Australians at War Film Archive

Certainly. I’m Frank Eyck. I was born in 1946 in Holland. My family moved to West Australia when I was 8. We moved around the Perth area for

lots of reasons, so it was so it was slightly unstable as far as putting down roots. But I think because of the sea voyage from Holland to Perth, I was pretty much captivated by going to sea. I had always, since that time, I had always wanted to go to sea and the obvious choice was to join the navy.

So I let school at the age of 14 as most of the kids did in those days, I guess, and just took any job that I could or I wanted. In fact in those days just to wait until I was 17 so I could join the navy. I joined the navy at 17 and that was in January 1964. I stayed with the navy for just over 33 years.

During that time I initially joined up as a naval aircraft mechanic which was unusual in those days in the sense that a lot of people joined the navy and had no choice about what trade they were trained in. So I was one of the very few to get their initial choice. So I enjoyed that part of navy life and I stayed in the naval aviation engineering game for probably twenty

years. During that time, I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to go to sea quite a few times which for most fleet air arm people, is not as ready as other branches. I went to sea on the HMAS Sydney which was at the time a troop carrier and we went to Borneo to drop the troops off for the Malaya campaign. And

I then was trained as an aircraft mechanic, or completed my training as an aircraft mechanic. I worked on the older style British aeroplanes. I was then trained on helicopters and then went to Vietnam with the RAN [Royal Australian Navy] helicopter flight. I did two tours of Vietnam. I came back and was trained on Trackers and then went into

training and training technology. From there I was commissioned and went to England with my family. By that time I was married and had a couple of boys. I thoroughly enjoyed England. It was very much a broadening experience. And from there, I did all sorts of jobs in the navy ranging from photography,

security, housing, training technology – all sorts of things, a huge range. I spent quite a few years at Albatross, the naval air station and after that a few other places including Creswell, the naval college. I retired in 1996 and have enjoyed my retirement ever since.

I can’t remember too much, although what memories I do have are quite distinct. I can remember going to school and

unlike Australia, you go to school by simply getting there however you get there. And we had to walk. And we lived in a small city, Hertogenbosch. We lived in the inner part of the city and I used to have to walk to school – absolutely fascinating because of all the sights and things. And the routine there was that on Wednesday afternoons and Saturday afternoons was market day, so school days was a full day,

Monday and Tuesday and Thursday and Friday and half days on Wednesdays and Saturdays. So on our way back from school by lunchtime on Wednesdays and Saturdays, I spent most of my time sort of wandering around the markets and making friends and sort of, I guess, for a young boy enjoying a bit of a cosmopolitan lifestyle.

Mainly food markets, yes, and you would have everything there from eels and

cheese and vegetables and that sort of stuff – the odd goods as well, but thoroughly enjoyable. We didn’t travel much like most people in those days. We moved from the Netherlands in 1955 so in the early 50s travel was restricted but every so often we used to get the opportunity to travel to my grandmother’s and she lived right in the south of Holland, in

Maastricht and that was always a good time. We lived in the inner city as I said earlier. We had no garden and nowhere to play outside. And my grandmother lived in a house that actually had a small garden in the back so that was fairly fascinating for us. A canal, a fairly large canal, with a road beside it out the front and a garden out the back. So I used to enjoy my holidays with my

grandmother.

I did. I’m the second eldest of six. I have an elder brother, a younger brother and three sisters. My older brother unfortunately joined the navy twelve months before me. I say unfortunately because I’d always looked forward to joining the navy. My brother wasn’t fussed. My brother had this thing about communications and electronics so he wanted to

be some sort of a tradesman, and he went round to all the services and offered his service and the navy just happened to be the first one that accepted him. So he went off and, I guess, stole my thunder to a certain extent. He also was in the fleet air arm but I don’t suppose we were particularly close at that time so although we were on the same base, we didn’t spend my time together. My younger brother did join the

navy, I guess, because of the influence of his two elders and he joined the submarine arm. He spent about 10 years in the service and most of that time in fact was at sea. And it used to fascinate me the difference between the seagoing responsibilities, I guess, of the submariners versus the fleet air arm people – we were fairly keen to get to sea, or, I guess, most of us were, and didn’t get much of an opportunity.

And, I guess, the reasons for that were technical reasons, because the aircraft need to be run on a daily basis as the pilots do and you could only do that from an air field, not from a carrier tied to a wharf. But getting back to my family – my father was a watch maker and my mother was, with six kids at home, obviously a home maker. We were a fairly close

family, but as I said earlier we tended to move around a bit for all sorts of reasons. When I say moved house and suburb sometimes because of lack of accommodation or my father wanted to buy a house and it turned out the house was just too small for us, or another job came up or something. So we tended to move from suburb to suburb and that gave me some instability with my schooling.

I left school at the age of 14, as I said, which was not unique for people in that time. People had to stay at school until the age of 14 but as soon as you got to the age of 14 most kids left, unless you wanted some sort of university degree or you specifically wanted to get into say technical training of some sort and then you did your junior certificate. I didn’t enjoy school. I loathed it,

absolutely loathed it and was fairly keen to leave.

I don’t know. It was boring, I guess, in the sense that, I guess, I tend to thrive on challenges. I really don’t know, I just found schooling rather boring and yet I find now that the subjects I didn’t like at

school quite interesting and fascinating. History, for instance, I love it. I still don’t go much on mathematics but plastic brains help nowadays. Certainly within engineering, within my trade, I always had some difficulty with mathematics and trying to work things out. There’s always formulas and things but I was never confident with that sort of stuff. So to a certain extent that

was somewhat of a handicap. And, I guess, with my general education. When the time came for me to be commissioned, it was a bit of a struggle to become educationally qualified. And certainly in those days if you wanted to go on or you wanted to better yourself although the navy was helpful, most of it you had to do yourself in your own

time. Schooling in Holland was very much different to Australia. My family is Catholic and one of the things that surprised us when we came to Australia was that if you wanted to attend a Catholic school, you actually had to pay school fees and uniforms and all of those sorts of things yourself, as opposed to going to what we would call a state school. So that was to a

certain extent an impact on my parents being able to establish themselves when they first arrived. The schooling, I guess, in what we’d now call a private school, was no real great difference to the state school. It certainly wasn’t better, I suspect.

For me it was a bit of a struggle in the

sense that I left Holland half way I think through 2nd class. But when I arrived in Australia, of course I had no English education, I was totally unable to speak the language. Mind you, as kids we picked it up fairly quickly. But we were just sent to school. We spent a whole week at our house having a

wonderful holiday and come Monday, Mum and Dad said, “Right. Off to school you go.”

It was a bit of a cultural shock I think. I had no idea what was going on, none whatsoever. But I settled down fairly quickly, like most of my siblings. But certainly in those early years it was a bit of a struggle to try and catch up. I was

able to pass the test, I guess, enough to get me on to the next year so I was advancing all the time but I suspect that had I settled down for one year and really put my nose to the grindstone [worked hard], later education challenges would have been a lot simpler I think.

Well my father is still alive. He lives in Perth. So bearing that in mind.

