Australians at War Film Archive

Well I suppose one must commence at birth. I was born on the 28th of May 1938 in far north Queensland.

The actual township itself was Innisfail but in fact we lived approximately 15 miles in from Innisfail on a sugar farm. That area up there was basically sugar and cattle. It was very hot and it was very backward in many ways. My early years were all there. I went to a school called Meena Creek State School which was a one room school

which was typical of those days. There was a horse paddock in the back which the kids put their horses in. Those who we considered rich, rode their bikes to school. But we walked and sometimes the dog would follow us and sometimes we would have to kick him back, but you’d get to school and there’d be another 8 dogs there so you wouldn’t feel so bad. It was a very laid back life. Just prior to that…before I went to school, there was an incident which I didn’t take much notice of and it’s only now that its impacted on me.

North Queensland was a complete ethnic hot bed. There was every conceivable nationality because the sugar industry attracted them. To this day I still think it was the toughest and hardest work ever performed by an Australian. In fact it was considered so bad in the old days - that that was the infamous Kanaka regime when they brought them in. My Dad remembers them. They didn’t prove that successful and they were all

smarter than we all thought and then the southern European influx came in. And ironically cane cutting didn’t do any tall men favours, because you would be bending over and all this sort of stuff. So it favoured the stockier southern European to pull the industry through. The dark point I’m mentioning was…I can’t remember it, but when I was two years of age they rounded up my father and most of the people of German and Italian extraction

and took them away. They interned them for four years during World War Two. Being two years of age I can just remember it. They took our car, but the down side of course was that Mum was left on her own. I idolised my mother. She’s now 90 and still alive. To enable her to get through, she worked the farm which she couldn’t do properly. She needed some help. Dad was away for four years at a place called Barmera in South Australia.

I think it’s near Mildura. It was really really…in hindsight, really stupid because in those days, and I think this is correct, you had to be nationalised to own property. My father actually swore allegiance to King George the Fifth. That was how long ago it was. He had children who were born here so it was really non productive. They put him away for four years. He produced nothing. Our farm went down hill. My poor mum copped a lot of abuse as a lot of the Germans and Italians did in those days.

It never impacted on me until later on because I was so young. But I can remember my father coming home and by that time I was 6 years of age. I wouldn’t have a bar of him. Who was this guy? He took off and I hadn’t seen him. And as a result that was a nasty point which only reflected on me later. My Mum and Dad ,to their credit, never spoke about it. They never dwelt on it. They never blamed anybody. They realised it was a mistake

and they got back to business. And to this day Mum has never said anything about it. She’s just so grateful that this is such a great country and it’s done for her what it’s done. We then went to school at Meena Creek and it was quite funny because the nationality spread was just enormous. But everybody got through. We would then not only have our picnics and that but …it was a complete example of

how it can work. It was amazing and in those days North Queensland was very very profitable. The sugar industry was having a boom. It was all harvested by hand and as a result there was a lot of money floating around in those days. Weekends in a small town of Tully and Innisfail and South Johnson and that, there were gangs of cutters and in fact that’s where the play came from, “Summer of the 17th Doll”. That was about a cane cutter.

So it’s high point was in the 50s. However in 1950 good old Dad in his rough way said it was cheaper to send them to boarding school. So my sister and I were packed off to boarding school. I went to Mt Carmel College in Charters Towers. A Christian Brothers School. At first I hated it with a passion. In fact I even attempted to run away once and all I got out of it was a hell of a belting from the Principal which didn’t do me any harm. But at the end I didn’t want to leave.

It was very sport orientated and very academic orientated and at that point there I wanted to become a pilot. All I wanted to be in life was a pilot. So I mentioned this to my parents and of course they were absolutely aghast, because in those days the life span of pilots was pretty low. In the early days probably four in ten crashed at some time.

Then my Dad took us overseas. We were going well at school and so he took us overseas and when I got back I refused to go to school. It was probably the silly turning point of my life. I had rebelled. I had seen what the “dolce vita” [the good life] was like. I didn’t want to go back to school for any money. And as I now know as a parent, when kids dig their heels in it’s very hard and I didn’t go back to school. So at this point in time I didn’t get on,

I started to argue, being a rumbustious 17 year old. I still wanted to join the navy as a pilot but they wouldn’t sign the papers so I took off, literally took off. Got on a train and came to Brisbane. I then…I can never forget being in Brisbane. Being 17, I was naïve and I was standing in the King George Square and a young kid…well I thought he was a young kid, probably a year older than me

came up and I think I told him to get stuffed or something. In those days that was obscene language. This bloke just went bang and flattened me. I looked up and there was the Town Hall doing cart wheels and that was my first lesson in life. Listen more, talk less. But prior to that…the life in North Queensland was lovely…although it was tough. We never had electricity. The things I really really miss about it are three basic things:

clean air, beautiful food and no crime. As kids we never knew what crime was. We used to sometimes ride our horse down to the movies. Hitch the horse up and get abused by the owner because the horses would eat all his frangipanis. There was no crime. We never had power. We had windmills. Life was a bit raw. We had an outside toilet. Dad used to be a terrible wag at times. He would

make sure it was aerated and put diesel in it to burn it and he would never tell anybody. And of course if you went to the toilet after he had done that, then you’d walk away with a black ring around your backside. Mum would get quite cranky with that. We had a kerosene stove and all of these things. I never forget, we had a shower down the back and you had to go down to have your shower and you carried a hurricane lamp. You would put that on a hook and of course there was no such thing as hot water.

So in winter time it got quite nippy but you got used to it. I hated toads, so I would line the main house up with the hurricane lamp in my hand and I’d make a bee line for the house. And I remember one night I stood on a toad and I gave this great scream and I let the hurricane lamp fly out and the grass caught fire. I got a whack off Dad but my hatred to this day for cane toads hasn’t diminished. But despite all those things it was very very good. As I say, fruit was plentiful,

north tropical fruit and it seemed to be better than today, maybe because it was ripened on the tree. As a young kid we…in modern day society people would probably be aghast at this but I had a 22 rifle, and I used to go down and shoot flying foxes and mynah birds and things like that. I don’t think we upset the fauna imbalance too much. But it was a way of life and we knew no better and sometimes what you don’t know doesn’t hurt you. So life itself was a bit idyllic.

The radio was a battery operated job and I remember very clearly listening to The Goon Show [a radio comedy]. I’m still a fan. I love them. We used to listen to Julius Sumner Miller [a scientist on television]… “Why Is It So?”. We never had TV, just the radio. I remember once…Mum used to go into town once a month to get the battery charged, and one day she got a charge and came back and hooked it

up wrong and it blew the bottom out of the radio. My father was a stickler for the news. He had to listen to the news every night. The good old ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation] News. And so of course he was news-less for about three weeks and that didn’t do the house any good. But it was carefree. The only thing about it now when I reflect back and think on it, is that my mother and father were absolute workaholics….like most of them seemed to be in those days. They just worked and worked and worked.

Dad had his dogs. Everybody had a dog in those days. We only had cattle dogs and irrespective of the colour its name was Bluey. If it was a red dog its name was Bluey. So all of those things. Then when Dad retired and I came down to join the navy …quite frankly Dad went down hill when he retired. Probably he should have kept working for longer. When I joined the navy I was only 17,

and in those days you joined with what was called Boy’s Time. Your time in the navy didn’t start until you turned 18, so you did a year’s Boy’s Time in other words. I came down…walked down Eagle Street in Brisbane and there was this big poster of a fellow, and of course this was only 10 years after World War Two and he was strapped in this machine gun and I looked at it and I thought, ‘That’s me!’ So I went down to the recruiting office and signed up, and Mum and Dad

at this stage had realised that they weren’t going to change my mind, so they agreed. I went in…I had only been out of college for a while, and I was doing reasonably well so I romped through the exams. This fella took me aside and he said I didn’t want to be a seaman, why don’t you take on a trade. He said I had shown that I had enough grey nous [intelligence] to become a tradesman.

So I became an electrician. In those days the electrical branch was considered to be the up and coming branch. They were virtually known as torpedo men in World War Two but with the advent of technology, the electricians came into their own, and as in the navy today, it’s so electro-mechanical…so I got into that. We went down to a place called the Naval Offices, which is near the entrance to the Botanical Gardens and I’m absolutely delighted that now it’s under the National Trust.

It can’t be demolished and every time I pass there I used to say to the kids, “That’s where I joined.” So much so, that towards the end when we would drive pass, they would say, “Yes Dad we know…” It’s still there with Naval Office on it and it’s lovely. It’s a beautiful building. Remember this is May, the 28th of May. This is the beginning of June. So we got on the train to Melbourne and …I think we arrived at Crib Point which is the little township outside

Flinders Naval Depot. It would have been no more than the first week in June, and Melbourne in June ain’t tropical. So there we were, we were still in our civilian clothes and we were all naïve and goggle eyed at the big world. And I shall never forget this. As we got there some chap came out, and who were we to argue who he was. We thought he was the boss. So he made us load all this cheese and I’ll never forget it. We had all this cheese all over us. We went down…and it was freezing,

oh my God. We went down to this dormitory. They called them dongers in those days. And you got a hammock. And I thought, no I want a bed. This hammock’s no good. So we put these hammocks up. There was bastardisation in those days, like there is today. Most of it in those days, in the winter time…they would open the windows and hose you and of course it was freezing and I wanted my Mum badly.

So recruit school was quite frankly an eye opener, because everything had to be done at double pace. But you didn’t mind that because you were young and you were fit. There was a lot of argy bargy [verbal disputes] as they say. There was the odd fight. You had friendships and there was a lot of sillyisms at that age. You’d jump in your hammock at night and someone would put a trick rope on it and it would collapse on the floor and all this sort of stuff.

There were some funny little things. I remember on Fridays you had to get dressed up in your good gear and you had what they called, divisions. And the whole ship’s company went down to this big parade ground and the band was there and a mate of mine and I said, “No we don’t want to do that” so we volunteered for what they called the ‘pig run’. We had to go around to the various cafes and load the slops. In those days they gave the pigs slops. That rule hadn’t come in.

It was cold and by the time we got back we were covered by pig slop, tired and everything and they had been in for about an hour, so that venture failed completely. We gained nothing out of it. Just one other little incident that I’ll always remember about recruit school. We were there and there was another young fellow there, about the same age and his name was Bobby Coulson. You’re at the bottom of the pile as a recruit. You’re a nothing. You’re referred to as a ‘macka’. A macka is a Navy term for sweets, lollies.

Most recruits are young, pimply faced and needing sugar and you eat lollies, so as a recruit you’re called a macka. I think we were cheap labour in many ways. So they said to us two, we had to clean the PTI, the Physical Training school. There were cricket bats and hockey sticks everywhere, and they had these old…you may remember them cleaners, scrubbers for polishing the floor. Scrubbers.

They said, “Can you operate one of these scrubbers?” I’d never seen one but I said, “Yes of course I can.” So I had this thing in my hand and I said to Bobby, “Switch it on.” And I pulled the lever and it just went wow…and it made such a noise and it bowled over every hockey stick and blokes came running in. They thought I’d demolished the place. Things like that would help you get through. You’d go for a meal. The cafeteria had no plates. You had a big tray with

indentations in it. There used to be an old trick. When you took your tray in, you never put your thumb over, because the cooks would see that, the ones who were serving the meal and they’d get a big dollop of red hot mashed potatoes and they’d drop it on your thumb. So you learnt very quickly. Recruit school was very very good. Our first time down there…after recruit school when you graduated, you then became what they called an EM2 in those days.

Electrical mechanic second class. Not very high up. Then you did your electrical schooling which was quite long compared to other branches, you actually slept in a bed, which was luxury and you lived in much more established quarters. You marched down every day. It’s a God forsaken place Flinders Naval Depot. I don’t know if you’ve been there but it’s cold, it’s wet and it’s miserable. And the joke used to be, that the Aboriginals who sold us the

land, were laughing their heads off in Darwin where they retired. It was a terrible place. And the thing that I always remember about it was that the navy, like all services, is dominated by times and regulations. In our case it was Queen’s Rules and Admiralty Regulations. On the 1st of November it was designated to be tropical gear, and you got into your warm gear, which consisted of short sleeve shirt, shorts and long socks. But nobody told God because it might be still minus 10.

So you’d be freezing. And the reverse would happen when it was hot. They’d say it was winter and you’d be in summer gear. The other thing that comes to mind. In those days they had a very antiquated fire alarm system, where you had to go along every four hours and punch a clock which was called a Bundy Clock. You had a key and you might

have to do the 12 to 4, midnight to four. So you got on your bike at certain times on the hour and went along and punched these clocks. Now because it was cold and miserable, there were two things you really wanted. So you had to do it fast, so you could get back into your warm bunk. You’d ride around the place at break neck speed on your bicycle and you’d put your key in and it would click and register back that there was nothing there.

One particularly fellow one night was coming down and a lot of the schools down there had big hedges around them, 12 to 15 feet high, very closely cropped and they were quite nice looking. This particular fella came down on his bike at break neck speed, missed it and piled onto the hedge and knocked himself out. So of course his Bundy Clock wasn’t activated and we had the fire engines racing around and there was this poor fellow impaled in the hedge. Things like that helped you get through life. The camaraderie was very very good and that was the key factor of the navy and if it was good on a depot it was even better on ships.

I don’t think it was that. I just think someone had designated and over the years they had formulated a pattern that said the 1st of November represents

summer and all this sort of stuff. I really don’t know how they came to that conclusion. Sometimes it was right but sometimes it was drastically wrong. And that’s why…I don’t know who devised it or on what basis they did it. They may have had a reverse role in the Northern Hemisphere I suppose. But it didn’t work and I don’t think it works today.

So after having done that formal training, we were split into four divisions actually. One was in the electrical branch. One we didn’t like. One course was the carrier base. In those days we had two carriers and the carrier personnel was quite big and the electrical side of that was quite big. But most of us wanted general service, which meant we went on small ships and destroyers.

You went to better places, more exotic and were considered the navy. There was a little bit of friction between the air crews and the general service. So our first posting…about 8 of us went to HMAS Melbourne. That was the flag ship in those days. It arrived in Sydney and we went on board, which was quite horrible.

All these chaps who had been on there, had gone over and had commissioned it and they were big time. They were talking about Paris and London and all these places they had been to, and here we were, we were talking about Meena Creek. We were still at the bottom of the line. So we went on there and it was an unbelievable experience, because we went on to a ship with I think 1300 crew. And in our view it was huge. As you all know, compared to these American

things it was a minnow. But we all thought it was huge and for the first couple of weeks you got lost. We were then split up into various sections because it was so big. You might have been in the engine or you might have done this or that. The only other down side was when you went somewhere of course, if a place wasn’t big like Sydney that could absorb it, and you went to somewhere like Hobart and all these people went ashore, you

were one of many. And it also never went to small ports. It was restricted and tended to go to bigger places because it was always the flag ship. But of course the other side of it was that on open days, people would stream on board and I met a lot of lovely people through that and I still correspond with people I met in Melbourne from them coming aboard. Sometimes you were allocated to show people around. I met a lot of

nice people and a lot of nice young girls too. So that made Jolly Jack quite happy. After that I went to another carrier, HMAS Sydney which was often referred to as the Cockroach Hilton because it was old and it was showing things. At that time it had ceased flying and it was about to be decommissioned but it got a lease of life when Vietnam bloomed, by becoming a troop carrier. But

its flying days were over and it had a long career and it had a chequered history. The time on the Melbourne was very enjoyable and it also had things like bunks…no air conditioning. But people were quite thrilled about that. And then I went to my favourite ship. Favouritism on ships tends to be linked to the amount of time you spend on them. The longer you’re there, the more affinity you have with it.

And that was HMAS Quiberon. These were old ships. This is still 1958 and these were all World War Two ex Royal Navy ships. The down side of that of course was they weren’t designed for the tropics. They were designed for the North Atlantic and things like that. They were just unbearably hot. The Melbourne was hot, the Quiberon was absolutely hot and in hindsight…,

we often ask ourselves how did we do it? We have a big association going and the short answer is of course we were young and bullet proof. But it was unbearably hot and especially up north there would always be someone sent back with crotch or underarm boils and they would suffer badly from that. It was just so hot. It was unbearable. If you were at anchor, then you’d sleep up above and invariably it would rain or the soot would come out of the stack and it was just so hot. But amazingly

enough, amongst all of that there was a great camaraderie. I have always thought that the navy had the edge on the other two services because of the camaraderie. With the army or the air force, if I hated Jim Spriggs, at 5 o’clock in the afternoon I could go half a mile away from him and not see him until the morning. But in the navy, if I hated Jim Spriggs he was in the hammock next to me, so I had to have a real change of heart and think, this bloke’s going to be here, OK?. So

you did become more lenient, a bit more pliable because you couldn’t afford not to. Camaraderie in the navy was very very strong and even today at our reunions, it’s still there amazingly enough even though I haven’t seen some people for 30 or 40 years. A quick flick and you’re back in each other’s pocket. So that side of the navy was better. But they were very very hard up there with the conditions.

The ship itself was very small and rolled awfully. They were uncomfortable. Any big seas you’d be jumping around and you’d fall all over the place. They’d roll and shudder and bang and all this. The poor old cooks, I honestly used to feel sorry for them and how they ever worked with the conditions. But everybody seemed to get through. They were considered to be very technological ships for their day.

But nowadays they’d be considered backward. They were very upmarket in their day. We thought we were very upmarket and there was always exercises and that, and sometimes we’d be overshadowed with the Americans who had massive doses of everything. We did some exercises with the Americans in Japan once and I’ll never forget it. We met this particular fellow ashore. They had EM clubs, Enlisted Men’s Clubs and they were monstrous bases and ships and everything like that.

We were talking about coffee…coffee was a luxury. So this particular fellow was a store keeper on that particular supply ship and he said he would get us some coffee. We never gave it any thought and the next day we were in a place called Sadipo in Japan and there was a pipe for Electrical Mechanic Osborn (my friend Frankie) to the Quarter Deck. So he went down there and this bloke had come on board and he gave us a 4 gallon tin of coffee.

That sort of demonstrated the imbalance between the Americans and us, type of thing. So we doled it out like Father Christmas. ‘Hey the electricians have got coffee!’ So we were the King of the Pops for a long time then. So we got on well with the Yanks, in fact we got on well with everybody. There was always the idiot who didn’t, but you get that in every facet of life. After that…I loved the Quiberon I really did. In many ways it was an awful ship. It was uncomfortable, but

I loved it. And then I came back to Flinders Naval Depot to a course. You’ve always got to advance your aim. And in those days if you were young and seemingly bright they would try and keep you. Like today it’s expense, so they like to keep people in the services for as long as possible. I then did some maintenance down there. Then I was transferred to a ship called HMAS Swan.

It was an old ship which had been converted to midshipman training, and it was a holiday. We surveyed too…gave them training and surveyed. And whilst I was on there, all our surveying was done on the Barrier Reef, especially around the Whitsundays. It was awful it really was. Palm Island and the Whitsundays and all this sort of stuff.

The cadets…they were at the bottom of the food chain now and they did all the manual tasks. They were treated pretty tough I must admit. The officers on board gave them a hard time. They had to put steel into them they used to say. We used to go ashore on an island on a weekend and have a barbecue. It was awful I can tell you. One particular time up there we had an accident and if I remember rightly a cadet may have lost his life

in a sailing mishap. They went out on a ship’s cutter and I think there was a bit of an accident. And one of the cadets on board…he was only a young fellow, his name was Morgan. His brother became relatively famous in Brisbane. His name was Porky Morgan. He was responsible for the Broncos and he died in the [HMAS] Voyager later on. I left the navy in 1962 and in hindsight

I sometimes think I should have stayed. They wanted me to stay but I didn’t. I was a bit foot loose and fancy free. I didn’t marry. I refused to get married in the service. I wanted to be at sea. We didn’t get a good deal when we left the navy in those days. It’s changed remarkably and so it should today. But in those days when we went ashore, I went to the relevant electrical authorities and they virtually looked at our papers…the technical training was brilliant. There’s not doubt about that.

The technical training in the navy as always was brilliant. But there was no practical application because there was no capacity to apply it. So I then had to work at 75% of wages under a contract ashore to get any form of ticketage. And I did this and I sat for the exams in 6 months instead of 12 months. I passed them all and was then given the relevant certificates. As an electrician and fitter and all this sort of thing. I was at loose ends then. I missed the navy. I really did.

So I went up north and I worked at a couple of places. The (UNCLEAR) River Project, I worked there. That was tough. Whilst I was there there were 3 people killed. I was witness to 2. Very dangerous, mining, blowing holes and drilling and concreting and stuff like that. I then went south. I had a bit of a misguided romance and

in disgust I went south and joined my good friend Frankie Osborn. When I was down there I lived in a boarding house in Newcastle and I played Rugby Union. I loved Rugby Union and I loved my sport. Some of the chaps in this boarding house with us were all going to what was called the Tighe’s Hill Tech [Technical] College in Newcastle and they were doing marine engineer courses. You had to be a fitter to do that. And they were telling me about all their trips and so I got the

sailing bug again. I went down to Sydney and I went to the big companies and gave them all my qualifications and the next thing I’m on a merchant ship. It was an Australian coastal ship, a very small one and we were going to places like Harwood up the Clarence River to Kangaroo Island, Sydney, Fiji. And when I was in Sydney I then joined a British company called Blue Star Line and they were big in those days.

They had a blue star on the funnel which made them stand out. I stayed with them for quite a number of years. Now it was back at sea but completely different to the navy. The camaraderie wasn’t as good I must say. The conditions were superb. As an officer you were given cabins with en suites and this sort of stuff, and the travel was the thing that really got me because I was a bit of a travel bug.

I stayed with them for a long long time and I only left them for one reason. I hear many times of the gap between the Australian government and the British government. Well in our days there wasn’t any. I then put in to get my tax back from the British government. Once I did that…because the two governments were so closely related, I received a letter from Canberra telling me that I had received my tax money back and they want their cut. I thought this is not on!

So I left Blue Star Line and I worked in what they called The Pool. You would go down to the London Pool and you were given 3 ships and you would have to take one of them. The down side of that was some of them were what we called trampers. You didn’t know where we were going. We went to some exotic places I can tell you. All over West Africa, the Mediterranean. Some of the places were horrific and some were very very good. Some right up the top and to all these places. So

I went everywhere which suited me to the ground. Then a fellow said to me that if I wanted to earn real money you had to join the Norwegians. They all spoke English so that wasn’t a problem. So I went to the Norwegian Embassy and within a short amount of time I was on a Norwegian tanker, a monstrous super tanker going to the Gulf, Iraq and Iran and all those places. The beautiful part of that was, we paid a base 12% tax.

No more, no less. And the Australian government is rather odd. They don’t mind you paying tax. If you pay 1% that’s OK. It’s when you get your tax back that they want their cut. But because we weren’t claiming it they left us alone. As we were domiciled in Norway, the Norwegians paid us this 12% flat tax. The Norwegian ships were very very good. I wasn’t impressed with their food because the Norwegians are very bland with their food. Don’t let them tell you that the Irish eat all the

potatoes, the Norwegians do. If it wasn’t potato it was fish. Uncooked fish, raw fish, fish roe, fish soup. It was awful but no one starved. No one died of hunger. That was a long long time ago. And it was only brought back to me when the Tampa thing was on because the Tampa was owned by Wilhelmsen, the company I worked for. But unfortunately a very important facet of life…Dad was very ill

and I flew back to see him. We all knew he was dying. I miss my Dad….so much. And what annoys me is that I never had quality time with him. I missed him for 4 years as a kid. I was at college. I was in the merchant navy and it just wasn’t there. So I went home and Dad was dying and so I said to Mum, “I’m not going

to cry. I’m going to show Dad that he’s going to be Ok”. So I mustered up all the strength I had and I went down the back and said “G’day Dad” and all this sort of stuff. I gave him a big hug and big kiss, and I got in the plane and the darn thing banked over our house and I saw Dad in the back yard and I cried all the way to Brisbane. He’s buried in North Queensland and I go up there every now and again and have a bit of a cry. Just not enough quality time with him.

