other side of the equation

in the troubles. They’d seen so much of life and war that the realisation was that people are more important and live for now, live now, do what you possibly can. Morality is a personal thing, it doesn’t have to be imbued by superstition.

You took

responsibility for your own actions. There was no way that confession was going to be a way out. Not on, you see. So that was the whole general deal. The scouts were exactly the same. Certain of the boy scouts’ groups were tied to the Arch Bishop’s own and things like that. The Moonee Ponds scouts did not follow the scout law

and the ideals to the letter. The general approach was that “If you’re a scout you’re an independent person and you solve your own problems. Don’t’ go looking for supernatural help.” That’s the way that I was brought up.

Most likely. There wasn’t any organisation like the Humanists Society. There was a Rationalists Society in Melbourne. The Ratties are so anti-religion that they’ve practically got a religion of their own. The Humanists, which I might put myself down as, says that

“If a person needs a crutch, for crying out loud, don’t kick it away from them.”

The first thing was the number of men who weren’t there. The number of men who were in uniform. The reactions of the newspapers to what was happening in the Middle East in particular and in France,

over Britain. One aspect of the war that perhaps is worthy of mention is that there was a large American camp out at Royal Park, Camp Pell. They were common all around town. MacArthur had his headquarters in Melbourne at one stage too, and I saw MacArthur a couple of times. The Americans’ attitude

was vastly different then to what it is now. There was a Private Leonski killed a number of prostitutes. He was caught and faced a firing squad. The Americans made no excuses for the ill behaviour, ill

manners or illegalities of their soldiers, whereas in Italy, in Okinawa, in Japan, in Korea, in the Balkans, most likely in Afghanistan and Iraq the American government military maestros, the generals, tell lies and protect their

soldiers over and above the local community. There’s been one case, as far as I know, of an American serviceman being charged for deliberate friendly fire. Friendly fire, yuck. The whole deal of the American soldiers in Melbourne at the time when I was working in Melbourne

1940,1941 and 1942 was that you respected them, they’re here as friends, they’re here to help. Particularly when we had the marines came back from Guadalcanal. They were well respected. They were as good fighting soldiers as the diggers.

Yes and no. It would have been if I’d have been of that ilk, but I wasn’t. I was too bloody busy. It could have been. It was more talked about than violent.

They were in the workforce all over the place. Driving

trams, tram conductors. The interesting thing was that the main thing of concern was “What are their uniforms going to be like and how are they going to manage in crowded trams and trains?” because transport was crowded. They didn’t use women on the cable trams. They used the connies [conductors] on the cable trams. It used to have a little swing on the outside, which

posed problems with transport. You’d get sideswiped with a bus without any problem at all. I travelled on a cable tram the last day that they travelled. Very interesting.

Cable trams were absolutely marvellous. Great deal. You get on and the grip man grips the cable and away you go. Hang on round the corners because they used to change cables.

They’d race up to a corner and with the impetus and the momentum of the tram they’d go round the corner. They couldn’t slow down. Go round the corner and then he’d pick up the next cable. Very interesting technically.

They’ve got cables running underneath the road. So you’d grab on cable A to get you down to the intersection, which meant that you could get onto cable A and keep going passed the intersection

and you’d get round the corner, they’d swing the points and you’d get round the corner and the grip man would pick up the next cable going up the other street. Very clever. They’ve still got them in San Francisco. They can go up hills without any great trouble. The traction of the wheels isn’t the concern. Once you’ve got hung on the cable like a ski lift or anything

you went. Great powerful engines operating the cables underneath the road all over Melbourne.

I remember the day, but I can’t give you a date or time or anything like that.

The time passed by. I had been skiing, I’d had a good holiday. We went to

Kellow Faulkner House in St Kilda Road. A motorcar sales depot that used to sell Rolls Royces and prestige cars. Not very much market in those days. So this was taken over as a medical centre. You’d go down there and wander round in the nude. Not much bloody worry about that by that stage, also done in the

air force tradition. We were tested and looked at and poked and prodded and coughed and did all the other things. They said, “Right-o, you‘ve got the right number of arms and legs” and off you go. That was it.

I told you I was lucky I was born naked and I have never had any problems with being naked. Perhaps when everybody else is dressed,

but when your mates and half a dozen other strangers are there it doesn’t really matter. At school for crying out loud you had the situation after a game of football.

What sort of tests? The Ichihara [colour blindness] test was an interesting one, which looked like a mad French

Surat painter, splashing dots onto paper. If you looked with the right eye sight you could see numbers. They would flash these pages at you and say, “What number?” You’d say, “46.” Now, the character who kept on saying “46”, he didn’t make it. It had to be, “46, 22, 11” whatever it was.

Ichihara colour spot tests. Very good.

The medical? For crying out loud it does exactly the same as everything else. No worries. Chest expansion, capacity to stand on one leg, medical history, wounds, scars, anything else. Got one on one of my fingers. That one, only one.

I was 17.

The age was 18, but you can do your medical beforehand so that you don’t waste people’s time. 18 years and a fortnight I went down to Somers.

Adolescence is something

that I picked up between the ages of 22 and 32.

I was too bloody poor and too busy. Somers was interesting. It had been a health camp organised by Lord Somers who was a governor of Victoria at one stage. Didn’t see much of the health camp swimming,

bathing side of things. Again, we were busy. Early morning, late at night, all the way through. 6 weeks training course, which in pre war days was taken at 6 months. We did it in 6 weeks. There were tests all the way through in that too.

One of the tests you had to do there was for hand muscle coordination. When you had to with

various optical devices you had to put a lion into a cage and you had to follow dots and do all sorts of things. I found that playing table tennis regularly and reasonably well gave me confidence in all of that. It was cross country running and things that just, ordinary nature.

I saw is as being a natural progression of something that I’d been training for all along. More important thing was being accepted for pilot training. The initial training school at Somers was aircrew training. You were an AC2, Aircraftsman second class. There’s no lower rank in the air force. As aircraftsman second

class, you were way down low. The course that I was in, which was late in the whole program, was about 34 or 35. 35 I think. We had quite a number of ground staff fellows trying to step up to aircrew. We had quite a number of army blokes trying to get into aircrew. So it was a mixed bag of wannabe

aircrew, must be aircrew, haven’t the faintest idea what I want to do but I think this looks like a nice uniform, all of those things were going on within the minds of the trainees. We did drill after drill after drill to see whether you could take orders, follow routine, whether you could bloody remember how to do things.

All of this became quite interesting and important. Some of the instruction was quite interesting. One of the physical education instructors was Hubert Oppermann who gave a demonstration of riding a bicycle on a roller set-up. He was good. There were other NCOs who were brilliant too.

Oppermann?

Riding from Perth to Melbourne, competing, I think, in the Tour de France, making records all over the world on Malvern Star bikes and for being a good bloke. He really was. If you wanted to look it up it’s Sir Hubert Oppermann and he was the member for Corio for quite some time. Right up till the end

he may have given up riding a bicycle, but he didn’t give up being a good bloke.

Fro reasons that I’ve never been able to understand, the Liberals. He must have had a reason for that.

It was in the wind. They knew it.

It was there. No worries. “At least we’ve got a spare bed.” But that’s all.

If they did, they did it. I don’t know. Quite possibly.

I can’t remember.

At Somers? I bought quite a lot of black chocolate, dark chocolate. I still buy dark chocolate. I wandered around and had a look at the accommodation. I’d been to air force stations before. It was nothing more than another air force station except it didn’t have a runway. There was no aircraft there. But it had all the trimmings.

Parade ground and flags and officers’ mess and all that sort of stuff.

They did testing to determine which branch of aircrew we were gonna go into. The one that I found a little bit difficult, and I did not study hard for, was electro theory and Morse

reading. I got up to minimum standards of reading and sending Morse. I got up to pass standards of electro theory. I wasn’t’ going to be a wireless air gunner. I got up to enough to understand and do map reading, which I was quite good at map reading, railways helped me with that. Map reading and

navigation, got up to pass standard with that. Didn’t want to be a navigator. As far as fitness and physical coordination and aircraft recognition, up there. We used a thing called a tachistoscope, which was nothing more than a camera lens and shutter working on the front of a slide projector.

There’d be photographs of an aircraft and they’d run it through the projector using the camera shutter. So that you’d get a fifth of a second, a fiftieth of a second, a one hundredth of a second view of an aircraft and you had to

read it and write it down. That was different. Mainly because we didn’t have that gear in the air training corps. That was all.

No worries. I was way up the top. They had recreational things and amateur dramatics. I was into that.

That one, there was a

bloke by the name of Johnny Smith. There’s a name to conjure with. John Smith was from the ground staff and he devised, or choreographed a drill team, 10 of us, I think, from number, who did drill backwards, sideways, some was the same as the American rifle

company does with rifles swinging around these days. Hilarious. We were taking off some of the DI, Drill Instructors, at the same time. All those sorts of things. That was all.

Amateur dramatics or

Oh yes.

I have to tell you again, we didn’t have much money. So the family entertainment was family entertainment. There were concerts conducted by the family and visitors. There were surprise parties conducted, which were fairly elaborate in their surprises. There were comedy songs

written, my mother was a very good pianist, my Dad would write the songs, Mum would play the music, or Mum would write the words and Dad would put some music to it and Mum would play the music. All sorts of things. There would be sets, a set, set up for a railway station so that people would come

and there would be this comedy act put on about somebody at the railway station. Usually taken from life, because Dad was a railway man. A lot of his friends and the people who would come would be railway men. These would be like what were later called “Bottle Parties.” You came with two bottles of beer or you came with a flagon of gin or something and there would be this party go on. And that was it because

we didn’t have much money. So the amateur dramatics was a thing that you grew up with. Getting fancy dress and singing silly songs and reciting silly poems and doing all those things.

Yes, but I’m not going to sing them now because I can’t keep the high notes. But as far as the things go,

I used to do the very interesting monologues put out by a Brit about a family Ramsbottom who took their son to the zoo and he got swallowed by a lion. That used to be a popular one. “Sam, pick up thy musket” and

all sorts of things like that so that you could do a crude interpretation of Lancashire accents. There was a “He were one of the crew of the Victory, and his job when the battle begun was to take cannon ball out of baskets and shove them down t’ front end of’t gun.” Joe got blown up on the Victory during fighting the French.

He said, “Come and save me, come and save me. If you don’t come and save me I’m gonna let these cannonballs drop.” Things like that, which for a lad of 10 or 11 was quite interesting.

It was usually,

I wasn’t very much involved in the air force, after the fancy drill exercise I was too much involved in learning. When you got to flying down Western Junction or Point Cook we’d go to the pictures. Amateur dramatics were on, but I never got involved in them. That was a gone past stage.

That’s an interesting thing because you make very few. The first thing being that they went different ways and it’s a defence mechanism that you get set up because sometimes they’re not there. If they were posted away or went on sick leave or went on leave, they weren’t

there. If they were in a box with a flag draped over it, if you treated it the same way, they weren’t there. So that’s what happened and it happened a few times for me that we had blokes in the training program in Australia, the same as all flying training programs in every air force, the casualty rate during training

is very close to the casualty rate in battle. Not as high in some areas, higher in others. But the casualty rate is always high. So you get a defence mechanism. I made a lot of friends later on, but again, they shifted and I shifted and we dropped out of touch. They

were in one world and I was in a different one.

It was usually very, very critically assessed. There was an accident investigation committee officially formed. There was an accident investigation committee

formed in the airmen’s mess, the sergeants’ mess and the officers’ mess. They were formed at the same time and the were just as critical in their assessment of all of the before, after and during conditions. Frequently just as critical of the perpetrator of the accident than the official investigation.

Accident is a funny word. There are very few motorcar accidents. Incidents, crashes, yes. Was it accidental that they were there? Not really. You find that the cause and effect situation when it’s really looked through, you find that there’s other reasons, but people don’t look at them.

yes, there were some horrible bloody accidents occurred in the air force.

They didn’t need to tell you. It was common. There’s no secrets because it’s essential that you knew. The facts were essential that you knew.

Otherwise you couldn’t trust the aircraft or trust the instructions or trust the orders. So you knew. If something went wrong you knew, and you started to look for it and watch it.

Oh yes. Yes, there was always a funeral even if what was inside the coffin wasn’t him. Oh yes, always.

Cremation is the situation that saves a lot of space in cemeteries because the ashes are provided. An aircraft running into a hill is a cremation, but the air force doesn’t have cremations. It has funerals for coffins.

That’s it.

After the initial part of training I went overseas. Well, to Devonport in Tasmania, which was a fairly interesting exercise because the seas were quite travelled. You can’t get a bridge to Tasmania.

So the boats were going across to Tasmania and there were boats going from Melbourne to Adelaide to NSW ports. There were also Italian and German and Japanese submarines using the same stretch of water. So that the ferry that went across to Tasmania went across as invisible as it could be, not having lights and trying to wander around and

doing a bit of a zig and a zag here and there. But we got there and that was it. There was no war service guarantee or awards for doing so. You got to Tasmania and that was reward enough. So we got down to Devonpoprt and that was quite fascinating because it was the first time I’d seen a policeman wearing a hat with a peak at the back. Not like wearing a baseball cap turned back to front. You had a peak at the back and a peak at the front

to stop the rain running down his back and running down his front. He was an inspector. So the Tasmanian police was just another indication that this was a different country. Quite hilarious. Realise of course that not only am I a young airman, still young airman, but by this stage I’ve moved up a notch. I’m a leading

aircraftsman at this stage. I went round to Western Junction by train from Devonpoprt, which was an education because it was a Tasmanian train. It was an education in those days, and you can’t do it now, because they haven’t got any bloody trains there. Well, there might be one if you’re lucky. Then I went down to Hobart. They wanted some blokes to walk around Hobart in blue uniforms on an Empire Day or something.