My image of my father was varied and I say that because he was, like most people from his era, very much a disciplinarian. His background was that he was the oldest of

eleven and his mother died when he was 12 or 13. So you can imagine sort of the strength of the growing family. He was unable to continue his education, for I’m not too sure what reason, in Holland, so he was sent to Belgium with his brothers, a couple of brothers, to a boarding school

there. And, I guess, from that he got a firm belief in education being very important. He tried to instil that in us but I don’t think he was very successful in that. For him, and for all of us, it was very fortunate when he arrived in Perth. He found that he was able to do what I call piece work. Rather than being paid

a wage for working a certain amount of hours he was paid for the amount of work he did. That encouraged him to work faster and better, because he personally had to also provide a guarantee for his work but that also allowed him to work at home. In later years my father would spend most of his working time at

home. So he would repair watches in the home. He would travel to the city by mid morning and be there by sort of around about lunchtime. He would then spend the rest of the day there and he would be travelling home by about 4 or 5 o’clock. After that he would set up – he had an entire desk and all his tools or the bulk of his tools at home, and he would repair watches until sometimes early in the

morning. And I can remember vividly going to school – getting up at sort of 7 o’clock and being ready to go at 8 and he would still be there repairing watches. So he was a very hard worker and very meticulous in all of the details of his work, but also, I guess, generally in life. He was very much a craftsman and as I say he was relatively well

educated, and tried to instil that on us. Hence the important for us to attend the best schools that he could possibly pay for and therefore having to work hard to make all this money to send us all to schools. I think it was as much a religious reason for us to go to Catholic school as it was the quality of the schooling. We were, I won’t say strict Catholics, but certainly for the era we were good Catholics if I can use that term.

We all used to go to church on a Sunday, we went to a Catholic school, we did all the sacraments and those sorts of things. My father was the anchor point, I guess, for my family. My mother was born in Indonesia and my mother’s parents were Dutch. My grandfather on my mother’s side was an Indonesian

military officer. He was educated and brought up, and did his training in Holland but as soon as he had completed his training, he got married and with his young bride went to Indonesia, the Dutch East Indies. And he came, I guess, what you would call a commissioner these days. He would go around the countryside and conduct trials and discipline and try and I

guess resolve disputes – a boundary dispute and all of those sort of things.

Very much like a magistrate. His standing in the community was fairly high of course. His wife, being white, was not allowed to work, and as a consequence they had staff for everything. They lived in a big white house on top of the

hill and they had staff as I say for everything, you know, a driver, and my mother had two personal maids. Now she was born in Indonesia, as I said, and didn’t leave until she was about 13. So she was very much used to living a very relaxed and easy life. She was educated mostly at home, although she would go to school on various postings

and for her, when she arrived back in Holland, because my grandfather was obliged after so many years to go back to Holland as part of their long service and just to make sure that they didn’t go native, to instil all those western European qualities, to re-instil them, they went to Holland. And as a consequence – sorry, during their stay, the

Second World War broke out and as a consequence they couldn’t travel back to Indonesia. My mother was as I say fairly young when she went back to Holland and had never worn shoes and certainly never worn stockings. The most miserable country in the world, she reckoned Holland was, because it was always cold and it was always raining. And, I guess, that instilled in her some desire to live somewhere

warmer. And she, I guess, when things didn’t go well economically after the war, she pressed my father to think about migration and the alternatives were Canada, the United States, South Africa and Indonesia. Both South Africa and Indonesia politically certainly weren’t on the top of the list. Australia wasn’t thought of because of

the requirements for sponsors and various other aspects. But through circumstances one of my father’s old employees happened to hear that my father was keen on emigrating. He lived in Perth and sent my Dad a letter. As a consequence we migrated to Australia and my mother just absolutely loved it. It was her weather and her type of living,

but she wasn’t too sure about this not having servants business. So I mean, when I say having servants, she was obliged not only to be the home maker but to do all sorts of other things because my father was so busy working. She’d have to do the gardening and all of those sorts of things.

It’s interesting. From what I can gather

now that neither party was very happy and I suspect it had to do with social standing. My mother’s family felt that she was only marrying a tradesman and my father’s family I suspect was colonial. I mean that’s my understanding and I don’t know I’ve only heard that guess from my mother and my father. But I

suspect that there’s some strong truth in that. Having travelled back to Holland when I was in England there is a quite considerable class distinction even now. It surprises me, it really does.

Very much so, the highlight of

basically my youth I think. I wasn’t too sure what was going on. Although it was explained to us that we were going to leave where we lived and put away our goods and chattels in large wooden boxes and go to the other side of the world it really had no – I was 8, you know, no idea. And even climbing on board this ship was, you know, this ship was huge, absolutely

huge. It was tied up against the wharf and we walked out of a shed and walked up this steep gangplank and I looked up and I saw this huge ship. In retrospect, it wasn’t that big, but it certainly was when I was a kid. But all the sights and smells and fresh air and furnace fuel oil and rope and all this sort of stuff and

fresh paint and it was just absolutely fascinating. I spent most of the time unfortunately in the child-minding section, but, I guess, the nurse or the young lady that was looking after us wasn’t very smart and I managed to escape lots of times and spent most of my time just sort of walking around the ship. And much to the surprise of most of the crew who used to say, “What the hell are you doing here?” and “Go away!” and “Go back to where you belong!” and that sort of stuff. But I think from that I got the

bug, I really wanted to go to school in addition to of course the exposure to new cultures. We left Holland and went straight to the West Indies at Caracas which is on the northern part of the South American continent and then through the Panama Canal and then Tahiti, Wellington in New Zealand, Melbourne and then to Perth. In most of those places I had the opportunity to go

ashore with Mum and Dad, and just look at all these different people and different climates and different languages and I just absolutely loved it.

I think so, yes. And I guess also from my parents being Dutch, western European, I say Dutch in the sense that they still had this sort of aspect of colonial

empire, and because of my grandfather’s background, my father having spent quite a lot of time in Belgium that I felt not so much a Dutch person as a European, and as such, very much affinity with different cultures. And I certainly have in fact an

enthusiasm for finding out about different cultures. One of the highlights of my life after the navy was that I managed to get 3 weeks in Papua New Guinea and absolutely loved it. You know, a totally different culture, a country I’d never been to. But one of the things that I enjoyed about my navy life was different cultures, different people and finding out about different places. I don’t know whether it’s an adventurous spirit in me or simply just an

inquisitive aspect. Probably more inquisitive than adventurous, I tend to be a bit conservative.

I don’t think there was any particular

time when I felt that people didn’t like me because I was Dutch. I think the kids and some people didn’t like me because I was foreign, but not specifically because I was Dutch which is interesting because a lot of the Australians, particularly in Perth, had some exposure to the Dutch because a lot of Dutch had settled there.

As a result of the Japanese invasion of Indonesia, a lot of people had either managed to get out or just after the war once Indonesia gained independence a lot of the Dutch wanted to leave or had to leave. And they certainly didn’t want to go back to that horrible-weather country many miles away and

looked for places of greater opportunity I guess and settled in Perth. So people in Perth were probably more exposed to the Dutch but there were still a lot of people who couldn’t tell the difference between Dutch and German and as a consequence of the war I suppose there was still some, early 1950s or mid 50s, there was still some resentment towards the Germans. But as I say I certainly had

no real – I can’t remember any experiences that I had where there was a resentment because I was Dutch, mainly because I was different or that I was foreign. I think that from those experiences and from my friends who were Italians, Greeks, Ukrainian,

Russian, those guys all tried to be as Australian, and myself of course, tried to be as Australian as quickly as possible. It was interesting – and I put a lot of effort into being the same as everyone else.