Then I met Terese my wife. We met at a squash court believe it or not. I was an avid squash player and so was she and she was this cheeky little thing running around. So we got married and then our two girls came along. I was at loose ends because I really missed the sea. I really missed it. So I started up an electrical repair business and I’ve basically done that all the time. I’ve got chaps working for me. Life’s been kind.

We’re certainly not Kerry Packers [ a wealthy Australian businessman] but we’re not poor. The only thing that’s kept me going is that I love my sports so much I still row now. I row three or four mornings a week to keep fit and to keep the middle age spread at bay. The down side…I would have liked to have had my kids when I was younger but on the other side, they keep you young believe it or not. They annoy the daylights out of you, but they keep you young and there’s nothing like a good verbal stoush with your 18 year old.

I have a sister and she’s still married. She lives in North Queensland and she and her husband are involved in stud cattle because the sugar industry is really really down on its knees. So they’re involved in stud cattle and are doing very well for themselves. She’s a workaholic. My younger brother Steven…he came along

10 years later. Dad had been in internment camp and obviously they had a break. Steven is an anaesthetist. He’s got a big practice at Ipswich. He lives at Pullenvale which is one of our western suburbs. Unfortunately he has 3 girls as well, so the family dynasty has gone. But that’s really not a problem. He and I are very very close. In fact we’re doing a Milford Sound trek next month.

We’re going there. He and a friend of his and I are going to do that. Mum’s 90 and I certainly hope I’ve got her genes and she’s doing really well. She’s a little hard of hearing but she’s a feisty 90 year old. She rang us up the other day and she said, “I found a funny man up against the house and he had a dress on.” I said, “Mum what are you talking about?”

So she said she had propped him up against the wall and gave him a cup of tea and biscuits and the next minute the police and the ambulance had arrived. He had escaped from the nut house [psychiatric ward] at the Royal Brisbane Hospital and he had on one of those capes you tie at the back. The police said to her that she should be more careful. He could have been dangerous. And Mum said she looked at him and looked at the policeman and said “In his dreams” and walked away. So Mum’s battling along. She’s very very good. That sort of brings us up to today.

As I mentioned to you before, retirement absolutely scares me. But I realise that one day I will have to. I’m involved in…there was a funny little incident that happened. I was at work and there’s this period when your service life sort of disappears and your family life comes in. I always equate it to the third level of your life. Your first is your growing up, the second is your family and the third is your post family when

you reminisce and that. And a friend of mine Tony Daniels came up and we started talking about old times. The Quiberon was our favourite ship and he said, “Why don’t we get a reunion organised?” And I said, “That would be hard work.” So we started off with two people, he and I and at the moment we’ve got about 480 on a data base and we’re having our third reunion. They’ve been spectacularly successful. The first two were in Brisbane and the last one was recently in Devonport and they’re spoken of as the yard stick of reunions. We don’t over do it but most of us are in our later years and we meet them and they are just fabulous. I haven’t brought it here but I have a montage at work, which was made of our last one. It’s just one of the events we all looked forward to. The wives are all involved. Widows are involved. And we have memorabilia and stuff like that and there’s the Ex-Navalmen’s Association which we’re all members of. They play a role. The good thing about them is they keep you in touch with people. Like unfortunately last Wednesday, I had to go to a funeral, because we are entering that time when a lot are as they say, crossing the bar.

Do you want me to finish off the Quiberon situation?

Just capping on the Quiberon situation. It was a rare situation in that it was a World War Two ship and as a result, a lot of the World War Two chaps had had their own individual reunion. When we came along we were these upstart young fellas sort of thing.

It was converted to a frigate and saw service twice. Now our first two reunions were just frigate guys only. The last one which has probably been the most successful one were both the crews, and the gap in years just disappeared, because these guys were much older than us, and even though they referred to us as the young fellas, I can assure you when you’re 65, being called a young fella is not bad, you don’t mind it.

But in the last reunion my wife and I did a bus trip around Tasmania and the bus trip was made up of half frigate and half of the others and the age gap never showed. It was lovely. It was fabulous and they absolutely enjoyed it, so we’ve virtually incorporated it into one now and it’s been a success. The next one is in Melbourne in 3 years time and we’ll all be there. So that’s it.

Yes.

We’ve got our little mementoes. We have ship’s bells and we have glasses and badges and things. I’m very proud to say that being Tony Daniels and I being the first two, we’ve done a good job.

Yes it’s a talked about feature every now and again.

Yes Mum did it very very tough, mentally and physically. She did a lot of physical work. She drove the tractor and of course we had a lot of horses, draft horses and it was hard to get good men. She couldn’t do it on her own and things like that. I didn’t notice it. My sister was older than I and she noticed it.

And Mum copped a lot of abuse because in those days the feelings towards anybody of German or Italian extraction was quite high, and that was understandable. My Mum understood that. But it was hard to take at the time. So she copped a fair amount of abuse. The only way she could counter it was to not let it hurt, although it must have but we were too young to understand. But she was tough. She did all the manual tasks.

She would cut the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s head’s off. I can never forget Mum running around the yard holding a WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK by its feet and the head flopping and blood everywhere. The calves and milking the cows. I can remember coming home from school one day. Dad had bought her what they used to call a woman’s shot gun. It was a very small calibre shot gun. We had our own WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s and I came home and the next thing there’s Mum crouched behind the thing going shirr…

and there was this hawk which used to take the chickens and there’s Mum like Ma Kettle…bang. And then one year we had the neighbours. The neighbours were a long way down, because the farms were pretty well spread apart. We had a big fowl run with about 100 fowls which we used for food and things like that. They had kangaroo wire on the outside because carpet snakes were very very prevalent up in North Queensland.

And one got through and it had devoured a WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK and a small chicken and it was now enlarged and couldn’t get back out. So it decided to have a bit of a sleep in the fowl house. So Mum trundles down in the morning and sees this pile in the corner and she absolutely freaked out. So she ran down to get our neighbour which was a fair way away and he came up and he hit it with an axe and pulled it out. We had it under the mango tree…we had a huge mango tree. And my sister and I were looking

through this window at this snake which is in its death throes …they contort from the back bringing it all out. This was like a biology lesson for us. It was about 15 feet long. She gave it to the school and I remember Mr Phillips the Headmaster…it was a Diamond Carpet Snake, and Mr Phillips cut the skin off and it was displayed. This was from a little old lady…well she wasn’t an old lady then but

this was from a defenceless Mum. And so until things straightened themselves out…until after the war, when Dad got back and worked and worked and worked. I honestly don’t know when they had time to have us children. And the house was…in my youth I can remember, North Queensland rained a lot. It was wet and we didn’t have a ceiling in our house. No ceiling, just a roof.

No ceiling. None of that. It was just a straight roof. So the rain would teem down and it was lovely. It was just the most beautiful sound to go to sleep to. I can remember Dad came home and he gave Mum a huge surprise. He had brought some linoleum, wow! So these were little social steps. The wood stove that Mum used to cook in, the food

was just magnificent. She would manipulate the wood as good as any thermostat. She’d cook sponge cakes and things like that and the food was very very good. Healthy. Even to this day and I can say this even with my wife present, Mum and her wood stove were just unbeatable. It was a healthy life.

We had horses and I used to love the horses. They were called different names and after the war labour was scarce and Dad sponsored some Lithuanians and Latvians. They called them Balts, from the Baltic States. I’ll never forget them. There was six of them. They came in the back of his utility. Everyone had a utility in those days. They arrived and they were the most bedraggled and poor people I had ever seen. I’ll never forget, one particular guy came and he had a

jumper and it was now hot and he had sweated so much and there was the white perspiration on his jumper. But later on I realised the trauma these guys had gone through. They all had Gladstone bags. That was their total possession, the Gladstone bag and their travel documents. So Dad paid for…sponsored their trip. I think it was a much reduced rate and then they paid him back. It was quite funny because some of their names were very difficult for us to pronounce and Dad would nickname them.

He was a great one for nicknaming. There was one particular guy, he was a stocky rollicking sort of bloke and he fought in the German Army in the Tank Corps and so Dad nicknamed him Panzer. Anyway they cut the cane and when they cut the cane up there, all the cane was burnt. There was always snakes getting killed. Vermin were always getting burnt to death and there was always a snake. So Dad decided they’d take this guy down a peg or two. So they cut the cane and they would put it into bundles prior to loading it by hand.

He got a burnt snake and he coiled it up and put it under a bundle in Panzer’s row. Of course Panzer was swaggering along and he picked this bundle up and he saw this snake under it. The biggest snake he had probably seen was a European viper two feet long. He saw this monstrosity and he turned ashen and Dad to this day said that Roger Bannister didn’t break the four minute mile, Panzer did. He went straight back to his barracks and it back fired on Dad because he was virtually useless for days.

But little incidents like that they made life. The horses, they all had names. I would go with my Dad and he never had to call them. They were brilliant. He would start what he called a chop chop engine because you used to cut up cane and feed them molasses and rock salt. And he would start this engine and when they heard the engine beat they’d call come up and they’d all go into their own individual shoots. I used to love this and I would jump on this back and as a kid…some of them would be so broad you’d be virtually doing the splits.

There was Katie and then there was Rosy and then there was Prince. As a kid I loved it. I honestly don’t think I could do it again but as a kid growing up there it was just beautiful. The horses…unfortunately with much regret, as they died they had machinery to take over. There were tractors and things.

One day I saw my Dad….we had a tractor, a Caterpillar. You might have heard the name Caterpillar. And they used to take these cane trucks down this big hill and to do that the tractor would lower it down on a chain. And I used to sit on a tool box next to him. He could tell by the tone of the tractor whether the weight was a bit too much. So often he would put these sticks or rods inside the wheels and they’d act as a brake you see.

And he jumped off one day and he stuck this thing in but it whipped and cut his leg and there was this massive cut right on his leg and blood everywhere. So what he did was he grabbed this hand full of grease and filled it with grease to stop the bleeding. And I thought wow, this is superman, this bloke’s my hero. When the trucks went down he went back up and washed it out with…every

household had Dettol in those days. So Mum washed it out with Dettol and put a few stitches in it, and I thought to myself…then in hindsight I think to myself, what could he have done? He wasn’t going to ring up Health and Safety. There was no doctor, there was no ambulance. But as a young kid this was heroic proportions. I didn’t think at that time I could ever do it but I suppose if the occasion arose you would do it.

Little things like that are impressionable to a kid on the farm in the bush. Dad and his cut. He was a tough old bugger. He used to have another farm. He hurt his ankle once and they put it in plaster. Of course you couldn’t keep him still. He went walking around and got it all wet so he cut it off. He had to go in and get another one. He had crutches and he used to hobble out to his utility and throw the crutches in the back and one of the crutches fell through a hole and was rubbing on the road. So

by the time he got to the other end, one crutch was about 18 inches shorter than the other. So he just nailed a bit of wood on it and kept going. Things like that you tend to remember. Little parts of your life you don’t forget because they were done by your Dad. When I mentioned before about the dogs….if he came out in roughish clothes, that meant he was going to

another farm, so the dog would scamper up the mud guard…the mud guard was all ripped and the paint had gone off the mud guard, and he’d get on the back of the truck and he’d stick his head around near the driver and there he would be and away he’d go. But if Dad came out in clothes that were much better that indicated he was going into town, then the dog wasn’t allowed. So it would lie under the mango tree and sulk all day. He wouldn’t move. How dare you. But when he would hear the car coming from a distance he would bark and

Mum would know and put the food on. So there was simplicity and little things that made sense. We all loved our dogs. We had a goat. Mum bought a goat once. I think to some extent that children in that area on the farms had quite an immunity because…I remember being in the fowl house and I had just a pair of pants on. And I had done something in the pants. We won’t say what. This

big rooster came along and was pecking at it. And I’ll never forget it. It drew blood. I’ll never forget it. I was screaming. And all this involvement with animals and things like that, maybe it built an immunity. We played in the dirt and never wore shoes to school. That came to haunt me because when my kids were going to school I would try and get my daughter to polish her shoes to go to school. And you probably know how hard that is. And I used to say I used to polish my shoes every day before school. And

of course my mother’s in the background say, “You never wore shoes to school.” But school was rough and ready.

The school was at a place called Meena Creek. It was one room and it was eventually split in the middle with about 3 classes on one side and three on the other side. Two teachers and sometimes

when I hear the argument today about class sizes I think wow, class sizes weren’t even thought of. But that’s what you had and that’s what you got. I don’t know if my schooling was poor or bad. But I don’t think it was. Although I did go to college after that. But the early state school education there was quite good.

Most of the class room was elementary. We didn’t have books, we had slates. You had a slate pencil which you sharpened and then you had a little bottle with a sponge in it. Then when you finished it and you got the ticks from the teacher and it was recorded, then you rubbed it off, dried it and then you could use it again. The stools were…it was just one stool, which was very very good if you had long legs but very bad if you had short legs.

The tall fellow was like that and the short fellow was like that. The schools were very hot because obviously no air conditioning. They were a tad crowded. And then eventually, I remember one year we got ink wells and a little pen that you dipped in and did your writing like that. All the boys of course were always in trouble. We used to get moths

and put them in the ink well, where they would absorb all the ink and of course the girls would hate it. I never forget, one kid put some rotten egg gas (H2S) in one ink well and that stunk the school out for a while which we thought was good fun. Then again there would be a little bit of scandal. I remember once, it was the big thing at school, everybody had to provide a small amount of excreta because there was ring worm in the area apparently and it had to be put in a jar

and sent to Brisbane for analysis. And wow did that rock the school. “Jeff couldn’t poo in the tin,” and all this sort of thing. So it was a bit of a talking point for a while. There’s one thing I can remember in the early early days…it was just at the end of the war, and they dug zig zag trenches in the school yard, and we’d have exercises, air raid exercises.

And you had to put a bag over your head and jump into these things. What it did to this day I don’t know but it seemed good at the time. It was a great thrill. Everyone used to jump in the ditch which was carved into a zig zag shape and I can remember American air men and servicemen coming through Cairns and that, but not very well. I was a bit too young for that. We had a reunion at that school not too long ago and of course

it’s now got much much bigger. So the thing that everyone complained about was that the horse yard was gone. There were about 10 people riding horses and the kids in the senior class were allotted time to make sure they had water. That was their job. They had to make sure the horses had water. …Of course land was aplenty and we all planted a tree. It was

called a Pinus Carabea. And I believe they’re still there and they must be horribly tall by now. I hope they’re not harvested. When I went back for the reunion they were all still there and you tend to remember that. Mine was the fourth or fifth tree down. School in those days…the big thing was there wasn’t the stress that they have today. I notice that with my kids there’s a lot more stress, there’s a lot more involvement. A lot more distractions. We didn’t have many distractions. In fact after school you went home. There was no TV to watch,

so you did your homework. This is still today, with a lot of migrant families from Europe who did it tough and my parents were the same, they made sure you weren’t going to be uneducated. My parents never had any education and the made extra sure, and I think that’s evident today in migrant kids. They were a lot lot harder…you’re not going to be a dumbo like I was. I think that’s a big plus. The origins of it mightn’t be but …

Dad never went to school. I think he was very bright but he was not academically bright because he never went to school. But they survived. They were survivors the oldies and a lot can be said for that. Mum’s proved to be the biggest survivor of all. When Dad died I thought, like a lot of people, she’d drop her bundle.

But she kicked on and she’s done well. The only reason she left the north was that at that stage I was overseas. I was running around the world and Steve my brother was at medical school. She came down and she’s never gone back. Dad’s buried up there and we’ve toyed with the idea of bringing him down but the complexities of that are just too huge to worry about honestly. So poor old Dad’s going to stay up there.

But Mum’s still here.

Well it was. And I think the funniest thing I can remember was, on Saturday mornings in those sugar towns, it was mayhem. All the cutters, a pocket full of money, not working on Sunday and of course there was beer flowing. Every pub had it and the funniest sight…if you can imagine this. Outside there would be a Scotsman.

There’d be an Englishman, there’d be a German, there’d be an Italian, there’d be a Greek and they’d all be talking to each other and hardly anyone understanding each other. Hardly anyone understanding each other but they all made sense to each other. It was a pot pourri of nationalities and they got on well. My Dad tells me that in the younger days, the very very early days, the Mafia tried to go up there but they never ever got a toe hold.

They never made the grade because places like Innisfail were predominantly Italian towns. It was a farce.

Why? Because there were too many other inputs. I personally think that if you’re Australians and we go over and live in Brazil then some of the Brazilian attitudes must rub off on us, and with the multi mix, a lot of that must have rubbed off.

The German influence on the Greeks and the Greek influence on the Scottish…it must have rubbed off and it just never got in. There were some little isolated incidents but it died and was never heard of again. There was one incident in Innisfail apparently when one fella was shot. He was deported immediately and I think that was the end of it.

As opposed to Griffith and places like that. The mix amongst the children, no one cared about it. There was really really no incidents of it. But children are always like that.

No as a matter of fact…I’ll reverse that. A lot of the kids, their parents spoke very bad if no English. For example you might get a kid whose parents were

Maltese. They would go to school knowing the basics of English. Those kids, within a month were fluent. The part about that is, the language they learnt from their parents they never forgot and it never affected their schooling and as I say, with kids it’s remarkable. They were just one of the crowd. And I think that was prevalent throughout the whole of North Queensland, in the cane areas.

The two chores I can remember really really well, one of course was cutting wood and that was a must. Dad used to sometimes do the heavy blocks, but we kids had to cut up chips for the stove and things like that. When we got an Electrolux kerosene fridge. God we thought…we had ice blocks for the first time.

We had to go home…they had little kerosene drums with little pumpers and you had to fill the kerosene container at the bottom, slide it back in and there was this little flame. And I can never forget, if the wick of the flame wasn’t trimmed to its correct level, it put a black mark on the ceiling and then you’d get a belt across the ears of course. I got very good at that after a while. But they were the two chores I remember. Feeding the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s was another one. You always had to feed

the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s. In those days for some unknown reason, they used to eat a thing called cracked corn and laying mash. Laying mash is self explanatory, but cracked corn…you used to put this corn in a hopper and turn the handle and crack the corn. Feeding the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s, keeping the fridge going and chopping the wood they were it. If the windmill hadn’t been working properly, we had a huge windmill but sometimes it wouldn’t pump it up to the top house.

So you had to go down the bottom and bring up buckets of water and things like that. Some other little chores were quite funny. When the mango season was on, one of the chores was to pick up all the mangoes because the mango was huge and flying foxes would come in of a night time. We would get wheelbarrows full of mangoes. That sounds sacrilegious but we did. We would get all these mangoes and dump them in the paddock. Also custard apples. We had a couple of rows of custard apple trees

and you’d have to go and pick up the custard apples and they gave them to the cows. When I go to a fruit shop today and see the price of food I nearly cry. Sometimes also we had to rake the mulberries. We had big mulberry trees and Mum could always tell when we had eaten the mulberries, because every part of your body would be purple. You’d have a big purple mouth.

So that was part of the chores.

Yes, well like all kids we used to have some horrible barneys at times. I’ll never forget one incident. As a kid I read comics like we all did. I used to like the Lone Avenger and Mandrake and Phantom. He was my hero. Anyway we went into town one day and we bought a lolly and it had a Phantom ring in it.

And I used to read how the Phantom used to thump the baddie and he’s wake up with a perfect Phantom insignia on his face. I thought I’ll try this. My sister walked passed and I lined her up and whack. She didn’t move and all she got was a big red mark and I got a belting. That day the Phantom went down in my eyes. I didn’t think he was that crash hot. But apart from little incidents like that we got on well.

Very much so and I think today it’s lacking. But because of the male of the house working so much, it was left to Mum and she was good at it. We got whacked and I have no bones about that. Some little incidents. I remember going to some people’s home and they had biscuits on a table and I crept up to the table and reached over and grabbed a biscuit.

Mum gave me a whack and said, “You must always ask first.” That may not have had much consequence but I’ve never forgotten it. So Mum was left to administer the discipline. Dad’s discipline was verbal. We used to be at home around the table and the news would come on. Dad and his blessed news and when the news came on you did not speak. So if your sister across the table wanted the sugar or something, you’d get her attention by kicking her legs.

If you spoke during the news it was a fate worse than death. There was no TV. That was the link to the outside world and as I mentioned previously The Goons etc. The radio was our life blood. Mum had a record player, which was an HMV and you wound a handle and you put a little needle in it and put it on the record and when the amount of energy in the handle wore out, then the speed would drop.

We didn’t have many. Mum had a lot of opera records which she liked and which we thought were absolutely awful. We’d see her go in and put these opera records on and we’d say, “Oh nonot the opera again”. So we’d go back to our radio. Being up in North Queensland, of course there was a high dosage of country and western. I can remember Buddy Williams and all these people you know. Tex Morton.

I still like country and western. It’s not my favourite but there was a lot of reasons to dislike it because we got pounded it. It wasn’t too bad.

Well no, because it was discipline plus. You got up at six and you went to eat at seven and

you went to Mass at eight and …so the natural reaction was no, at six I used to be out with my rifle. This is no good. So it was awful I thought. The Brothers were very strict and they were all brothers in those days. They were very very good educators but they were very strict. They gave the cuts. In those days it was a leather strap.

One can argue whether it was right or wrong, all I can say it never did us any harm. We were never left writhing and bleeding on the floor so it wasn’t punishment as such. It was a rebuke for doing something wrong. That’s the way I see it. Some of the Brothers gave favouritism more than others. The Principal at the time, Brother McSweeney, I absolutely adored. He was a very taciturn little fellow. We had a champion sportsman there called Peter Hall and he was a

champion footballer. One day Brother McSweeney came down and gave us tackling practice and everybody scoffed and said, “Wait until Hallie hits him.” Well Peter Hall got the ball and Brother McSweeney hit him with a proper tackle. Peter Hall was dusting himself for about a week and all he could say was…you know, “I’ll never think disparaging of him again.” But they were good people. Sometimes it makes me angry to hear

that some of their kin have done some horrible things but in my time up there I never saw it. And for the deeds of the odd few they’ve all been tarnished. But the Brothers I remember up there were just lovely people. Towards the end…they were very disciplined. Their schooling was excellent. Their sport was brilliant. They were sport orientated. Especially rugby.

I think so.

Also sport was a great get-er-out-era I used to say. If you were good at sport you didn’t have to do some horrible chores. All those not good at sport had to be in there. But I think still to this day at school, sports helps you get out of things. But I liked Mount Carmel. It was …sometimes…the environment of Charters Towers wasn’t the greatest. It was very dry.

It was. The humidity factor in old Meena Creek was high but in Charters Towers it was very dry. It was full of chinky apples they called them. They were a little apple that grew in the parched land there. Charters Towers itself we never saw much of but it was a big haven. There were six colleges. Six boarding schools in Charters Towers. Three male, three female. They were big and it’s a big

educational centre. In those days it was the roll over from the gold rush days. In its y heyday I think it was the second largest city in Queensland. They had things there called mullock heaps, which was the refuse from the gold mining and I found out recently that there’s none left, because the extraction processes have improved so much that they’ve still found gold in it. So now there’s no gold mining there at all .

The inter school rivalry was brilliant. We had All Souls which was Church of England. Thornbrough which was Presbyterian. They were boys. They had St Gabriels and all that. So it was very very good. inter school rivalry in the tennis and the cricket and all this sort of stuff. It was full on. All Souls were the enemy because they were the biggest and they got the lion’s share of the sport. I didn’t like them that much.

Yes it was very very good. Then some of the schools fell on hard times and even now I believe Mount Carmel is co-ed [co-educational].

Oh yes. We would have dances and things and you all went there and at that age you giggled more than anything. But it was an introduction to what the other half was like. It still left me very naïve.