So we went down there to march through down. That was interesting because we were met at the railway station by a bunch of girls, one to a fellow. I’m immediately taken off by this girl and we stay at a lady’s place and we go to a party that night. I’m laughing about the railway station, which was equivalent to, well not quite an outback station, because it had a roof over most of it,

but it wouldn’t have been very much respected as a suburban railway station in Melbourne. The trains of course were quite hilarious. Steam trains. I’m sounding up about this to the daughter of the railway commissioner. Well. I’ve got tooth marks on my feet from putting them in my mouth over the years and that’s where they started. We had a hell of a good time in Tasmania. Met this girl,

went back to Tasmania again a couple of times to re-meet her, but nothing ever happened. Tasmania was interesting. I saw a bit more of Tasmania than I should have. I had a forced landing. Ran out of railway line, again. Being a very junior pilot I was using the railway line as navigation aid to get back to Western Junction and I found

I was on the wrong railway line and didn’t have a timetable. Railway stations didn’t have any names on them. So I couldn’t even find out where I was. All over I was shouting, they couldn’t hear me. So I had to go put my little yellow bird down on the ground. So I went round, did all the right things, landed, taxied up to a bunch of trees, out the aircraft in a sheltered position, put the

pillow that I was sitting on, which happened to be my parachute, put that behind the wheel, walked in and saluted, I’ve never worked out why I did that, saluted the person in the house and said, “can you please ring Western Junction station and tell them I’m here. That was fun.

Good, we were wondering where you were. That was all. They were glad to be able to speak to me. As I say, incineration makes communication quite difficult.

So a couple of blokes came down and they had a look at the fuel and they said, “That’s’ about enough to go home. So one bloke jumped in the back and I went back to the instructor and he took the thing off, the two instructors, and they took me back to Western Junction. I wasn’t that far away, except they had a bloody mountain range in between us. About 2 years ago I went back there. the mountain range is still there and so is the farm. It was very good.

Avoca was the name of the little area.

Goodness gracious. Nothing. She was pleasant. We were both awfully, awfully young and that’s all there was.

I think the attraction was in Tasmania was fairly much the same that if

you’re male you score 5 for a start. Oh dear. If you’re not a relative you might score 7.

I was learning to fly in a Tiger Moth, which also is a very good, very pleasant, very serviceable aircraft. We bent a few of those.

I didn’t. I never bent an aeroplane at all other than one.

You bend aeroplanes by running into things that shouldn’t be there. Like hills, you run aground, or you run across something like another aeroplane or a post. All of these things shouldn’t be there, and that’s what you try to avoid.

For goodness sake it’s the standard opening bloody gimmick all the way through. When we were learning to fly at night, you take off, you go round and round and round with the instructor and he eventually says “Right-o, off you go.” So I took off, this night, and I’m going around and I get a

red light. What happened was a bloke tried to land about 20 feet up in the air and bounced and went to 22 feet, which is what happens frequently, and he ended up nose over in the middle of the runway, which wasn’t much of a runway, it was only a lot of candles put out. I had to hang around in the air and then got a green light and came in and landed. He didn’t hurt himself much, but it was all very interesting.

That was good for drinks for a few days later.

No, no. They were, you know those flares that you have a barbeques? Kerosene with a wick in the top. They’re big candles, aren’t they? That’s what you had down each side. They were all the one colour, no worries.

Once you knew how, you knew how,

and that’s the whole thing about it.

A gentleman’s aeroplane. Very, very pleasant. Draughty, but very pleasant. The crazy thing is if you go back to a Tiger Moth, which I did a couple of times, after flying a proper aeroplane, there’s nothing to do. You get in and you tighten up the friction

nut to stop your throttle from moving and then you look around. And there’s nothing else to do. Lock the slots, fiddle with the compass, waggle the controls to see that they’re all right, you do that. Then you go.

That was a Tiger Moth. That’s all you do with a Tiger Moth. Then you waggle

the nose of the aircraft, you get out to wherever you’re gonna take off, you turned it into wind, open up the taps, push the stick forward so that you can see where you’re going, get up to speed, ease back with the fingertips and you’re airborne. If you’ve got enough fuel you can fly to New Guinea. If you haven’t got enough fuel you come back and land, get some more. True. Simple, beautiful aircraft.

I’m only there for a short time.

Excellent. Quite good. Instead of 40 to a hut I think there were 20. Everything was fine except I got influenza of

some description. Mainly because we were mixing with strange people, like in Launceston. So I ended up in the base hospital and slipped a course, which was quite unusual. I wasn’t put off the course, I picked up the next one as it came through, which gave me an opportunity to do more training, more flying, more checking everything else. So it was quite good. A

fortuitous bit of, just a little bit of hospital time gave me that break. It also meant that I never swung the prop of an aircraft, which was a bit unusual.

Because I was in hospital. That was the only reason I could think of. Everybody had to go and swing the prop of a Tiger Moth and I never did.

Not particularly. It’s just an action like starting a lawnmower.

Because they didn’t have the engines. I was taken off the coursed, I was off sick. I was really sick. The prop swinging session was on when I wasn’t there.

The next course? Something else happened. Didn’t worry me. Nobody else worried about it. It’s just a bit unusual.

No worries, because we’d been through the same experiences at ITS [Initial Training School]. Most of them, I think all of them, came from Somers as well. It was the standard track of which way you went.

There was a bloke called Tiny Cottee who was part of the cordial family. He was so tall he used to look over the top of the Tiger Moth main plane. That was one fellow who was different. There were a couple of Tasmanians, which was again unusual, there’s not that many of them.

I can’t recall details, but all in all a very interesting, because we’re all aiming to do the right thing, the same thing. So I finished up getting through elementary flying training school quite well.

Nothing at all. No way. Let the others be the judges.

No. No.

It was a Saturday morning, I know that. It was after, I think about 7 or 6 hours 50 or something like that of flying time. The instructor said, “Do a circuit for yourself, Pettersson.” I said, “Right-o” and that was it.

I think I was too busy trying to feel what it felt like to feel, I can’t recall it now. The whole thing was that “Oh, yes. That’s good.” Then I went through the whole drill of going down wind, turning cross wind and coming in to land and flaring and doing a landing with a little less weight, which I hadn’t really appreciated and I flared and floated for a little bit.

Just a standard trap that I got caught out with again 30 years later.

That was it, it didn’t land. It floated across the runway, or the landing line. It was a square paddock. Western Junction has got runways now, but there was nothing there when I was there flying.

I expected to bump and bounce and roll along and I didn’t. It kept going because the instructor wasn’t there to make the weight.

Then I touched down and landed and came back and we all went into town. True. I think that was the first Boag’s beer that I had. No drinking while I was flying. But I’d soloed, so I had a couple of beers. In

the Criterion Hotel, which I think has burned down or blown up or something.

Western Junction didn’t have much social life itself. It was a very small station with a very small WAAAF [Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force] contingent. What social life there was went on in Launceston or Longford, one of the little villages around.

That wasn’t terribly thrilling either.

PT, morning exercises, go flying, discuss the flying, go flying, learn about what you were going to do the next day, navigation, all sorts of training exercises

with aircraft recognition again and we kept up the Morse, I know that. There was also a bit of an Airspeed Oxford hanging in a hangar, so you could climb up and get into an Airspeed Oxford and know what the cockpit was like. I used to do that.

Airspeed Oxford is the aircraft that was flying out of Point Cook, which is the next stage. So you could prepare yourself

for the next stage. And I did.

You’d get up and sit in the cockpit. I talked about the Tiger Moth cockpit that the nut that you screw up and a lever that you shift and that’s it for a Tiger Moth. In an Oxford you had many more bits of control. You had a trimmer in a

Tiger Moth too. You had trims and you had two engines to look after, all of those things made it quite different and you could retract the undercarriage. It flew faster and it took off faster and it was a bigger, better, more beautiful aeroplane.

Emotionally didn’t mean a thing, because there were so many others exactly the same. I think I wrote back to Mum and said, “Isn’t it beaut?” and she wrote letters to “My dear pilot son” and all those things.

No, not at all. Nothing. The way was open for people to

go. Commissions were being granted, men were commanding ships who never thought they would, men were commanding battalions who sometime before had been a sergeant. The world was opening up for those who were there to grasp it.

This was a long way away from Hobart and Tasmania. We weren’t concerned. We knew we were not going to get into the war for a further 6 months. It was 6 months training at service flying training school that you started to get into the sharp end. Before that the people were back you were Aussie tied.

Except those blokes who went to Canada. They still had the same timeframe, but that was it.

I expected to, I was looking forward to, because that was the function, that’s what you were there for.

I suppose it’s motherhood. You have a child you know what it’s all about. If you hadn’t got a child you don’t know what it’s all about. So that was the point that we were training for something that we expected. Many of the instructors were returned airmen and they would put the slant on things. They’d say, “don’t bloody do that, that’s the only thing you can do.”

Or “keep your head out of the cockpit, keep looking where you’re going, where you’ve been and where everybody else is.” “Relax, relax, relax. You can’t do it and tighten up.” So the realities were being reinforced all the time by those who knew and we were getting it and starting to learn.

Oh yes. At Point Cook for goodness sake, we get to Point Cook don’t we? At Point Cook we were dropping bombs. That was the obvious function. We were doing longish cross countries of two and three hours so that was an obvious function. We were flying in formation, which was an

old, maybe not, but they still taught the idea of flying in formation.

You carry little white bombs. You fly along and your mate has a plexiglass window in the nose of the aircraft. He has a bombsight and he is talking to you and he’s saying “right, left, left,

right, left, left, back a bit” no you can’t do that. Then he’d drop the bomb. The little white bomb would go down and it would be aimed at a target. There’d be a couple of fellows down in shelters on the ground. They would have sights to determine where the bomb fell according to them. They would say 27 degrees and the other bloke would

say 182, so they cross 27 and 182 and they find out where that cross on the target sight and they’d say, “He’s off by 40 yards” or “50 yards” or “150 yards” or “We can’t find the bloody thing. It’s somewhere in the next paddock.” All of these things we would do.

We knew what

time we were dropping the bombs. There was only one aircraft on the target at a time. I would be bomb aimer for the first 5 runs, say, and Johnny Wardrop would be bomb aimer for the second 5 runs. We’d know the time we were on target and off target. They’d all come back at night and somebody would sit down with a open and pencil and write them all up and say, “It’s all right, except you're hitting the next paddock.”

No, we weren’t that far out most of us. Quite good.

The thing of being a bomb aimer is the same as being a navigator. The pilot had to know every job. Perhaps not properly, perhaps not very well, but understand what the problems of the navigator were and the problems of the

bomb aimer and the problems of the air gunner. We had to fire machineguns as well. All of those problem areas we practised. We flew as navigators, we flew as bomb aimers and we fired machineguns on the ground. We didn’t fire them in the air, they didn’t have any turret. No, we didn’t have any turret ones there. So that was it. It was all quite interesting.

Western Junction was a modified civil aerodrome. Point Cook, right from it very earliest starting days of 1912 had been a service aerodrome.

Civil aircraft

didn’t use the place. It was air force, air force, air force. That was the whole deal. It had tradition, it had all sorts of things from runways to slipways. They’d have flying boats, they had, well, that’s where the museum is now and it’s magic. I’d been there as a little boy.

I called back to the Cook a few times. It’s not used these days, which is very sad. It’s not going to be lost either, apparently.

The conditions had gone up a bit. I think we slept 4 to a room in the Cook. Again, ridiculously, I

got influenza for a little while, which skidded me around a bit. We ended up again, I think, slipping courses. That could have been for all sorts of different reasons. There was no pressure on the air force to provide gun fodder. Aircrew weren’t in high, high, high demand. There were plenty of them and thousands of them to waste in Brighton in England. So there wasn’t

any pressure for bringing the crews forward in a rush. We had a fairly easy time.

No. Things went along quite nicely at the Cook. It was a pleasant time. There were very good facilities for sport.

We weren’t that far from Melbourne. We could go up to Laverton if we wanted to. My parents were still alive in Moonee Ponds, I could get there. All in all it was quite reasonable.

One weekend a fortnight was reasonable I think, at that stage. There was nothing much else. Other

than a very interesting exercise whereby between courses you could get a leave, which was rather unusual, you could get inter-course leave, which was very good. I think a lot of people took value of that too.

Home. I was only an LAC [Leading Aircraftsman], we still didn’t have much money, I had no motorcar,

dad’s car was up on blocks, so where else could I go?

Yes.

Goodness gracious, you’d be lost in the crowd. No concern at all. All you got was a little white tag in your hat, that’s the only thing that made you different from any other blue orchid.

The army’s name for the air force was “The Blue Orchids.” Hot house flowers. True. I was one of the real ones, but I had a little white flash in the hat and that was aircrew trainee.

They were never seen in battle.

They were looked after and cosseted. Oh yes.

Rude. I won’t tell you. No, let’s not worry about it.

That was also rude, so we won’t worry about that as well. My brother was in the navy and he said yes, there were a lot of them were like that.

Very friendly.

Hell, yes. If you’re in the navy you’ve gotta take it in good nature.

If you’re in the air force, it was, oh yes, that blue orchid thing didn’t hurt anybody, because we knew that it wasn’t true. When the

sharp end was there, the battles weren’t frequently, were not where the army was. It was before or after or miles away. The problems of being cosseted were not there in New Guinea. They were living rough, hard in the territory they were living just as rough and hard as anybody else. So we knew what the conditions were like, we

hadn’t been there, but we had it well and truly reported. People living at Coomali Creek and flying Beaufighters out of there, they had it hard. Flying in New Guinea they had it hard.

No. Not at all. There was millions of

people in uniform. If you were in civvies you were one of the fewer ones. No way.