Some conflict with my parents to a certain extent and that was probably the biggest impact initially. My

parents insisted that I speak Dutch at home because they were trying to give me the skills of two languages rather than just one. But it did generally instil on me the need to I guess copy my mates, you know, do what they did. Again that was some conflict with my parents, because that made me very much culturally, it gave me an Australian

outlook rather than the values that they had. This is particularly true in my teenage years. So that led to some concern on their part, certainly not on mine. Australia was my home and I had no intention of going anywhere else and I wanted to be as Australian as everybody else. And to a certain extent I felt very much an Australian as well. The hurdles, other than being able to speak like an Australian

and I guess one of the things that really hurt was that I’d been in the country I guess about 6 months, yes, and been going to school that whole time. I was talking to what I would consider an elderly woman at the time and she spoke to me about various bits and pieces. And I can’t remember the circumstances but then she said to me, “What part of England are you from?” And that horrified me, you know, how

dare she consider me a Pom! I suspect that I had some English friends, but also because we went to a Catholic school they were stronger I suspect in things like the English language and we used to do elocution at school rather than mathematics and science, so I guess that was – and that was very much

almost an insult. So I then went and spoke like an Australian for a while which I guess was a reaction to that. But the interesting thing is that when we talk about in society now about the debates of different cultures mixing with Australians, I suspect that a lot of people are not aware that the bulk of the kids, if not all of the kids, are desperate to be as Australian as possible.

Yes.

I think I was probably closer to my mother than my Dad, simply because Dad was behind his desk working. Although he was a strict disciplinarian, as I said earlier on, he wielded the big stick and said, “This is the way it is going to be,” but generally my mother made the decisions

on most of the things. She was a strong influence in most of the things that I did and I suspect that she gave me a soft spot for – because she had come from a different background to Holland – she gave me I guess this interest in other cultures. On of the most disappointing things that I have

experienced was the loss of my mother. Not so much the loss itself but one of those things that “I should have taken the opportunity earlier.” I’d always wanted to take my mother back to Indonesia for her sake because whilst I was in the navy, I had the opportunity to go back to Holland. I was posted to the UK [United Kingdom] and spent some twelve months there and took the opportunity to go back to where I was born and

saw all of those places. And I discovered that they were not as big as I had imagined they were much smaller. But they hadn’t changed much, much to my surprise and much to the surprise of my family. And I saw the schools that I went to and the shop where we had lived. And I’d hoped to do that for my mother, because she left as I say at 13. And she had all these sort of memories and I had been to Indonesia during my time with the

navy and loved the country and I was hoping to have the opportunity to say when I retired, “Look, let’s go back,” and for me and I use the term ‘lay the ghosts at rest’. There are things and I can sort of remember going down this road as a kid and turning right but I can never remember what was there. It turned out to be another road or that’s where I went to school and all those sorts of things. And I think they were important for me and I’d hoped to do the same thing for my mother.

As I said, she died rather suddenly, she collapsed and died, and I was unable to do that. But she always provided me with an alternative view certainly from what traditionalists were thinking and conservative aspects, because my father was very much a

conservative. So I was able to sort of get two views which was very important I guess right throughout my life, even through my career.

I guess Perth was very much laid back. You went to school because you absolutely

had to, because that’s the law and that was expected. But why you went to school, why I went to school, I really don’t know why other than you had to. In Holland the attitude was very much different. I knew why I went to school in Holland, that is to get an education, to further myself and that was all part of preparation of life. It wasn’t I guess like that

for me in Australia. And not only for me, but I guess all of the people that I grew up with. What was important was going outside to play and we went outside to play. And as a consequence, outside was where you did things so outside things were important. I guess because of the climate Holland, you tended to do most activities inside in Holland and therefore

studying and learning was easier because you were inside anyway, and there were no distractions. But it was just as important to learn say music or art or those sort of things in Holland as it was to go outside and climb a tree as it was in Perth. So for me that was probably the difference, the emphasis on education and the emphasis on outdoor life. The other thing I found the big difference as I

mentioned earlier in Holland, we didn’t travel. In Australia we always travelled. You always travelled to go somewhere. Even if you didn’t have anywhere to go you just travelled for the sake of travelling and it was great. Although the big difference between Australia and Europe was that in Europe you could travel I guess half an hour to an hour and you’d be in a totally different environment. I can remember in Holland that I had a good friend who came from a

small village in Vught which was about 10 to 15 kilometres outside the small city, and I guess it was a city but it was very, very small. But my friend who came from Vught had a dialect that my father couldn’t understand. I guess as kids I had no problem, but my father and mother couldn’t understand this kid because he spoke this different dialect. A different dialect from a small town

fifteen kilometres down the road. And that’s the way the country was, because they were very much set in their ways over the many years they just did their own thing. In Australia it wasn’t like that. I mean a gum tree is a gum tree whether you go to Perth or Brisbane and I shouldn’t say that, because that’s not quite true but certainly the initial impact was, you know, that’s pretty much the same.

No. In fact it took my father quite a

while to acquire a car. Most of our travel was done by public transport but most of our friends, and, I guess, when I was younger most of my father and mother’s friends were mainly Europeans, mainly Dutch, but they all had cars. And it was very much let’s all pile in the car and go somewhere. And we used to go on picnics and go to various activities, outdoor

activities. And I guess there were other items that forced us to travel, be it from school where there were various activities, the school activities – sport – although I’ve never been a real sportsman but I mean it was part of life. You went down to a particular oval to play cricket or Aussie Rules or whatever. And my

sisters played netball so it was that sort of thing that drove us out of the house. And, I guess, also the fact that most houses in Perth at that time were not built to contain people. Basically it was a place to stay and sleep, I guess, and to prepare your food and have a quickie while you were between journeys.

It’s interesting that you ask me that. That’s another strong impression that I have of my childhood. We went to a beach called Como which is near South Perth, we were in South Perth at that time. And I think I must have been about 10 years old and part of the wonderful Australian system of teaching all the kids to swim – we were just enrolled, and I learned how to do the dead man’s float for a

while and that was probably for about three or four days and then they kicked me off the end of the jetty into deep water and said, “Swim!” And I swam and I loved it. And as a consequence I spent most of my time, not sunbaking but swimming. And, I guess, lack of transport because we were away from the sea, beaches, we spent most of the time when we swam in the river. Although I’d prefer to swim in the

ocean, providing the waves weren’t too big, because surfing wasn’t in in those days and I really didn’t know how to handle it too much but I loved it, absolutely loved it.

No, I’m too undisciplined for sport I think. The challenge of sport is probably fairly good. I would prefer, I guess, individual sports which is a bit of a contradiction because I consider myself very much

team player and, I guess, having been reasonably successful in my navy career, I mean that’s all about teams, but individual sports if any sports. But I suspect that with sport I’ve been brought up with sports interests on the sideline and I find it quite boring talking about, you know, a goal or a mark or something.