Very very strictly. As they are today I must admit. My girls went to Loreto up the road. Without being overly battering ram strict but they were good. Mount Carmel had school cadets which I absolutely loved. We would go out to a place on the Burdekin River called Salheim. It was a camp and we would have our bivouacs there.

Believing you me. When you’re firing a 303 at 13 you think your shoulder would dislocate. But we got all that. We had machine guns and all that and maybe that was the introduction to some aspects of the service life that appealed to me. The cadets were very very good.

Yes well the senior cadets had Vickers guns and the younger ones just had rifles. We had our little uniforms and our puggarees and our slouch hats and we polished the brass. We all had to look neat.

The Brothers themselves, they converted into army uniforms. There was also a Regular Army chap who used to come around. We thought he was God. He’d fire all these things. So the school cadets were an integral thing. I don’t know if they have them today. I’m not a 100% sure if they’re around today. I don’t know what harm they did or what good they did. But as a young boy I thought they were brilliant.

Parade was once a week or once a fortnight. The camping out, the bivouacs were a lot less regular. It was a bit of fun too. You’d be in a tent on the edge of the river. You were a young kid and you’d open up your tin and you’d cook your tea, and of course this was fantastic to a young kid. It was an extended boy scout. Every kid thought it was great. I don’t think we saw the serious side of it. It was more just yahoo.

But it was good. I don’t think the girls had anything similar. I don’t think so or I’m not aware of it. Most of our social interactions were little dances and fetes and afternoon parties and things like that. It was good fun.

Yes weekends. Weekends you were. Although if you were a junior you weren’t allowed out unless you had a sponsor from the town. What used

to happen…most of us were boarders, but there were some day boys. So you’d get a friendship up with Jeff O’Donnell probably and his Mum and Dad would take you out on a Sunday. That was the thrill or thrills because they invariably came in a car. You’d go out and see something. There was probably not much to see in Charters Towers. But if there was something to see then you’d see it with them and you got a bit of home cooking. The food was good.

As I say, we Australians always complain about the food but nobody dies of starvation. You know what I mean. Every serviceman complained about the food but nobody died. So the schools were the same. I remember getting an absolute hatred for beetroot at the college. I don’t know why. I love it now. But the thing college taught you was, that if you didn’t eat what was in front of you then there was no second chance. No one would say “Would you like another slice of bread?”. So that instilled a bit of ‘do it’ into the system.

And it held us in good stead for later on.

Well I think you should believe in something. I don’t think you should make it to the point of zealousness. I think that’s wrong. What we’re seeing in the world today. I don’t think it’s wrong for Christians to believe in something. My kids all went and they now have the option as they’ve grown older to continue that in which ever

way they want to. And my parents did the same. I’m not a great practicing person at the moment. I was born a Catholic and if someone asks me that I say Catholic. I have no bones about that. I’m not an avid church goer. I go sometimes. Not often. Mum likes me going when it’s Dad’s death anniversary. But I don’t push it on anybody and I don’t believe it should be pushed on anybody.

But I don’t think there’s anything wrong in believing in something. I find there’s nothing wrong with that.

Of course being a Christian Brothers’ school we had to go to Mass and things like that. We all did our little stints as altar boys. I have no bones about that at all. It was never pushed to that extreme. There were kids who were involved in it more than others and I think that came from their parents, quite frankly. Mum and

Dad never pushed us. When we kids on the farm…it was quite funny really because there was no church in the bush. I remember one incident so clearly. Reverting back to these chaps who worked on the farm, they got a dog. And they nicknamed the dog Stalin. They had fought in the German army and they hated Stalin with a passion you see. So the Church in Meena Creek was a hall and the altar

was raised on ropes up to the ceiling. So when it came down…they would lower it down and it became the altar. They had a thing there…at night time…it wasn’t a Mass service, just a Stations of the Cross or something like that. These Baltic chaps, a lot of them were Catholics. They got in there and the dog got let loose and of course he’s running through the church and they’re trying to catch the dog and running through the church, calling out “Stalin, Stalin”,

probably the greatest atheist of all time. So if you could picture it. A church with a religious Catholic ceremony and people running through calling out “Stalin, Stalin”. It just doesn’t set the picture does it? But that’s what happened and that’s just one facet of bush life. Mum and Dad took us to church and it was quite funny because they used to go in the car. I remember when I got my first bicycle, I refused to go in the car and I rode to church on the bicycle.

Of course it was so hot and when I got there I was just a lather of sweat. So that was the only introduction we had and Mum and Dad never pushed it any further. But I still believe there’s nothing wrong in having faith in something. I think if you have faith in nothing, then you end up pretty empty.

I think so. In this unbelievably correct world, in many ways it would be frowned upon today. The thing is it didn’t make me a killer. Like I don’t go around shooting people today. I’m an advocate of no guns

because I think the less around the better. Having said that though, I still have no qualms about having one when I was a child. It seemed to be a badge in the bush, as in many ways it is with farmers today. We did have a lot of vermin and that’s all it was used for. So no I don’t think it was breaking any massive boundaries.

Yes, having a 22 rifle in those days disciplined you in some small way, because Dad of course taught me to be very very careful with them. It wasn’t a toy. If it was incorrectly used it could be a lethal weapon. Some people called it a plinking gun[?] but it was used in very limited ways.

Yes. The thing is, the transfer to a more stereotype usage of weapons was helped by that. You were aware of the basics. It taught you the basics.

It was a situation that was more by chance.

It wasn’t planned. We just happened to be there when a truck arrived full of cheese and they wanted some manual labour, and what better than a group of goggle eyed young recruits who knew no better. And someone yelled out, “Load the cheese.” and of course we did, because there was nothing else in our system to say no. I shall never forget that.

A little thing etched in your memory. They were huge and it had that slimy stuff on it which ended up on our clothes, so we didn’t smell or look too good. But as I say, we were on the bottom of the labour chain.

No. I think it was just a non commissioned or leading hand. At that stage of the game he could have been an admiral for all I know. And it was all new, so away we went.

Little things etched in my mind.

The horses used to be in the back paddock. They had a paddock. They had a leanto to protect them from the sun. A big water trough which had to be kept primed, and there was a small area too where, if needs be, they’d put up some chopped sugar cane or some foliage for them to munch on.

So they just sat there all day. It wasn’t an ex-Melbourne Cup winner I can assure you. An old plodder which was very safe for the children to go to school on.

Some kids did. Especially the kids who never had horses. It was a bit of a thrill to them. The other reason was,we used to walk to school sometimes and in those days there were a lot of bullock teams because they used to take out timber by bullock. They used

to put them on the main roads to agist them. You’d be going along…I’ll never forget. Just up the road from us was a fella named Tassie Bear. I think his proper name was Otto but they called him that because he came from Tasmania. And he used to put his bullocks in there. And we used to be deathly frightened of them. And you’d be going along and someone would yell out, “Tassie’s bullocks are on the road.” So you’d jump under the fence and walk through the cane paddocks until you got out on the other side. Whereas if you were on a horse you were pretty safe. But Tassie Bear’s bullocks played a big role in our going to school.

No. It was just the visual impact. They were big animals and we were little kids and that’s it. They wouldn’t have hurt you. They were pretty docile.

No, that’s incorrect. I went down on my own.

To some extent. I took off on the basis that my parents accepted the fact that I wasn’t going to change my mind. I was stubborn, pig headed and probably stupid to boot. So they must have thought, “Well our options are pretty cut and dried here. Let’s sign and he can join the navy. At least he’s joining something.” So I went down on my own. The thought of going all that distance in those days…the crime factor, or the scare factor

didn’t enter it because quite frankly crime was at an all time low. It was a situation where the locksmith was the poorest person in town. We couldn’t lock our house. Our house was never shut on the farm. You couldn’t. There was no doors. There was just a door that had a bolt on it or something. So that aspect never entered your mind as it would today. But that’s the difference in the times.

Yes that’s a farmer’s bible. Always shut a door or a gate after you’ve gone through. You’ve just got to.

Yes.

I think…

if I remember rightly there were places like the …not the Salvation Army? YMCA [Young Men’s Christian Association]!

Yes we did a medical and we did an eye test. You know the books with the speckled dots on them which formed a circle and that. Different coloured lights

shining through small apertures. We did all that. The other thing was of course the obvious one, reading a sign on the wall. That’s about the extent of it. The doctor gave us a physical check all over, blood pressure and that sort of thing. But it was pretty rare unless you had some major defect that you never got in. Most of the bush kids seemed to be alright.

No. I had filled in the consent forms at home. That was all done and I was in possession of them. So when I came down it was a matter of doing the medical, doing the exams. Should those two be successful then it was straight in. After we had done those two, a group of us were taken down to the Naval Offices which was at the bottom of Mary Street I think.

Then we were handed a bible and that was it young fella, away you go. A group of us then met at the South Brisbane Railway Station. It was all rail in those days. Brisbane to Sydney, Sydney to Albury, Albury to Flinders Street, walk up to Spencer Street and train out. In the early days in the navy, West Australians and North Queenslanders were only given leave once a year.

We only went home once a year. All the other states went home twice a year, but we only once and then by train. I’ll never forget it. We were given 6 days travelling time because the train trip was Crib Point to Melbourne, take your kit bag and everything from Flinders Street to Spencer Street. Then to Albury,,then change the train to Sydney, then to Brisbane, then change at Brisbane. Then from Brisbane to North Queensland and that took 6 days. By the time you got home you were covered in coal

dust and because of the railway sandwiches, you were pretty much constipated as well. So it wasn’t a very exciting trip I can assure you.

Yes that’s right. We weren’t given mid year leave, as the people in the closer states were.

Flinders Naval Depot.

HMAS Cerberus

after some mythological three headed horse. And it was also mongrelised by servicemen as Sore Bare Arse.

That was the off the record one.

No the Australian Navy doesn’t seem to have that full on vocal impact that the Yanks love, especially the Marine Corps. We were given our orders. In those days when you first go in, you don’t have any officer contact to start with. You’re treated by people who were petty officers or leading hands. They take you under their wing. You’ve got to get kitted out,

shown where you’re going to sleep for want of a better word, and eat. And from then on you’re given what’s called an instructor. Now my first instructor was a fella by the name of Tommy Hamilton and he was an absolute lovely fellow and by coincidence I met him again about 6 months ago. He’s now living in Brisbane. I’ve got a photograph of him at work.

We’re all in a group and he’s sitting there at the front of course. Lovely chap.

He stayed in a fair amount of time, much longer than most of us. He’d been in the navy quite a while. He was a leading hand when we joined. We were his class and he took us everywhere. He was virtually our mother for a couple of months. He did all our primary training. Even though you not what’s called a seaman, you do learn the basics. So even though you’re a tradesman,

you learn about anchors and ropes and pumps and damage control and all these things. You go over to a rifle range and you throw hand grenades and some of those experiences are a bit scary. But you do all of those things, rifle training and all this sort of thing. The people who are in that particular branch, the seaman’s branch, they can stay in the path and do a much more concentrated course. We then break away and do our trade training, but you must have that basic training.

Everybody has to do the basic training.

Yes, 3 months. And that’s your first run ashore. The first time you’re allowed ashore. For 3 months you don’t go ashore. You stay in the depot. So you go ashore and you put your hat on. The first thing you do is put it flat aback, which is illegal. You’re not supposed to have your hat back but if you’re got reasonable hair, the young blokes would put their caps back to make themselves more attractive, if that’s possible. You’re supposed to wear your hat across there, you see.

If you were caught with it back there, then the standard reply would be, “You walk under your hat sailor, not in front of it.” So you’d have that. They had a place in Melbourne called the White Ensign Club which was in the old Exhibition Building. You’d go there and that was your first run ashore. Melbourne in those days was quite awful, because they had six o’clock closing and after six o’clock it was a pretty horrible place to be.

You would have friends there and you’d go to see them and you more or less mixed in with them. But when you first went ashore at 17 years and 3 months of age, you would sort out all the haunts. You’d go there and make a goose of yourself. But it was fun.

’55.

That may have been the case, but when you joined of course, you went down to the ship’s barber and he made a bit of a mess of that. He wasn’t well equipped and he just gave you the standard hair cut, which would take 3 months to get back into a decent shape.

Well it depended a lot on what your academia was like. In some cases the kid from the bush who rounded up his cows and rode his horses would have been better in fields associated…if it could be, with that. If someone had gone to school and was good at algebra, then he was good for the trades and he did all the exams much much better. The practical side he didn’t do so much better. The bloke where sport was his big

forte and things like that. There was the reticent sort of guy who wasn’t very forthcoming and the pundits would say “Well he’s never going to be a leader”. Then you got the bloke who probably wasn’t as bright as the rest and he went into…I’ll probably be hit for saying things like this, but he would probably be going into things like cooks and stewards. You didn’t require massive doses of flamboyancy to be a steward. To be a good steward you had to have a touch of subservience in you. If you didn’t, then there was no point in becoming a steward.

So that’s how it sprung out. My complaint in those days, in hindsight, was that the psychiatry wasn’t used that much. There must have been people in there in those days who were pushed into a branch that they really weren’t suited for. I thought that should have been looked at more. It didn’t play a big role. It does these days, and even the argument is that it’s not enough these days. People are coming back from [East] Timor with stress and so the argument is, he should have been

checked before he went. So there was no real psychiatric tests down there for us, so it was just, well this kid’s romped this exam in, we’ll make him an electrician. What about this one, he’s pretty useless but he can run and jump and tie knots, so we’ll make him a seaman. I think it was very basic. And I still think there were blokes who could have done better in other branches. In my opinion.

Well

some that stood out were the chaps who…there was a lot of different characters there. I remember one particular character who was just so untidy. Oh my God he was untidy. He was awful and his sanitation wasn’t the best. I really don’t know where you’d put him quite frankly. I thought he was best put out but that wasn’t my job. He to me was never going to achieve anything. His capacity to regulate himself was zero.

How was he going to regulate anything else? I think if you can’t control yourself, how the hell are you going to control anyone else? So I thought he was a debit and I don’t even know where he ended up. But he was just awful. An awful person. A nice person individually but his habits weren’t the best. And being so confined. I mean heaven help you if you ever went to a submarine.

Being so confined, your fellow shipmates’ personal habits did impact on you. There’s no question about it,because if you were lying there like that and the fellow next to you had BO[Body Odour] that would kill a horse, it would soon wear you down. So all those things became very very important.

Yes there was that.

Every now and again they did that. This one particular bloke I remember we did that too. We nicknamed him Dizzy Anderson and he was a bit of a scruff, so we took him to the showers and turned it on. Locked the door and left him in there. The irony of that is that it works for a couple of weeks and then the old habits come back again. Like you can’t change the spots on a leopard. That did happen on many occasions. And I personally think things like that should have been picked out and dealt with. There’s always a shortage of

personnel so let’s look over that and maybe he’ll change. But I don’t think that’s the way.

They can but it’s only on a temporary basis. That’s my opinion. I think if you’re a certain way you’re a certain way and nothing much is going to change. Whether we like it or not, we are what our parents made us. That’s sad in some cases but it’s true.

Yes. But that’s just a form of bastardisation. It goes on in every service of the world, even today. As a matter of fact on Current Affairs you see it every now and again. It pops up about a Crossing the Line ceremony and some bloke’s got a rotten egg put on his head. Now my view of that is we are so different individually, that if 3 people in a bastardisation situation in the services were given the same punishment, then it would effect those 3 people 3 different ways.

The first bloke thinks it’s a piece of cake. The second…nah, but fair enough. But the third one’s asking his Mum if he can sue someone. So it’s…I never found it to be difficult. You shrugged it off mostly on the basis that there was nothing you could do about it. That was the big issue and in those days and probably today, if you went to your leading hand or your commanding officer…and in many ways he writes up your

character assessment, he might note that and say something like the bloke’s under stress, so all your advancement potential is…so a lot of people don’t do that. I would take it. I wasn’t very keen to have a rotten egg smashed on my head and I stunk. But them’s the breaks. But the other person is completely polacked by it. And this goes on all the time. I’m not for or against bastardisation in massive ways.

I think small doses of it are OK. Some might say it’s character forming. Some of it is probably bad. Too much to the wrong person can probably have negative effects, as we’ve seen. But it’s part of the system. If they’re going to change it and how they’re going to change it and why. It happens in boarding schools. It happens in boy scouts.

Oh yes, boarding school did it. Yes it was at boarding school. Definitely. Filling your shoes with jelly. That was a favourite. You’d be running late and have to go to Mass or something and you’d put your shoes on and …oh no! So you’d wear them full of jelly because you didn’t want to be late. So maybe it did help and I’m sure it did. But also I think it’s the character and the individual being brought up.

Putting it simply, if you were a Mummy’s boy too much, then bastardisation wasn’t your strength. But if it was the other way round…

Well they see life in the life raw more. They see Mum cutting off the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK ’s head and they see Dad killing the cow, so they’re more attuned to what’s happening in that respect. But yes I’m sure it does help.

I would be surprised if they didn’t have it still. Even the women against the women. I’m sure they do. It just seems to be a part of regimented life. Being a prison, the service, boarding school, nurses. They all seem to get it.

There is no question about it. The first introduction of women in the navy was a disaster from the point that they put them on ships

that weren’t built for two sexes. The first ships that took on females weren’t built…the first one was the HMAS Stuart I think. And it wasn’t built…if the ship is purpose built for two sexes, hey it’s great. The only thing that I noticed that nobody’s ever going to cure and that is when you’re a walking ball of testosterone

and women come on board, unless you’re dead from the neck up, there’s going to be a reaction. And I don’t think you need a degree in psychiatry to work that one out, do you? So if you’re in a position of any command and you’ve got four people. Three ugly blokes and one (I’ll be Australian) good looking sheila and there’s a dirty job to be done by 3 people, and

you think she’s alright, who’s going to get the job? The 3 blokes aren’t they It’s not rocket science is it? So from that point of view maybe there’s going to be that. It happens everywhere, in every form of life. Nothing’s going to change. I think it’s a good thing, because I think women have got traits that men haven’t and men have got traits that women haven’t. And I hate these idiots who try and bring us together and say we’re the same thing, because we’re not. Women have got some brilliant traits that can be adapted. I’m not speaking for the army or the air force

Sometimes I wonder of the capacity of a woman with a 60 kilo pack jumping over hurdles. But in the navy environment I think some of their assets are absolutely brilliant. But the ships have got to be purpose built, because the first one was rushed. All the critics threw them on there and the first one was a disaster. I think there was a case against that.

Harassment which is probably a nice way of saying there was probably sex going on. So it was a disaster. You just can’t get a ship that was built for men and put a curtain down. You just can’t do that. And the modern ships are built for that. I’m all for it. The high jinks you hear of every now and again where girls are slipping out of boots and falling into the sea, well that’s part of the original comment. There’s two energetic groups of people.

The choice of that electrical course you make before you go in as a recruit. The only reason I made it was because the fellow took me aside in Brisbane here and said he had seen the exam results and that I would be stupid not to do this. So that decision was made with his assistance then.

You, as you’re going through you know which way you’re going. In the group of you, there might be 30 of you: 3 what they call stokers; 2 electricians; 2 radio operators; 2 signalmen; 1 cook…so that’s all predetermined then. And then when you break up, when you finally do your final training, that’s when you go and join a larger group. You are then recruit Electrical Mechanics.

Oh yes. Your divisional officer is like a mother hen. He in liaison with your instructor might say, Leading Seaman Hamilton and I have noticed

that Recruit Mechanic Sprigs wants to become a cook. And he might say, yes he does give me the tendency that mechanics aren’t his forte. So in agreement they would do that. They were a lot less…I notice today there’s a lot more compassion. If you don’t like it after a certain amount of time, you can get out automatically. In those days it was very very difficult. Compassionate grounds were very very difficult.

No, not even that. I can’t remember anyone getting out on compassionate grounds I really can’t. One incident which was quite funny. I was on the Melbourne and I had to scrub the floor of the mess where we lived. A bloke came in. I’ll never forget his name. His name was Leading Hand Monty Woolly. He said something cranky and I threw the bucket down and stormed off. And we had a chaplain on the Melbourne called

Father Lake. An adorable man. I went up to his cabin and I told him I wanted to get out and of course there were no grounds. So he talked to me and gave me a cup of coffee and a biscuit and he took me down and I apologised to him and nothing more was said. And even in those days, I can’t remember anyone getting out on compassionate grounds. I really can’t. I don’t agree with that principle because there must have been people in there who should have been out and weren’t out and went on and to me, that’s like a disgruntled employee.

Why keep someone if they’re not happy. I’m sure that would have occurred in the services and that’s probably why they’ve changed. They might have got smarter.

Like every course, the basics. The basics, DC [direct current]. AC [alternative current]. Batteries. Very very basic stuff. Distribution of power.

How it goes from a generator to a switch board, to a fuse board, to the various arteries of its load. The unbelievable basics. The thing about the services is, with a lot more financial backing, they have the resources of movies and models and things. There’s nothing easier to have something explained…I’m saying this…in the

electrical world…my friend had a very good saying. He was frightened of 3 things: AC, DC and JC [Jesus Christ]. He couldn’t see any of them. And with electricity it’s just an unknown thing. So you think to yourself, this is crazy. But we would go into big cinemas and they’d have a diagrammatic scheme which they probably have now on computers. So the navy had access to those things. As I mentioned before,

the training was excellent. You’d go into a big room and there’d be a generator and they said, “OK you, get on the handle”. And you’d be turning it and there’d be all these sparks and you’d say, “Oh that’s how it works”. As opposed to the old days when the schools weren’t as well equipped. So the navy’s training was good. It was good from that point of view.

That was…

getting back to Brisbane. That’s what the bloke said. If you do this, you give yourself some sort of preparation for life outside. You might want to stay in forever but if you don’t, there is some basic preparation there, which will hold you in good stead. The worm has turned completely, because now we’ve got an absolute shortage of tradesmen all over. In 10 years time they will be charging the same price as doctors. So the thought pattern in those days…as I say it was only 5 years after World War Two and

there was a very big shortage of tradesmen.

Most accidents in the electrical field are caused by two things: one is abject stupidity and the other one is laziness. You get very very relaxed about things.

Like you get an electrician. I’m an electrician and lots of times I want to test something, I know I should really switch it off, but I’ve become so blasé about it and all of a sudden…and you just become so blasé about it. We never had any. I can’t remember any major accidents. There were lots of funny incidents. I remember one time I was on the Melbourne. It had this huge generator. It was a big ship and the generators were

monstrous things. You could crawl inside them. They had a big thing on them called a commutator. And there’s brushes on this commutator and it’s attached to this steam turbine, which drives it at speed and produces electricity. So the routine was, you got in there with a little blade and you had to clean all the gunk out between the forms of these things. We were in there and one of the stokers noticed us in there and without telling us put a bar on…there’s a big fly wheel with holes in it

and he started what you call barring it over. He started to crank it over. We’re in there and all of a sudden this thing starts to turn. Well the pair of us shot out of there like rabbits, and of course we turned around and they’re all laughing their heads off. That’s what keeps you sane, silly things like that. But there weren’t many accidents. Most of the accidents I saw in the navy were accidents with motorised things, like we had an accident on the Melbourne when we were coming into Hobart.

When you tie a ship up you’ve got ropes and then you’ve got wires across like that. And a gust of wind blew it away…being a big ship it came in, recoiled and hit a bloke, Able Seaman Moore and killed him. Things like that do happen.

Yes. On the wharf and came in like a rubber band. It killed him. So there are accidents.

There was one accident which really didn’t come under the terminology of an accident. In Trincomalee there was a sailor who was attending what they called a evaporator which is so hot in the engine room. It converts salt water to fresh water. He didn’t take his salt tablets enough and died of a…I don’t know what the death was caused by, but he eventually died. Some pilots were killed on the Melbourne. I’ve seen pilots being killed.