Yeah, you were supposed to as a matter of fact. Unless we were going down the beach or something like that, but even that was a very difficult bloody thing to do because we had to get somebody else’s car. Dad’s car was

up on blocks. You travelled by train or tram or bus. The buses were fairly crude. Trams were packed and the train were getting worn out.

We had a super heterodyne receiver.

That put you above some of the other receivers, which meant that we could receive things that were clear and understandable. That was the thing. We would get the news and Dad would make a mark on his newspaper map and say, “They’ve got to do this and that and this” that was all. He looked at the war as if it was an exercise that was best left to the experts.

They had two spare beds. No, actually my brother had married by that stage. Our bedroom was my bedroom back then.

On me? No. Not only were they atheists and realists, only once, under the influence of a number of sherries, did I ever see my mother talk about her boy, Ross, only once, “I wonder where he is tonight.” That’s the

only time. As far as I was concerned I often enough did not go home if there was something happening around the camp when I was out in the service. I would never tell my mother that I was coming home at the weekend because if I didn’t she would be concerned.

What you don’t know is better, so I never told her I would be arriving, I would arrive. This was a defence mechanism too.

She was a mother, yes, of course. Twice over. She had two children. So she’d have practise.

Had a husband who went to the war too. And relatives all over the place.

Not so much at Point Cook. When I got down to West Sale.

No. I went skiing from West Sale. Went up to the High Plains again with the rovers. We went fishing a couple of times from West Sale, Gippsland Lake is just around the corner. There would be weekend parties that

started Friday night. Quite a few things for a young bloke to do.

It was a weekend party. You stayed there until your weekend weakened.

They could be held in any of a number of places. There was a cow shed on one occasion, there was an abandoned house,

well, it wasn’t tenanted anyhow. Sometimes they’d be sort of backwards and forwards from the sergeants’ mess. It depended. People had a real good birthday.

Whoever was going to, somebody who had, cars were very valuable and popular in those days. We had one character had an old Marmon car,

which used to run quite well on aircraft fuel and aircraft oil with one great problem. When the fuel was getting down low you had to drive on the wrong side of the road so the fuel could tip down into the petrol tank. Hilarious. We had a lot of fun.

We’re sergeants’ mess stuff. All sergeants by this stage.

No. It would be all sergeants, sufficient unto the number of the car, like about 8, it was a big car, the Marmon. The rest would be locals.

You do that in the first dance. You go to a dance and first dance you have

a girl there and you dance with her. You say what you’re doing and you put a plan, or proposition, or something like that. In the wintertime it was very awkward to do very much, because it was terribly, terribly cold around Maffra and Sale and those towns. Or even smaller towns than that.

I went out on one occasion and I met this girl and got onto the first dance. I think we did two circuits of the floor and she said, “Yes” and I was third into the car, which meant that I didn’t get into the car, because the first bloke got in the car stayed there. When he got out he gave the tap to the second bloke, who he knew because he’d been knocking on the window.

I was third there, and I didn’t get to the car at all that night.

Because the second bloke forgot ours was in the darkness and tapped somebody else on the shoulder. That was a pity.

You needed a bus. By this stage I was just on 20.

Only if you were dancing. Yes, very easy, very easy indeed. You had a number of things in your favour. One was that you’re male, second one was that you had money, third one was that you had booze. You see, you could buy liquor from the sergeants’ mess.

The other thing was, I think, that you were fairly young and enthusiastic. All of this, to a rural population, with the blokes away, gave you five or six points starting.

I don’t think it would have mattered if I’d have been wearing boots and a navvy’s outfit. But I wasn’t. There

weren’t many other than air force around there. It was an air force area of Victoria. East Sale, West Sale.

Oh hell, yes. They’d talk about the aircraft. They’d see us overhead time and again. We lost the Marmon car on one occasion. It ran out of petrol and the road wasn’t slanted enough, so we had to walk and walk and walk

and walk, we had a rough idea of where it was. Had to get an aircraft out the next day and go out and find it. Give coordinates, there was another bloke who’d go out on a pushbike and bring it back. Fun.

No. Point Cook training school, yes. You had to go through the gate and that was all. At West Sale, this

was operational training, no, we were staff and it didn’t matter. The things that were more important there was getting the job done and keeping the airfield alive, going. We had two bushfires whilst we were down there at West Sale. Grass fires, big ones, blew right over the place. Not over the airfield. We kept it clear of the airfield.

I’m at West Sale now.

At Point Cook there’s only one thing that I’d like to tell you, and that is that I got my wings granted by Air Vice Marshal McNamara VC, the first air VC in the world.

The flying

instructors and the ground instructors get together and say, “He’s in, he’s OK, he’s up to standard” and you’re there. There’s blokes been dropping off the course all the time.

Yes, if you did anything wrong and you were caught it was a fear. But if you didn’t do anything wrong and you didn’t have anything to be caught about, your confidence was high, you weren’t

worried.

Bend an aeroplane is fairly nasty. Assault somebody, that can be affliction. All those sorts of things. Or fail your bloody ground exams, they were constant situation.

The navigation ones were fairly constant. You had to get certain standards

in Morse by light and by key. You had to get certain standards in bomb aiming. All of your ground exams in theory of flight. Air force rules, regulations, laws and king’s regulations and those things started to come in then. That became awkward because you had to know the bulldust of the air force.

What you could be charged with, what were the penalties, all of the internal discipline, because a serviceman is under not only the law of the land, you’re under the law of the service as well. The law of the service is quite distinctly different. Quite distinctly separate from the general law of the land.

Insubordination, telling an officer what to do rudely, would be one. Theft of property would be another. Malicious damage of an aircraft would be another and malicious damage of equipment would be another. Disobeying

rules, regulations, the certain regulations regarding safety and security on rifle ranges and firing ranges and things like that. If you wilfully break those rules and regulations, the chargeable offence. So those things were what you’re concerned with. All these had to be told and learned by the trainee. The amendments

had to be included in the book. It’s an ongoing exercise.

Yes, when I got my wings I had a girl from the tourist bureau came down and Mum and Dad came down. That was it. McNamara

was there and I marched up to him and saluted and he gave me some wings and I walked around to the other side and they put some stripes on my shoulders and that was it. And marched out.

I must admit that at that stage there was a feeling of achievement, a bit like climbing the top of a mountain. You get there and you have a look around, but you don’t

hang around. You have a look around again and then you go down. You get back to where the other people are. That was it.

I don’t’ know whether Dad bragged at all. I doubt it. There would be side swings of saying, “My boys; gone to air gunnery school at West Sale, he hasn’t gone up to

OTU [Operational Training Unit] or any of the difficult exercises, he’s on Ansons.” He said, “Oh, a stagger around the sky.”

I don’t know if he said that, but that’s what he could have said. One thing that I must tell you about, whilst I was at Point Cook I was in a train with my father. He was driving an electric train in Melbourne. I

said, “If I get up above the driver’s seat, right up high, I’ll be at a bout the same height as when you’re coming in to land.” So I had a couple of afternoons and an evening travelling with Dad, familiarising myself with travelling at speed that high, which I though was a bit of an effort of training.

A Victoria railway train engine, you’re about 10 feet off the ground when you look at the up top window, which was a guard’s window really. I could stand up there and look at the ground and get the view that you’d get when you’re coming in to land. I never had any problems about coming in to land. A, I’d been playing table tennis and getting the

eye coordination well, and I’d practised this travelling at speed 10 feet off the ground. That was it. Nobody said anything about it, nobody commented. Dad was a foreman driver by that stage, so I don’t think they worried. He was a union rep and he was well respected.

The sense of speed is enhanced the lower you get. You sit in an aircraft travelling at 30,000 feet the earth moves very slowly underneath you. You get at 10 feet travelling a the same speed, it whizzes past with great, great, great speed, apparent speed, and recognition of items and what’s coming and things like that is different.

So I was getting the idea of seeing ridges and trees and things at a distance viewed at speed from 10 feet high. That was all. A bit different though.

The circumstances of my arrival at almost each

flying station in the RAAF was that there was a prang within the first week or so prior to my arrival. The one at West Sale was slightly different. It wasn’t an aircraft crash, it was a true accident, where by a Fairey Battle tug pilot swooped down on a group of people sunbathing on the 90 mile

beach near Seaspray. The sad thing was that he had his drogue attached. The drogue is a large canvas saucer thing, hanging out the back of the aircraft on the end of a very long cable about 800 feet or more. As he swooped down low the cable was below him, swept along the beach and took

off a girl’s legs. It was terrible, unsurprising and the basis for a very prompt and important court martial held at Sale. I’m not quite certain what happened to the bloke afterwards. I think he was taken off flying. Accidents are common in the air, common

on the ground I should say. That was a nasty one.

Yup.

No bloody rumours, the facts were out.

No, I didn’t.

There was very little training of the

pilots at West Sale because we were there as staff pilots. We were merely drivers doing a job. The only training that was involved was what you picked up as you went along called experience and the practical sides of how to perform all of the exercises. The job was to give air gunners air experience operating power turrets and

controlling the machineguns. You’d first of all fly up beside the drogue, they would fire at it. Next you would fly underneath the drogue and they would fire up and it and you’d wave around a little bit so that they had a variation of position and aiming spots and things like that. Then the next one was the very interesting one where you had to fly in such a way that the drogue was seen to attack to

aircraft as though it was a fighter. For this you have to throw the Anson around from low lever, compared to the drogue, to high level, swinging up and down and around again in a big swinging motion. This was very interesting and precise flying. Very good. The gunners that we were getting for trainees, were almost all Catalina and Liberator gunners.

Frequently ground staff, not specifically air gunners or aircrew. They were ground staff doing flying duties. So it sometimes meant that, for experience, we’d take them above the cloud and see what the weather was like. Or we’d take them out to sea a little bit further and show them what the coast was like when we had time and the

gunnery exercises were off early. That was the Anson flying West Sale. I got about 1,200 hours on that.

I haven’t the faintest idea. By this stage it’s getting into late 1943, middle of 1944.

Wasn’t a posting overseas that I expected. I expected, well, if you can call New Guinea overseas, we didn’t look upon it as that. Yes, there were a number of Beaufighter squadrons being formed and I was hoping to get onto one of them because I liked Beaufighters right from the start when I first saw them down at Laverton. The idea was that you go flying from East Sale, the Heart

as the station was known, and at East Sale you do a conversion course onto Beaufighter aircraft, Beaufighter bombers as they’re commonly called. The Beaufighter’s an Australian built aircraft, very rugged, very good. We would do a conversion course on that and then take on the Beaufighters.

A very small crew

and a very big aeroplane. Two engines. […]

The very big engines and the very big firepower. They were fast, they were low level, they

had a crew of two, one at the front, one at the back, four cannons and various numbers of machineguns, from 6 to 8, plus bombs, plus rockets, or they could carry a damn great torpedo. It gave you a menu of what you could do if you were out on battles up in the north of Australia. They were called Whispering Death, not by the Australians, but

by others, for very good reasons. I got down with one on the very shallow calm water out of Stockton Beach on one occasion, flying at about 300 knots full power. There were feathers of foam coming off the tips of the propellers near the water. We were very accurate in flying low. You had to be or you couldn’t tell the

tale. Bold pilots and old pilots, but we had to fly low and that was as low as anybody could ever get and walk away from it.

Well, a Beaufighter is a low flying aircraft. A low attacking aircraft. It fires cannons and rockets, which are fired at about anything from 60 to 200 feet and the

cannons, machineguns are exactly the same. The Japs did not like them. I think they would have been very good in Korea.

Peace being declared was a very interesting situation. I was at East Sale. The

rumours had been flying around and we had been flying around, but rumours had been going all over the place. We’d only been staying around Sale. I'm there, under the hood, in a Beaufighter, due to take off on an instrument training exercise, or check really, and the character beside me said various words. There’s a Jeep out in front

of us. The bloke on the Jeep was beckoning us back to the standing. I got onto the tower, or he got onto the tower, we threw the hood off, got onto the tower and they said, “Return to the lines.” No other comment. “What’s on?” “Return to the lines.” That’s all that was being said. There was no other radio messages, we didn’t have a radio on this one.

All the aircraft that were in the air from East Sale were all called back. If they were working radio they were kept on the radio so that they couldn’t get off to find out what was happening and every one of them landed safely. Had it been otherwise, characters have been known to go crazy, low flying, zooming around, doing all silly things and we could have lot aircrew and aircraft.

That’s where I was when peace was declared. There was a bit of a party on that night and every Beaufighter on the line lost all of its fairy lights. All of the fairy cartridges were taken and fired. Boom, boom, boom. A bit hard to buy fireworks at that stage.

Nothing. It’s over and done with. That was all it was. No disappointment,

no adulation. “I wonder what I’ll do now” was about the only thing.

Yes, in a way. All sorts of things change in war. You get sent to one place, you go to another place, you change and aircraft. All sorts of things change, so it was another change, a big one.

There were those people who had family relations and wives, children, they were wanting to get back, get home. I didn’t have any so that was no worry. And I was due to go onto Beaufighters. Low and behold, within a couple of days, a week after that, they did not cancel the Beaufighter course, it was continued. So I went up to Williamtown, north of Newcastle, which was very good.

I’m rather glad that the squadron I was going to didn’t get more than just a number and a couple of officers. It would have been 92 Squadron. 92 Squadron was going to fly the Australian built Beaufighters. Same power, delightful armaments, all of those things, but it had room for an automatic pilot.. Quite different to the ones

from Britain. That was because the task they were going to get was to fly from Borneo to Singapore and attack all the airfields and all the installations to try to keep the fighters out of the air, stop them from bombing the ground attack from a long range. It would have been interesting, but if you have a look at the map there’s a hell of a lot of blue between

those two places. The casualties would have been high and I wouldn’t be sitting here.