For me talking about sport is an excuse for, I guess, an –

Very much so.

From the moment that I left the ship in Perth, I knew that that’s what I was going to do for a career. I wanted to go to sea, specifically go to sea. Whether it was the merchant navy, the navy, a sail boat, a fishing boat, I wasn’t particularly fussed. It was just the atmosphere, the fresh

air the waves, the sunshine, the storms – the whole aspect of it, I loved it. One of my favourite places in Perth was Fremantle. Fremantle was a very dirty port in those days but I loved it. I watched the ships go in and out and I was fascinated by it and just waited until I got to the age of 17 before I could actually join.

Very much so. I certainly got models and, I guess, because the bulk of the models tended to be warships, I then got more interested in warships than I did about other aspects.

Very much so, and certainly from the Western Australian

perspective – the merchant navy, there wasn’t much of it, and certainly if I wanted to join that I’d have to have some sort of degree or that sort of stuff. It was very difficult to become a deckhand or something unless you know someone and unless you changed your nationality and became an Italian and went on the fishing boats. You know, that sort of stuff. I really had no other option but to join the navy. Having said that I certainly didn’t resent that, in fact I look forward to it. The

navy had a good lifestyle. You wore a fancy uniform and got plenty of girls when you went to foreign ports and lots of money. I mean whenever you see sailors they’re always having a good time. I forgot about the time that they were out at sea chipping paint, but that’s another story.

Yes and no. I was fairly interested in that part and whenever we bought comics which invariably all kids did, I liked the war comics and particularly the comics about the navy, that was pretty all right. I certainly

wasn’t interested in reading about battles at sea and to be quite truthful I don’t find them fascinating even in this day and age. I’m more interested in the political aspect of it. No, I had this thought in the forefront of my mind, I’m going to join the navy, and I never assumed that that would not happen. So I didn’t what I would say prepare myself for

that. Had somebody at the interview board said to me, “Quickly, name all of Australia’s warships,” I don’t think I could have done that, which is interesting because I suspect that’s probably what they did. It wasn’t a keen competition to join the navy in those days particularly as a general entry sailor. It certainly was for other areas of entry like the officers and more importantly the apprentices.

That was very, very keenly contested.

Certainly from the schooling aspect, no. I don’t think really it was ever mentioned at school from memory and I suspect that’s

because it probably wasn’t history in the mid 50s. It was more a thing that everybody knew about it. You didn’t have to teach it at school because it happened just recently so that might have been part of it. But I was certainly very much aware of my family’s conditions and things that happened. Both my parents and their families

were in Holland during the German occupation. My grandfather was taken away by the Gestapo [German Secret State Police] and shot. He was very much involved in the underground. There was a large underground, a very loose movement, that covered most of the south of Holland, north of Belgium and parts of Germany.

And he was very much involved in that, I guess, because of his officer training, but also for his administration experience and of course his political ideals and those sorts of things.

Sorry. That’s my mother’s father. I say the officer training, because he had been in Indonesia. At the same time my

grandfather and grandmother on my mother’s side were sheltering a Jewish family in their home as well. So I found it fascinating listening to my mother, because my mother was the eldest of her siblings, and would take the lead. My mother, she was a young woman, 16, 17, I guess, by

the time that war was well and truly doing its thing. No, probably a bit older. But some of the stories that she used to tell about some of the things that happened – there wasn’t a real aspect of security. There weren’t any protection systems. There was no risk management,

any of that sort of stuff. So to me it was somewhat of a surprise that people had not been caught up by the Gestapo much earlier. But listening to the stories of my grandfather’s experiences because my mother knew of those, of how he ran part of the organisation, of my grandmother’s experience because she was responsible for hiding that Jewish family in her home. They had

a secret room built up in the loft, and the main concern there was how to feed these people. My mother worked for the Red Cross and she was also dabbling in intelligence gathering. So it was very much of an adventure without people really taking much of a risk management attitude

to it. As a young boy I never realised that. I was listening to these stories wide-eyed and open eared. My father’s side was far more conservative. My father was working for his father, who was also a watch maker, and then he was at a fairly early age sent out on his own. So he was a young single man trying to build up a business, a watch making and jewellery

business in another town, the town that I was born in, from where he lived which was a fair distance. So he was pretty much a lonely bachelor and that gave him some opportunities as well. I suspect that for him, because he knew nobody within the new town that he was in, he was reluctant to take too many risks because he had no family and didn’t know the

background of these people and could easily have been set up. I got the impression that there weren’t too many people who were very much against the German occupation, initially not so much for what they did to the Dutch, but what they did to the Jews but also to other people in general. And it wasn’t until much later on in the

war, towards the end of the war, when things became really tight for the occupational forces where they started gathering people up in crowds and sending them off to labour camps. My mother’s brother was sent off to the mines in Germany. My [mother’s] other younger brother had to try and avoid that, so he was living in an attic somewhere. So all these sorts of things were going

on, and it wasn’t until I think that there was a real hatred, a personal hatred, for the German occupiers. From my Dad’s side, most of the experiences that he’s told us were of what it was like to live in an occupied country and try and

walk a very tight, almost a tightrope in a sense you had all these forces. Initially as a young boy he lived in Eindhoven which I say a young boy, a young man. After he came back from boarding school in Belgium he went home to Eindhoven and his father’s shop was near the big Philips factory in Eindhoven. The Philips factory at the time were making

very important parts, particularly for German radar. So the Allies didn’t go much on that and subsequently bombed the factory but, you know, he was living just up the road which was a hair-raising experience. All of this was told when I was a boy with some joviality I suppose. He said it was terrible because he’d wrecked his brand new

shoes. It had cost him a dozen coupons to buy these shoes and he was hoping – and because all the glass was on the road, he wrecked his shoes. You know, those sorts of stories. But it gave me an inkling of what it was like I suspect when a whole community is focused on something and all other personal aspects are pretty much

left to one side and not considered, but it’s very difficult to do that if you know what I mean.

No, I wouldn’t agree with you there in a sense that yes we did hear these stories, but invariably these stories were not directed to us. They were can I say

Anzac Day type stories where there would be a gathering of people and there would be a few drinks and there’d be, “Do you remember such and such?” “Oh, I remember so and so,” and before you know it these stories would spill out. But they certainly weren’t directed to us and they weren’t directed in a sense like, “Look, son, this is all about –” It was, “Look, if you’re very quiet you can sit in a corner somewhere and you may overhear this conversation but any noise and off to bed.” That type of thing.

I was curious about things, certainly when I heard a lot of those stories initially because, remembering that we first came to Australia the bulk of my parents friends would have also been Dutch, that’s the

sort of thing that was relatively fresh in their minds depending on what part of Holland they came from and it was something that these people had in common. Again, as I say, on Anzac Day the same sort of thing, we’d get a bunch of buys together and, “Yes, I was in the navy too,” blah, blah and before you know it the stories spill out. So certainly from that aspect it was not repeated often but often enough for me to remember the

stories that they told. There are major gaps in some of the things that they have not told me. There’s major gaps in the continuity of these particular stories, and certainly it wasn’t until I visited the west, Perth, some time about 3 or 4 years ago that I sat my father down and I asked him specific questions, basic questions.