Accidents…there was one particular fellow. A very good friend of mine, Pat Hanson. He eventually walked with a limp. He was on the Melbourne and a Fairy Gannet…a front wheel collapsed and the propeller hit the deck and a big sliver went into his leg and he walked with a limp. And talking about Australian humour, he walked with a limp and his head would go like that. So his nickname became Signwave. Australian humour.

As a matter of fact I had hoped to see Signwave the last time I was in Tasmania but I’ve lost track of him. That is the bad side of things, you lose track of very good friends, because Australia’s so big and sometimes I wish we were smaller.

Oh yes. Yes, you’re tested.

The electrical field was then split into two divisions. The first one general purpose and the other one was aircraft. There were electricians who worked on aircraft,which in itself is a good trade. Then the general purpose one was split again into two things. The general purpose one was split into P for Power which

involved all the distribution of power on the ship, and the other was E for electronics. And that did all the gunnery, all the sonar. We used to say it was because we were smarter, which of course was a load of rubbish. So I became an E and in hindsight P would have been better because you got to do shore side work.

See E was supposedly for the smart alecs but it wasn’t really that relevant to work ashore, because there weren’t many gun turrets ashore were there? So we did all those sorts of things. And when you graduated from there, you were an Electrical Mechanic Second Class. Then you went to the ship and then you studied and you came under a higher rating.

You did all the various jobs assigned to you in parties. We used to call them parties. They would have for example, fan parties and they would do all the fan machinery on the ship. They would have an engine room party and they would do all the work in the engine room. And they switched you around and on the capital ships like the Melbourne you did what was called Switch Board Watch Keeping which meant you did 8 to 12, 12 to 4. They gave you an insight into everything.

The next step up from that was leading hand. The leading hand was getting to the higher side of the lower class. leading hands didn’t scrub floors and didn’t polish brass. So once you got there you thought thank God for that. I’m not cheap labour any more.

Yes in those days the pay did go up per rise. In those days there was

a hell of an anomaly. The other services, for example we’ll just take sergeant and leading hand. sergeant in the army and leading hand in the navy. A leading hand in the navy who was an electrician, or a marine engineer or a cook or a steward or a signalman all were paid on the rate of leading hand. In the army he got paid on the calibre of work he was doing. So a sergeant cook got paid $10 but a sergeant whiz bang got paid $15. Since then that’s been righted now. So the complaint then was I’m suppose to be a bright spark and I’m getting the same pay as the cook. Not that the cook wasn’t an absolutely important person. But that’s the way it was in those days. But that’s been since changed. But when I was there you were paid on your rates.

They would say you were paid on your left arm. In other words if you had an anchor there you were paid on that rate.

Oh no no. The third ship. It takes a long while. It takes about four years.

No. On for example a big ship like the Melbourne, they had the capacity there to shift you around to all the parties. On the smaller ships it was different. On the smaller ships the P did all the power and distribution and E did all the mortars, anti submarine equipment, guns and all that sort of stuff.

No, of course electronics were in their infancy. They were called electronics then. To the modern person today, the electronics in those days were so basic

that it was laughable. But of course we thought it was fantastic. This was in the 50s. In those days it was really new territory. We had all this new equipment and it was a bit of a thrill to be involved with all this new equipment. The mortars and anti submarines, and the things they did we thought were magic. But today they’re nothing. But it’s all relative.

Yes everything is naval terms. You go ashore. That sounds rather strange because you are ashore. So everything is still port side, starboard side. It’s an understandable tradition I think.

Traditions are very very strong there. Everything is done as per ships. You have routines. You have 1400 hours 1500 and all this sort of stuff. I remember once we had a fellow in our group. He was a bit of a character and Leading Seaman Hamilton said something like, “You’ve got to be at the parade ground at 1300 hours.” Someone said, “Well what if we get there at 1400?”

And this bloke said, “What’s a 100 hours?” I’ll never forget that. So it’s all done like that and we had little traditions. In fact…I thought I had a photo, but we had a bull dog who was the depot mascot and believe it or not his name was Nelson, what else. And they used to have this bulldog and they would bring him out and of course most bulldogs aren’t very attractive and there’s saliva coming out by the bucket loads.

They would put a little hat on him and thing over the side with an anchor on it. They had him one day and they were playing Aussie Rules. They kicked the ball to the sideline and not being very financial, they only had one ball. Well, Nelson flops on it and covers it completely with his big flabby body and all his saliva. And over came these six foot six ruckmen who would run through brick walls. None of them were game to touch Nelson. So they had to get his handler over. It’s probably the only case when a bulldog’s held up a game of Aussie Rules.

The tales about Nelson were quite funny. One was…it may not be correct but it was funny at the time. The depot commander thought it would be a great idea if Nelson could lead the parade. They had him all frocked out and on a lead. The band always lead the parade of course, and out the front was the band commander who carried this big thing. They had this bloke there and he had Nelson tied to his wrist. Every time a band takes

off there’s this great brrr of drums. And they reckon that as soon as the drums came on Nelson took off and the last we saw was him running across the paddock with the bloke still attached to him. Obviously Nelson died but I don’t know if he was ever replaced. But tradition was a bit thing down there. There were a lot of navy names too. Where you got your clothing was called Slops. When you went for a meal it was Scran. “What’ s on for Scran?”

Little things like that. Little navyisms that came out. “Stand Easy” instead of “Smoko”. Stepping ashore was a favourite thing. ‘Where are you stepping ashore?’ Obviously from a ship you stepped off a ship onto the shore. So there were little funnyisms that came around and most of them were harmless.

The big thing that stood out with Cerberus was the inclement weather in winter. It was cold. Especially to a North Queenslander.

Not well. They weren’t centrally heated. But the good thing about it was you were insulated from it by a thing called youth. I don’t think I could handle it today.

Youth and your exuberance was a great insulator. The other thing I thought helped…reflecting back on what we were talking about before, the big thing that helped us was the beautiful Australianism of taking the mickey out of everyone. There would be some…there was a class bully a bit. You know, the bully was there sometimes. You got them everywhere. The first reaction sometimes was to counter it physically,

which was a really bad mistake to make, because as in life, there’s always someone bigger and better than you. The best way to counter it was mentally. If you made a retort that showed that you were smart and he was a fool then he soon woke up. That was the best way to balance things out. But there were punch ups.

Oh yes you’d get thumped every now and again. As I say there was nothing major. I think they used the word growing up.

No, I beg your pardon. It was a year. We left Flinders Naval Depot exactly one year after. 1956. A very memorable year because as I mentioned before we joined the Melbourne and one of our first duties was to go down to the Olympic Games. And the navy,

the army and the air force were a big part of the infrastructure of the Games. We were ushers so we wore white gaiters and a white arm band, which I’ve lost. And we were always done up neatly in our blue uniforms. We would show people around. I had a camera and this breaks my heart. At the start of the 200 metre race…there were two Australians in it. One eventually won it of course as you know, Betty Cuthbert. So there was Betty Cuthbert. There was a German girl Christina Stubnic, and … Marlene Matthews.

They were at the start of the 200 metre race and I went there with my camera. I got a photo taken with the 3 of them. And then I had all these other photos. I had one with a swimmer Lorraine Crapp. Dawn Fraser was there. And the camera leaked light and the whole lot was lost. But one funny incident there was,

I was 17 and this lady came in that I thought was gorgeous. At 17 you think most people are gorgeous. Anyway she came in and said “Are there any spare seats?” So I thought wow, for you I’ll find a spare seat. So I pushed all these kids up and told her there was a spare seat. Then she waved to her husband to come and join her. I thought not a good move. I had really bombed out there. We all stayed there. We were invited to the Post Olympic

Party at the Heidelberg Village. The dark side of it was, I was at the Olympic Pool when the Hungarians and the Russians played a game and it was so…there was no much animosity, because the Russians had just invaded Hungary. There was blood in the pool, bits of skin and everything. Some navy blokes jumped in to separate them. That was awful. They really really hacked away at each other.

In fact after those games, most of the Hungarians defected and stayed behind. The party was at the Heidelberg Village and we sailed that night, so we couldn’t go. But I saw all the games. Most of the cycling and that. It was good. And we were being paid and it was free. We would go back at night time to the ship. It was just fantastic. The whole 1956 Olympic Games.

Oh it was great.

I thought this will do me. They also had a Grand Prix race at Albert Park and Stirling Moss was there and all this sort of stuff. But to a kid of 18, wow it doesn’t get much better than this.

That’s right.

Well anything about Garden Island was fascinating for anyone with any mechanical bent. It had the biggest crane in the Southern Hemisphere was there. It had a dry dock that was probably 400 or 500 metres long. This monstrous hole in the ground. When I joined the Melbourne it was in dry dock. No water. And just that factor astounded me, how this thing could be in there with no water. I was very very green on things nautical.

Everything about it was huge. The rolling stock and the gates and everything like that. We stayed there for a while doing what they call a refit. A ship gets pretty dishevelled then. There’s pipes and hoses and stuff. So it’s a bit dirty. So after you’ve done your refit, they do what they call post refit trials. You got out and we used to go to a place called Jervis Bay which you’re well aware of. And they did trials down there and some of the trials were fascinating.

I thought they were. One that they used to do was called a Heeling[?] Trial. They would pump all the water out of one side from the ballast and the ship’s like that for about 36 hours, and then it does it that side for 36 hours. And it’s incredible how tired you get walking along supporting yourself on one side. It was just a good experience. First of all why would you want to do it and that was for testing equipment and various things like that. We used to sometimes go ashore. There was a place there called

Huskisson in Jervis Bay. It’s probably got the whitest sand in the world, it was just beautiful. But the climate’s not too good down there though. It was always rough. But the first time you went to sea was…although I had been on a ship going overseas with Mum and Dad, I worried, will I get seasick? I found through out my whole career, even in the merchant navy, I’ve spent a lot of time at sea, you either get seasick or you don’t. I found there was no in between. And there’s no cure. And the funny part about being seasick

is that most sailors are very very reticent to agree to it. They will say…you’ll say “Are you feeling crook?” “No no. I’m alright.” It’s very hard for a sailor to admit they get seasick. It’s like a badge of honour that you’re throwing away. So I was lucky I never got seasick. If you had a heavy night the night before and you sailed early in the morning, it was not too nice. But there were some pretty sad sights. If you got really really seasick

the navy would transfer you to the bigger ships like the carriers. Or if you were an extreme case you went to a depot. I only knew of one case where that happened.

The only way to deal with it is to eat dry food and get fresh air. Get up on deck. The worst place if you’re seasick is being down in the bowels, with oil slopping around and hot diesel air. There’s not cure.

Sometimes, in extreme cases but of course it would get to the point where you didn’t have anything to throw up. You just felt bilious and uncomfortable. I knew some guys who really did suffer, especially on the smaller ships which would bounce around like corks. The bigger ships were OK. They weren’t as jerky for want of a better word. They tended to have these great ponderous rolls. That was annoying to the people who suffered.

So after the refit you did these trials. They did other trials too. There was one that was an interesting trial. You went over…they had magnets on the sea bed metres apart. Now ships…when they’re in dry dock they’re hammered and banged, hammered and hanged and they inherit electricity. Static electricity. Now in World War Two, a lot of mines were magnetic so if a ship went over it it would blow up. So what they had to do

was demagnetise the ship. So what they did they ran over a series of meters which worked out the inherent electrical magnetism you had. You had equipment aboard the ship which you would then pulse to counter it. You had to do all those trials and it was quite complex. Then they’d go down and the aircraft would come on. They were Sea Venoms and Macchi and helicopters and they’d come on. They would carry

their own personnel. They had the pilots, the frame fitters and all this sort of stuff and all this came on and it was a big influx. You would notice it when you went on the scran queue, the meal queue because on the Melbourne you queued up for your meal. And of course it got 10 times bigger and it used to be real pain. It was great when it was short.

They tended to keep more to themselves.

Their work environment was the hangar. The aircraft would come up through big massive lifts. And they tended to work amongst themselves. General purpose blokes were a bit different. We ran the rest of the ship and they also lived up the top and worked on the catapults for launching the planes. They were noisy horrible things and would make a noise that would wake the dead. The other thing that was noticeable…

I had come from an environment in the bush where at night it was just so beautiful and quiet. All you’d hear was the cicada and kookaburra in the morning. I went from that to … my wife still can’t work out how I can sleep with the TV on and the kids…because it’s just noise. And when you’re on a ship the environment is all noise. There’s a fan going. There’s a diesel generator going. Noise, noise noise. So you got used to it. And if they were flying at night there

was noise noise noise plus. So you tended to get used to it.

To me it was huge. As I mentioned before it’s no longer in general terms huge, but then it was huge. The first thing was it was one giant labyrinth. It took me days to find out where I was.

The other thing about it was that below certain deck levels, hatches had to be shut at all times and you went through a little manhole which to some people was quite claustrophobic. I never struck a huge dose of claustrophobia until I was in the merchant navy. It didn’t seem to strike me in the Royal Australian Navy although submarines obviously would be more claustrophobic. But we never had them in those days. We had …the British

had submarines over at Balmoral in Sydney Harbour. As a matter of fact I was over there once and I went to have a look at one. I thought they were horrible, small, compact, smelly things, so I could never have been a submariner. But as far as the major ships…claustrophobia? It may have struck people but I was never aware of it. There were certain areas that you went down to…and certainly when you shut down for stations, everything would…you’d shut the door and the bolts that came down were called dogs.

And they’d put these dogs down and you’d have to go through little holes and things like that. The mind boggles how some of the more portly guys got through that. Then when they flew at night time you couldn’t walk onto the main deck without going through curtains. It was quite humorous actually. They had a set of curtains. One here and one there, so at no time were both open to let light out. You’d go in there and if by coincidence someone was coming the other way, you’d do the waltz for about five minutes.

And hope to God he wasn’t carrying a hot mug of coffee. It tended to be claustrophobic and all those things. The Melbourne had bunks and in this case they were four high and when you went on as what they called a raw bone because you were raw. You either had the bottom bunk which was about that high off the ground, or you had the top bunk,which had an asbestos lagged pipe going over it. So the senior chaps got the two nice ones in the middle. That was pretty horrible.

In those days all those ships were riddled with asbestos, which since then has become a sticking point with a lot of guys. But they had asbestos everywhere. In fact if you hit a heavy sea, there’d be asbestos flakes coming down like confetti. There was a lot of it there. But so far so good.

Being…we were lucky…the electrical branch. We were in the middle of the middle

for want of a better word. The only down side to our mess was when we got into port and they shut the boilers down and to generate electricity they had to start up these massive diesels about a long as this room and one was right next to our mess. So as soon as you got to port this thing started up and it went… and shook the daylights out of the place.

Some of the other personnel who lived right up the front, they copped a lot of noise from the catapult. But they were all the same configuration, the bunks. There were the…some of the mess areas were not far from the uptakes to the engine room and they were just so hot, boiling stinking hot. They had piping, the trunking going through

with little things shaped like an eye ball which you could swivel for air. But they weren’t much chop.

Everybody had that ventilation. Giant fans which blew it through…sometimes hot air. And that’s all you had. But they were hot ships. And of course once again the Melbourne was a British ship and not designed for the tropics.

In our mess, and don’t forget we were only juniors. The seniors had a different mess. They had a more upmarket mess. With the juniors there were probably about 90.

Yes. It was very spartan. Not much room. You never ate there. On the smaller ships you ate in your mess. On those ships you took your food back there.

And the senior guys had lockers in the mess but the junior people had lockers below. If you wanted to go to your locker you had to go down out through a hatch and down. It was a real pain actually, because it was a long way. It wasn’t a long way but it was an inconvenient distance.

Yes. But fortunately the bunks would fold up and when they dropped down there wasn’t much gap between them.

Once again getting back to that. If you were unlucky to strike a bloke who was BO plenty, it wasn’t very good. But as I said, you seemed to get by.

They were staged in different parts because the ship was so big. You had a workshop in the engine room with lathes and that. You had one in the starboard front for the fan party. They

were all over the place. The main switchboard, really the hub of the ship was housed in the complex. One was called the main switchboard and the other was called the damage control area. That was pretty much where all the control…where power emanated from and your coordinated pumping happened. It was very much a key part of the system there. Everyone had to do their turn in there. You did your stint as what they called a Switch Board Watch Keeper.

They would play pranks on you too. When you were young.

I remember being on one and it was about 4 o’clock in the morning and there was a phone call and I picked up and a bloke in a muffled voice said, “Chief Cook here can you switch on the breaker? The circuit breaker…for the vinegar pump.” And he slammed the phone down. And I thought I’ve never heard of a vinegar pump. And looked around and I couldn’t find this vinegar pump. Of course it never dawned on me. Being a big ship I thought they might have a vinegar pump. Anyway

the phone rings again and this voice again and I started to panic. So I got the plans out and I’m reading the plans of the switch board and I turned around like that and I noticed that the curtain had parted and there were the fellas from next door looking through laughing. And of course I thought you sods. Once again it was taking the mickey out of you. So I’ll never forget my incident with a vinegar. I mean who in their right mind would think there was a vinegar pump anyway.

But when you’re panic stricken and naïve you don’t think that way.

You had to take your turn. The one I hated the most of course was the mess deck. Mess deck hand for the week. You had clean up afterwards and you had to scrub the floor.

And I thought I’m here to fight the enemy. I’m not here to clean floors. Sometimes you cleaned up after guys who you didn’t particularly like and you would think this is a bit degrading. I don’t like him for a start. But it was your duty and you did it. And with the knowledge that after two days there was only five to go and then four to go. Everybody did it. The juniors had to do their stint. Then you’d just clean it and

it looked beautiful and some bloke would stomp through with dirty boots. But the fella was 10 feet bigger than you so you pulled your head in. It was a balance of power.

Well once again that depended on what group you were designated to. For example if you were engine room electrician or EM they called it. They’d say, look

the meter on the number two evaporated or something like that is not functioning properly, so you’d have to go there and repair that as best you could. You’d hope to God you could because if you couldn’t you’d have to get a senior person down and that was a slur on your capacity. And all this sort of stuff. It was good from the point of view that sometimes they’d let you do something on your own, which I thought was a good routine. And if you did it without having to ask anybody, then

it was a feather in your cap. Mind you 99% of the time you did ask. So it was good from that point of view. And that depended a lot on the chap in charge of that section. Even though he was a senior rating, some of those senior ratings weren’t that crash hot either. And there might be a personality dislike too or something like that. The other hard juggling act in the service was juggling your personality with the controlling personality. I supposed it’s a bit two-faced.

But it’s a good survival routine. If you knew that the bloke who was going to make life tough for you was a certain way, well you bent his way a bit. That made sense. And not to do so was only making a cross for your own back. So that part of it was also training.

Well the only one I can think of was this Monty Woolley. In those days there were a lot of ex Royal Navy personnel. They switched after the war.

There’s been…there was always a bit of agro between RAN and ex-RN. We used to call them R/Ners. Oh he’s a bloody R/Ner. There used to be a bit of agro. There was. The same as there is today with the cricket team. The Poms and all that stuff. It was harmless and the person who took it further than that was pretty stupid And there was a bit of agro and maybe that happened to him, but he got on my back a bit

and that’s when I threw the scrubbing brush down and went to see Father Lake. But sometimes that did happen. And of course as you got older you matured a bit more and you thought more with your head.

Well although we did inherit…see most of our officers had had Royal Navy training.

One of our electrical officers, Lieutenant Drew Reddings was absolute gentleman. Our instructors at the electrical school were ex-RN and there was a funny incident with one. We had a chap called Lieutenant Commander Trist and he was a…he was virtually a school teacher in uniform. I never forget, he drove a water cooled Valaset [?] and we had a wag in our class called Wolf.

We nicknamed him Zeke Wolf what else. And one day he came in and he was limping and Lieutenant Commander Trist said, “What happened?” and he said, “I tristed it.” And of course he then had to run around the paddock with a rifle over his head for about 10 laps. But he was an absolute gentleman. He was involved in electronic work or electrical work in the sinking of the Tirpitz. So when you think of it in that view, this guy was up there.

But we didn’t know that at the time. We were just a silly buff headed 17 year old. But in real terms he was an absolute gentleman. I can never forget the look on his face when he said “I tristed it.”

Tommy Hamilton was one. Our instructor. He was just such a lovely human being. He was a very compassionate sort of fella. He wasn’t aggressive

and he wasn’t as the movies depict. The in your face screaming. No we never got that. He to us was a bit of a hero. He had done Korea and he had medals. Wow anyone who had medals when you were just in the service was just a hero you know. He was probably the biggest mentor. We had various characters who…we had a fella called Lieutenant Greenwood. He was a tough sod.

But in hindsight he was very good. At the time we thought he was the biggest sod that every walked and wondered if his mother and father ever got married. But in hindsight he was just a lovely human being. See they were all ex-RN. Tommy wasn’t but Lieutenant Greenwood was. He took us…a big day in the navy is Trafalgar Day. And in those days the recruit school always put out an honour guard and Lieutenant Greenwood took us for it.

We used to go to a place called Como Park in Melbourne and there was some funny stories come out of that. One was…one of the exercises is where you grab your rifle and bring it in various movements to your shoulder and all fire at the same time. The perfect world would be that there would be one sound. But trying to coordinate that. And the story was they had a guy in a tree with a lamp. And everyone look at the tree and when he flashed it they were to pull the trigger. The idea was brilliant, except just before it happened he fell out of the tree.

That was one story. And the other story was, they had the WRANS[Women’s Royal Australian Naval Service] marching and they felt they looked a bit pale, so they got them to put on that artificial tan, and you guessed it, Melbourne rained. So all these make like funny but they also make life great. Some of them came across as tough, but anyone would think they were tough when you 17.

You only think people are tough when you’re the victim.

Well if you’re in ranks or something like that and you coughed incessantly well a fella like Greenwood would say if you’re going to cough incessantly go to the sick bay. If not, don’t cough. So his logic was correct

but the practicality of it sometimes failed. If you coughed, he’d get annoyed and he’d pull you out and you’d run around the bull ring with a rifle over your head for about 20 laps. And because you were young you could do. It wouldn’t happen today. And to us he would say we’re finishing at four but you’ve been so bad we’re going until half past four.

Toughness like that. But he got the desired result and at the end of the day, when you did it and along came the CO[Commanding Officer] and he said fantastic, you didn’t think of the half hour extra and the running around, you’d just think of the end result. But that’s the same in sport and life I think.

The carriers are fortunate that they’ve got a flight deck.

So you can jog. And they had lift wells where they played volley ball. They’d get in there and they’d have the electrical branch versus the supply branch. They had…I’ll never forget once, we had a guy on board who was a very very keen footballer. His name was O’Hara. His nickname was Taxi O’Hara. So he got a crew together and we were going to play Rugby. Not on the deck but just to train. And he was the instigator and drive and all that.

But there’s lots of wires across there where the aircraft come in and land and poor old Taxi on his first training land tripped and just about pulped himself with gravel rash. So he was a write off. But the hangar also had a lot of space where, if you wanted to, you could go and do various forms of aerobic exercises, weight lifting and things like that. And I see on modern ships now they all have gyms.

Up market gymnasiums. But in those days they didn’t.

If you wanted to, you’d make your own or you’d do sit ups or chest ups and stuff like that. When you’re 17 or 18 you don’t seem to think about it, because God’s given you a lot of energy and you’re as skinny as a rake. You probably don’t need it. It’s only when you get older that it becomes part of the system. But they used to play a lot of volley ball. And I’ll never forget, we played netball

and the officers came down and the captain at the time was an immensely popular fellas named Gatacre. And he came down and it was very hot so he stripped to his shorts. I’ll never forget it. I nearly fell over. He had a tattoo. It’s common for sailors to have tattoos but very rare for officers to have tattoos. I’ll never forget it. He later became an admiral and he had a big tattoo, and I thought wow. But he was a very very popular person.

Yes he was a lovely fellow.

On any war ship you know every square inch. You get to know every square inch.