I reckon your number can only go so many times around in the barrel. So that was it, but I liked Beaufighters. I flew them with great love, care and affection.

I was flying in a formation of 5, a Vick, and I was in the middle right at the outside, number 5, right on the wing. I lost an engine. Not untidily or anything like that, it didn’t fall off, just I lost power, no power in the engine. Now, with some aircraft that’s a very great drama, with this one I dropped down low, out of the formation, we were up at

about 250 feet, I dropped down to about 100 feet telling the formation leader what I was doing and I went back to the field on one engine. Climbing up to the 1,000 feet to do the circuit as though I had no problems at all, and I didn’t. It got quite interesting because I called the tower and told them what I was doing and they said, “Yes, fine, we’ll have everything waiting for you down here.”

Ambulance, hearse, all that sort of thing. I then proceeded around the circuit. What you do is you go cross wind and you torque. So I’m turning base. I did that with a chest pressed to speak throat mike except I left it on. I broadcast to the formation, no, not to the formation, but to all the tower and the people there, “Now come on Wal.

Come on Wal. You put the engine on the outside of the strip and you land down the centreline to your left. That’s the way you’re gonna” I talked myself into a landing and everybody heard it. Everybody who was on that frequency. You do funny things.

“Good job.”

No. Not many who

knew about it, but the whole funny thing was that I saw the bits of engine that came out afterwards. The training aircraft get belted unmercifully by the pilots because they haven’t got any attachment to them. When you’ve got your own aeroplane you treat it rather differently. Rental cars are the same. So it’s not good.

It just failed on me just at the time I was in low and in a formation. Fun.

All I did then, I did a couple of crazy things. I could have gone to Zamboanga in the Philippines to pick up a Beaufighters and bring it back to Australia for

scrap. But instead, I went out to sea and welcomed my next-door neighbour, mate, back from POW business. That was a crazy thing because it would have been better to have gone to Zamboanga because I haven’t yet been to Zamboanga.

He was slightly impressed, overawed and that was it. We had

two brief conversations and I don’t think I saw him from that day to this. He was living in Moonee Ponds and I wasn’t.

Very interesting. Name it, I did it. I went to Mallala as a railway transport officer, crazy job. I flew radio calibration

at Point Cook. That involved travelling around Victoria a bit. Then I went to Laverton flying again a Beaufighter, but I was also flying an Anson. The Anson was when I flew Cy Greenwood around getting him back in the air again. Then the outfit

was packed up and we were all sent to Schofields just out of Sydney. When I got to Schofields I applied to go on the list for the Berlin airlift. The blokes at Schofield were on the list and they said, “You characters from Laverton are way down the list. You’re not ever likely to get on. The list is full, so hard luck.” I said, “Well, that’s all right.

I’m going on leave” which had been arranged back at Laverton. This leave was to go up to the Bogong High Plains skiing. The season was magic. There was snow every night, the wind was low, except at night it blew the fresh snow off the hills and down onto the, everything was great. So I had at least a fortnight. I forget whether it was a fortnight or a month, but at least a fortnight of skiing up there, plus

a day. The transport was simpler to arrange and I was a day over on my leave. I got back to the station and the squadron commander was Cy Greenwood. I said to him, “I’m sorry Cy, I’m back a day late.” He said, “That’s all right. We haven’t got anything for you to do. Report in when you get in and we’ll talk about it. You’d better be duty

officer for the weekend.” Duty NCO. I said, “Yeah, that’s fine.” So the weekend comes, Friday night comes, I take over duty NCO for the weekend. On Saturday morning there’s a signal from Melbourne which says “The British government have accepted the offer of 10 aircrew to go to Berlin.” That was interesting because all the Berlin people had gone off

on leave over the weekend. The Qantas bookings were for Tuesday night. Well, the whole lot of us, including the duty NCO, had to work out ways of getting people back from Sydney from racecourses, from all sorts of places, to get them to get back to the station. This was done. I was duty NCO. Because I had

gone on leave immediately on arriving on the station I had not cleared myself in. That is, you go to the doctor and you go to the hospital and you go to the dentist and you say, “I’m here.” And the cards and records are annotated appropriately. In the couple of days after arriving back from skiing I had leisurely cleared myself into two or

three or four of the places because I was meeting blokes from other squadrons and other places. There wasn’t any pressure. On Saturday morning I then had to organise the clearing out of all the people going to Berlin. Somewhere along the line, devilment got into me and I cleared myself out also.

This was fairly interesting cos it meant getting a special issue of clothes, getting three months of inoculations done on the one afternoon, getting my photograph taken for passport and all the things that were required. On Sunday all the bodies were back. There was a parade, as is usual. I went up to Cy and I said, “What happens if one of these

blokes pulls out, it’s a voluntary posting?” He said, “Oh, shit. I hadn’t thought of that.” I said, “Look, as a skipper I can go. As a second pilot I’ll go.” He said, “You’ll never get cleared in time.” I said, “Look at that.” All I had to do was a couple of minor things. I was the first bloke onto the aircraft on Wednesday.

The aircraft on Tuesday was delayed. I was first bloke onto the aircraft on Wednesday and a few days later I was the first bloke off the aircraft at Heathrow, which still had tents on it. How about that? And I was the first bloke back from the airlift some 9 months later.

No worries. I was cleared. It was all there on paper. Black and white.

Beautiful bloke, great bloke. Old cadet. A800 was his number. Nice fellow all the way through. Very human. Beaufighter pilots are like that.

That was

a long time ago when he first got back from POW. That was all.

We went to a little airfield called Bassingbourn. Small airfield. RAF permanent airfield. And the Daks Dakotas] could fit in there no worry at all. We did a bit of training at Bassingbourn. The skippers, I was the second

pilot on this one, went over to East Lynne or one of those places to do a specialist course on ground control approach, because we hadn’t got any in Australia and very rarely tried it here in Australia anyhow. They did ground control approach and we did a bit of instrument flying and familiarisation. Then we went over to Lubeck, and old Luftwaffe station place called Blankensee outside

Lubeck. Again, lovely station. Quite unfortunately located. You had to fly carefully because one side of the airfield was clear, the other side of the airfield put you over the Russian border. There was no fence there, but you knew where you were. So we had to fly left side or right side and that was it. They didn’t have ground control approach there.

The weather they had there was just as equal to the rest of the rotten stuff that you’re getting around Germany. That meant we had some interesting approaches into Lubeck. The only casualty the Australians had was Mick Quinn who went in flying with an RAF crew. He was on a different deal. The only Australian casualty on the lift. Very awkward running around there. You can run aground fairly easily.

That was well and truly known. Stalin kept on saying “no, you can’t come in.” We kept saying “oh, yes we can.” It was a difficult diplomatic thing. My passport of that year shows that I’m a British citizen. This was

important because the treaty that established the access to Berlin said the access was by British nationals. This posed the problem. The French nationals or the American nationals could fly their corridors into the. We were Australians, but we were British nationals. I think it was the

last time that anybody from Australia went overseas as British nationals. It was quite interesting.

Yeah, but it was a very straight forward exercise. “Go to Berlin, unload, come back.” You had times and

altitudes and that was it. The Russians did not appreciate the transport capacity of the Americans or the Brits. It was the Brits who started the airlift, the Americans wanted to go forward with tanks into Berlin down the middle corridor, the short one, and the Brits said, “We can fly food in and whilst the food is

coming in we’ll keep talking.” The Yanks put a squadron of B29s into England. What the B29s were carrying we don’t know, but they could have been lead encased if they were nuclear, they had nuclear capacity. They were the aircraft that bombed Nagasaki and Hiroshima. So it was right on a knife edge exercise. That’s what

we knew. So it was fairly interesting.

No, because again, the whole feeling was that “they can’t beat us.” I only saw a couple of Yaks [Soviet aircraft] come up to us and they did nothing. We were very experienced. The

Australians, the Brits, the Americans all were experienced, multi-hours air pilots. With the capacity with ground control approach and accurate flying, it only was boring, tiring and a stress in the aircraft. That became interesting because you sometimes flew aircraft with bits that didn’t work.

But only bits. The engines kept going and while the engines kept going we kept flying.

You might fly with one altimeter instead of two. You might fly with some of the lights not working. Minor things, which under normal circumstances you wouldn’t accept it.

Keep going. You had one job.

Go to Berlin, unload, come back, which was fairly interesting the first time I went there because we went there with our experience and our ideas and the rules as it was. We let down into Berlin, a whole series of beacons and radio things you fly in and around them, report in and do all this stuff. We were cleared to Gotow tower, the Australians were flying to Gotow. We called to

Gotow tower and called when we’re turning down wind, that is parallel to the runway. I was on the radio, Reggie Schadforth was flying and I said, “Turning downwind” whatever the course I was “175” say. “Roger 175, we have you. You are number 5 downwind.” We couldn’t see anything in front of us.

There’s four aeroplanes in front of us and we’re down to about 200 feet in light drizzle. That was common at the start when the weather was bad. Within less than a month, a month I suppose I’d say, we were flying straight through. No circuits. You let down from outside at the beacon and you let down into

control and from control to tower, straight line to the runway and if you didn’t make the landing you went home. Then you had to explain to Mum why you didn’t drop it, why the load is still in the back of the plane. It didn’t ever happen to an Australian as far as I know. A lot of funny little stories about those too. Very interesting.

“Gotow tower, 105, clear for landing.” “Clear for landing, 105.” Pommy talk. “York 105s you’d say.” “Gotow tower, sorry about that, going down again.” “York 105, return to base.” “Gotow tower, this is York 105 going around again.” “York 105 return to base.” “Gotow tower, this is York 105, why do I have to return to base?”

“Why do you have to go round again?” “York 105 returning to base.” That happened. Poms were flying Yorks in.

You could not fit another aircraft into the stream coming in. One taking off, one at the end of the runway,

one coming in.

Interesting. Nothing beyond that. We knew what we were doing, we could see what we were doing, we were under radar control and it wasn’t any great problem.

Yes, it was in times. Some pilots had some very interesting things in going in overloaded. Dave Evans

went in with two loads. Reggie Schadforth again, he had an interesting one. He lost an engine and had to unload the coal, we mainly carried coal. That was an interesting one. Generally everything was all right.

You name it. Everything that a city needed. Toilet

paper, sheet lead. Got into the aircraft there was no load there. Sheet lead for the industrial side of Berlin. We carried seamen’s electrical generators out of Berlin. We carried children in particular, but families out of Berlin. Some of them had come from the east, some of them were just bloody scared stiff and wanted to get

out of the place. We had quite a big passenger traffic.

Worried, concerned, they didn’t know English. We’d try with out Pidgin German to reassure them that Australians were on their side now, all that stuff. Fairly interesting when you meet Germans and you

say, “Yes, I’ve been to Berlin. I went to Berlin 89 times.” Then you say, “Taking flour and coal.” Coal was the main load.

Apart from

training I’d been flying all over Australia really from Laverton and doing all sorts of interesting flying. See, the grasshopper flying was interesting. I didn’t tell you about that. In early 1946 I was posted to fly Beaufighters around the Mallee and to Woomera, in particular to stop grasshoppers

getting into the citrus and wheat fields around northern Victoria. That was interesting, because we had to fly these Beaufighters at 35 feet, not 40 or 70, and we could get 35 feet fairly accurately. We practised and practised on it. We were taking out spray to

put over the grasshopper beds, or when they stopped, when they were in the crawler stage. That was interesting flying.

You don’t expect these things. You’re posted, you’re taken, you’re accepted. It was so interesting on one occasion that I climbed a fully loaded Beaufighter from 1,000 feet to 5,000 feet in a spiral, insufficient

power to move it on the ground. Everything throttled back. I’d even gliding a fully loaded Beaufighter. I kept on going up and going up, going up. They were ready down on the ground so I came down, sprayed and got back to land and they said, “Where have you been? You’re 20 minutes longer than your fuel capacity allows you for.” “I’ve been gliding.” How

about that? Interesting flying.

Curious. Excellent. I did a gliding B licence, which is only solo and a bit of spare time, at Alice Springs one time. Gliding is lovely. Slightly cheaper than power flying, but it takes more than two to tango. Takes about 4 to get you into the air.

That was only a short run. 6 months or so. The grasshoppers didn’t stay that long. OK, we’re back to

The decision was that second pilots were redundant, you could carry an extra couple of bags of coal. So we were sent back to Australia. That was an interesting thing. I came back in a Bristol

freighter. Flew back. A Bristol freighter, do you know them? Bristol freighter has a great big clam shell door at the front of it. The crews sit on a little area over the top of them. It’s got hanging down, fixed undercarriage. One of the first of those that went around touring was in Canada, and it went into La Guardia

airfield, and called “Coming in to land at the field.” The American flight controller said, “I have you, you’re at my field. Is that you on downwind?” He says “Yes, downwind.” “What sort of an aircraft is that?” “This is a Bristol freighter” said the Canadian.” Yank comes back and says “did you make it yourself?” It really looked a funny aeroplane. We flew back in one of those.

The springing system in the shells has a built in bounce to it so that precision landing really was wanted. It’s a flexible aircraft and it tends to, when it leans over sideways you can’t open the doors. You’re sitting up so high, that when you go to land

you go higher because the change of altitude puts you higher than when you start, which is all very funny.

When we arrived in England, England was still under wartime rationing conditions.

It was very limited in the way of food and clothing. There was plenty of food, but the scale and the scope was quite limited. The weather of course was a shock to us, even though I had been skiing early August. It was September when we arrived there and I went down into the town of Royston

looking around, wearing my heavy great coat and visited the swimming pool to see what the hell people were doing on a day like that, and they were swimming. England impressed me. I liked it, I went wandering around. I found a grave in the Royston churchyard from 1648, which I thought was fairly impressive.