“Why did we emigrate?” You know, we did, but I had no reason why. And he then explained things like the political climate and more importantly the economic climate and the aspects of, you know, we wanted to go here but we ended up going there, that sort of stuff. And that was important to me. I asked him about some of the war stories, but we’d simply run out of time. I’d certainly like the opportunity to do that now and it’s certainly one of the things that I very much value that

I was able to ask those sorts of questions to my wife’s uncles. These guys had spent their time in New Guinea and various other places in the islands and, I guess that drove me to ask those guys the questions because I hadn’t the opportunity toast my own family.

Very much so. It’s interesting that at the age of 16 people are invited, kids, are invited to become

Australian, naturalised Australians. I don’t know what the machinery was in those days to make that happen but I got a letter from the Mayor of South Perth and he said “Dear Frank, (or Master Eyck in fact it was) if you would like to become an Australian, tick the box and we’ll organise it.” And tick, tick, tick and away it went and on the

day we went to the Town Hall and I did the thing and became an Australian. And I thought, “Beauty,” and I had my bit of paper but that was the accepted thing and everybody tripped over themselves to do that, possibly not because that made them an Australian, but because that confirmed your Australianism if I can put it that way. That was the last nail in the coffin, this is it, I’m fully fledged. And certainly my thought process and my

language and my attitudes and probably most of my values I would consider Australian, I did consider Australian. And I wasn’t the only one, I suspect that most of my friends and the people in similar circumstances to me, as well as my siblings, were all the same.

Fairly easily, I suspect, because one of the things that impressed me with the migrants that were of that era as opposed to of later periods was that they were all committed to the new country. When they came to Australia they did burn their bridges – to get

here was a huge financial and emotional hurdle. For the bulk of them they were on the other side of the world and for the bulk of them they were here on assisted passage so they had a commitment to stay here a certain time, I don’t know what the details are. So even if they wanted to go back within a certain amount of years they wouldn’t have had the finance or the resources to do so,

nor the legality to be able to do that. I suspect they could have gone back if they’d paid the fare or something, I don’t know. But certainly from my impressions was that all of those people and not just the Dutch but the Italians, the Greeks and the East Europeans, the Germans that we’d met, as well as the majority of the English, they were 100% committed to

their new home. And it’s a waste of time looking over your shoulder. You get stuck into it because you’ve got no other option – a whole hearted commitment.

Yes. It was more a frustration on my parents of, “You silly boy, we’ve given you this gift of the Dutch language and some Dutch culture and a sense of belonging not just here but somewhere else and you’re too silly to take it up.” And I’m like

“Who needs it?” – like education – “Who needs it?”

I don’t say I rebelled against it. I don’t think I took it up and if I did it wasn’t serious. Yes it was nice to know, don’t get me wrong, it was nice to know about things Dutch, but it was easier for me to speak English than it was Dutch. Don’t forget that when I left Holland it was as an

eight-year old. Now probably being fairly fluent in Dutch up to the age of 10 or 11, but my vocabulary was very much limited to – in spite of that I would hear my parents and other Dutch people speak, but even their language started to have the odd English word thrown in. Why? Because it was a lot easier to say that

word than try to translate it or in some cases they did not know the translation or it wouldn’t have a translation. You know, what’s the Dutch word for a mouse on a computer, what’s the Dutch word for a computer, it’s a computer, these sorts of things. But with my language problems is that, I guess, my outlook,

sophistication was getting broader, but my language was not and my language was inadequate. One of the most difficult tasks that I had when I was in the navy is that in the Bicentennial I was the liaison officer for the Dutch task group that was here. I was swamped. And it’s just as well the bulk of the Dutch officers could speak English as well, as I could because I was hopelessly lost.

Although I could make some polite conversation in Dutch, certainly I was hopelessly lost in their technical terms because I had never been exposed to those. You know, be it from ship to security things to all of those sorts of things – so it was a lot easier from a professional point of view to talk in English than it was Dutch. And, I guess, as a young teenager it was the same sort of thing.

Very much so. At 14 I had just completed the first year of high school. I had turned 14 and I was just starting my second year at high school. We had just changed schools once again and when I say

once again, it was no big deal for me, I was quite used to it. I just couldn’t see the sense in getting all – it was Perth Modern School which had a reputation for being a very good school, and I felt hopelessly lost in 2nd year high school. It was way above me, and why am I here, I’ll just go out and get a job and get some money. I needed the money because I wanted to do things, you know, smoke and drink and all those sorts of things.

I don’t think it really concerned them much. I suspect one of the reasons that we moved was probably financial. So when I said, “Look Mum I want to leave school to go to work,” I don’t think there was any real sort of, you know, grinding of teeth. I think they liked the idea. And in good Dutch tradition, no I won’t say Dutch tradition. I’ll say the

bulk of the guys that worked in those days, they lived at home would go out to work and bring their wages home and Mum and Dad would give them pocket money. And that’s the way it was. That’s probably the way it as with most people.

Very much so. I knew I was going to join the navy.

I had applied to join the navy at the age of 14 as a cadet at the naval college. They took one look at the maths paper and said, “Thanks but no thanks,” and they said, “Come back when you’re 17.” And once a year on my birthday or near my birthday I would go to a recruiting office and say, “Is my name still down?” And they’d say “Yes.” They probably didn’t, but that was part of the system of encouraging. It was very easy to get a job

in Australia generally I suspect but certainly in Perth. It was a matter of which job shall I take rather than, you know, I’m desperate for a job. But most kids did start work at 14. As I said earlier people didn’t go on to school unless there was a specific need for it, in a sense that you required your education or some sort of an educational score for something specific. If you were

into the technical trades and by that I mean electrical or something like that that required maths, then you did your Junior Certificate, otherwise you didn’t bother about it. And nobody did their, what’s it now called, the HSC [Higher School Certificate] unless you were going to university. Why would you? A leaving certificate’s not much good for anybody and you could be out there earning a quid. So that’s generally the thought process for

most people. That of course came back to haunt them many years later when there was a requirement to have at least 3 or 4 bits of paper before you even could start a basic job.