It’s part of a combination of nosiness. It’s where your job takes you. The only place you don’t see much off is probably the admiral’s quarters. The only time you go there is when you have to repair something.

Then you do it gingerly and make sure you take your shoes off and all this sort of that. But things like that. But everywhere else as an electrician you virtually cover because there is some electrical item in every compartment. That was one of the advantages and being a war ship there are no big spaces, they’re all multiple small places for obvious reasons. Should you be attacked it’s about water tightness. So there were

lots of them, lots of compartments.

Oh in a couple of months you’ll get around. As I say curiosity was the major one. There were some places that were out of bounds. One was the cryptographic room where the signals came in. The only people who went in there were the people who operated

the equipment. Ironically some electricians who got clearance. I got clearance on another ship I was on. You had to get clearance. They used to call it the James Bond thing. Frankly I think it was a bit of rubbish but if you were a bit snooty nosed you could say I’ve got clearance. But most of the other…it’s probably counter productive to make all but one or two places out of bounds.

When I first joined we got our kit and I had the smallest head, the smallest hat so I was referred to as Pin Head. And then a movie came out… “They’re a Weird Mob”. It was based on this Italian migrant who came to Australia. Do you remember that? The

star of the who was a bloke called Nino Culotta. So for a long time they called me Nino. And the thing I found out is, that the worst thing you can do about a nickname is rebel. Because if you tell people you’re cheesed off with your nickname, you’re stuck with it. So you just cop it on your chin. That’s all you do. It’s not a sensible thing to do.

No not really. That just about covers it. The navy was just notorious for nicknames, so anybody who’s surname was Rhodes was Dusty Rhodes. Miller, Dusty Miller. Smith, Smoe Smith. All Clerks with Nobby. That came without saying. It was just automatic. As a matter of fact even today when you see somebody. All Withers were Googy.

Googy Withers the film star. Even now a very good friend of mine. I see him all the time and his name is Nobby Clark. I actually don’t know his Christian name. But that’s it.

The only social life we had was things like…

we called it Tombola[a lottery], Bingo. And that was one and of course movies. We had movies. We used to have movies in the lift well. On the smaller ships you had them on the upper deck. There was an incident with a movie. One of the funniest incidents I had was on the Quiberon and we had the movies on the side and they had this type of thing up and

they had the speaker sitting on a fan. The electricians ran it. It was an old Bell and Howell. I don’t know who was the star. Well say Humphrey Bogart. And unbeknown to us whilst the movie was on, there was a guy on the ship who was a bit of a lady’s man. His name was Randy McGuire. He was ringing his girlfriend in Sydney. I can’t remember her name. We’ll call her Raelene. Anyway what happens, he gets on this thing and there’s this big whip aerial.

This is a quirk of electrical stuff. The whip aerial signal was going to Raelene in Sydney was picked up by the lead of the speaker and the next minute there’s Humphrey Bogart or who ever on the thing saying, “Hello Raelene, how’s Mum?” And of course everybody …and they knew straight away. Well didn’t they give him a cheer. So one of the officers said “Stop stop”. We had to stop it and he made his call and it then went back on again. I shall never forget it.

Yes his Hollywood moment.

That’s correct.

Yes, this was the big reward. I’m sure it’s the same with a pilot when he’s flying a plane. And to us being at sea…going through Sydney Heads…Sydney Heads has never been flat in its life. You go through Sydney Heads and you get that gentle rolling and you think wow! I’m at sea. And you start to roll and pitch and things like that. The other beautiful thing about being at sea, no matter how hot it is, it’s always cool above deck so you could go up above deck

after hours and it was just really really lovely and refreshing. It’s very serene and peaceful. There is noise but it tends to be background noise. So there you are, it’s lovely. And to look around…to look 360 degrees and see no land and you think to yourself, wow I finally got here. The routine of life then sets in. Like all war ships they’re 24 hours a day.

Someone’s up, someone’s around, someone’s doing something. It may not necessarily be yourself but there is always activity.

No, there’s a joke in the navy. They call us the silent service. They call us the secret service and they call us the senior service. We maintain it was called the silent service because you never knew a thing. I’m sure the authorities did but

at the bottom of the pile you don’t get told much. There is a posting listed. Estimated time of departure and then sometimes there is schedules given to you. When the ship came out, it was very much the in thing. It was the new flag ship, so we did a lot of home trips. We went to New Zealand. I remember we went up Milford Sound, right up Milford Sound,

turned around and came out. It was absolutely beautiful. All these sorts of things. Then we went up there. Now the Malayan campaign is a very very touchy subject on the basis it was never declared a war, nor was Korea, nor was Vietnam. The strange part about that is, even though they don’t declare it, people are getting killed. That’s the irony of it. It’s not called a war but people are getting killed. The navy…

after World War Two, the navy’s role became a support role. Ships firing at each other…they’ve gone for ever. In World War Two this didn’t happen. So quite frankly our danger factor in the navy was low. But the thing remains always the government told you to do a job and you did it. It’s irrespective of the danger factor or what or where or how or why. It’s like the Battle of El Alamein, where the cook wasn’t as involved

as the foot soldier. It’s part of the system and there is that inter service rivalry…you blokes we were down there and we were up the front. The Melbourne went up there and its role like all navy ships in those days was as a support. With its size, it was limited and being an aircraft carrier of course, its role was mainly aerial. I am sure I never…I never went up in a plane

but they must have done a lot of reconnaissance and that. In those days the threat was internal. There were Malayan insurgents. They were led by some canny guys who had a lot….some of the population was in favour. Contrary to Vietnam, more of the population was against them than in favour of them. The English were very very involved. The army was involved and stationed at a place called Penang and Butterworth. The English had a fellow in charge of it, Sir Gerald Templar [Commander in Chief, Britiah and Commonwealth Forces]].

He became the Malayan hero. The Melbourne went up there and had its tour of duty and things like that and then came back. I then went to the Sydney. When I went to the Quiberon…the smaller ships were more involved in that campaign up there. Once again it was purely a support role. A lot of ships participated in coastal bombardment, because of the insurgents were bringing down ammunition from

Thailand down through the coastal regions there. So they were all involved and they all did their duty. And it lasted for some time…I think it lasted from post war to about 1960. So it took a long long time nibbling away. In the meantime there were other duties around there because there was Borneo which was part of the Indonesian thing and they had a lot of trouble. There were things like piracy patrols, which were

sometimes funny and sometimes frustrating. These fellows would disappear up coastal rivers and you couldn’t find them. Sometimes it was quite funny where a sampan type vessel would be apprehended and there would be an interpreter on board and he would speak to him for half an hour. Obviously the commanding officer would say, ask him if he’s got any arms on board. And the bloke would speak to him for half and hour and then he’d say ‘No!’.

It was like watching an SBS [Special Boradcasting Service] movie. So things like that. There were…the Americans weren’t involved. Now with the English, they were more involved than we were although we had support ships with them. On the Quiberon we actually came under the British and we were…I don’t know if we were the only one or just one of the very few who were given a rum issue. We had a rum issue on the Quiberon which is unheard of in the Royal Australian Navy.

The Royal Navy has rum issues. And we were up there and involved with a very big cruiser called HMS Newfoundland. I remember it leaving us to go to Suez when the Suez exploded. But we got a rum issue. I couldn’t handle it, it was awful stuff. But everybody got it and of course then there was an illicit rum trade where if you didn’t drink it, you’d store it away and then flog it to somebody else who liked it.

So all that went on. The bootleg days I suppose. The mess deck hand would go up with his container. It was all done…ten people, ten scoops. It was all very well done and everyone got their tot of rum. Powerful stuff and we were one of the few ships that got it. We’d go to Penang and Butterworth and we’d go ashore and play

rugby union against the air force and that. The navy was a little cranky about that. Because we came under the British we didn’t get a lot of conditions that the army and air force got. They got things like Amah Allowance which was having someone to clean your dormitory, because labour was obviously cheap. So all of these things. And they got tax reductions and things like that and extra leave and this sort of thing.

We missed out on that and we were shunted to one side. When this all blew up about ten years ago, why weren’t we rewarded in any small way, they kept saying it was not Australia’s problem. You came under the British. Ring up Whitehall which was a pretty stupid thing to do. So it wasn’t until this Strategic Reserve Committee was formed that some rewards came in. All the saying was from the blokes in the Strategic Reserve which covered about 12 ships, was

we don’t want anything special, even though we did lose two men….ironically one by friendly fire. We were exercising with English naval vessels and one fired what they called a star shell. It goes up and illuminates. It’s a magnesium based shell which when it explodes just illuminates massive amounts of sea. It came down and landed and hit one of

the blokes and killed him. Quite ironic also, next month there’s going to be a do in Canberra where these two guys’ names are going to be added to the Roll of Honour in the National Museum[probably means the Australian War Memorial]. For want of a better word this was duck shoved for years. It involved…it wasn’t as I say gung ho stuff.

It was…once again I keep harping on it, but it was so hot. The conditions were just unbearable and closed in. It was just so hot. So it took us about 40 years to get any recognition. And in fact I think probably more and we’ve only just got it in the last 4 or 5 years. That little experience left everybody…but the experience itself was very very good. We exercised a lot with the English and not a lot with the Yanks. Although

later on we did exercise with the Yanks. We were over in the Philippines. It was …we were there exercising with them and I remember once we were in Hong Kong and we got called back to sail. What’s going on and everybody said…in those days between Formosa or Taiwan as it’s known now, on the mainland there’s straits and there’s little islands there and they’re called the Staits of Quemoy. We went up with the Americans. I think it was the 7th Fleet, or the 6th.

We went up there as a show of force to tell the nationals, hold your fire. And then we went back and we were in a bar in Manila and we spoke to some Americans and I shall never forget this. We said to a guy, what that ribbon you’ve got there? He said, “That’s for duty time in the Straits of Quemoy.” And we said, “We were there too and it was about as dangerous as crossing the road.” I can see the Australian forces are now going towards that American thing.

You can see they’ve got more fruit salad than Haile Salassi. Yet in the old days they were very loathe to give anything. But that American train of thought … they maintain it was a good morale booster. There’s nothing like a young serviceman coming home with 4 or 5 ribbons and it was a great morale booster…and recruitment incentive. But the RAN didn’t think of it that way. So that’s basically was the Malayan campaign. As I say most of the ships

did two tours of duty and most of us spent well over a year and a half up there. The locals…we did what we called refits there as well. Some of the locals…there wasn’t any great problem, although there was always the case of nationalism by the locals and a bit of redneckery by the Australian blokes which caused a bit of conflict. Irrespective of the fact that we were good guys, we were still foreign troops in their country.

And in those days, as opposed to today, everybody went ashore in uniform. I never ever went ashore once in civilian clothing. We were in uniform. You were inspected and if it wasn’t good enough, you went back and tidied yourself up. But nowadays they don’t. There is some reasoning behind it. I don’t totally agree with that situation. But in those days you went ashore in uniform. And the locals sometimes looked at your dismissively, unless they were a trader and they could sell you something.

There was very little case of that even in Japan. There wasn’t much antagonism. There wasn’t much. I could understand it. I’m sure if you see troops in your country you’d say, hey hang on this is my place. What are you here for, why are you here? If you’re visiting good. I suppose a lot of the politicians saw it as an economic benefit, because the Singapore Navy Base was huge.

There were British ships and Australian ships, American ships. Hong Kong was just wall to wall sailors. It was probably the most favoured port of call too, because you could get cheap gear and all this type of stuff. So all in all, the Far East was really really saturated with…in those days it was called SEATO [South East Asia Treaty Organisation]. which was mainly…yes, New Zealand ships as well.

The New Zealand ships added a bit of an Anzac flavour. And when we played rugby up there it was always the Anzacs versus the British. Their presence wasn’t as big as ours, but at any stage there Australian would have had at least 2, 3 possibly 4 or 5 ships in the area. So it was a constant reminder and that’s all it basically was.

We used to play them sometimes and in those days rugby union wasn’t huge in Australia. It’s only become professional in the last ten years. So we got thumped and we had tremendous friendships and when we joined forces with them they were good to have on your side as a rugby team. That era…I now go down to Sydney to watch rugby union and for 80 minutes I hate the All Blacks. I don’t hate them…I just don’t

like them as an opponent. But when you’re up in a place like that the camaraderie between the Anzacs is there forever and any fool who says it’s not, doesn’t live in the real world. You can crack Kiwi jokes until you’re blue in the face. But if you’re in a situation, I don’t mind having a Kiwi there, he’ll do me. It’s fantastic.

We had distanced ourselves from the British even in the forces. There’s no doubt about that. It had to come. Obviously geographic proximity and plus the navy was changed. As I say, my surname’s Bianchi and I was in the navy. I was in the navy with a bloke by the name of Freddie Hartman. His father died on the Bismark.

The enemy. And that’s how cosmopolitan the Australian Navy is. But Freddie’s a great…we just love Australia and we’re Australian to our bootstraps. That helped the little distance between us. And of course the influx from the Royal Navy …then the big turning point came when we started to buy American ships. And now I don’t think…maybe one or two British made ships. Our submarines aren’t even British designs any more.

In my day every ship was either ex-RN or built on a Royal Navy design.

No no.

The only time we made our own ships in any great sense was at the end of World War Two. Some were made on Cockatoo Island in Sydney and some down in

Melbourne. But they were based on British designs. Tribal Class Destroyers, Battle Class Destroyers. Deering Class Destroyers. They were all British. Then they broke away completely and bought American made ships and the flavour seems to have been…we make our own ships now and they don’t necessarily have to be on a Royal Navy design. The break’s been there…it’s been coming. But the basic training is still more linked to the Royal Navy than any other one.

I personally think the Royal Navy is a marvellous force. It’s got an unbelievable history, like them or not. They’ve been brilliant over the years and I don’t see anything wrong with that. The Royal Australian Navy has got more of an independent flavour now.

Oh no. You were all over the place of course. We used to stop…depending where you were going. We used to go up to Calcutta, Trincomalee,

Colombo. We went to Rangoon once. It was quite hilarious actually. We were on the Quiberon and Rangoon is situated on the Rangoon River. And all the rivers coming down are just flooded and fast flowing streams with debris. Most navy ships have got dispensation to go up to a port without a pilot.

I’ll never forget this. We were at the mouth of the river and we picked up a Scottish pilot. A big taciturn Scot who spoke with a big brogue. He came on board and I can remember him asking the captain who appears in that photograph, how much power he had. How many propellers he had and all this. And he sort of looked at this with glee…God I’m on a speed boat. We went up this swollen muddy river at about 25 knots and the poor old captain just about chewed his fingers off. He knew every sign post

on the river…the captain was shuddering away there. And we went up to Rangoon. It was different but it’s not some place on everybody’s map. I don’t think too many people want to go to Rangoon. So we went up there and of course we were feted. It was really funny because the British Consul came on board and told us to do anything but drink the water. He said drink whisky and beer but don’t drink the water or you’ll end up with the Darjeeling Two Step [dysentery], they used to call it.

So Malaya was very very good. There’s a little ironic twist here. Off the coast of Malaya is the Tioman/Andaman group of islands. And they had various names. We’d go there…the fleet would go into these harbours and drop anchor and we’d go ashore and you’d get a couple of cans of beer each and play soccer or something like that. I saw a photograph the other day of one particular island. The bloke said, “Are you aware that that was the island they made South Pacific on?” And that same island now is just a monstrous concrete resort. It was just an island, nothing. Just vines and weeds and beautiful beaches and lovely scuba diving waters. But that’s the progress of time I suppose. I would rather remember it as it was.

Well Hong Kong itself was magnificent Don’t forget of course it was totally British ruled. There was a British Navy base there. They had an army base there. So it was part of the old colonial empire. We used to tie up at a place there and they had places like the China Fleet Club. You’d go in there and there would be blokes playing two-up in the toilet and bingo in the front. There would be characters flopping around all over the place.

There was a Barbary coast atmosphere but it was fun. There was the local vendor who called every Australian he saw Ned Kelly. “Hey Ned come over here, you want dirty post cards?” And all this sort of stuff. The one incident in Hong Kong that really shocked me when I was still youngish. A friend of mine Frank and I…this was a little routine in the navy…when you were at sea, on Sunday morning

you would clear lower decks. Unless you were on duty you would have to get on deck. And you’d go to stern part of the ship and the captain would get up and say something like your performance last week wasn’t very good etc etc. And he’d storm away and then the executive officer would get up and say, “We’ll have some church services. Roman Catholics forward, up the sharp point, other denominations aft.”

So I would go up there and invariably we’d finish quickly. You would go back to your mess and the others would come in and say, “How long have you blokes been here?” “Half an hour.” So the next week he’d say, “Roman Catholics forward.” and after a while the Roman Catholic population had grown. I remember the captain saying, “Someone’s been doing a good deal of conversion on my ship.” And in a similar vein we were in Hong Kong and

we thought we’d go to Mass up the road. As we came out of the dockyard gates, I noticed a girl laying on the half pavement type thing. I didn’t take much notice of her and we went to Church and on the way back we stopped at a bar or something and had a drink, and on the way back we noticed the girl was still there. She had a few flies around her mouth and her nose. She was dead. She had been hit by a car. So what will we do now? In those days

the policemen who wore a red underlie under their badge spoke English. So we went over and got one and what I remember about it was he was so blasé about it. Just another day…but he advised us to go back and said he would take over because sometimes the finder of the body can be hit with the funeral expenses. So we thought we’d better go. But that wasn’t the part…it was this attitude. It was a life. And if it happened here

it would be different. The reaction was so unbelievably flat. There’s this kid who had obviously been hit by a car. It was on a corner. So she must have been hit there and just died. So hey…your appreciation of life in this country is really really something compared to those…and that was all throughout the Far East. In Bangkok and places like that. Girls being sold and you think to yourself, wow life’s not good.

But that’s the way it goes and it’s still there today. It’s improved but that’s debatable.

Pretty much as support that’s all. A show of force which navies are still doing today. The Americans do it a lot.

If there’s trouble in Lebanon, let’s send four battle wagons and a carrier and they might not do anything but it’s that show of force. I suppose it’s reassuring to the people there. I’ve never experienced and you’ve never experienced it, but it must be reassuring to the people that there’s a good guy in the back yard and that’s basically its role. There’s probably no other role it can do at the time. Pretty much that was it.

No. The pilots of course were very highly skilled and very gung ho guys. I’ve met a few since ironically in different things. In those days you knew of them because they were heroes type of thing. And they did very scary things. They landed planes in the middle of the night on a pitching deck about twice the width of this room. It took a fair bit of ticker for want of a better word. And there were some stories

that came out with pilots which was pretty strong. There was one particular fellow, his name was Hanna and he was on the Sydney. The Sydney or HMAS Vengeance I can’t remember. The story goes that he was in a propeller driven craft with two people in it. It went over the front into the water and the ship ran over it. Now the other fellow got out and was killed. Hanna had the forethought to stay in there until he heard the propellers going over the top, got out,

never flew again because his ear drums were effected. So he reverted then to general service. That’s just some idea of the dangers and the skills they’ve got. These jets and things like that, they really made a …I suppose in today’s navy they’d be nothing, but in those days it was considered pretty good. And the Melbourne had an angled flight deck which was an innovation in those days. There was a steam catapult,

an angled flight deck, which meant the planes could take off and land and land at full speed. The reason there being that if they came in at full speed, flat strap or for want of a better word, and missed their arresting wire, they had enough power to go straight off again. Whereas in the old days, if they missed it on a straight deck they ran into a barrier which caught them. That’s what they did.

Stop them.

Like fibre.

A big barrier came up. So he came in…the carrier was one straight line, whereas with an angled flight deck to one side, the planes came in at an angle. Then they had another little innovation. You remember in movies and things, the bloke bringing them in would have like two ping pong bats. Well that was all gone and they brought in this thing called a mirror landing system which we electricians worked on. It was virtually

beaming two light beams at a central point into the aircraft, which he followed down. It was still scary though, especially at night and when the sea was rough.

That’s all I wanted to be.

Yes. If I won the lottery tomorrow and I retired…

I tried to get my pilot’s licence. I went to Bankstown…when I was on the Melbourne. I went out to Bankstown and I trained in a Tiger Moth. I did 11 hours and I reckoned I could fly it, because those things you could just about fly…they were a magnificent little aircraft. And then we sailed to Singapore. Now the logistics of getting from the ship to get some training was just too much, so I gave it up. I never did it again and it broke my heart.

Oh yes Manila was a favourite. There was Manila itself and then there was a place called Subic Bay. Subic Bay was a massive American base and next to that was a massive air force base called Clark Airfield. Typical of the American bases they were huge. Some times…funny incidents there. The Americans of course had multiple ships.

They might have 12 ships of a class and they all looked the same. So to save time they might have five small destroyers tied up at one wharf. In other words the first one would be tied up at the wharf and then the others were all tied up like that you see. So a lot of sailors would come back and they would be a little bit under the weather and of course by the time they had crossed the 3rd one, they were totally bamboozled and it was virtually a roll call…hey you’re on the wrong ship.

So that happened a lot. The bigger ships would stay out anchored in the bay and they in turn had a similar problem. They’d go to the wharf with these big landing barges. And there’d be two carriers, the Sydney and the Melbourne out in the bay. To a drunken sailor at night they looked identical. So the bloke would wake up and there would be a gangway and up he’d go and no wrong ship and back down again. Little incidents like that helped kick life along as well.

No not really. Manila was very popular. The popularity in the ports was sometimes the distance from the ship itself to the hotspots. In Singapore for example, if you in the dock yards, there was a long haul into town. At Hong Kong for instance we were mostly anchored out and we got little boats, they called them bum boats.

You’d yell out for a bum boat and you’d get on and you’d give him some Hong Kong dollars and he’d row you ashore. So you were virtually there. And Manila wasn’t very far either. That’s why Hobart in Australia was immensely popular, because you go down the gangway and you’re in a pub. Sydney was the same.

Yes I did and they’ve all still got it.

It was quite funny because when the ships came back, Customs weren’t as rigid in those days and less rigid with servicemen. We weren’t renowned smugglers or anything like that. Apart from his carton of fags, Jolly Jack brought home coffee tables and things. Look the stuff I brought home. Noritake dinner wear and silk brocades and I would give it to my sister and be the local hero. I didn’t bring much for myself.

I think I got an ivory Mahjong set.

Oh yes we did. Everybody bought the cameras. Cameras of course were so expensive in Australia and they were cheap there. Hong Kong was a marvellous duty free port. It was probably the pick of them. You’d go ashore. The navy term for something that is not service uniform is, tiddly suit, or abbreviated as Tid Suit. That

meant it was made by a private tailor. It was cut better, it was more flamboyant. It had little red inserts and things like that. So when we were in Hong Kong everybody….there used to be these very clever tailors on board who invariably were called Chang Key. Everybody was called Chang Key. They would give you a card and invite you to their shop. So you’d go to their shop and the first thing they’d do is ply you with copious amounts of beer. The drunker you got the more stuff you ordered from them. About four suits, ten pairs of pants, shirts…

but it was very cheap and good quality. It was excellent quality stuff. And the other thing I remember was you could buy shark skin really really cheap. Top quality. And all our T shirts. We used to get T shirts and shorts made of shark skin. It looked a million dollars. The service chiefs didn’t like it very much because they were a bit…they weren’t the…in those days the uniform issue like the RN and their

shorts were just diabolical because they and huge legs and these buckles in the middle which we called Empire Builders. They were horrible. So Jolly Jack would go ashore and see Chang Key and get 2 or 3 pairs of shark skin shorts and he’d look more like John Newcombe then he did a sailor. But it was beautiful cheap stuff and the women …the professionals would come on board and they’d set up a shop on board and they had badges and things and it was all done

by hand. It was brilliant stuff. I hope that’s still there. I’m sure it is. And they have…women would come on board…they’d come along side and they would call them…they were always known as Jenny Side Party. They’d clean the ship, paint and clean it from top to bottom. So Hong Kong was very popular. Not only from the sailor’s point of view but from the navy’s point of view The ships were always immaculate. These women would just swarm on board and clean

it. So Jenny Side Party. Famous they were. Any sailor of that period would certainly know what a Jenny Side Party was.