I didn’t know that people died that old. The whole thing that went on in England was welcoming. They were welcoming us, we were welcoming them, it was all very warm and friendly.

No, it’s all obvious. You don’t talk about those things under those circumstances.

We went down to London. It was fairly impressive to see that the rubble had not been touched very much at all and I’ve got photographs of London with St Paul’s Cathedral standing proud and bugger all, all around it. Lots and lots of rubble, lots and lots of disastrous breaking down.

No, but we were welcomed back into various pubs. Particularly I went into one in Cambridge and the woman said, “Just a moment, I’ll put a couple of bottles in the fridge for you, dear.” Very difficult to get cold beer, but we did. In Germany we used to leave it out in the snow. The Brits thought we were crazy.

That was quite interesting, because when we flew over in our Qantas constellation aircraft, we travelled as government officers, not RAAF officers, we travelled

as government officers in civilian clothes because we had to go through Egypt, which at the time was having a war with Israel. In fact the first air raid that I went through was in Egypt.

Nothing. But it did mean that we had civilian clothes with us. So that we could go into Lubeck

wearing civvies and disappear into the crowd, which was rather interesting. Didn’t ever get to Berlin. 80 times or so going to Berlin and never getting to Berlin. Always got to Gotow, but never got to Berlin. So as far as seeing the people, yes, Lubeck was interesting, not very much knocked about. One big raid back in

41, but that had largely been repaired. Some plaster fell off the inside of their cathedral, which they liked very much because it showed something of the old touch of the place.

An Israeli aircraft came over looking at what the weather was like or something like that. A weather recognisance aircraft, that was all. We’d

just landed at the airport, then we went into Heliopolos palace and stayed there.

That’s a hotel, it’s not a palace.

A bit like a hotel which was like a palace. Very generous, very friendly place, which as somewhat similar to Raffles Hotel where we stayed in Singapore. Travelling was crude in those days.

We had no time, we didn’t go away from the hotel. Distant view of the pyramids, that was it.

They accepted what we were doing as being fairly amazing.

That was the general view. They would not have expected it of their own forces, and certainly not of the Russians. So they were fairly amazed. That was the general sort of thing. Did not expect it. “goodness gracious.”

RAAF were there for

the long haul, this wasn’t known for a start, but the Brits used to be pulled out after so many months. Our blokes, the original group, stayed there all the way through. I think Dave Evans flew 250 flights into Berlin. I only got up around the 80s.

Working was a very interesting thing. I explained that the chaos of the original flights in.

The Americans organised this straight-through system, which was brilliant. The Brits organised a timeframe that was brilliant. That is, it was a 20 hour day. If you took off at 8 o'clock tonight, you took off at 4 o'clock tomorrow and you took off at midday the next day. After 3 days you had a little break and you started the whole thing again on a different time. You’d

start takeoff at midnight, then you’d take off and your day became 4 hours shorter each day. Breakfast could be late at night, or it could be early in the morning, and there’d be fellows at the table eating lunch. The messes were going all the time.

Well, it was quite curious, because the base tended to explode under bad weather.

When the place was flagged in, when the birds were walking, the messes used to run a little bit hot and there’d be drinking competitions and singing competitions. And a rugby game on one occasion, which was quite marvellous.

Somebody who knew the rules. Or some of the rules.

This would be the Brits versus the others. We had South Africans and New Zealanders with us at the same time. Not many New Zealanders, but a lot of South Africans.

I don’t think anybody can remember the rugby game. If you got a try you had half a bottle of rum or something to drink.

Most of it, yes.

No, it didn’t do much damage. Repaired within a week or two. Carry on.

We didn’t see much of the RAF officers other than the ones we dealt with in flight planning and control.

Their airport control and ground control approach was brilliant. Absolutely marvellous. They carried an atmosphere of confidence and clarity right down to the ground. Very good.

Hell no. No. I flew with every pilot that was there. I was flying second pilot you see. I flew with every pilot that was there. Which

I started this bloody idea I think of cutting the crew back to three, because I went away skiing, went away skiing and then I went away skiing. The thing being that I went on regular leave, skiing, used to get a few more days after a few months. I went down to Austria, down to Lemoos, where the Brits had a chalet system going,

all free and for nothing. Very good. So I went skiing down there, came back, and there was a little notice in the RAF news, that those people who would like to represent the RAF against the civilian occupation force send their names in. I said, “That’s not a bad idea, I’ll do that.” So I sent my name down to the RAF bloke wherever

it was and explained that I’d been skiing down at Lemoos, which is near the Zugspitze, very impressive mountain, and that I’d been skiing in Australia back in August, so I’m fairly au fait with what the snow looked like and I got the job, got a place, all expenses

paid. But the CO didn’t want me to go. He said, “You’re making a welter of this.” I said, “I’m flying the flags.” I never did get a flag to fly either.

This is an alpine competition between the civilian occupation people, the British “Administrator”, who were looking after health, money, all

the things that administration does, and the RAF, who don’t look after all that stuff. So that was all. And there was a South African and a Kiwi and myself, a sole Aussie, and a couple of Brits, ground staff fellows. I won the combined alpine and cross-country one. But I didn’t win any

one of them, I came second or third in each of the three competitions and ended up being the overall winner. But it only gave me a little silver-plated medal. Didn’t mean anything. I did get membership of a ski club down there. That was good.

Yeah, that was the first time I’d ever been in T bars, which was quite a lot of fun.

I didn’t know how to operate T bars, and I was watching them went away. Second nature. Within a day I was tearing down the slopes with the best of the little kids, because they always embarrass you. A bloke said, “You have been here before?” I said, “No, no, I just arrived yesterday.” “You ski very good, sehr gut.” I said, “I was

skiing a bit. I was skiing in Australia just a couple of months ago.” “In Australia? No snow in Australia.” I said, “Viel schne, viel schne.” Had a lot of fun.

A flying day? No, because you start whatever the shift time is

8am. Say you’re taking off at 8am. You fly

You gotta go down and check your aircraft number and those things and have a meal, usually because it’s out of sync everything, and you go down, check your aircraft number, check your crew. You’re not really certain which crew you’re gonna be flying with. Then you check where your aircraft is. Then you go out to your aircraft.

That becomes a bit funny, because later on there were so many aircraft moving around, that checking the aircraft, required listening on the radio, rather than calling up to check whether people could receive you and whether you could receive them. So I’m sitting there, this actually happened sometime round about 11 o'clock at night, get into the aircraft, do all the ordinary checks,

turn on the radio and there’s silence. Nobody, nothing, you can’t hear whether the aircraft is working. So one of the other crews said, “Hey, somebody say something.” And a third fellow came up and said, “Something.” From that everything was right, we all knew we could receive, so we were then clear

to roll, clear to taxi, clear to all the other things that you clear. You go back and set your self in the queue to take off.

Doing all the things that the skipper doesn’t want to do, that’s the main things. We used to shift around. I could be flying left seat, he could be flying left seat, doesn’t matter. Skipper normally flies left seat.

The second pilot does the radio. Then again, we’d be off early the next day. Instead of leaving at 8am, taking off at 8am, that block, we’d be taking off at 4am. Then the next day we were taking off at midnight. By the time you get back from that, you

get ready for 36 hours leave.

About an hour and a half. Not much. That was all.

Yes, outside Berlin there would be a radio beacon, which was right on the boundary of the British sector

at a place called Frohnau. You would have your time to get to Frohnau, plus or minus a few seconds. So your navigation had to be quite good. You’d get to Frohnau and you would call at UHF [Ultra High Frequency] Frohnau. You then call what your load is. This would be recorded so an appropriate truck and unloading party could meet you and you’re strictly in sequence

going through. Frohnau you would get that information and you would say, “Descend to another beacon” at which stage you’d report over that beacon, which is a radio beacon, and they’d put you onto control, or approach, and approach would then put you onto tower. All this is happening in a straight line. Descending, descending, descending.

You’re still flying, and I was still flying skipper half the time, which is only left hand seat. No, it never did worry me. I flew quite a lot of second pilot time after getting qualified as captain. It didn’t worry me. I was still getting paid.

It’s only boring when everything’s happening absolutely marvellously. When you start getting weather troubles and that was common, and when you start getting perhaps a bit concerned about an engine, all of those things start to get

a bit different. Then there’s all the natter going on. Radio discipline was terrible. The Yanks would be talking about what they’re doing and who and what and where they’re going and what the black market prices were. It was crazy. The Americans came from all over the world. Flew their aircraft in from Alaska, Hawaii, South America,

Canada, the big DC4s were flying in from all over the place. They’re getting to know each other again. Although they were stationed at Frankfurt am Mein, that was an airfield that was like a small city. They may not even meet one another. It was quite amazing. They had two man crews,

they did all their nav and all their work together. We were doing 4 and then 3. There was a fair amount of pressure, but they used to relieve themselves by nattering, but they had a longer drag as well. They used to fly from Frankfurt.

The SAAFs [South African Air Force] were good. The Kiwis were all officers, a little bit,

we didn’t have much to do with them. One bloke turned his Dakota up on its nose in the taxi area, that was an interesting one. I’ve never seen that done before or since.

Yes, he was all right, just embarrassed. Had to work out how to get the bloody tail down, that was all. No, no, we had a couple of blokes from Barbados, we had British army engineers working with us, they were mainly doing

the loading. No, no worries, a lot of fun.

Not always.

Yeah.

We had absolutely no problem with anybody. The Brits came and went and we stayed. The SAAFs stayed. We mixed with them. I went on leave with a couple of them on one occasion. We went into town together. No problems. We were all flying the same aircraft, all got the same experiences, all got the same background and all facing the same rotten bloody weather.

No, it was a very interesting situation, Lubeck provided the power. The power station was in Lubeck. If the Russians had given any trouble to the air force or people in Lubeck, they’d have cut off the power, and the Russians knew this. Our one and only prang, when Quinnie went in, was

on the ration side. Although it was lousy weather, our blokes went in, picked up the bodies, came back.

They ran aground in disastrous weather. We were all flagged, we weren’t flying. I don’t know really why he tried to get back, but he did. He was with an RAF crew and somehow or other missed the beacon, missed everything and ran aground.

Yes, the Russians “da, da, da” No worries.

No.

No. I went into Hamburg and saw street, after street, after street, after street piled

10-12 feet high full of rubble. No houses at all, and a little pathway through it for somebody who had found a cellar that he could live in. We flew over Berlin and saw vegetable gardens growing on what would have been the ground floor of a 6 or 7 flats. We saw hundreds of women cleaning bricks in the streets.

I landed at Tegel, which is now the municipal airport, when there was only tents there. Tegel was built on the rubble of Berlin. It’s in the French sector. The French showed their Gallic sense of humour by when the aircraft came in they were all recorded on the board and then

they showed their destination as “Nice”, “Paris”, “Lyon.” That was all rubbed out and we all went back to Lubeck.

No. There was a girl working at Blankensee who was trying to

come to Australia, that was how I met her. She had come from somewhere out in the east and was in Dresden when that got its treatments. She said there was no reason for Dresden being bombed. There was nothing there. She was a nursing aid in a hospital and said she had to carry a bloke

with no legs down 8 or 9 floors in a hospital. Got down the bottom and they had nowhere to go. There was fire outside. They tried to go on down further and there was a shelter somewhere down further and she couldn’t get in, so they stayed on the steps of the shelter. Never did meet her again in Australia. I tried to find her at one stage. Yes, we know about

the atrocities, but some of them were on our side.

No, that was very hard. They weren’t talking, still not really realising, accepted it. I’ve been back to Germany. There was a comment I wanted to make.

Can’t, doesn’t matter. The Germans were quite friendly with us. We found that they knew quite a lot about Australia, cos there were a hell of a lot of Germans in Australia. We had people with German names in the crews that were flying. All of that was quite interesting.

No, down to 3 from 4.

There was no sense of me staying over there, so I came back to Australia on the beaut Bristol freighter, which I only got to fly once. Didn’t thrill me, didn’t want to thrill me, I didn’t want to be thrilled. So we got back here and

I was in at Schofields and a crew came in and said, “Wal, what are you doing?” I said, “I’m doing nothing.” They said, “why don’t you come down to Canberra with us? The Governor-General’s flight is looking for a new second pilot.” I said, “Oh, God not again. All right, I’ll go.” So I went down to Canberra. That was quite good. One aeroplane, one crew, lots of different flying all around Australia. Took a bit of

sorting out mentally, I admit this, what does the boy from Moonee Ponds do flying VIPs? I had flown VIPs, odd ones, with the communication flying from Laverton, but this was a real deal of white uniform and “Yes, sir” “No, sir” business. And “Your Excellency” let me say.

So that took a bit of dealing, because I’d been used to flying Beaufighters I flew in army boots always. I did a lot of flying with army boots or air force boots. Here I am flying in spit and polish shoes with a white uniform and everything starched. Very different. It was interesting.

So we flew all over Australia. Over to the west, up to New Guinea.

Very easy to meet. This was Sir William McKell. Very easy. Very friendly family. We were dozing along, that’s a terrible word to say, we were cruising along across the Great Australian Bight going across to the west on one occasion.

The navigator was asleep, that didn’t matter, the wireless officer was almost asleep, the skipper was asleep and I’m flying the aircraft with George.

George? George is the slave who flies the aircraft when nobody else wants to. Automatic pilot. I can show you a trick with an old stiff glove at some stage. Stiff glove, you put it

on the control column you see. The girl comes along and she says “what’s that?” and I say, “that’s George flying.” Fun. However, we’re sitting there doing nothing, rolling across the thing and there’s a “BZZZZZZZZZZ.” All spring to action stations. I’m madly checking the engines and every other damn thing and somebody says “It’s the buzzer from the cabin.”