My very first job was working in a factory making Coca

Cola. I was 14 years old, just over 14. I wasn’t very big, wasn’t very solid, and my job was to carry fairly large, and I don’t know how much they weighted but they were like a huge potato bag, full of sugar. And I carried them from the stack where they were stacked up at the side on the mezzanine floor, tore them open, and put them in this huge vat,

stainless steel vat, that had propellers in the bottom and then I put ascorbic acid in it and various other bits and pieces and I made the syrup for Coca Cola. I did that for about 3 months and then I graduated to ginger beer, and I cleaned kegs and the other things. Then I got tired of travelling all the way to that factory, so I ended up working in a pellet factory for a while. I didn’t like it there and

then ended up as a messenger boy with a company that electrical spare parts, automotive spare parts, bicycles, automotive paints – but I worked mainly in the automotive parts section, which was great because I was on a push bike all day long and the weather is great in Perth. I got to see different people because I had to drop stuff off and pick spare parts up. I was horrified when I was

promoted to a packer, which meant that I had to stay inside. I was with that company for 2, maybe 3 years, I can’t quite remember and I joined the navy from there. But I had other jobs, part-time jobs, in between. In those days a young bloke got paid by his age not what he did. And when an adult was making say

twenty dollars a week, a boy might be making three. This encouraged young boys to a certain extent to work because there was no other way of getting money. But it was important I think generally for all of the group that I was with and I suspect right throughout Perth, very much a middle class society, that young boys and girls were

expected to go to work and help the family. The eldest went to work because the youngest then had a better opportunity. No different, I guess, to the migrant culture. I suspect the bulk of the migrants, if not all of them, came to a country not for themselves but for their family. A lot of them say ‘greater opportunity’ but if you pressed them and said, “Greater opportunity for who?” invariably they would have to say, “For my kids.” Because the bulk of the migrants, as it turns

out all of those people that I knew that were friends of my parents as well as associates, all have a reasonably comfortable life now, but by God, they had it tough. And when you compare what they have now compared to what their siblings who stayed in the old country have I suspect that life in the old country from a monetary value and from,

not a lifestyle but from goods and chattels that they have and support and education that they have from the system they are possibly better of in fact probably.

Perth was the centre of the universe certainly for all those people in Western Australia. The population of Perth, I’m not

too sure, but I suspect that it would be 75% of the whole of West Australia. West Australia is the largest state in Australia, you know, probably a 3rd roughly. And there’s a hell of a lot of distance between Perth and Broome and Kalgoorlie and Albany, the other towns. So everything went

to the centre of the hub which was Perth. But Perth itself possibly there was this class consciousness. You had the old families – politically conscious, very much aware that they ran the place, a lot of political dynasties and all those sorts of things.

You had the educated elite – school teachers, university professors, all of those sorts of things. Then you had this group, and they were quite separate from the rest of the professions, you know the lawyers and the doctors and all those sorts of people. And then you had everybody else but everybody else really was everybody else. It didn’t make much difference whether you were a labourer or a

bricklayer or a carpenter or a motor mechanic or what I would consider now a tradesman – there wasn’t any difference. All the groups got together. Housing Commission [state owned housing] was very strong in those days, simply because of the booming population and everybody needed a home. New suburbs were set up quite readily possibly

without the infrastructure, the support of transport and schools and those sorts of things so that tended to bring communities a lot closer together. There were probably some other people within the community that gave some cross-pollination of ideas from the east. And they were the people like military, like

I guess local government type people, banks, those sorts of things, people that drifted in and out. And they brought some ideas from the east. As I say, Perth was very much the centre of the universe.

I can remember reading some time ago that there was a well-known Melbourne criminal that was going to expand his territory and in fact he was looking at going towards Perth. And as he stepped off the ship in Fremantle, he was shot dead and I don’t suppose that there were too many criminals after that that wanted to expand their territory. No, I only

say that because there was not quite the general feeling within the Perth community of that but very much that if you were a West Australian, invariably you were a Perthite and you were a close knit community. You considered yourself close knit. You probably weren’t, you were probably the same as everybody else. But there was this isolation and I don’t know what it’s like back

then for a lot of the older people in the community, but even now when I visit Perth I have a sense somewhat of isolation. Not only from my own point of view but I suspect a lot of people from Perth feel a bit isolated. You know, you look at your watch and by crikey I’m 3 hours behind the rest of Australia. That must have some bearing and I’m sure it has. But in those days, well it

wasn’t until the Commonwealth Games, that they had a sealed road between Perth and the rest of Australia and the West Australians couldn’t think of any reason why it should. Why should we provide a road out of the country, rather than for people coming in, and why would we want people to come into the country. That’s I suspect a bit tongue in cheek but that’s how some people I think very much saw it and probably

the political elite saw that as their constituency’s thinking. So they felt that that’s what is needed to drive them. So you didn’t provide roads out of the country, you tried to give the impression of isolationism. You always spoke about those bastards in Canberra

and that sort of attitude I think.

Yes, but I’m not too sure why. It wasn’t until probably the 70s I think that people travelled – don’t get me wrong, people in Perth did travel, particularly from Perth. There weren’t too many

people who just before they got married didn’t travel to Europe. When I say travel to Europe, they went straight to England, spent some time in England because it was very easy to do in those days and having travelled right around England would come back and say, “Well, we’ve seen the rest of the world.” But it was that travel and then other influences that made people aware that living in

Perth was a very idyllic lifestyle. The weather was absolutely perfect. Compared to other places it was great. The lifestyle was great. You didn’t lock your front of your back door, that sort of thing, and those are the things, the lifestyle things were very important. If you had a job, that gave you an adequate amount to be able to enjoy that that was all that was important.

I guess in a nutshell, running around with my mates. Now whether that meant – because some of my mates were, I guess, older than I was and by the time they were 16 ½, they were ready for their learners permit and by 17,

the day they turned 17 would have their licence and of course a car. Cars were fairly expensive and the idea was that we all pooled money and helped each other buy, you know, one guy would buy the petrol and the other guy would buy the car, that sort of thing. And we used to travel to beaches and by that time it was no longer swimming in Como but swimming at the beaches and it was just as much as checking out the talent there than it was actually swimming.

As I said earlier, I wasn’t really keen on sport but there were lots of sporting activities around that allowed you to do that. You would visit people at their houses but invariably go and hang around somewhere else, the back yard. My main mode of transport in those days was push bike. I had a bicycle and I would find myself – I even got as far as Rockingham and Garden Island at one stage. It took me the whole

day but I would have no qualms and neither would any of my mates to do that sort of travel. The weather was good to allow you to do that, so really there was no restriction on being able to go anywhere you wanted to. I’d go into Fremantle and sit on the wharf, go into the city and wander around or as I say occasionally play some sport. And most of that sport really wasn’t organised. When I say sport – you’d go down to the oval and you’d ride past and somebody would be

kicking around so rather than have an organised match you’d just kick the footy, that sort of thing.

A good night out was definitely parties because certainly night clubs weren’t in in those days. All those sorts of recreational activities were all held in people’s places and any excuse for a party.

Beer gardens were fairly important, in fact very important, but there was very much the onus there of no alcohol for those under 18 and it was pretty much certainly from my memory pretty well enforced. Certainly that wasn’t the case with parties at home and if somebody was old enough to bring beer, then everybody would have the odd glass or so. No, people

didn’t fall over and make idiots of themselves. But certainly alcohol was readily available and consumed so that loosened the tongue and the feet. Rock and roll of course was very important and we turned the radio or the record player up. And that was all good stuff. You couldn’t go anywhere in the suburbs in Perth on a Saturday night without being able to hear music wherever you went. I called it music, but my father may not have.

I very much made the conscious decision to stay at home, because I was going to joining the navy. A lot of my mates and some of the guys that I met through work were from the country and they didn’t like the idea of having to work physically hard, which was the only thing you could do out in the country, so they were attracted to the city and would want a job

there and they would live in boarding houses.