They were frequented. In fact I’m sure they were. See in those days the incidents of VD [Venereal Disease}was still there. It’s probably been there since Julius Caesar’s time. But it was nowhere the epidemic proportions or the variety they have today.

Even when I was in the merchant navy, some of the places you’d go to, unless you had a death wish, you just wouldn’t. In those days there was less incidence of it, so I guess Jolly Jack took his gamble. I don’t know if he still does today but I’m sure he doesn’t

I was 19, 20.

Oh no, everybody’s interested. There’s no question about it. If you’re not interested, I think you should see a psychiatrist or a doctor. But no, you were interested and like everybody else you took a punt. But even in those days, if you had sensibility about you, there were levels. To put it frankly, there’s the mud hut and there’s the swanky building. So you would apply a bit of commonsense. That’s not to say you were guaranteed.

No warranty came with it.

The services …they were quite funny really because it was counter productive. I remember going to Singapore. Singapore had parks.

They’re called World, New World, Old World. And some of these were out of bounds. So Jolly Jack would read that and say they must be good if they’re out of bounds and make a bee line for them. The only trouble with that was the British would have patrols there which we called the Red Caps. They were horrible military policemen who would wear the hats with the peak down there. To this day I don’t know how they saw.

So if you met one of those he’d give you a good kick up the backside and throw you in the back of the jeep and take you away. And they were horrible monsters and I suppose they had a duty to do. And that’s how it was. It was a gamble in those days and the odds were longer and today I’d say they’re a lot shorter.

The authorities had deemed it to be that in conjunction with the local police.

Maybe they thought that the prostitutes in there didn’t really come under the World Health Organisation. So they in their judgement, would declare in out of bounds. And that just spurred the young and silly on.

Oh yes.

In fact it used to be the catch cry of the more experienced bloke. You would go into a bar and obviously they could tell by your face. I don’t think I shaved until I was 20. And you’d go into a place and the girls would come along and sit there and the older bloke would take over. He would be the godfather. He would say, “Cherry Boy!” Cherry Boy meant you were a virgin. He’d say, “Cherry Boy!” And you’d say, “No!” And of course that would be it. The girls would swarm all over you.

And of course the older bloke would continue this on. It was a continuation of the Australian mickyism. Even if you weren’t and your face was juvenile enough, you could get away with it. Yes there was a hell of a lot of that that went on.

Maybe today more than yesteryear, where promiscuity today seems to be just normal. It was embarrassing and yes, I’m sure it was.

It must have been. I can’t recollect it being that embarrassing, but I know when it did occur you’d go….and think there must be something wrong with me. I’m a man.

You thought you did. Don’t forget also this was combined with the plying of alcohol. There’s nothing like plying someone

with alcohol to reduce their inhibitions. And that happened and I’m sure it worked a lot of times. Some places had better reputations. Bangkok was a terrible place even in those days. Manila not so bad.

It was one of those …who knows, jobs.

There was no hard and fast rule. But it did happen. I would be lying if I said it didn’t, plus you wouldn’t believe me. But it was part of the system.

The other things is, in the 50s and that, Australian girls were very prim and proper. There wasn’t that much liberalism around.

All of a sudden there’s this guy and once again he’s loaded with energy and he finds a girl who’s not unattractive. She’s absolutely pliable. She’s subservient. She doesn’t argue. It’s heaven. What have I got here. So this is it. If you didn’t succumb there was something wrong with you.

Yes we did a big refit there. Where we were billeted out, the barracks there were called HMS Terror. There’s the English side of it see, Her Majesty’s Ship…and the place there was called Terror. We were there ashore in these big dormitories which was a nice break.

Overhead fans and open dormitories and a couple of incidents there. One I remember was this local chap bought this new beaut drink dispenser which was fool proof. But as you and I know, there’s no drink dispenser that’s fool proof. So anyway we had this all there and we worked out that if you got these little flat discs and burled the edge it worked perfectly. So they emptied the poor drink container on him and I remember

him coming down and so we hid. He had one of those 3 wheeler things, like a motor scooter with a trunk on the back. He pulls up and opens it up and there it was, no drinks and full of tokens. He looked around at us and I swear he would have killed us if he could. There was nothing left. But the incident that was really quite awful…the HMS Newfoundland was

a big 8 inch cruiser and it had a rum vat and they used to mix their rum in a big wooden vat On the side it had written ‘God bless the Queen, or the Queen we serve’ or something like that. Two guys, obviously too much to drink pinched it and tried to swim across the harbour with it and of course the flaming thing sank. Well this thing had probably taken 20 years to cure.

You can imagine what overnight salt muddy water did to it. So we were virtually banished and then to add insult to injury, one of New Zealanders…they had a big photograph of the Queen in the mess hall and he painted a moustache on her. So there was this rivalry between the Anzacs and the British. The authorities didn’t like it and the repercussions

of that were felt for a long long time. I think we were banished out to sea or something like that. But little incidents like that and later on in years are probably funny but it was pretty hard to take if you had cured that rum tank for all those years. I remember going…they had a canteen there and there was a great friend of mine and his name was Ox Webber. We used to drink…

Fosters in the green tins. He came in one morning and he said he had a headache. “I’m going to write to Fosters and see why I’m getting a headache”. I said, “Don’t bother I can tell you. You drank so much of it.” He said “No no”. Anyway he wrote them a nice letter and they sent a letter back from the chemical department saying, because the beer was being sent to tropical areas, the preservative factor had to be increased and one of the main preservers was arsenic, and that maybe the extra arsenic gave him a headache.

He was happy then. It wasn’t that he drank too much. It was because of the arsenic. There was a bit of inverse logic for you. A French ship came in once and ironically it was the same chap who was ringing up Raelene on the radio. I remember he came back one day and I asked him how he went. He said, “I went ashore and I bumped into these French sailors. God they’re ignorant none of them can speak English.” That was him.

You always got one of those on board. The only thing we found out, there’s one thing that’s undisputed, and that is as far as singing ditties and shanties, no one matches the English. Even to their Barmy Army. Even to that. There were cases of sailors coming into canteens and that and the British were brilliant at it. They would sing ditties and sea shanties all night. All we’ve got and still probably is, is ‘Aussie Aussie Aussie.’ They were

brilliant and it was quite fun to be with them.

Of course we always…we weren’t big on that. We never have been. I don’t think Australians have ever been big on that. I think it’s getting better. See God Save the Queen was our national anthem in those days. So our big song was Waltzing Matilda.

That was the bees knees and that was our national song. Advance Australia Fair had been penned but it hadn’t been accepted. That’s virtually all we had and when that failed, ask them who won Wimbledon. But when it came to singing ditties they were unopposed.

Yes. And most of the occasions it was over two things: Money and women.

There were a lot of characters on board. From these characters tales emanate and as the years go by, they get burnished a bit more. They get bigger and better and there’s always the tale of the sailor who got knocked over by a car and when asked by the commanding officer how come and he said, “I thought it was two motor bikes, so I jumped in between them”.

That always happens. In Singapore they had a place there which was called the NAAFI Club and it stood for Navy Army Air Force Institute. The wags said it stood for No Ambition and F All Interest. The NAAFI Club was donated by a chap called Lord Nuffield, who was an industrialist in England. In fact he made Rover cars and that sort of thing.

And all the sailors would go there because there was cheap food and a pool and some of the sights there would be quite hair raising. A fellow would get drunk and dive in the pool fully clothed and misjudge it and land on the side and all this sort of stuff. There was always the odd brawl but nothing serious. One of the funniest incidents that I struck. There was a character on board the ship

called Ted Bridle. He went ashore and he bought a bicycle for his kid. We were in Singapore and it’s a long way away and he never had any money. So he thought, what a great idea I’ll ride the bike back. So he took the wrapping paper off it and everything like that, trying to inflate the tyres and he’s riding back in a drunken haze and mistook a corner and landed in this buffalo ditch which ponged to high heaven. By the time he got back on board he was a filthy reeking mess. They left him down the gangway and hosed him from top to bottom.

Those sorts of things were quite frequent. Not on a ship I served on but there’s a story of one particular ship, a destroyer up there, and one of the boys bought a little elephant back and brought it on board and tied it to the torpedo tube and then promptly went to sleep. The officer of the watch came along and sees an elephant tied up. Look, they’re never ending. We used to go to Darwin. And in Darwin as you may be aware the rise and fall of the tide is huge.

And because it’s so hot they would stretch an awning over the back. Now when you would get there, if it was high tide for example, the gangway would be virtually perpendicular to get off. And when you got back it would be the reverse. One night we got back and the tide was really really low and the ship …from the wharf to the top of this awning was about 6 feet. So all the sailors went leaping onto it like a trampoline and the odd bloke would stay there and go to sleep. And there’s this awning

down the back littered with drunken sailors all having a sleep. The officer of the day would get a bit cranky and nasty. Some of them didn’t display much sense. We were in Tokyo and when you’re in a port like that, there’s a constant flow of visitors and things. And to add to it we had a guard at the gangway. I forget this guys name but we nicknamed him Speedy Gonzalez. He must have been the slowest human being on earth but with Australian humour he was the fastest.

He was standing there. He had to be dressed up, so he was looking all very efficient guarding his home. The officer of the day walked along…he had to be there for the whole day, he couldn’t move…and he looks over there and there’s his rifle with the bayonet on it on the ground. He thinks, where is he? And apparently they piped stand easy which is smoko. He heard it, put his rifle down and went and had smoko. So that was really….never ending.

At the time they get a bit…they anger some people but at the end of the day it’s not earth shattering.

The biggest difference of course was that it was a much smaller ship.

And with the smaller ships the role was purely on armament maintenance. Maintaining the guns, maintaining mortars and what we called anti submarine mortars. So it was virtually the work. And as you got higher in rating you got a bit more responsibility, there’s no question about that. The ships were so small and compact, and

the ship wouldn’t have been more than 100 yards long. They were very small ships, very narrow. So to some extent you’re tripping over each other. So there was never a time when you were on your own working on something. It became more…what shall I say? It became closer in every aspect. Not only in your private life but your work environment.

Like on a big ship you can get lost a bit, but on small ships you just can’t. There’s always some bugger looking over your shoulder.

Even if you want to you can’t. So this is the trouble, yes. So that was a bit character building. It made you more tolerable. I think the navy made you more tolerable for that very reason because intolerance was a dead end,

because he was still there tomorrow.

Well that’s right. Everybody had an action station. You closed up and hatches came down and …there’s a very funny incident on the Melbourne. The toilets on the Melbourne were all salt water toilets. There was the toilet bowl and on the side was a plunger which you hit

and you virtually leaned over like that to it. Now when they went to action stations they first thing they did was…you had to be prepared in case of fire. So they put full pressure on the mains. The pumps that pump the mains are wound right up and these pumps feed the toilets. And you’ve always got the young fellow…and he always learnt the hard way. You never told him…if you go to the toilet, you push the thing with your foot

or you don’t go. So the poor sod would go and push his plunger and come out wearing a sorbent necklace. Things like that were the lighter side of exercising. The exercises some time were necessary. They always were. But there were some funny incidents. This was on the Melbourne. There was a particular guy called

Hayden Sly. A lovely chap and he was a radio mechanic. Now when you go to these action stations you’re given envelopes. You open yours and it may say, ‘You’ve been allotted to 4BF party and you’re to supply emergency services to the gyro which has been blown out.’ And likewise the cook might say, there’s an emergency party stranded …and the sick berth attendants up in the hospital, they might get one that says,

sorry…you might get one that says, ‘Proceed to hospital’ And you give it to the bloke and he says, ‘Mild concussion’. So he has to treat you for concussion. This Hayden Sly was on an exercise and during the exercise,one of the radar screens went a bit silly, so Hayden got his screwdriver out like I did before and bang he got knocked over flat. Very seriously actually. So they took him down to the sick bay and the fellow said to him, “Where’s your chit?” And he said he hadn’t got one, he was fair dinkum. So he said, “You’re not coming in here.”

So there’s poor old Hayden gasping, nearly dying and the bloke wouldn’t see him because he didn’t have his bit of paper. So there are the funny sides of seriousness. One particular bloke. His name was R.M. Peterson. Whilst they’re having these exercises of course the ship’s commander and officers are walking around seeing what’s happening. And apparently on the Melbourne the flag officer and the captain were walking around with the commander

and there’s this Peterson sitting in the passageway reading a comic book. The captain said, “What the meaning of this?” And Peterson, “Don’t worry about it, this part’s been blown out, I’m dead” which went over like a lead balloon of course. They were very good and you had to have them. The only thing was if the ship was hot under normal conditions, when you close up it gets hotter. And you had to lug pumps around. For an exercise you would have to get a pump, put it into position and start it up.

I remember they would have a two man pump and the wags would say it would take four men to carry it. That was navy design. So if there wasn’t a light heartedness in everything you did, you’d go potty.

The Melbourne if I remember rightly…once I was in the main switch board…you get changed around a bit. Once

in the generating room. Then I was in the fo’c’sle, the front end. So you get changed around a lot and you get adequate chances to do it and all these things. It’s invariably your station that you would be used to. It would be folly to put you somewhere that you’re completely out of tune with. The idea was…and the current navy now is doing what we all thought should have been done back then, and that is making

people multiskilled.

Yes but our biggest…you see the guns and the sonar and the radar were all operated by what they called seaman rates. Now if they got in the turret to work the turret and something failed, they couldn’t fix it.

They’d call the ordnance artificers or the electricians. Now our argument was that surely to God if you were going to maintain it, why wouldn’t you operate it. It makes sense. And that’s what they’re doing today I believe. There’s more multi skilling, so it’s changed a lot but in those days it didn’t happen. You’d go…sometimes you’d go up there without ear protection of course. There might even be an exercise and when those things fired, mate they made an awful noise. And that’s why most of the guys of my era are suffering from a thing called tinnitus.

That’s what happened, because we were never given protection, even in the engine room. Nowadays you see them and they’ve all got muffs on. We were never given any protection, never. The only consolation of that is, that it’s recognised by the services and you can get some disability out of it.

Well,

exercising is of great importance, because it keeps the ship on an alert footing. So the idea of exercises of course, is that when the real thing happens of course, you’re ready, you’re prepared. They had to strike a happy balance, because if you exercised all the time, you’d wear the people out. Some times you might stay at action stations for a long long time and it would be a. boring and b. tedious. It’s a bad thing to bring into a person, tedium.

So they had to average it out and it was up to the CO or in fact the overall commander. In a lot of these cases they have joint exercises now. Most of them are joint. We exercise with the Americans a lot. The British and the air force and all that. Not so much with the army because the Australian Army didn’t have a massive presence up there. Any presence they had was in Penang and Singapore. But now I notice more of the exercises are held in Australia.

We didn’t have many here. Most of ours were held…because of the SEATO Pact with the Americans. They were off Hong Kong or the Philippines and stations like that. There were some bases. They had a base at a place called Manus Island which is no longer there. Ships used to pull into there quite often for a bit of recreational leave, although there wasn’t much there. Palm trees, that’s about all.

They had various competitions too. They may have a prize and a certain ship…the HMAS Warramunga has won the so and so award and they would carry that as a little award. To this point I don’t know how they ascertained that but somebody did. Someone did.

Very efficient.

Like I firmly believe to this day still, and you’ve three there who are still in cahoots today. They’re very efficient. And quite frankly, if you’re going to be on someone’s side I’d rather be on their side. At the end of the day, irrespective of who you support or who you don’t support, I’d rather be with the big strong fella quite frankly. The Americans and British are very professional. As I say most of our stuff…the equipment is American,

principles are Royal Navy. It’s a good mix. I think it’s a fabulous mix.

Oh yes a lot. The Americans I found, being such a huge place….I think if you get an Australian from Perth and an Australian from Brisbane there isn’t a huge amount of difference is there? But the American from Brooklyn and Texas and the American from Pasadena and the one from Wisconsin,

I thought there was a big difference, bigger than there is here. I think that goes for Britain too. Like a Liverpudlian to a Geordie to a Londoner to a Cornishman. You might as well have 4 different nationalities. Whereas the Australians haven’t got that big gap, which I think is one of our strengths.

You tended to pick out the

Americans. The city slicker American I always thought was a much wiser guy. The Brooklyn man was a wise cracking smart alec, whereas the bloke from Idaho was a good ‘ol country boy. A bit more genuine. That’s were the big massive difference was. There was a difference between the Melbourne guys and the Sydney guy and I suppose the bloke from Longreach, but it wasn’t huge. But the Americans were huge. I like Middle Americans. I always thought

they were nice. The end bits tend to be a bit…mongrelised. The British were the same and that I experienced in a lot more detail in the merchant navy. That came more to the fore. So overall I think the Australians had a great affinity with them. The Americans absolutely love us, which I a nice thing to know. And the British arguably pillor us but

I think they think we’re alright.

Well the routine was pretty much…if you didn’t work shift work. See a lot of the ship’s company were shift workers. And they did, 8 until 12, 12 until 4, 4 til 6, 6 to 8 and they did that. So they were a sort of different crowd. The others

who just had day jobs, you’d get up have your breakfast, make your hammock or your bunk, stow it. It had to be stowed neatly, because the principleof a tight hammock was that it could be used as a life raft if you sank. A well strung hammock could keep you afloat for 3 or 4 days. A bad one would just go. But that was the principle.

No, that was the routine you were taught.

The routine of the ship. When you got up in the morning, the first thing was you lashed your hammocks and you put into knots and you tied it all up and it became a virtual sausage. It was pretty much a tight sausage and then you took it over to what we called the hammock bin and you stood them all up vertically. That was perfect when you were at sea but when you at shore and some bloke came back drunk and decided to sleep in the hammock bin, it was a disaster because you couldn’t get your hammock out. Especially if he was a big lump.

It was. So you did that, you lashed your hammock and then on the smaller ships you didn’t have a cafeteria and then the mess deck hand that was allotted went up and got the food. Or you went up with your tray these horrible metal trays. And you’d have for your meal for example: you’d have a stew in one dish, the custard in the next dish,which worked really well, until someone bumped you and then you had custard flavoured stew.

Or the ship rolled and you came down these virtual ladders one hand. You got very adept at coming down ladders one hand. Then you ate your meal, then you took it back and got it all cleaned and then you did your day’s duties, and then you had what was called stand easy at 10:20 for 10 minutes. Then lunch break and then afternoon break. And then at night time, there wasn’t much you could do in those small ships. Mahjong was very popular.

Everybody played mahjong. It wasn’t as pure as the Chinese play it, because the navy mongrelised it a little. They’d have certain times, Jimmy Ricks and all this sort of stuff. There were movies which weren’t that frequent and then there was bingo which wasn’t that frequent. We all read a lot, or you just sat up on deck and told yarns because it was cool. Most people just gravitated to the upper decks to get a bit of breeze.

That’s right.

In very rough seas hammocks win hands down because the ship tends to swing around the hammock. Bunks had the advantage that if you by chance wanted to sleep face down you could. If you slept faced down on a hammock, you’d end up like a swayed back horse. It was just impossible.

Bunks were probably user friendly all round, but hammocks were good. I liked them. You could sleep on your side a little bit but mostly you slept on your back. They took the roll out of the rock and roll. The only bad side about it was, that with bunks, you just flicked it and it was gone but these things you had to lash them up all tightly and tuck them all in and drop them in.

You got them pretty tight and then you grabbed hold of the bar and you swung into it. It was like a little aerobic exercise every night and every morning. Because the mess decks on those small ships were so crowded, they jammed you in there. I remember on one ship I had a bunk and about that far from my head was the exhaust fan to the galley.

So at about half past four every morning, this thing would start up, but at the end you got used to it.

Well on the Melbourne

the biggest problem with electrical equipment on ships, and this translated into my merchant navy days was vibration. Most of the electrical equipment on this earth, take Mum’s fridge. It likes getting in there, sitting in there and just purring away forever. But if you put that same fridge in an environment where it shook, rattled and rolled, it would probably last about a 10th of the time. And the other thing in ships that killed electrical equipment were the variations in temperature. Electrical equipment likes stability. But

with variations in temperature of course, it’s up and down. When HMAS Voyager was first commissioned, the ill fated ship, it did its trials off Sydney and they had all this equipment on board, the air conditioning equipment for example. It had it mounted on what they called a resilient mount. As the name implies, it was resilient in its movement and therefore takes vibration out. But it all broke to pieces. It just couldn’t handle it because those ships do vibrate. The small ships, the amount of vibration

you get a head sea, when you hit a big sea. They pound into the sea and the whole thing vibrates and you wonder why the whole thing doesn’t crack in half. And to the uninitiated, you think, is this thing safe? Pounding and crashing and of course they’re rocking and rolling and of course that takes its toll on the equipment.

No,

with a lot of equipment repair 10% and 90% is finding the fault. With many of the complex equipment, finding the fault took up the bulk of the time. Fixing the fault was the smaller amount of time. Some of that stuff we thought was quite complex and hairy. A lot of the stuff there was newish. A lot of our stuff

was …the Australians are very good at improvising and improving things. A lot of the stuff we got from the Royal Navy we improved. So Aussies did well that way.

The sonar we got from the British I think was called an AS 180B or something. And there was a simplistic design in it that an Australian had picked,

that converted an electrical impulse to a mechanical movement. It was based on a pencil going up through a hole. And this hole was on a round disc and if that disc moves, it provides more than one movement on the pencil. So

by one movement, that way we attained two movements that way. So the disc going around would provide two movements. Simple things like that. A lot of the times they had to be improved because of climatic differences. That was the big thing. It’s all very well the system working in the Atlantic where a hot day was minus 4. So when it came out here a lot of it had to jazzed up for our conditions.

Awful. Awful. I was going to bring that up. With electrical systems on ships, one of the biggest things is what they call an earth. As you know electrical systems have got to be at a higher level than rating, so the moment you got an earth rating, it would blow a fuse or indicate that there’s an earth and the system will not work properly. Because of the corrosive nature they worked in, they were always there.

That was very common. In fact they used to be buggers of things to find. Sometimes very intermittent. The environment on deck is awful. That salt spray will just corrode anything. And of course all your armaments are all above deck.

We were on the Quiberon once and we were running out of fuel…actually we weren’t running out of fuel, but we needed fuel, because it’s always policy of a war ship to keep fuel in balance. So the only way we could get fuel was from this big English cruiser the HMS Newfoundland. The normal way of taking on fuel, is the mother ship steers a course and the baby or the calf goes along side.

They fire a gun over with a line on it, that line gets bigger and then that line gets bigger and then they pull over a fuel pipe which they then lock onto a thing on the deck and they start pumping, and the two ships maintain a course. The captain’s got to be very very rigid. Now if the seas are too rough that can’t occur. So they have to rely on the other system which is called stern fuelling. The feeder ship, the mother ship, in this case the

cruiser, gets ahead and throws the line over the side and it floats down, and on the fo’c’sle in this pounding sea the blokes pick it up, bring it on, lock it into the system and it starts pumping by radio control…start pumping, are you receiving me, yes. This had occurred. We’d locked on and it was howling. It was awful. The engineer rings up the bridge and tells them to tell them to start pumping. Of course the Newfoundland said we are pumping! And we never received any fuel. It was that rough that it had broken the fuel line and there was all this oil…don’t tell the environmentalists but there was all this oil spewing out into the sea.

But we had enough fuel to go into [?]I think it was. But it was rough. Very very rough and of course the smaller ships don’t roll as much. They bob and prance and squeal. Awful things.