It was Pam McKell, the Governor General’s daughter. She said, “I’ve often wonder what would happen when that.” In the many couple of hundred hours that I flew with the Governor-General, that was the only time that the buzzer was ever pressed. We’re sort of “What the bloody hell?” It was fun. That’s the atmosphere that we established, you see. The rapport.

Yes. It was enjoyable because it was a challenge. You see, it was like the lift, because there was a timetable. The aircraft stopped, the doors opened, the Governor-General walked out and it was all on time. The Governor-General got in, the doors shut and the engines

started. We had the techniques down like that.

No, we’re not gonna talk about girls. No, we’re not gonna talk about girls.

I know, but you’re asking what the bloody hell I was doing. We were wandering backwards and forwards from Sydney to Canberra and Canberra to Sydney, and you’ve heard of sailors.

I wasn’t a sailor, I was an airman, and that was quite interesting. Girl in each port. That was the way we went.

No, it all blew through, all folded up.

Absolutely marvellous. Great crew. We had, Jimmy Inkson was the flying engineer.

His father was a very good racehorse jockey in Melbourne and came from the same school in Moonee Ponds. We had another little steward who used to fly with us. We liked little fellows that doesn’t take up much weight. Didn’t have any WAAAFs in those days doing those sorts of things. The steward looked after the Governor-General’s meals. We’d serve meals in the air and do the whole five star bit. Very good.

No, the crew was marvellous. Very good.

No, forget about security in those days. Although I was involved in security on one occasion. I had to escort the Queen around the government house. “Just go there and stay close, Wal.”

Nothing.

She was visiting.

No, I didn’t end up, it was I was an officer at the Canberra airfield and I was delegated to go and hang around. That was all.

Quite lovely. Quite lovely. She’s got a mole on her left shoulder.

You can get fairly close when you wander around.

No, somebody, it just happened to be there.

No, we didn’t talk, we didn’t natter, didn’t touch her or do anything like that.

Yup. The presence of some uniformed fellows was always. You raised the subject of security. No.

No,

unless it was his cook. He used to travel with his cook. The cook is a very interesting fellow because his name was Ces Pennycook. He was a chief petty officer in the Royal Australian Navy, so he was CPO [Chief Petty Officer ] cook O Pennycook O. I think that’s the right sequence of it. Just for the

hell of it. You’re getting, you ask me the questions, I’m only providing the answers.

He was very interesting of having a look at his property in Goulburn, so we always did a circuit or two of that. That was all.

No. He got into the aircraft and I was at the front

working.

No, there’d be a gentle nod I think was about as far as we went.

Yes, flew quite a lot of VIPs. [Herbert Vere] Bert Evatt [Deputy Prime Minister, 1946-49] was a passenger who was a bit different. Hated flying. He hated flying. Really and truly

hated it. So we tried to do the best thing for him this time. We planned to go down the coast to Nowra and come over into Canberra that way. We got into some clear air turbulence off the coast and tried to get out of it and we could not. We went up, we went down, we went sideways and so did Bert Evatt and he did not like it at all. I think that was the only time we ever flew with him, or he ever flew with us. No, VIPs are

very easy to get on with. They know you’ve got a job to do and you just do it, that’s it.

We flew up to New Guinea to one of the last real sing-sings. This was a terrific exercise. Girls, all in native costume, grass skirts,

that was it. Absolutely delightful classic dancing gear for the men and the women . A girl guide troop marched passed. Absolutely delightful. Little girls, little white legs sticking out of blue skirts and about 20 native girl guides in

grass skirts. That was classic. I’d love to have a photograph of that to go to Lady Baden-Powell. There was a lot of interesting stuff in that trip to New Guinea because it was all so very developing and new. We also went into Morotai where there was a Japanese prisoner of war camp. These were the bad prisoners of war. I was taking movies of that.

Yes, not only Kieran can work a movie camera. Do you edit this?

I don’t think the person who stopped the Governor-General from doing anything had been born yet.

The Governor-General was going into the Japanese war criminals camp and I was taking an 8 millimetre film of the Governor-General’s tour for the Governor-General’s personal records. That was all.

The Governor-General’s flight was a luxurious touch of Australian loyalty. It started with 2 aircraft, then 1, hand polished, white uniforms, all the touch. There was more and more VIP traffic developing.

So we were shifted to join the rest of the crew of the regular transport squadron. So it was 86 wing north of Sydney. This was quite good. When I was there, I only did a little general flying around there. Some of it with paratroops up at Williamtown, which was interesting. Then I got a chance to go to

Korea. Korea had been operating with Dakota transport aircraft from before the Korean War. There was a single aircraft up there and then there were more and more until we formed a full 36 Squadron of aircraft flying out of Iwakuni over to airfields in Korea. When I got there we were flying into Pusan and Taegu.

Pusan’s right down on the south coast, Taegu is basically in the centre of South Korea. Then we managed to get cleared. The front went back a bit and we started flying into Suwon. Suwon was an old Japanese fighter strip really. Quite short, built like a dumbbell. Unusual with two big circle at the ends. This was south of

Kimpo, Seoul, but that was beaten up and we couldn’t get in there. Later on we could get into Kimpo. I got in there when there was an airfield that was under 3,000 feet long. That is fairly short for a loaded aircraft. We got in over the damage and stopped before the rest of it. That was rapidly repaired. The Americans were brilliant in their airfield construction

and maintenance.

By this stage I had been commissioned. By this stage, the air force career looked very well settled, very good, I had no hesitation about flying the aircraft up there. I had no worry about that. I thought it was a good

opportunity to get more experience, all of these things. It was in the regular routine of doing what the rest of the mob were doing. Except I’d mucked it up slightly and got myself married at that stage too. Ah well.

What? Getting married?

No, no it wasn’t.

I liked the idea because it was obviously going to be interesting flying. And it was. Flying into Pusan was brilliant. “The Land of the Morning Calm” as they used to call Korea. You go in there early morning, which was usual. Poetry has been written about that.

No.

She was there and I was going and that was it. It was sort of the done thing with the services. Yeah, I went to Korea. Into Taegu. Taegu was fairly interesting. The Americans had their, I don’t know the number of the fighter wing, but they were flying F86s from their Sabres. They would build a strip,

rollout a strip, say a mile and a half long. Then beside it they would start another strip, which would be two miles long. When the two mile long one had been finished, they would go back to the one and a half one and make that two and a quarter miles long. And improve the surface. So this left, right, left, right strip situation meant they were getting bigger and better and capable of

flying more aircraft all the time and it was impressive to see how efficient they were. They were flying these massive groups of Sabres up into MiG Alley, up the top end of North Korea and getting victories too. So we ended up going into Taegu and then to Suwon. After a while we got into that

short airfield at Kimpo. That also then started to get the US efficiency of building and the longer an longer strip got in there. So eventually the 77 Squadron boys could bring in the Meteors, which had just started when I got there to Japan. Meteors were very interesting. They also gave us more work because

we had to fly rocket motors an ammunition and stuff over to them, and that was a common load almost all the time. We weren’t only flying one way loads. We were flying one way loads in Berlin in the main, but into Korea we were flying things into Pusan, sometimes from Pusan to Suwon, sometimes from Suwon into Taegu, not very often. Then again,

back the other way, picking up all sorts of things, including casualties. I became something of a casualty expert later on.

The places were knocked about, really and truly. Thee was a

hell of a lot of work going on all the time. It wasn’t knocked about in the same way as Germany was knocked about, but there was a lot of damage all over the place. Villages were knocked about. They weren’t totally flattened, eradicated, wiped out, call it what you will. The Taegu was knocked about

a bit. Seoul got most likely as bad a beating as all, and certainly the airfield. The facilities on the airfield. The concrete facilities of Korean Airlines and such, were just shells. It was really rough.

We got

practically no briefing. Transport squadrons don’t work that way. You have a job to do, you’re told when to take off so that people can catch you, like a transport. All of your destinations usually have a time that “Be here at such and such a time if you can and don’t take off before such and such a time because we might have somebody to go with you.” So that you were working to a timetable.

It’s a timetable wasn’t terribly strict. Sometimes you’d get back really quick. Other times you’d be hanging around waiting for people.

Yeah, I used to talk to them at Schofields, people who’d come back. Yeah. Just general natter. The same as any

place at all. What facilities are there, if there’s problems on the approaches, those sorts of things. Nothing, you weren’t worried. You had the capacity, so you weren’t worried.

Happens all the time.

You get

interested in what’s happening. You’re looking at things. You become an observer of curious things. Like a factory near Taegu where the chimney goes up the slope of a hill and then is vertical at the top of a hill. Things like that become landmarks in your mind. Or when you’re coming in to

Pusan down the south and you fly over a little ridge and you drop down into a valley, or you can, which I did, and the ridge up the top is marked all over with grave domes. They make little hillocks for their relatives. It’s interesting country. Also the most beautiful country. It’s like

Windsor or Newton had gone out with their paints and painted the trees orange, red, yellow, all sorts of colours. Brilliant, beautiful. Hilly, timbered, curious, agriculture. And the little towns that were around the airfields just struggle up like little bush towns

in Australia. In those days you’d see people wandering around with white gowns and conical hats, which was the original old traditional clothes. You’d see the women walking around in their flowing garb. Trussed up, high straps under the dress. You’d see kids looking for lollies and cigarettes.

The world was the same everywhere.

You get a call from the tower. You say, “G’day tower. I’m coming in.” They will then tell you the operating runway. They then tell you the weather.

This became interesting on one occasion. I went into Kimpo and couldn’t see Kimpo. Kimpo was under a stationary rain cloud. I knew where the approach was, so I did a bit of fiddling around outside, but the time was getting away from me. I said, “I’m coming in. I’m going to clear to land.” They said, “You have a cross wind which has been gusting as high as

40 knots and it’s raining.” I said, “I can see the rain.” So I drove into a grey wall. Couldn’t see anything other than rain. Kept on going, saw the piano keys at the end of the strip, went in, landed with lots of left boot and that was it. please understand that we had been doing this for years.

it wasn’t’ anything different unless you got things like radio towers and things like that. That becomes different. You’ve got to know where they are.

Mainly stuff for the 77 Squadron. Mainly, but we were carrying mail, we were carrying passengers, I carried ‘Speakmen of the VC’ [the correct English way to address VC winners] at one stage, who I thought was from the Gloucesters and actually he was a sergeant from the Black Watch, but that’s by the way.

Speakmen can be an NCO or a private and you salute him. I did. Passengers, we had personnel for 77 squadron, they’d come back to Iwakuni on leave. Wed be taking them backwards and forwards. Flew the CO a couple of times backwards and forwards. I was sitting at the end of Kimpo strip ready to take off one time and they called me and said, “Have you got any load capacity?” I said, “Yes.”

He said, “We have five packs for you.” Passengers that is. So I said, “Plenty of room.” Over the five passengers came and the most senior admiral of the United States’ navy plus his four support staff got onboard. I had dirty Canadian army sleeping bags

were going back to Japan to get washed and reissued. So I brought the admiral up and we talked and talked and talked about flying and sailing and ships and America and Australia. As the evening drew on we went across the Sea of Japan and there were the little fishing boats all with their lights out. We came in and landed and there was a car waiting for him to take him away to another aircraft.

I got roused up by the bloody station commander cos I didn’t tell him, cos he could have come down and got a shake of the hand. Yes. I also brought a bloke back and nobody knows who he is. I think I know who he is. A senior British officer who was brought back under military guard. Interesting.

I don’t know and I wouldn’t like to hazard a guess.

It was the only time when I was directed to wear a .45 [revolver]. We occasionally carried side arms. The CO, Johnny Gerber, said, “Well, have you got your .45?” I said, “It’s in my armoury. I don’t carry it.” He said, “Draw it.” We think it was most likely a mental breakdown, but that’s by the way.

Absolutely quiet, no worries.

There was a captain of the British military police, a very unusual beast to see around the place. And a couple of sergeant red caps along with him. Yeah.

Weather and other aeroplanes occasionally. But that was the only thing.

No.

We had no casualties. It was one of the greater safety records, fail safe things. We got in to some stations when we were the only blokes who flew in and flew out. Although I tried on a couple of occasions, three times I tried to get into Pusan once. I could have run aground, so I didn’t. Pusan’s sitting right in the

middle of a valley and it was too dangerous, so we skipped Pusan and went home.

Again, all of the aircrew had many thousands of hours of flying. The standard was high, the experience level was high, and the aircraft maintenance was so good that we could trust the aircraft

and trust the radio no worries. Very good maintenance. Very good team. Some of them were Japs, incidentally.

No worries. They’d most likely been keeping Mitsubishis in the air. They could keep Pratt and Whitneys [engines] in the air as well.

Great, no worries at all.

Excellent. All ranks, all levels. The very senior officers tended to keep to themselves. Beyond that, no worries, the rest of the squadron, all the flight commanders and squadron bods all the way down, very good. And with the Americans, we had two American squadrons on the base as well. One flying flying boats and

one flying A26 attack aircraft, which were fairly hazardous operations.

They tend to use more rather than less. That’s the main element of their operations. If you can’t do it with 16 aircraft, we’ll do it with 32 because they’ve got more.

That was the same in all their things. One thing I must tell you, a funny one, as I said Suwon was just south of Kimpo. I took off from Suwon one time to go to Kimpo, which is a very short run. The weather was down over Kimpo so I requested clearance to do a low approach to Kimpo. I kept talking to the tower that

I’m approaching and I’m gonna turn around. They said, “Right-o, we’ve got you, we’ve got you we’ve got you.” I said, “I’m turning base”, that meant I’m coming in to land. At the same time as I turned base to land a block of flats called a C140 or some such thing of vast American cargo plane,

which became a globe master at some stage, came out of the clouds right where I was going to be to land. Interesting. So I continued my turn, turned around, he went back into the clouds and I went down and landed. I think there were some fairly crazy conversations with traffic control. I had been keeping myself perfectly clear all the way through because we used to do this

often enough when there was low cloud. The bloke on the instrument approach, they’d forgotten him. He’d most likely been on the instrument approach for 20 minutes. He was on the instrument approach before I left Suwon. He’d been on the instrument approach for so long they’d forgotten him. I think that was it. I just went zip, 360 and around and landed.