I was still working for Atkins WO Pty Ltd as a messenger boy and they were very much aware that I was going to join the navy as everybody else did. And I suspect that bulk of their staff were sort of transitional guys

and moving on to bigger and better things as the age and the opportunity arose. And I had been to the recruiting officer, a couple of months before I had gone to the recruiting office and got all the papers that I needed. And then it was a matter of getting my medical examination. I had already done a series

of education type tests and psychological tests so the only thing that really needed to be done just before I joined was my medical. I turned 17 on the 26th December and in most places they all shut down for the Christmas break, so I was able to get all of my papers

organised while I was still 16 so that by the time I was 17, everything was in order. And I think they came back, the recruiting office staff came back on the 2nd or 3rd or 4th or something of January. And I was on my way from Perth Airport to Melbourne on the 6th of January. So as I said, I’d just turned 17. The first time I’d ever seen an aeroplane, which was not

bad for an aircraft mechanic in the end but the first time I’d seen an aeroplane was when I actually sat in one. When I say the first time I’d ever seen one – seen one of the ground and seen one up close. So that was an interesting experience. From Perth we flew directly to Melbourne. We were picked up by buses and then moved to HMAS Cerberus, the training establishment there.

All very bewildering for me. We left Peth very late at night and I don’t know why, it was about 10 o’clock at night and of course it was an overnight flight and it got to Melbourne fairly early in the morning. So as well as being bewildering I was very tired. I got to this strange naval establishment and

the first few weeks were just a whirl. I can’t remember much, it was all just people running, shouting, marching – mostly shouting at me I think – I’m sure they were all shouting at me. It didn’t take very long to get into uniform at all and I suppose that’s part of the psychological process of turning you into a sailor quickly and making you part of the team.

Things like washing and ironing and those sorts of things were taught fairly quickly so that by the time that your kit was issued, and there was miles of it – in my younger day I think I had one pair of long pants, half a dozen pairs of shorts and a couple of shirts and that was it, whereas the amount of uniform they gave us was just unbelievable. But we had to wash and iron those of course in our

spare time.

The kit comprised a summer and winter uniform because you got the whole lot. That would be the old sailors jumper and a collar and lanyards and silks and bell-bottom trousers, shoes, boots, different types of socks, what we’d call a white front, caps, two caps, tally

bands, underwear, singlets, underpants – those old boxer pants 3 sizes too big – but we didn’t have to wear those, we could wear jockettes if we wanted to. White shorts, I think 3 pairs of white shorts, 2 pairs of white bell-bottom trousers but also other things like toothbrushes, clothing brushes all that sort of stuff. We had our own soap and

soap containers but so much kit that there was no possibility of being able to take the entire kit and fit it into your kit bag. But you weren’t allowed to have anything else except for the kit bag, so that’s always intrigued me. But it was a bit of a challenge, not so much for me because by that time I’d learned pretty much how to wash my clothes – I didn’t have to, but we did as a matter of routine I suppose but for

some of the guys that I’d joined up with they’d never seen a washing machine, let alone what we called a pogo stick. A clean rubbish bin and you’d fill it with water, hot water, some soap powder and what looked like a funnel with holes on the side onto a stick and you would actually plunge the stick into the water where you would throw all your clothes, starting off with your whites.

And that’s how you would wash, simply because otherwise you would never get your clothes or your uniforms washed because I think there were 2 washing machines in the entire block of maybe 300/400 guys. So that was the way to do it. Very, very busy day. You’d get up, and this is in summer, get up when the sun got up, very early, 5, I think or something,

and you would do morning PT, physical training, before you did anything else. And then you would have to race back get changed, have a shower, get into your normal uniform and go and have breakfast. They just couldn’t keep the food up to me or anyone else, but it was damn good food, it really was. By 8 o’clock you would have had to do all of those activities that you didn’t get a chance to do last night like clean up but you also had to clean your cabin, make your

bed and be ready for inspection before you had the opportunity to march. Sorry, at 8 o’clock it was colours, which meant raising the flag, in a formation, all of the classes would be in a formation and dressed, lined up in their uniforms for the day. They would be inspected by the chief instructor or whoever, sometimes the

officer in charge of the particular school and then you’d march off to formal classes. And formal classes would range from boat work, basic maths, basic English, first aid, basic engineering, ships recognition, flags, rank structures, parts of a ship, all sorts of things.

Invariably you would be tested on those things but the best part about the testing was it was always a multi-guess question. The official term is multi-choice but we would be in a lot of cases multi-guess. So that at least gave you an opportunity to get it almost right. Those lectures would be given by the various specialists. So your first aid class you would go to the hospital and they would teach you basic first aid.

Basic fire fighting would be at a fire fighting place and although there’s a lot of theory involved there would be some practical as well which I just absolutely loved. All new subjects, all new interesting things and, I guess, being inquisitive you’d learn them. So testing wasn’t a real problem for me other than English and maths but other than that I think I did fairly well. They would categorise people for their trades.

They would categorise people for their trades much later towards the end of the 3 month basic training. I was very fortunate that my selection was aircraft mechanic. I had thought about being a photographer, but there were no vacancies, so I thought aircraft mechanic was a good choice. But I was one of the very few that got their initial choice. I mean, really, it was all of those who wanted to become cooks became stewards

and those stewards became cooks and those people who wanted to be mechanics ended up as supply attendants and you know it really was dreadful, but we knew that when we joined and we weren’t particularly fussed. I mean nobody thought I want to be an aircraft mechanic because it’s a good job when I get out. Nobody ever thought about getting out particularly, because we signed up in the navy for either 9 or 12 years. And at seventeen, 9 years, you’d probably be

dead by then so who cares? So that wasn’t a real thought in people’s minds, it was basically I want to be a cook because I like eating and it’s close to the food, or I want to be a mechanic because I like tinkering with engines that sort of thing.

I know now that that’s very much the case. The psychologically testing that we did initially at the recruiting

office and then later on a series of tests during the recruit training section was very much on how people thought of you. And I suspect that they were put into 3 or 4 categories and depending on the vacancy requirements was how people were selected and pushed into various areas. Vacancies were very important. There was a group I wasn’t aware of when I joined

but there was a group called Junior Recruits. And these were people that were recruited at 15 ½ and 16 ½ and spent 12 months in training. That was a scheme devised by the system to try and capture those people who if we’d waited until people were 17 and they were already in a job they might not want to join the navy and leave that good job, so we’d try and get them a bit younger and mould them.

So that’s certainly the attitude that prevailed in those days because the navy was competing with a lot of other people for people to join. So part of that aspect, they set up a junior recruiting scheme. A lot of these guys had – a part of the carrot for the mums and dads to say let your son join at 15 ½ to 16 ½ was that they were going to spend 12 months furthering their education.