Yes because footings are hard. You might be walking along and you’ll slip or you’ll hit your head. A lot of injuries occur in very rough seas. You might be going along a passage way…now passage ways on ships aren’t just clear unencumbered passage ways. They’ve got hand wheels, they’ve got pipes, they’ve got rolls of cable. They’ve got a board sticking out. And of course when you’re going along like that, should you slip or fall…

That’s why footwear was very very important. They would allow you to wear things like this but not thongs. Thongs were not allowed on deck because they were awful. They would cause more accident than you can poke a stick at. So there would be head gashes, broken wrists. A lot of injuries on heavy seas.

By keeping it properly painted with a paint that has an anti corrosive base on it. In fact the upper deck was always being chipped and painted, chipped and painted. And as time went by they had a more modern thing, which had multi needles which would remove it all and then repaint it. It was just ongoing thing, as the Harbour Bridge is.

I don’t think you would ever get on top of it. They did use aluminium superstructures later on but they got a bad report mark in the Falklands War, because they caught fire. So I don’t know what they’re using today. Maybe they’ve gone to plastic but in my day it was all steel and it was round the clock.

The only instrument they used in trying to keep the hull clean was what they called anodes. They were bolted to the hulls of ships and all that was supposed to do was to stop electrolytic reaction between metals. If you get two metals and one is impure to the other, you’ll get electrolytic reaction, so you combat that by earthing it, or putting an anode on it.

So that’s what they did on the hulls. It was very effective to stop marine growth and things like that. But at the end of the day, they jokingly would say, it needs a hair cut. It would go into a port dry dock and get a hair cut. It’s amazing in the older days how much gunk actually attached itself to the hull. These anodes helped a lot. It was OK if the anodes weren’t on there so long

as they didn’t have any corrosion. It was just a matter of shaving it off and painting. But when it was of a corrosive nature, that’s the killer.

No it’s just an ongoing thing with sea. Some seas are more corrosive than others with the higher salinity content and the richness in the water too. The tropical waters seem to be a hell of a lot more richer

in nutrients than cold waters do. So the ships around the tropics certainly copped a hiding.

No,

not in the navy. You have to accept the fact that when you’re 18 you’re pretty gung ho let’s face it. I’ve never met anyone at 18 or 19 that’s not gung ho unless there’s something wrong with him. So there’s no such thing as fear, not in a direct sense. I know if you came against something in dark you’re frightened. But over all fear doesn’t seem to be part of the psyche of an 18 or 20 year old.

I don’t think there was. In my opinion there wasn’t.

Yes. With the Australians being in Penang and Butterworth that was quite common to go ashore and meet other Australians, soldiers and airmen.

The air force were a bit out of Penang at Butterworth. They flew what they called Sabres in those days. And the early Gloucester Meteors. They performed a lot of bombing in Vietnam. I believe some of the ships in the Malayan emergency provided bombardment support to the various terrorist hideaways, camps and things like that.

They would stand off and bombard the area. The wags would say they just cleared my area for them to put their tents up. But the British…I think the British declared it…in 1960 I think there was a big march through Kuala Lumpur which is the capital of Malaya. We went to a place called Teredak. I think that’s now been changed. Typical, a lot of names get changed.

At one stage in the game there, there was a party sent ashore because there were anti-Malayan riots and Kuala Lumpur had a lot of ethnic strikes. The local Malay and the Chinese didn’t see eye to eye. I think the Chinese were gobbling up all the business. So they were sent ashore there as crowd control. Having said that I just want to retreat back. In the early days, when I first joined and was down in Recruit School, of

course, off Flinders Naval Depot is a small island, no two islands. One’s called Phillip Island where as you know they have the car race on, and the other one was French Island which had a very low security prison. So we were all in our dormitories and someone said we had to go down to the bus. Someone said, ‘What’s going on?’ And some prisoners had escaped from French Island. So they piled us on the bus and they gave us a 303 each which was really great. Great this is. I don’t know what we were going to do because half way out, someone

found out that they had no bolts in them, so we were probably going to have to hit them on the head or something. So that’s the first incident. But in Kuala Lumpur that time there was a lot of ethnic strife. I don’t know what Malaya’s like these days but it was in those days. The locals…the way the British did it was very clever. They

swayed the locals over to it, which was counter to what happened in Vietnam, where the locals really didn’t like the allies that much, whereas in Malaya it was virtually the reverse. So the insurgents didn’t have the support of the locals and so it all the failed, as the reverse happened in Vietnam. That was declared in 1960 I think and I think it went for 12 years. No more…

So it was quite protracted.

It just gives you some little feeling of achievement. You did something irrespective of its problems, dangers, call it was you may. You did something. You joined a service and the boss in Canberra said go there.

We did it and we came back, so there is that achievement. I don’t know how you measure achievement. I don’t want to measure achievement in grandiose ways. It’s a sense of achievement. When we all meet in our various reunions and all that, that invariably comes up. It was great. It was a period where a lot of character was formed.

A hell of a lot of character was formed and obviously friendships were made. It was great. It was great to walk around with HMAS on your hat. It was a good feeling.

In a fight. And I obviously lost. That came about because of that silly rum issue. This friend of mine on board said, “I’ve got some extra rum.”

And I thought, I don’t like rum but we went up on deck and we got under this lifeboat hidden away there and we drank the rum. Well it took me about four sips and I was silly as a fowl. And then something started and the next minute I got whacked. That’s my rum issue scar. It’s a little badge of growing up. Next to it is says, I grew up that day.

Yes I know who it is and I believe he’s still around.

And I believe life hasn’t been too good to him and seeing life’s been a bit better to me, when I see him again I’ll say, “Right now do it again.” No. I think it’s what you call youthful boisterousness.

Yes.

Well a lot of those were done in recruit school. We went

down and these movies came out that every giggled at. Diagrammatic sketches and wow wow. You took it on board because if you didn’t you were stupid. The feeling in Australia in those days was pretty much non existent really. The navy had a term for VD. It was called the Jack. And anybody who got the Jack in those days, it was about the same odds as winning the lotto. It wasn’t a big deal here. I must admit, it wasn’t a big deal. When

you went to these ports…most ships carried a doctor. The very very small ones didn’t. And they would give you little lectures and remind you. Your divisional officer would. Every department on board had a divisional officer. There was an electrical officer; the engineering officer; the supply secretarial officer; the pay officer and it was their business and he would probably say to the chief, “OK go down and give those young blokes a talk” and he’d go down there and there would

always be the heckler. So you were aware of it. I don’t think the amount of awareness you got came near the amount of energy you had.

No. They were both similar. Both in a similar vein. It was a support exercise. In fact I can’t remember, whether it was the first one or second one, we even did a bit of flag showing and we were in Japan for a while because the Australians had just shut down a big base up there at Kure. That was the…the Americans were still there in numbers.

The remainder of the Commonwealth forces had gone. So we went up there and went to various places in Japan which was absolutely wonderful. We went everywhere, we had a great time. We went to Tokyo. I thought Tokyo was just the hugest…I had never seen anything as big as Tokyo. And the Americans were there in numbers. They had bases everywhere. We went to Hiroshima.

We went to Kobe.

Yes there were bus tours going to it but there was nothing there, there was just a broken church. Most of the damage is in history books and what people inherit and know. Everything’s grown again apart from the broken church. The Japanese were very very good. They’re a remarkable race. There were people there who had belted the daylights out of them

and yet there was no animosity. They seemed to enjoy…or respect victors. MacArthur was feted like a God. They bowed to him and he was the victor. There was one incident in a bar there once, where one bloke went a bit silly. He screamed abuses. I assume it was abuse. It was Japanese. But the bulk of them didn’t. The Japanese are funny.

Here was a country with people who represented a group, a country that beat the daylights out of them and there was no animosity. That’s just their psyche I suppose. A victor is a great guy. I don’t know if we would support that theory. I wouldn’t be very happy, but they were.

Yes. There’s a dignity in defeat which I thought was rather unusual.

Not so much a dignity in defeat but a dignity carried to the victor. I’ll rephrase that because defeat to them was horrible. They had the Kamikaze element and the Banzai and all that. But all of that they still had dignity to the victor, which was really remarkable.

Yes that’s right. And to a group of young Australians going there, who were brought up with history books of Gallipoli and all this sort of thing. We found that rather odd. That these people were actually in awe of us as victors. I’d hate the bugger. He beat my dad and so therefore I don’t like him. It’s something that was acceptable to them and it was a good lesson.

You get postings. It would come through the signal office and the electrical officer would get it and it may say you’ve been transferred to the HMAS Warramunga and you’ll go ashore the next time you’re in Sydney and get your travel documents and join the Warramunga in Perth or something like that. That’s how it worked. A group of us went to the Sydney.

At that stage it was a virtual training ship. It had been neglected a little bit hence the name The Cockroach Hilton. I suppose that’s being a bit awful to it. And as I mentioned before, it gained a new lease of life as a Vietnam troop transport. But in those days it was just pretty much a holiday home. It was training. And when you’re training if you’re not the trainer or the trainee, you’re just the person in between, then

it’s very easy. We just did our jobs and things like that. What turned out to be, all of us who went there were then all earmarked to commission the Quiberon, because it was recommissioned you see. It had been converted in the dock yard and when it was recommissioned, we had this big ceremony on Garden Island. A very smart ceremony. The captain gets up there and of course the padre is an integral part of the ceremony. We were all lined up in our whites because it was January. And it was God bless this ship and all who sail in it and all this sort of thing.

And then once you get on there, then you’ve got to do sort of an assimilation process to find out all its equipment. It goes through all its trials and speed trials and all of this sort of thing. That photograph was taken during a speed trial. When you join a ship from its inception like that, there tends to be a bit more affinity to it.

So that’s why you get a sort of love relationship with a particular type of ship.

Yes a short while. It was only for about 3 or 4 months. That’s all. And it was non flying, there were no aircraft on it.

No we were just there to keep the thing going because there are a certain amount of duties on any ship that had to be kept going. The machinery has got to be checked,

the machinery has got to be run, the meals have got to be cooked, so there is that part of the crew which has its strict duties. There were others on there who had classes and things like that.

Yes I met up with him at recruit school

Yes I see him all the time. He lives down at the Gold Coast.

Yes.

Yes, and on the Quiberon. It was only after the Quiberon that we went our separate ways and then I lost track with a lot of people because I went back to sea in the merchant navy and I did a lot longer in the merchant navy than I did in the RAN. I spent so much time overseas.

Frank was a Novocastrian to start with. He was from Newcastle. And now he lives up in the Gold Coast. He’s there and he has a son who works in town here. I see him quite often actually. The thing I noticed about the services and more so the navy is, when you make a mateship, there seems to be a pretty dose of cement there.

It seems to hang on. I’ve got lots of friends from school. I bumped into a friend from school and even though I know him, he doesn’t seem to have that…I don’t know, that something.

Twenty five hours a day.

You get …amazingly you end up being so much part of the fellow next to you, that you know who he votes for, what religion he is, the

colour of his sister’s hair…you can’t avoid it. Because of boredom and the passage of time, it all comes out. And some of the things on ships are quite funny. I was on one particular ship and to relieve boredom you would do anything and you would pin the letters you got on the notice board and they would be invariably from your Mum or your Auntie which had funnyisms in it. And I was on a ship called the HMAS Swan and I had written to Mum and asked her who won the

Melbourne and the Caulfield Cup? And she wrote back to me and said a bloke called Galilee has won them both. That was the name of the horse. Another funny one I remember, there was an Englishman on there called George Ballard and he got a letter from his Mum and he had it on the notice board and it had something about his Auntie, Auntie Enid or something. It said, Auntie Enid had all her teeth taken out and a new gas stove put in. Well that broke the boredom up for a while.

You did all these things and injections like that….not only did they do things like that but you got to know the person so well. You knew he had an Auntie Enid and you knew his grandma was bad and all this stuff. And because of that, that’s where the mateship came from. And you really did get to know all those things. You can’t avoid it. It was virtually impossible to keep a secret.

Not so much because you asked it but because through the passage of time and sometimes boredom, you spill it. That’s why maybe the friendships are longer and better.

By then I had become what we call E. And as the ship, for its time was pretty well upmarket. It had a certain amount of armaments on it and I was assigned to a petty officer whose name was Rosie Budd. His name wasn’t Rosie but his surname was Budd and once again the navy comes into it. There was another chap there called Nugent and he was Nugget Nugent.

I’d say that only 5% of navy personnel are called by their name. So they were the two technical gurus for this new equipment. A friend of mine and I, John Best who I saw recently down in Sydney, he and I were their underlings. So we virtually followed them around and tried to absorb as much as we could. And we did learn a few things, I’m sure we did. Nothing earth shattering but we did learn something.

It was.

It was because I spent the longest time on there. See when you spent a few years on the one ship, part of it sort of grows on you.

That was mainly Strategic Reserve in Malaya and Borneo. We did a lot of time around Borneo. Up and down chasing pirates for want of a better word.

It was an allotted area which

covered the Malay Peninsula, parts of Indonesia, Borneo, the outlying islands and I think that’s pretty much the Strategic Reserve. It was probably strategic, because in those days there were a lot of upheavals. Sukarno was in power in Indonesia and there was movement afoot there. There was a lot of trouble in what we call Irian Jaya now. When we went up there it was under Dutch control. There was thought then that they might go into the west. There were a lot of trouble at Ambon, there still are.

There was trouble in Borneo, especially around Brunei and that especially with the oil fields. There was an Australian show of force once again to pretty much say, “Hey fellas we’re here, watch it.” That was basically it. You’d exercise a lot. The British were up there a lot.

That’s right. Smaller ships tend to be closely knit and you forge the best friendships there. As I said with the big ships like the Melbourne, you could always go and sit on the flight deck for two hours but on the small ones you just couldn’t. No matter where you went there was just wall to wall people. The small ships had over 200 people on board.

I think I’m an extrovert. I couldn’t survive without having people and fun and activity around me. I just couldn’t survive. So maybe that helped. Some people didn’t handle it that well. In fact a lot of people didn’t handle it that well. In fact we asked one particular fellow if he wanted to come to our reunion and his reply was scathing. He didn’t want to know anything about it. He hated it with a passion.

So we don’t want him back. So it obviously affected people in different ways, there’s no question of that.

Some people had mood changes I must admit. As time went by…sometimes where you were out at sea and out at sea for weeks…it’s a long time and people did become moody.

There were mood swings no question about it. It might have been exacerbated by the heat, because that made you rather intolerant. It makes everyone intolerant. And a lot of people suffered more from the heat. As I mentioned before, one particular fellow in our mess had to be sent back to Australia. He suffered really bad. As I said he suffered from boils with the sweat. So they flew him back. He couldn’t handle the heat. I’m sure others might have been close to that point.

The only way they could exhibit that was with mood swings. There were some people more aggressive. It was hard to keep a level line but you just had to.

Honestly can’t remember now. They tried to make it best as possible because of the very facts we’re just talking about. It was their interest. Maybe 17 days.

It is.

You just don’t have privacy.

Yes that’s right. It’s a naughty word privacy. Some times blokes would get up in the middle of the night and sit on the quarter deck on their own, but that’s with the thump thump thump of the ship underneath you.

But apart from that, no. Very impersonal life. There was always somebody there.

Well Borneo was of course…we used to go to places that people have never heard of…Lahad Datu and Semporna and places like that. I’ll never forget. We were at anchor once and there used to be…I’ve

never seen jelly fish like them. They were monsters. And every now and again you’d anchor somewhere and of course you couldn’t go in and you would probably shut down the boilers and you’d be on a diesel. And the next minute everything would go black, oh what’s wrong. These jelly fish would get caught in the intakes for the diesel, and of course the poor sod in the engine room would have to get the grills and get all the gunk out and put them back in, flush them out, start it up again.

They were just massive things. I’ll never forget them. And there was always that and of course what small amount of air when everything shut down…so it just got worse. We were invited once by a big plantation owner to a saw mills. He had saw mills up there and the pirates used to go up there and loot and burn and pillage and plunder and all this sort of stuff. It did happen quite frankly on these fast boats. So we went up there as guests too.

And I can remember, it was quite good. It reminded me of Kenneth Moore and his white hat and the old days. It was quite a thrill. Then we’d go back to the ship. But the change was brilliant. He gave us cold tea and we had a look around and things like that. It was very close to my upbringing and the saw mills up there. And then we’d go back to sea again. So we hung around quite a lot.

Yes. I’d write. I must admit I wasn’t that good a writer. Lots of times it was difficult to find something to say. I used to envy some guys on board who had girlfriends and wives and that. They would write these 10 page sagas and I would think, “What can you say?” I only had my Mum and I adore my Mum but there’s only so much you can say to Mum isn’t there? I don’t think she would have been very interested in jelly fish or Borneo.

It was pretty much, “Hello Mum I’m home. We had Christmas away once and we got packages from the Red Cross.” They have the Troops Abroad series and a package from the Red Cross. It was a Cherry Ripe and a tin of talcum powder. It wasn’t much but it was lovely just to see that and open it up. We had it in Singapore Harbour and there was an age old ceremony from the Royal Navy days,

where the youngest person on the ship, which wasn’t me but some other kid, becomes the captain and he has the captain’s command. There’s a little ceremony and the first thing he ordered was the first lieutenant to be thrown over the side. I’ll never forget it. And there’s the supply officer and they’re two lovely guys and the Jimmy we called him...he just passed away actually. His name was Donald Wogan Brown. He ended up running a bed sit in Wilson’s Promontory of all things. And the supply officer was

Brian Riggles who’s unfortunately passed away. And I’ve got a photograph somewhere of us fishing them out in the whites. It was fabulous and we had the captain there and we made him put one of these silly caps on. But we didn’t dare throw the captain over the side. That would have been a bit too much. But it was a bit of fun and we had a decent meal. Not that the others weren’t decent but this was a bit up market, and it was good. But Christmas away from home was a bit sad.

Oh yes. He’s since been an integral part of our reunions and he’s a real one of the boys. But the captains on those ships...they were at the top of the pyramid. The pyramid of power so the bloke at the bottom knew him but he didn’t know the bloke at the bottom. They had someone of a lonely life I thought. They were the sole

arbiter of command. Incredible powers, the captain of a war ship. If you take it from the nth degree he has the power to hang you from the yard arm type of thing. But they were master and responsibility stopped with him. Which is why he’s called of course the ship’s master. I don’t know what his relationship was with his senior officers but I never had any trouble with him. There was the odd fellow

was a bit authoritarian which sailors disliked. You had some favourites and by the by they were very good. Most of them had come up through the ranks so they knew what it was like. It was good.

I went to Flinders Naval Depot which was the training depot down

there and we did a bit of a course, a refresher course, and then for some time I helped maintain more equipment down there at the gunnery school. They had what they called a gunnery range and they had a gunnery range overlooking Port Phillip Bay and we maintained that and it was a good soft period. I worked at a place called the West Head, or the West Gate. It

was a big gunnery range and they used to get aircraft coming in. The blokes used to fire and all this stuff. It was a training routine. And there was a chief gunnery instructor called Reg Blackwall who was an absolutely fanatical clay pigeon shooter. He was very good. And he had this beautiful rifle, a shotgun, and he said to me one day, “Would you like to sit in the hut and load the clay pigeons?” You’d put them on that and someone pulls it and they go twang, and then bang.

The first time I did it there had been some water lying in there and I was eaten alive by mosquitos. I’ll never forget that day. And he said, “Don’t come out or you’ll get your head shot off.” and I said, “No I can’t stay in there any longer. I refuse to go back in there unless you can get me some mossie spray.” So poor old Reg had to go and get me a can of mossie [mosquito] spray. But it was very very close knit. He was in charge of the area. Two of us maintained the equipment and we were like a home away from home.

Because the depot was so huge, I didn’t have to fall in with the rest of the crowd. I used to get on my bike and wheel up there. It was a good break in the system and I quite enjoyed it. But I would rather have been at sea. After being there for a short amount of time, I went to a ship called the Swan.

Yes the last ship.

Well on the Swan I was a leading hand and therefore I probably did more sort of…not so much administrative work, but more allotting work and supervising than the other stuff. We had young kids with us and we had a lot of midshipmen on there. It was a training ship for midshipmen and at the same time we surveyed. And that’s when we went up to the Barrier Reef. It was just idyllic.

One of the officers who was on there at the time, Mike Hudson. He later became the flag officer commanding the Australian fleet. I’ve met him a few times since. It was just beautiful. It was a holiday. But the ship was still crowded. There’s no question about that. They were still hot ships but the environment was just pristine.

To go ashore on White Haven Beach and have a game of cricket is what people paid a lot of dollars for. And here we were anchored off and doing these things. And we surveyed up and down and mapped the area and things like that. You went into little ports. You went into Bundaberg. You went into Townsville. You went into Mackay. You were treated like royalty sort of thing. There’s was this, wow a navy ship’s coming in and even though it was an old thing, and wouldn’t hurt a fly,

but they’d flock down at weekends to see you. We didn’t understand why they would want to look at this but to them it was a bit of a thrill.

Oh yes. They’d go on board and have a look around and ask questions and things like that. So that was nice. It was really nice for the locals. They enjoyed it as much as we did. Then towards the end of it…I didn’t know whether to sign on again. The chap wanted me to. He said sign on and do an officers course, or something like that.

I had visions of the world. I wanted to see the world. So I discharged and came home. When I left it was really really sad. It was really touching. I didn’t want to go. There was that little bit of a bond, a bit of a tie, but the decision had been made.

The engineering officer, his name was Ford. He said to sign on but I didn’t. So I went ashore and then got my… as best I could, my civilian credentials, which were obviously important because I was a civilian. As I mentioned before we weren’t treated that well. I didn’t think the services looked after their ex-servicemen that well in those days. We were virtually bundled ashore and they said, thanks for the memories, sort of thing.

The authorities ashore didn’t do anything for us and the virtually made us go back to square one which I did and eventually got my certificates and things. That’s when I then went down to Newcastle and then my merchant navy career commenced, which was even longer. A similar sort of career but vastly different in work, pay, outlook, camaraderie and everything. The only constant in it was we were rocking around at sea.

Well with hindsight this is it. Sometimes I think I had, because a lot of the guys who stayed on and were paid off later, got better conditions. Access to pensions and things like that. I’m not regretting it in one way. I don’t regret what I did in one way. The

services now have got a very good network. The Department of Veterans’ Affairs I think is very good. I can’t complain about it. A lot of them are getting pensions and disabilities and things like that. I’d rather be healthy and not get them. Things have changed. When I turn 70 I’ll automatically get a gold card.

I’m not looking forward to it in any other way but just as a reward. But as far as getting disabilities and things like that, no, I don’t want them.

The gold card is given to exservicemen who have got a certain percentage of disabilities or if they have to required dimension of disabilities, they get it when they get to 70. Free dental, free medical, free optical.

That’s the major ones. There’s discounts on electricity, rates, car registration, telephone, travel a couple of times a year. But the big one is medical and dental. It’s free.

God, heaven forbid.

It’s the most monetary rewarding one, that side of it. People who are under 70 have got it because their disability is a percentage. See if you’ve got asbestosis or some people are getting it for trauma. And that’s a very very odd word. And that’s it. And if you don’t qualify you don’t get it, and I don’t qualify. And

quite frankly I don’t want to.

They had. They had started a thing called…something like DFRB [Defence Forces’ Retirement Benefit Fund] or something like that. They had commenced it in those days.

It wasn’t really…DFRDB. Defence Forces Retirement Benefits or something like that. It was in its infancy but things like that hadn’t been cranked up to any great extent. The biggest let down was having got out and no one in the civilian stream of things wanted to know. As I said before, the technical training was brilliant, but

the practical hands on stuff wasn’t. And that’s understandable because you don’t see too many armoured ships on the main street of town. That’s when we were told then we had to get 75% of force. Now that 75% of wages was OK to a happy single happy go lucky guy. I didn’t mind it. But a guy married with two kids I thought surely the armed forces could have made up the difference. But it was just non existent. So once having achieved that, I

didn’t carry anything on about it. I just thought it was an anomaly that should have been addressed. And I’m glad to see that in later times it has been. With that in mind I did various work in North Queensland where I had lived. And some scary work. Then because of a bad romance I decided to head south and forget about it all. We’ve all been there and done that I’m sure. And I met Frankie again.