Yes, four letter word. The same one that’s used all the time by all aircrew, and it can be found on every cockpit voice recorder when there’s an accident or near accident or an incident or an engine had come. S-H-one-T. That’s all I said. The second Joe was looking at me and we continued the turn and landed.

Dakota C47. A gentleman’s aeroplane. Like an Anson with automatic retracting wheels. You’d have to really use a razorblade or a gun to kill yourself. If you pick the weather, if you pick the conditions, that’s why they’re still flying, that’s why there were so many of them built. Brilliant design, brilliant concept.

All very interesting.

Because they’re so solid, so rugged, so easy to fly, so easy to maintain, either the Pratt and Whitney engines or the Wright Cyclone engines, they stood the test of time. That’s it. So many people know how to fly them and know where to fly them.

What was it like? You want another warry [war story]?

It was in a Qantas going up with a C54. Skymaster for you. Skymaster. The only thing that was different was Dave Shannon was flying it. Dave Shannon was a Pathfinder on the 617 Squadron. That’s the

only thing that made a difference. Coming back it was another Qantas trip. Stop off in Philippines and back to Sydney.

Every time we went from Iwakuni we had to come home. We only very rarely did we stay overnight in Kimpo. If there

was somebody to come back, a passenger who wanted to come back early morning, that would be arranged. Generally we came back in the early afternoon, back round about 1-2 o'clock.

Very short. It’s not a straight line flight. You’ve gotta fly airways. Go down to the southern island and then go across to Pusan and you come back the

same track at a different altitude. There’s no sweat in it at all.

Japanese quarters. Brilliant. Single rooms, house girl to look after your clothes, I taught her how to spit polish shoes. She thought that was brilliant because it gave her an edge over the other house girls. She liked that.

Of spit polish?

You put a little water into the lid of the polish can. We used to provide the Kiwi polish. They polished the shoes, not boots those days, shoes with Kiwi and water, that’s all. It’s the same as the army use to spit polish. The accommodation was very good. Had a basin in every room.

Got in the way at times, only because she used to starch the clothes. It took three washes when I got home to get the starch down to a comfortable wearable level. They were very attentive the house girls. That was part and parcel of the scene in Japan. You must have a servant, you must have,

you can’t play tennis without ball boys. All that sort of thing was quite crazy.

Like most people who go up there. You think it’s crazy until you think, “I wish I could get used to this.” I found it was quite surprising to find somebody else tucking in the tail of my shirt. That was about the most curious.

Getting your neck massaged, that was quite interesting too. I must say that it made flying and life around the place rather good. The hot season, steamy season mean that you sometimes wear three shirts in a day and your flying gear got awfully dirty and stinky, So that took a bit of the scunge out of flying.

Now you’ve given me an entrée. The New Years Day whatever year it was, 1952 or something, a bloke named Johnny Newman and I were going into Yong Dong Po [secondary airport in Seoul]. We’d shifted out of Kimpo into Yong Dong Po. There was more traffic going into Kimpo so we got shifted. The ordinary transport squadron contact was

Yong Dong Po, down the river a bit, or up the river inland a bit further. We went into there. Johnny was flying. We’re doing a ground control approach and we could tell from the natter that there was a lot of aircraft on the dirt. When we were getting approach in they give us the call that the weather is low and lowering and it’s got cloud and snow in it.

We get down, break cloud at about 100 feet and we’re descending. We’re descending according to the ground control instructions precisely. On the taxiway were three C54s lined up. That made it fairly interesting. Power on, I’m in the right seat this time. Power on,

climb ahead. “Jump out of the seat, I’m getting in.” So he gets out, I’m hanging onto the throttle. “Get out, get into the side and stay straight ahead. We know where we are.” Still under the cloud though, just about climbed to 200 feet. So we’re going around. I did a long circuit so that we got ourselves all nicely settled down. Came around and did our approach and touchdown

at which time the C54s had gone. That was interesting, because the other side of the airfield had a 350 foot radio antennae sticking up. So we turned the right way and did the right thing. That was the sort of thing you could get into. You’d have to be aware. Yong Dong Po for a while was a bit twitchy on the approaches. The Americans were not as

good as the Brits were at that stage. Later on they became excellent too. It just meant calibration and changing of things. They got very good. The ground control approach at Iwakuni was excellent. That was an American station and that was very good. We would try and trick them. Say “We’re returning and we’ve been shot up and we’ve lost one engine, most of our

instruments. I think I’m south of you and I can’t stay around for more than about 20 minutes. I’ve got a fuel leak as well.” They would find me, bring me over the place, let me down into a quick let down for quick landing and bring me onto the runway with the live engine over the lights. Brilliant.

They were good. There was no emergency, that was all practise. We used to try and trick each other. That’s how good they were. That’s how good it can be.

Just for a change, I went skiing. The weather was such that I could go up north and went skiing at a couple of American

station resorts that they had up there. Absolutely marvellous. The skiing was quite interesting because some of it was primitive in the extreme as far as the facilities went. They had a sled on a cable which went up and down the snow, which required little Japanese men with straw capes keeping the track on and even keel. Hilarious. But it

got us up to the top of the hill and down the bottom of the hill and they would load up again and go up the sled. The resort was excellent. One of the hot spring areas. You could have a spa after skiing all day. Generally excellent facilities.

Good place too. We also had to take flights into

Narita, the Tokyo airport, fly in there. They had one occasion we were flying with a cyclone or typhoon and from takeoff to landing was something like 17 hours and we went all the way around, just getting away from this typhoon, which took us all round the place. We got to Narita and delivered what we had to deliver,

but that was fun.

We had to go along the north coast of the islands, because all the south coast. We were supposed to go into Iwakuni and up to Narita. But we had to go up the north coast and land in American strips again. Funny places.

Wait there until the weather cleared a bit more and then go up and over the hills and into Hanida and coming in from the west again.

The war wasn’t progressing, it was all stalemate situations. There were occasional casualties coming through because there was still patrol actions and small incidents. The major battles had

been fought. The arguments were going on and the patrol actions were going. And there were all the accidents. Traffic accidents and burns and all the things. Some of the casualties who had been treated a long time before needed going back to Japan for further treatment. We had quite a few stretcher cases coming through.

I wouldn’t say every day, but every two or three days we’d get a load of cas-evac people.

It’s only a part on the back job. When you’re flying cas-evac, what you try to do is to treat everything as though you’re carrying eggs. You fly smooth, fly in clean

air and land smooth and taxi smooth and stop smooth. All of the smooth things that I’d learned and polished with the Governor-General flight in particular, but with other VIP flights. Just one of the things that were care and concern. I was flying with sister Pam Schultz one time and I had a could be emergency, which

I had to land at an American airfield to get something patched up. I was flying with Pam Schultz the second time and we had a could be emergency. I can’t recall this one. We landed back at the base and I said, “You’re not superstitious are you? Three’s always the danger number in flying.” “No, not with you Wal, that’s all right.” I was very abstemious that night. I was very particular getting

up early in the morning, went and looked over that aeroplane all over it. Got over there to pick up the cas. Again, everything fine. Got back to Iwakuni and one of the hydraulic lines blew and I couldn’t lower the undercarriage. So into emergency drill, got the undercarriage down, landed, nothing said to Pam, she was in the back looking

after the passengers. Landed and she said, “Well, that was all right, Wal. There was nothing wrong with that at all.” I said, “Come and have a look at this.” And there was oil dripping and running out of the engine all over the place. That happens.

It’s a bit annoying and frightening. Not so much annoying, but shocking. You see the burn victims. They’re

stretched out, crucified on frames. You’ve got to fit them in with stretchers and straps. You try to say, “This requires a bit of special care, ease and concern,” but that’s all. I carried a bloke I went to school with on one occasion.

He wasn’t a casualty. Bloke called Ernie Radnall, a sergeant in 3RAR [Royal Australian Regiment].

That was a bit different. “G’day Ernie, how are you?” Way back from Moonee Ponds West state school.

No. He went up to Kobe and I didn’t see him again. I tried to find him down here, but he’s disappeared.

No. The thing that brings it home to you more is the casualties who you don’t see. You see, 77 squadron lost quite a few. I think it was about 1942. They were the ones, because most of the pilots in 77, or a lot of the pilots in 77, were my ilk and my age grouping and I knew them and it was

sad. You see them go and you see them come back. Then you don’t see them. Meteors were getting chopped up down on the ground because the Koreans had started to work out how to pick them off with ground fire. That was the sad situation.

You most

likely have a small beer and that’s about all. It happens. It happens.

No. The only ones that you talk about are the ones that are significant. The ones where like Susans and the people who had the

real record and history and very good and they went int. That was awkward.

Who, Schultz? She was one of an excellent bunch. There were quite a few sisters on regular circuitry of coming and going on flight sister duties. Brilliant women. Brilliant.

Their dedication, their professional capacity, knowing what they were doing. That was where I finished flying practically. I came back to Australia and got a bad backache.

One of the great stresses of being a pilot at the end of the war was scrub courses. The air force had many, many more aircrew than they wanted. They wanted not only to have them leave, they wanted to get rid of

them totally firmly. So they instituted a series of “Courses” called “Revision” or “Advanced assessment.” It didn’t matter what it was, it was a scrub course. The single engine ones were conducted in a couple eof places. The twin engine ones were conducted at Deniliquin. I got through the first scrub course without any great trouble,

then got a various couple of postings, still too many pilots and they send quite a few of us back to Deniliquin. This was getting fairly tiring on the check instructors, not from Czechoslovakia, the assessment instructors. They were doing crazy things. On one occasion I went out low flying with a test

instructor doing steep turns around a tree. Around and around and around this tree. He then proceeded to cut the inside engine, the down side engine and say, “Take me back to the base.” This was a test on whether you knew where you were, whether you lost your head in the steep turn after steep turn and whether you could handle one

engine at a low level and whether you were frightened of dying. I got him back to the base quite OK. Under normal circumstances, if that had been done in any other circumstance, you would have taken something quite heavy and blunt and hit him over the head with it because it was a ridiculous thing to do. The second course I got through. I’m doing instrument check. The instrument checks were

those nasty situations of flying an aircraft blind by having a hood over your head and covering up what you can see in the cockpit, like what it was on VP Day [Victory in the Pacific] ] at Sale. I did everything ready to take off, took off, got up high, checked the compass, checked the directional gyro and it was inoperative.

I hadn’t uncaged it. Immediate failure. It would have been. I broke down into a swearing, crying fit. I said, “It is unfair, wrong, every bloody thing.” The instructor bloke, I don’t know his name, said, “Let’s

go back to the field” satellite airfield, just an ordinary farmer’s paddock. He said, “Go away for half an hour and come back and we’ll start again.” How about that? I don’t know his name. So I got through the second scrub course and kept on going and got 3,000 odd hours.

Why didn’t he?

because I was most likely as honest as anybody could be. And reacted with the greatest disappointment of all time. Very, very, I don’t think I’ve told that story to many people. Now I’ve told it to too many.

Yeah, then I went back to flying parachute jumpers and doing all sorts of odd jobs around the place.

Not that I can recall, no.

Hell, no. No, it’s a return from a trip. It’s the same as coming back from the airlift, the Governor General’s flight to New Guinea, the trip to Western

Australia. A trip was a trip was a trip. You come back and land and that’s it.

No. You had your own life. Your own life as air force. When I got back I found that I had a backache, which was really debilitating.

I don’t know. It was generally accepted that it was too much flying, or it could have been rough flying cos when we were pushing the aggies around, the air gunneries, we used to do a lot of violent flying. Or any of a thousand different things, or it could have even been the seat of the aircraft, which ridiculously had an angle on them in Dakotas. They were all bent and twisted

down one side. So I tried to get straightened out and I ended up, of all things, wearing a bloody corset. Nothing was doing me any good. I was newly married and quite happy to stay in the air force, so I took a ground job. Reduction in pay, but a ground job. No reduction in rank.

I didn’t like it, but by the same token I didn’t like a back that inhibited me. I could not move quickly. If I was to reach for the controls I couldn’t do it. It was that crook. I was falling over. It’s sometimes called a slipped disc and it’s a figure

of fun in comedy shows. It’s not fun. So I fell over and I got hurt time and again, ended up with these corsets, which I hated, had I known anything about a TENS [trans-cutaneous electronic neural stimulation] machine or chiropractic, I would have stayed in the air force to most likely follow Dave Evans. But I didn’t.

The two influences that were starting to come through. One was the cadets were now graduating and coming into the service, and they didn’t, in the main, mesh in with a lot of the thinking and organising of the old

wartime crews and there seemed to be a perceived, perhaps not real, but a perceived idea that they were getting favoured treatment in postings and promotions. So that became a bit of a barrier.

Only mildly. You couldn’t really say whether it was the person or the system.

But it was perceived, there was an “us and them” feeling that was developing after round about 1952 or 1953.

That was coming and everybody was welcoming it. That was perhaps the greatest disappointment of me grounding myself because the Hercules was coming. This

was well and truly known. One of the great things about transport is that the more engines the better, the bigger the better and the better the flight deck the better. All of the elements that were wanted in Dakotas, C47s, were there in spades in the C130 Hercules,

and I missed out on it. The same jobs would have been done. Para jumping out the rear, all the same thing. Bigger, better, faster, perhaps a bit noisier, but all very good.