Frankie was from Newcastle. So I stayed there and that’s where I noticed all these other guys getting their sea legs through the merchant navy and I thought hell I can do that too. And it sounded like a good medium to get paid and travel. But having said and done that, it turned out to be just that because I worked over seas for a long time and that was all travel. Some exotic spots and some not so exotic spots.

Some of those African places relevant to the questions you asked before about the locals, you just wouldn’t, not unless you were brain dead. That was an insight. There were a couple of incidents. One incident annoyed me a little. I was on a British ship and we were travelling to Nigeria up the west coast and back to Casablanca.

We had sponsored a little girl because the Biafran war had just finished. There was this massive Biafran civil war which left people homeless. It was awful. So we sponsored a little girl and we were taking so much of our pay. We were paid in pounds sterling. So at the end of the month, or whatever we had accumulated, probably about 600 pounds, which was a lot of money in those days. When we got back to England we were paid off and someone said, “We should go and see her.” And we thought, “No we’re not keen on going to Nigeria.”

So we wrote to them and said “Have you got our money” and they wrote back and said “Yes we’ve got your money and we appreciate it so much and with this money we should be able to buy the school books.” Hello, school books….that would have bought the school, let alone the school books. And ever since that day, unfortunately when I see things like Ozcare and things like that, I’m left a bit chilled because there we were, with all that money and the fellow said we’re going to buy the school books. My resentment to that still carries on today, where if I give a dollar to Ozcare, how much does the kid who’s hungry get. And a lot of Australians are like me, and mine more so because I had a personal incident. So then we decided to give it all to the Life Boat Association. To save lives. But Africa was a very very sobering place to go to. So much poverty. And in South Africa the imbalance, especially with apartheid was huge.

It wasn’t bad but it had a degree of seedyism that the others didn’t have.

The Thais…I have now grown to love Thai food. They’re very elegant people, but because of poverty I suppose…most people don’t become prostitutes if they’re filthy rich. So because of the poverty and the willingness of so many whites to satisfy their whims, that’s probably why Bangkok seems to be the sin capital of South East Asia.

Nothing much has changed I notice. But you have to feel sorry for them and of course Bangkok itself is just so chaotic. To get from A to B in some cases is just impossible.

They called them pirates because

it was actually an act of piracy what they were doing. They were destroying property and going up streams and setting fire to the saw mills and stuff like that. That was part of the…I think it was the Indonesian Confrontation…it might have been even slightly prior to that. There was a fair amount of rebellious going on. In fact that whole area has probably never ever stabilised. Even today it’s certainly not stable.

As a matter of fact, now the degree of piracy has gone more open sea and in fact now and again you hear of merchant ships that are attacked by them.

We were dealing with boats directly themselves. Once again it was more a …we were aware they were there. You must be aware that close to shore there’s nothing much a war ship can do.

Nothing much at all apart from showing the flag and saying look out smarty pants, don’t get too cheeky. The capacity for a war ship to go as close in shore as they can is nil.

That’s right. So the only way it changed I think…it was maybe an economic change and with most changes, it’s the economic ones that work.

Most of the pirates now come from the Vietnam China area. The piracy around Borneo and that…Brunei is settled with its massive oil wealth. And the rest of it is Indonesian and the Indonesians of course poured troops in there. They somewhat settled once Sukarno was toppled,

Suharto came in. They were both military men but of different ilks. Suharto did at the beginning crack down on communists and the bulk of these rebels tended to have a communist bent. So maybe…but we showed the flag once again. It’s amazing what you can do with a flag I tell you.

With anything man has a tendency to only remember the good times. Not the bad times. The good times were a collective amount of funny times.

I remember they had a chap on board, Joe Scully. He was a tall laconic ambling sort of a guy. He went into a bar in Hong Kong and there were a stack of American Negroes there. Joe said, ‘G’day Digger’. And they thought he said, ‘G’day Nigger.’ And they thumped him and when it was explained that what he said was in fact a term of endearment, they bought us beer all night. So every now

and again they’d go up to Joe and say, ‘Can you come ashore and call a Digger a Nigger again please, we want some free beer.’ Little incidents like that make up a whole collection of good times. They’re the things you remember. You can’t put them into one area. It was an accumulation of times. Playing rugby in Singapore. That was good fun.

And listening to some of these madcap things that came through the system. It was great fun and all of it collectively.

There is. I personally think that the average person, particularly one who hasn’t been to sea

has no idea of the power of the sea. It’s awful stuff. It can do things that the average bloke would not believe. I wasn’t on this particular ship, but years and years ago, there used to be a London to Christchurch Air Race, and the New Zealanders and the Australians used to station a destroyer in the Tasman in case someone ditched. And in this particular case I think it was the Warramunga. And it had a landrover bolted down

to its stern. Bolted down very tightly. And of course the stern on those destroyers, they’re built like greyhounds. They’re only about that high off the water. Well they got really bad seas. I don’t think the Tasman’s ever flat. It’s awful. A very bad sea. And it virtually pulped this landrover to pieces. Now the average person cannot believe that, or will not believe

that it can happen. But it does happen. I remember once when I was in the merchant navy and I was on a ship called the Auckland Star. We were sailing from Cape Town to Melbourne. If one looks at a map of the world it is in fact not flat it’s a globe. So when you go from Cape Town to Melbourne you in fact go like this. There were some islands down there called Amsterdam and St Paul Islands. We were carrying a lot of deck cargo, horses and tractors in crates.

We had about 8 or 9 thoroughbred horses up high. We struck the most awful weather. It was just awful. The crates started to shake a bit. Now once anything on a ship has the slightest amount of movement, it’s awful stuff, it just gets bigger. And the ship’s mate and master in collusion, we cut loose all those horses and tractor crates and they went over the side. It’s just unbelievable the power of the sea.

Massive tankers, cracked in half and things like that. A lot of those is because they’re badly loaded, but the way the sea tossed them around. In fact you see on the news sometimes of what it does. I remember going to Hong Kong once in the navy and they had had a typhoon through there. And as we went in on the right hand side, there was this 8000 ton merchantman ship and it would have been 150 metres up the beach.

And you think yourself wow, but the simple fact is that when the typhoon was in its full cry, that’s where the water was and it blew it up there. And to see that thing standing there you thought, “Wow, how did that happen?” Unbelievable. And the number of idiots who get into trouble. The number of people we picked up…one of the worst places was Port Phillip Bay because it’s huge and it’s unpredictable and it’s awful.

It’s shallow and it’s deep and every now and again we’d be coming out and they’d say can you go to position so and so and there would be some lunatic out there in his dingy. He had no idea of the power of the sea. It should have the utmost respect…it must be respected. It’s awful. And there is an affinity to it. You sort of get a feeling to it and there’s nothing nicer than sticking your head out the port hole and you see it’s a nice calm day and you’re slicing though the water and there’s about half a dozen dolphins

jumping in and out and you think, “Ah this is great. “ How can something be so nasty, and two days later there’s 20 foot waves breaking lifeboats, bending divots, caving in, combing and stuff like that.

They creak and groan so much because they’re twisting. You’re rolling around and you say, “God don’t creak too much.” But they

creak. It can’t stay rigid. If it did it would shatter. But they do creak a lot and of course the backbone of it is like your spine. They make a lot of noise and if you’re down in the engine room and it’s creaking like that you think, “God I hope the bloke up knows what he’s doing.” But they creak a lot and stuff sloshes around.

Yes there’s no question about it. But when you’re down there, especially in your younger days and it happens to you the first time, yes.

In fact there is a lot of apprehension when it’s really creaking and groaning and pitching. The other thing about it is, if you’re going into a sea, the propeller will be at one point in very deep water and then very shallow water and so it tends to cavitate and give a different pitch. And you think

“God what’s going on!” So you do as a youngster get a bit apprehensive. There’s no question about that.

In isolated cases, but not deep seated ones.

The uncomfortable conditions were probably easy the worst. I remember my kids as babies seeing the ship that’s down in dry dock here and asking me of a night time, “Did you go ashore to sleep?” They couldn’t imagine that anyone would sleep on there. Yes the uncomfortableness of it is probably the worst point and the oppressive heat. You had to take salt tablets all the time.

That’s the down side.

Yes it is time. There is a certain element of time. Some branches were more promotion friendly than others. And one was the electrical branch and in fact most blokes got …you got a stripe after four years of service. And most people got their stripe first and then their anchor.

I got an anchor first and then a stripe. Now that was very derisory. When people saw you with an anchor stripe they gave you a nickname which was …see a leading hand was called a Callic…I don’t know where that comes from. So if you got your anchor before you got your stripe, you were a Mickey Mouse Callic meaning you weren’t a fair dinkum one. Jesus if you became a leading hand under four years you must have been a brown nose. So you were called a Mickey Mouse Callic. And the newer branches

tended to get that more than the established branches, like the seamen and stuff. So the technology branches got a swifter rate of promotion because there was an appetite for them, because ships were becoming more and more technologically advanced. So they started to devour them. Technicians were the skill of tomorrow. It wasn’t because you were smarter or taller or better looking. That was the reason.

Demand. Supply and demand.

One stripe is four years service, and an anchor is a leading hand. Two anchors was petty officer.

I had the potential to go to petty officer when I was paying off.

Now naturally the navy said, and quite correctly, if you’re going to pay off, we’re not going to give it. And I thought fair enough. But no doubt that would have been the next progression had I stayed. So it wasn’t to be.

The reef, because the reef is unquestionably a treasure and because of the increasing navigation through there, it’s important that it be continually surveyed. Shifting reefs, maps out all the time which would go to the cartographers in Canberra

The traffic in ships then wasn’t that great but it has increased and as you’ve seen, there’s been some silly accidents. Now continually monitoring the reef and surveying it, is a big step towards curtailing that. Eventually it comes down to the individual. You can survey until you’re blue in the face. If Fred Stupid is on the bridge then he’ll run aground and that’s what happened with those last two ships. Human error. And with a lot of ship board accidents like that it is invariably human error,

believe it or not. The machinery is much more reliable than the human.

We were regulated at all times with what was called the dress of the day. When you woke up of the morning…on the smaller ships he blew his whistle and on the Melbourne he had a trumpet. He would say, ‘Hand to, breakfast.

Dress of the day number 8.’ And on shipboard that was sandals, blue shorts and blue work shirt and in the tropics no shirt. In those days, but in these days they may be more sunburn conscious and make you wear a shirt. In those days we didn’t. We just wore a cap. So then they may say, ‘Liberty men to clean…’ That meant those who had liberty going ashore could go and have a shower.

And the dress of the day for liberty men was say number 10, or whatever it was. Black pants, a white tee shirt with strips and black shoes. So you were regulated at all times, irrespective of what ship you’re on or the depot you’re in, by the dress of the day. That’s rather funny calling men’s wear a dress, but anyhow that’s how it went.

Not a huge amount. The

logic behind the uniform was that it could be compacted. Sailor’s trousers have seven creases in them. They always said that stood for the seven seas. But the main reason was that when you folded them up, if you folded them up property and put elastic bands around them, they would go a piece that big (approx 2 in x 2 ins). Because space is critical and your lockers were so small and you had to push them into your locker.

So that’s why everything was folded neatly. The only thing outside your locker that was allowed was a towel. All towels had to be spread because bunched towels were moisture laden and didn’t do anything good for the environment. And I still rouse [criticize] my kids for not doing that.

No, in one ear and out the other. But I didn’t have the liberty of kicking them in the backside like our seniors did.

So there was a reason for everything.

Oh yes. There were a whole range of them. My memory on that is a bit vague but the two top uniforms were the full blues and the full whites. And it depended whether it was winter or summer.

That involved a jacket and a shirt underneath. It involved a lanyard. It involved a little flap at the back and your hat, bell bottomed trousers and black shoes. There was a silver thing…not silver, a shiny silky type of thing that came down and the art was in doing all the bows up. It was an awful thing to get in and out of. But in hindsight it didn’t look that bad.

In fact it looked quite smart. But they were awful things when you got back on the ship and you were tired and confused and you had to get all this junk off because they were skin tight, and unless you had a mate or you could wake someone up to help take this thing off, you had to sleep in it, because it was a matter of getting it over your head. What they called the Tiddly ones sometimes had a zip up the side, but they

were sort of illegal. But it was a very tight uniform. It was Royal Navy to a tee.

The blues you wore a lot when you went ashore. The whites you didn’t use that much when you went ashore.

When they had divisions in the depot or when they cleared lower deck for the captain to inspect everybody. You’d put your full whites on then and he’d inspect you. Sometimes depending on the officer concerned, who was a noted nitpicker or not, you’d get away with it or you wouldn’t. Your lanyard’s too short or your shoes aren’t clean enough. All very very good things, because

it introduced a lot of personal being too. If you grew a beard, you couldn’t go ashore until it was inspected. I grew a beard once and it was the most pathetic thing on earth. It was all over the place and to get ashore I’d put boot polish in here to see if I could get away with it. I went ashore and the chap looked at it and went (flicked side of the mouth) and I didn’t even say a word, I just turned right, shaved it off and went ashore. It had to be a luxuriant growth and befitting the navy.

Typical, as you envisage a sailor. These motley things were just not on. So I never attempted it ever again. Yet some fellows could. I could never understand why they would have one in a hot climate but some did.

No, blues were winter. Blues were cold.

And the whites were just the reverse of them only in white. Exactly the same.

Yes lighter. The blues were serge. And we were also given coats. Very nice coats actually. They were called Burberrys. It was a throw over from England and the company in England called Burberry. You’d put them in a locker,

and there would always be someone pinching your Burberry. You’d go to get your Burberry and it wouldn’t be there, but your name would be inside. I remember once a fella by the name of Johnny Dobson borrowed by Burberry. Outside the dockside gates in Garden Island was a place which has now become folklore, called Harry Café de Wheels. It’s now a tourist thing. In fact it started off as a caravan outside the dockyard gates and he sold the world’s worse pies. And then someone pinched the wheels off it and so he put it on blocks and called it Harry the Axles.

The sailors used to go there and buy a coke and a pie which was awful, and Johnny Dobson had my Burberry on. He bought a pie and stuck it in the pocket and forgot about it. So I pulled my Burberry out and there was this pie that had gone to the same consistency as Araldite. So I cut the whole sleeve out and got a lady to sew a new sleeve in and threw the whole lot over the side. I was in the depot once and

a friend of mine came back. He was Selby Thurkle, would you believe. He couldn’t get his shoes off. He was a bit confused at the time. He couldn’t undo the laces. And he was still smart enough to not dirty his own bunk, so he jumped into mine and there were two black streak marks from his heels on my sheets. I never forgave him for that. But that was part of being a mate. That’s what mates are for apparently.

No, not when you’ve got to scrub your sheets because stupid Selby had jumped in with his shoes on.

Quite a while because in all fairness the merchant navy was a very very enjoyable experience because we were paid well. We had very good conditions. These monstrous ships and only about 30 of you on board. So you had space to burn. Massive cabins. Travel

everywhere. It was a fabulous life. It wasn’t as congested or concentrated in the navy because we even had stewards serving us and things like that. So it was great stuff. And depending…some of the places we went too weren’t very good but some of the places were fantastic. The South American run was brilliant. You’d go down there to the mouth of the Amazon and Beunos Aires. Or you’d go to Rio and you’d have some time off and you’d be on

Cocacabana and Ipanema and all these young girls in G strings and you’d think wow, where have I been. So that side of it…and quite frankly when you’re in an environment like that, you tend to forget the rest of the world. Although South America was very sobering. The gap in poverty was awful. The poverty down there is just unbelievable. Particularly in Brazil. Brazil is just awful.

Well if you go for example to Cocacabana and places like that,

there’s Mercedes and it’s like Surfers Paradise and in the hills there’s these shanties and every now and a again there’s this massive storm or something and half of them get washed away and killed. There was a terrible thing when we were down there. Orphaned children would roam the streets at night stealing for food, and they would roll themselves up in newspaper so they could sleep at night and keep warm. And bands of toughies would run around and set fire to them.

And there would be charred bodes and this was life. To an Australian this was awful but it happened. Argentina wasn’t as bad, although it was in a similar vein, but Argentina had the most magnificent meat. The best meat in the world. So all those things made for a nice run down south and all those places. And up north to Venezuela. But in all those places, apart from Europe and the North

American continent and Japan and that, poverty was constantly there. The poor were constantly there so it gave you a different perspective on life. It really really did. South Africa where you had the rich white and poor blacks and all this sort of thing. The merchant navy was a real eye opener. The real university of life.

Nothing seemed to change though over the year, especially in Africa. One despot was thrown over and another came in. So nothing seemed to change for the man in the street. It was heartbreaking in ways. You’d go to Mombasa and it was just poor and you’d go there 3 years later and it was poor. Three years later again and it was poor. Nothing seemed to change. The top half changed but the bottom didn’t.

That was quite depressing and I can understand how…I lift my hat to those people who do work in those countries. They’re heroes.

Yes it did. It didn’t have the side benefits of camaraderie and fun and all this sort of thing.

But in the navy’s defence, the training it gave me was just absolutely perfect for the merchant navy. Australian personnel by British companies were just snapped up everywhere. If you told them you were an electrician or an engineer….when I went to the Norwegians, they did the same thing. They never hesitated. They looked at the resume of service and not

a problem and away you went. So we had a great…the language barrier was non existent…although on one Norwegian ship I had a funny incident with language. I had bought myself a little translator book and this was a massive big supertanker. It had a little telephone exchange…telephones on board. And that went through a battery bank and these batteries had to be charged up all the time. But they had a night watchman and he used to flick them on at random.

Now I didn’t want him to do that. They had to be done under supervision. So I got my little book out and I wrote a little note, ‘Do not charge this battery bank.’ But the translation was bad. It said, ‘Do not run this battery bank on a horse.’ Get it? Charge. And of course that was the joke of the week for a long time. I told everyone. So the translation lost something and you got this quite often. The Norwegians once again…

they’re a very dour race. They certainly didn’t have our sense of humour. As I mentioned before their cooking wasn’t the best. It was good food and you were fulfilled but it was bland. My God was it bland. So you went on a ship, the first thing you asked was, “What nationality is the cook?” If he was Norwegian or German you’d think, “Oh God no.”

When you went ashore you did. It was sadly a bit of a navy culture. I’m going to go ashore and get drunk! It was a culture that existed and I hope it’s changed today because it wasn’t a very sensible culture. We never got beer on board. Every now and again we got an issue…apart from the rum issue

under the British flag, we got a beer can issue which was opened in front of you. So you couldn’t hide them in the cupboard for three days and have a big binge. But in the navy you could have as much beer as you wanted and it was absolutely filthy cheap. But you didn’t drink a lot then, so the responsibility was more individual, because you might be on a massive 200,000 ton tanker and you would be the only electrician on there. So there was

a lot of responsibility that came with it. The pay was very very good and the capacity to save was good. And you didn’t have the distractions you had in the navy when you had so many mates to go ashore with. The travel in the early days of the merchant navy was very very good. In the early days cargo was unloaded by crane and something like that but now it’s unloaded

by container. So you unload and zip out. So that side of it and you go to these horrible container wharves which are 20 miles from nowhere. So that side of it has taken a lot of the lustre off. In the older days of merchant navy there were a lot what they called trampers, and when you got on a tramper it’s as the word describes, you just tramped anywhere.

So you might pick up a tramper in Glasgow or Liverpool….where’s it going? Oh, it’s supposed to be doing the Caribbean. No, no we’ve got to go to Fiji and get bananas and then go to Tahiti. So it’s all over the place. You might go to Hawaii and then back to England in 6 months. The Blue Star Line, they were probably more liner orientated. And by that I mean set routes. I

laughed when I first got to England because they said,” You’re going on the colony run”. And I thought, “How dare you call it the colony run!” They still called it the colony run in those days, which was England, Australia, New Zealand, Panama and England again. And they called it the colony run and I thought how dare you. But it’s just a name so who cares. There was an incident on one ship which was just so coincident.

We were sailing from Melbourne to Sydney and the chief engineer on board, McChesney his name was, a Scotsman. All chief engineers seem to be Scotsmen. He found all these old engine room logs and they dated back 15 years and he said “No one would miss them, so throw them over the side”. So I threw about 20 of these books over the side. Anyway we got back to London and the superintendent engineer came down to the ship

and wanted to see the chief engineer, who in turn got me up to his cabin. And it was a please explain and I thought what’s going on here. A fisherman had trapped these logs in his fishing nets and there was enough left on the ink, blotchy as it was to identify them, and he sent them all to London. So they arrived there and they said, how did these books with all this information…so that was a coincidence. And McChesney and I used to always

say, “What have you tossed over the side lately? Not much.” And the other thing…one little funny story about stewards. A lot of stewards on there were gay [homosexual]. They loved the work and it suited them down to the ground. There was one on there and his name was David Manifold. He would not answer to the name of David. He would not answer to the name of Manifold. He would not answer to the name of steward. He would only answer to the name of Jane. So we called him Jane.

Anyway Jane had this cabin done up in silk brocade. He used to shave and all this. And one day we were in Melbourne and there was this hell of a ruckus on the wharf and all the wharfies had stopped and we couldn’t work out why. Why had happened, Jane had gone ashore in high heel shoes and they had got jammed in the wharf and he couldn’t get them out. He held the whole port up. And the other incident I remember was

there were a couple of stewards and one of them was gay, and ship belonging to Shaw Saville and Albion came alongside us. This was in Christchurch. The Great Britain Hotel or something like that in Christchurch. And a steward on our ship married one of the stewards on this other ship and they had a ceremony in this hotel and we all went along to have a look. I wished I had had a movie camera and it was hilarious. The bosun on our ship

who was in charge of the lower deck, gave our steward away. And it had to be seen to be believed. It was just so funny. It’s one of those things…it doesn’t occupy a great deal of my life but I could never forget it. They loved the work and there was no great difficulty. It didn’t interfere in my life.

I never…

personally never struck it. There were always rumblings. I remember one particularly guy who shall remain nameless, there were rumblings about him. A few years later when mentioning his name, someone said he got shunted out of the navy. And I presume it was because of that. There must have been, but it’s a very very harsh environment to be in. Like if you are homosexual surely

privacy is part of it. And very difficult. On a depot mainly but on some of those small ships it would have been impossible without someone knowing. Very very easy to detect. Maybe on the bigger ships.

The first thing it did was give me a reality shock. That there was more than just the cloistered little world around a farm in North Queensland. Second, the thing that was introduced to me was discipline. There’s no question about that. I repeat again. I think that’s lacking today. Thirdly it gave me the capacity to conform.

I had to conform with my mates and their highs and lows and my highs and lows. It emphasised camaraderie. It emphasised my love for Australia. I just adore the place. It’s my home and I’ll do anything for it. It gave me a small sense of achievement. When we came back we had achieved something. I’m not going to put it into capital letters. Who cares? We achieved what we were told to do. So that was great.

It matured me a lot. My God did it mature me. When I see my daughters today…when I was their age I had been knocked over about 10 times. But the binding of the navy for me was everlasting. And the one thing that I always maintain…and we’ve proved this with our reunions…you can leave the navy but the navy doesn’t leave you.

It’s there all the time. There’s part of you still there when you meet your mates. And it’s always there bubbling away. I still have photographs of friends and myself. It’s something that’s an inescapable tattoo on you…even though I don’t have any tattoos. It’s there. I would never ever stop anybody who wants to join the navy. If

that’s what they want to do, then it can only do them good. I’ve never seen it do anybody harm as such. There are some guys who are better off not being in it, but I don’t think it harms them in any way.

I don’t think…I’ve never been in that situation. I suppose bravado can make you do that.

It’s a combination of bravado and stupidity when you’re 18 and the two are inseparable.

It’s been a pleasure.