I did a bit of adjutanting for a while. Didn’t go very far with that. That was just a

hole in one place. I got switched into ground defence, airfield defence. This was because I’d even a scout and had been wandering about. Outdoors activities were well and truly recorded on the history sheets. So I did an aerodrome defence officers’ course at Kapooka and various other places in the army. That was not thrilling, but it was good learning.

The more skills you get the better. The more courses you do the better. I went into a specialist one of that and went to artillery. This will be one of the funniest situations of a pilot who was a qualified artilleryman, infantry company commander, artillery battery commander and shot down a drogue from the ground. All with wings.

I was on a 40 mill cannon at North Head School of Artillery firing at a drogue being towed by a Mustang. I was one of the layers and Billy Prane was on the other, he was laying. Suddenly there wasn’t any drogue in our sights.

I said, “What the bloody hell’s happened?” They said, “You shot it down.”

Steering. You’ve got to lay the gun. You lay the gin that way or that way. So one side operating a handle to put the aircraft in the right line of whichever way you’re firing and I do one thing and Billy was doing the other thing.

Suddenly there wasn’t any drogue. We chopped the damn thing down. Not a familiar activity for a flight lieutenant pilot.

Yes, school of artillery.

To be an artilleryman.

No. I’d have left under those circumstances cos I didn’t know enough. The whole thing of the school of artillery was, we were

going to have anti-aircraft guns around our airfields. They decided that was a silly idea, so we didn’t do that. The air force does a lot of these things. They did a lot of those things. I suspect they still do a lot of those things. So we were going to go the next step and we were going to fire guided missiles, Rapiers. I didn’t get to that school. That was funny.

I ended up down in

Canberra again helping to run, I was flight commander at one stage, and then squadron commander, of the number 5 National Service Training unit. That was interesting. We got 144 boys in for 6 months, just on 6 months, training and we had to turn them into tough boys. They were. They were turned

into quite ridiculously proud of taking any weather, any challenge, anything. It was quite good.

Gradually. We started off taking them out into the field to do field exercises. We took them out there by bus. Then we took them out there by truck, but we also stopped if it rained. The last

three months they walked and we took no recognition whatsoever of the weather. It can snow down there, and we were close to snow at times. They just went out and did the exercises.

Because they were doing national service training and we only had them once. The army took them and held them

and brought them back for various other continuation training after 3 months. We had them for 6 months and we only had them the once. They had to learn their map reading, their gun firing and all their explosives work, and all the elements of digging and setting up defence gear such as they use now in the airfield defence squadrons that the air force has.

They had to learn this all in 6 months. They were 19 and 19 year olds.

It was easier that way. They didn’t have any problems. We didn’t need to throw them in at the deep end. We had the buses there, we could take them out. We had the trucks there, we could take them out. The walking out, by day

and by night, they had the boots to do it, and they were fit. They were really fit. Cross country running and cross country marching over through swamps, through everything. Straight line by night carrying a pack.

They didn’t tell me. I know at the

end of it they said, “thanks.”

It was a good learning experience for me too, yes. I very rarely had any back problems, because I was working so hard. It was good.

I could have been bloody well back flying, cos I wasn’t suffering.

I incidentally found a chiropractor who sorted out the problem for a start.

I left the air force.

Well, I could have had a permanent commission, but fates were against me and I was rejected at the last minute. I don’t want to take it into any further, because there was enough

of another two people involved. It was a sad story and I think the air force lost. But I didn’t because I got out. Ended up, after doing very many jobs, going to university and finding out that I should have been there 10 years earlier.

Camaraderie,

challenge, achievement, which go together. Confidence comes with competence and I always considered myself competent, not brilliant. Never, never brilliant. Above average a few times in ratings, never brilliant, but competent.

Keep learning. Keep fit. Learn wherever you go. Travel has always been the great key stone of my service and my learning.

If you observe, like standing up in the train, if you learn to observe, you learn to question. What am I seeing? Why is it different? Is it really different? Why is it called so and so? These are the skills that you develop so that you learn to learn. This is why travelling has been

so much a part of my very favourable relationships since I retired.

Putting your trust in somebody and it wasn’t returned. That was about the main thing.

Let’s not worry about

it. But let me give an advice to you in this. Don’t call a bastard a bastard, he’ll bite you.

It’s been difficult. I’ve tried to explain it to a lot of people because the stories

went, not from me, but from the others, they were there, I wasn’t there. I couldn’t defend because I wasn’t in the air force. That was one of the awkward things. It had its awful effects too, because I lost a little bit of self confidence out of it. I certainly lost trust

and that was difficult to achieve again. I started working, I started getting jobs, I started collecting a bit of money, I started doing things I wanted to do. I started to travel again, looking at the world in a different light. I’ve driven around Australia time and again. I’ve travelled with various people to various places, always interesting.

I read as though it’s just been invented.

I was working in a terrible job, which was making money, but it’s still a terrible job.

Selling life insurance. My wife said, “Why don’t you find out what you can do?” So a couple of

investigative services of assessment services were enrolled. One was a government one, vocational guidance. The other was a personal private vocational guidance assessment, a bunch of psychologists, in Sydney. I found that I was up in the top ratings for a number of areas.

That was in the morning. In the afternoon I went for the government one and the same figure as there was confirmed slightly differently. The bloke said, “Why are you looking for a job?” I said, “I just don’t know what I can do.” He said, “I think the best thing you can do is to go to university.” I said, “I’m 38.” Must have been 38. Yeah. In between time I’d run a pub down

in the Snowy Mountains. So that’s where the 38 comes from. So at 35 I thought I was too old to learn to be a chiropractor. How wrong can you be? At 38 I went to university because I had to, yes I went to university. 3 years later I failed

one subject and had to repeat. The scholarship ran out so I had to get a job. So I got a job in the public circus in Canberra, which in those days would accept anybody with and arm and a leg if they had a returned soldier’s badge, which was quite good. I had some interesting jobs there too. I ended up running assistant director of the tourist bureau. The wheel

goes around and around. So from being the enquiry country at the Victoria government tourist bureau in Collins Street, I’m now the assistant director of the tourist bureau in the Melbourne Building in Canberra. I’m still going to university. I eventually got the extra unit that I needed to get. I’d had hepatitis in between times and also wrote a musical play.

Both those things seemed to be time consuming, debilitating and putting you off your studies.

Bachelor of Arts, which was largely everything. History and politics and politics and history and all those things.

Great, great. As I said, should have been there 10 years earlier, or even 20 or 30.

Yes, I had two boys by that stage.

it was fairly interesting, because I was the house mother. My sweet occasionally loving wife was working very, very well in doing what she did absolutely brilliantly. That was, she was a dictation typist at Hansard. Queen Bee later on,

running the Hansard typing pool organisation. Very good, very clever, brilliant and a good mother. But we needed money. My DIMWITS, Disabled Members and Widows Training Scheme, DIMWITS it is. The DIMWIT scheme fouled it up so we didn’t have much money. But I eventually got

advanced in the public service, everything was fine. Whilst I was at university I was house mothering, feeding the kids three meals a day, or two, and riding around on either a pushbike or a scooter.

No, there were quite a number of elderly students there, to the extent that we were sort of recognised because we used to wear Harris tweed coats with

leather patches on the elbows. The worst thing was I was doing modern history and the tutor, Dr Don, can’t think of his name now, beaut bloke, he said, “Now, Wal, what happened then?” This was modern history and I’d been living through it. Yes, that was quite good. It was a lot of fun. I was back

into amateur dramatics, student dramatics, again.

The most colourful character in Australia’s history. That was how it all started. I was selling life insurance to a fellow and he said, “I’m really not interested.” I said, “That’s all right.” I was in his house. “I can see from this you’ve got a lot of interests. Do you write music?” He had manuscript stuff there. He said, “Yes, I’m writing a musical

on the most colourful character in Australian history.” I said, “Ben Boyd?” He said, “Oh, no, Ned Kelly.” I said, “you’re wrong. Ben Boyd.” That’s how sad it is. So few people know about Ben Boyd. So, I wrote the script, 92%, wrote 100% of the lyrics,

98% or 99%. My music man didn’t ever buy the life insurance, but he did write the music. To get rid of me from selling life insurance he said, “Don’t tell me about Ben Boyd this way, give me a synopsis of the show and give me some of the songs and I’ll believe that you’ve got something.” I rang him back late at night and I said, “listen to

this.” And I read to him the lyrics of two songs. Straight there and then. We proceeded then, for the next 12 months or so, maybe longer, spending much more time than we could ever afford, both of us, in writing music and writing the show. Ben Boyd

was the greatest conman, Scotsman, pioneer. He built a town, he built an industry, he built another industry, he fought two duels, he most likely fought three and lost the last one.

The town was Boyd Town. He had a line of properties that went from Boyd Town right across Victoria, NSW, down to Portland on the coast, which included Deniliquin, my interesting Deniliquin. He had whalers operating whale boats and a whaling station operating out of Boyd Town. He built a church,

he built the first lighthouse, he bought his own money from England in coinage, for the community. He got here in 1841 or1842, before the convicts stopped. He used convicts. He went to Central America. The Brits pulled all the money out supporting him. The Australian Wool Company died. He went to California to try to win again.

He got involved in a duel over there, came back and was on his way back to Boyd Town having travelled around the Pacific. He landed at a little place called Guadalcanal with another boat in company. There was an argument, or loud

voices, and the other boat left, the Ariel left. Next morning, Boyd went ashore in Guadalcanal on his own, which was the most unusual thing, cos he usually went ashore with his gun bearer, a bloke called Carpentaria of all things. He took his gun himself, went ashore, one shot was heard, Boyd never

returned. Searches were made for him by all sorts of people including Owen Stanley and the Rattlesnake and all these things. Official searches. Nothing found. My theory is, and it is a theory, is that he was fighting a duel with the American. Winner take all. The all was the trading empire of the Pacific, just that.

In his papers were found that this was the idea. He’d been to the Marquesas Islands, Tahiti, Hawaii and all these things with his shipping. He said, “We can build up an empire and we’ll bring the British Empire with us.”

Yes. 7 performances.

I got $134 out of it. The music is magic. The story is trite in places cos I did not know how to write a musical comedy or a musical drama. But the characterisations were beautiful.

I stayed in the public service until I was 55. This gave me retirement benefits. I retired. I took long service leave, travelled around Australia on

the ground. I’d done it by air, I wanted to do it on the ground. So I went round Australia by air to come back to Canberra to retire because it had everything for me. The coast wasn’t far away, the skiing was there, the hills were there, my kids had grown up and was settled into some things there, it was all quite camber. I got as far as Geraldton. I said, “This is bloody ridiculous.” Those are the words I used.

I said, “I should be looking at where I want to retire,” not having made the decision first. So I drove on up to Darwin, at this stage looking much more closely at all the communities. From Darwin back across through Queensland, back to Canberra. Got to Canberra and said, “I will retire at age 55 taking early retirement.”

For goodness sake, that was way back. I was very interested in the Humanist Society. About this stage I got divorced, no, I got separated. There’s a sequence in this. I got separated

and I was then president of the Humanist Society in Canberra. Don Dunstan [South Australian Premier, 1967-68; 1970-79] had started a free, clothing-optional nudist beach Maslin’s, down on South Australia. I wrote over to the Humanists of Adelaide saying, “What’s the score? What’s it like?

Are there any problems? What’s it all about?” They said, “The problems are being sorted out. Why don’t you come over and see?” I’d met him in my travels. So I drove over there, had a look at them because we were then going to present a statement to the ACT [Australian Capital Territory] government regarding the creation of the Canberra pool, free beach.

Anything that will give Humanism

or humans some more mutual respect rather than the problems of churchified Puritanism. I found within the communities of Maslin’s and these other places, the women were happy being women and the men were happy being men and that was fine. The worst thing was that there was also a third group out there, the homosexuals, who

took a lot of controlling. That was the problem that we were facing of how could this be administered? It hasn’t yet been sorted out. We had a solution to it at Canberra that used to work very well. The pervs and the people that aren’t happy being what they are. This is far away from the service life. Have you still got the thing on?

One of my great mates in Korea was the RC [Roman Catholic] chaplain. We used to go drinking and talking and talking and drinking, usually together, to the extent that I found him again, still in the RAAF, at a different station that I visited and he said, “Hey, Wal. Can I borrow your car?”

I said, “Yes, of course.” He said, “Mine’s been a little bit too well known in certain suburbs.” Yes, the padres of the services are very much people who are down to earth, knowing what’s going on, no problem, easy to talk to, easy to discuss

points of theology with and even to have a laugh at some of the ridiculousness of the contradictions in the Bible, which is another interesting study that I’ve done at times.

I’d like to echo the feelings of a very close and dear life companion. National service for the youth of Australia can only do good. The expense of putting the youth of Australia through military or civil type productive

service can only do good, for it mixes up the people, it stops them being self centred, it will give them new values. The services allow you to travel. They assist you to travel. These days people travel without a uniform. But travel is one of the greatest broadeners of the mind

and the tolerance. If people are to learn one thing, they really should learn to be intolerant of intolerance. If you’re now taking words of advice to the world, look at the religions of the world and you will see that all of them, from the Dutch Reformed Church

to Judaism, to Hinduism, to all the Christian sects, they have evolved and been modified and changed. The Moslem religion in fixed in the early years of the life of one man back in the 600th century.

I was lucky that the only enemy we were fighting were those who organised their battle from the top down through a king, through an Emperor or a Fuhrer in a formal fashion. I don’t know how in the hell you can fight a battle where every Imam in every Mosque has the authority to interpret

and carry out the dictates of one man who lived in the year 613. It’s a difficult war ahead. It’s a difficult future ahead. Change is most likely the most difficult thing to learn to accommodate,

to administer for the benefit of all people. There are people who have vested interests in not changing. And in religion, that’s the Moslems. Sad.