Some of these guys had 5 and 6 HSC equivalent subjects that they might have had because the education was not based on what you did at school and it wasn’t based on a formal school year. You were educated at your own pace. So if you were good at mathematics they just kept feeding it to you

and the more you gobbled up the more you – and probably not at the high school level but certainly at the school certificate level some of these guys would have that. But what I’m trying to say is that they were very, very highly educated by my standards, but they were yet put in the same category as I was, and certainly from an educational point of view I couldn’t compete with them. To for them to a certain extent sometime down the track might have led to problems because

some of these guys they made into cooks and stewards, which were not academically very demanding. And these guys had huge education experience and nobody took advantage of them which, I guess, later on in life, well later on in their career, would have made them somewhat dissatisfied saying, you know, this is all I do. Going back

to recruit school – it took 3 months, about 3 months. And I was fortunate enough to be part of a scheme where rather than being categorised and going straight on to my technical training or career training I was then sent to the HMAS Sydney which was a converted aircraft carrier, and it was the training ship of

the RAN at the time. Training ships have always been a problem because there were never ships big enough to put all these trainees. When you consider there was 120 trainees left the recruit school about every month, probably 10 months of the year, that was a lot of trainees that the system had to gobble up, so the navy was expanding in those days and

there just wasn’t enough people to train the young recruits, the young trainees, let alone to go out and do the job. So for the navy it was a very challenging and demanding time. To try and soak up some of the trainees coming out of the system we were allowed to go to sea on various ships but in particular the Sydney, the training ship.

They would have maybe 3/400 trainees on the ship at one time and the trainees would wait until there were enough people to start a cookery class or a stewards’ class or whatever, you know, a mechanics’ class, and that was certainly the case with me. At the same time a confrontation by the belligerents Malaysia and

Indonesia had started – Indonesia was starting their Confrontation campaign, and as a consequence the Australian government was sending troops to Borneo. The Sydney as well as a training ship was primarily a troop ship. So, I guess, I was lucky enough to stay as a trainee on the Sydney to take the troops to Borneo.

Not for the time but, I guess, for this day and age yes. I wasn’t even 17 ½ and there I was in a war zone. They’ve got to send me a medal for that as well. But there I was and the system allowed for that to happen. And I can remember sort of having to

do sentry duties looking over the side making sure there weren’t divers, looking for air bubbles for divers that were possibly trying to damage the ships.

This is when I was in Borneo, yes. So that was the sort of thing that allowed us to do those sorts of things. After recruit school – as I say it was 3

months –we were basically packed off to the training ship and we were supposed to do continuation training, learning a bit more about the fleet air arm. But our primary day was basically what I would call ship’s husbandry. That’s chipping paint or painting or that sort of stuff of cleaning toilets or washing dishes, those were the sort of things that trainees did.

That wasn’t to happen until I’d in fact come back from my Borneo trip.

I did but for some reason or other we really didn’t stick together at recruit school and as I say I don’t know why. It seems to be my

experience later on in the training field that all the West Australians and Queenslanders and Tasmanians all tend to stick together, but that wasn’t the case in my intake. And I really don’t know why. I think because there was such a broad area, everyone was from everywhere and I knew no one from Perth and we didn’t get a chance to mix. Not the case with previous West Australians because we travelled by air and they had travelled by train and they had been

together for 4 or 5 days before they got to Cerberus so that gave them an opportunity to get to know each other very much before they hit the big training camp. The same with Queenslanders and Northern Territory people – I mean Northern Territory people, my God, they’d be in the road for months.

No. And I don’t think many of my

friends did. It was well balanced. The good part about it, I guess, was that they explained the rules in minute detail and you knew exactly where you stood. And if you broke the rules, you broke the rules, you took the punishment. They pushed the envelope a bit, you know, you ware always just a little bit late and it didn’t make any difference whether you were 30 seconds late,

or half an hour late, you would get punished for it and that’s the way it was.

Depending on who did the punishment – you know, certain – if you broke the rules God forbid, if you disobeyed an order you actually were fronted before an officer and charged, but your class leader or

class instructor had very much the power to send the class for a double, a double march, a run. When you were doing rifle drill or something and you made a mistake of course, you’ve seen it in the movies exactly the same, you’d have to run to the end of wherever and back with your rifle held up high or you had to do half a dozen push ups or all those sorts of things, which

is good because it made you fitter than you already were. But it was all part of the game and it was all – I won’t say tongue in cheek, it was very serious but it was something that people expected and I think they would have been disappointed if they hadn’t have been treated that way. And it was an interesting thing from my perspective that many years later I did two years as a training instructor for the junior recruit training scheme.

And after having spent 12 months with these young men some of the things that you would talk about many years later, you would say, “What did you think about the training scheme, the discipline, was it too harsh?” “No, it wasn’t as tough as we thought.” So, you know, and I think that was part of my experience too at Cerberus.

For some guys, yes, particularly for those guys that joined and flew down with me. I can remember and still have an association and strong friendship with guys that I joined the navy with and we’ve sort of been in the navy ever since. Some guys mightn’t have done the 33 years as I did. Most people would have done 20 but even some guys who only did 10

I still know and associate with. And, I guess, that’s the beauty here in Nowra, being the home of the fleet air arm, it makes it a lot easier than say someone like my brother who spent all that time in the submarine service, but he lives in Armidale and there’s not too many submariners that live there.

I don’t know. I think it’s because my father was a watch maker and I liked mechanical things, as we agreed I’m a bit inquisitive. But I certainly didn’t want to do instrument fitting or anything like that. The psych was fairly keen to make me an electrician, but I don’t like stuff that I can’t see and I certainly didn’t want to

be a marine engineer, what we would call a stoker, the guy who runs the ships engines and pumps. That really didn’t appeal to me, that’s sort of smelly and hot and whatever else. I could sort of see myself laid back on a nice green airfield somewhere sort of fixing aeroplanes and strapping pilots in. Little did I know.

We did only on two occasions and I had what they called a sponsor, a family that possibly had a son in the navy and kept their ties with the navy, and then would volunteer to host a young sailor in their home for weekends.

Until you were 18 we were not allowed to stay away from the camp overnight. 12 o’clock was the finish of our leave and we had to be back on camp at midnight. But if you had a sponsor or if you went home and you could obtain a signature from somebody, and this was very formal, you got a leave pass and they

required that you were in the care or someone specific, and they had to sign and they had a specimen signature unfortunately, so you couldn’t forge it. That was the sort of structure that they had. Until you were 18, as I say, you had to be back on camp at midnight but even so, leave was restricted during the week and depending on what part of the training

establishment you were in depended on which weekend you were allowed off. In my case my training was cut short a little bit because the Easter period fell through, part of it, so we were only allowed away from the camp on 2 occasions. And I stayed with a family whose son went to Western Australia to do his training. And I stayed with the family all of the time I was in Melbourne and

afterwards I would visit them on regular occasions. And it’s interesting that I knew a lot about their son but had not met him for many years. It was probably 6 or 7 years before I actually got a chance to shake his hand.

Dreadful. I hated it. It was dreadful. I absolutely loathed it. It was dreadful. The weather was pretty bad but because we assumed that we had to go into the city to find anything to

do, we were pretty stupid. We’d go in the central business district and wander around and wonder why nothing was happening, but only when all the shops were shut. Melbourne, it was still 6 o’clock closing for pubs and 5 o’clock closing for shops, and we would not be allowed to leave the camp until midday on Saturday so by that time the shops were shut.

It was illegal for us to be in a hotel and 6 o’clock closing – I can’t remember – I think they did shut in the afternoon for some time but I can’t remember when – and alcohol was not that important in my life in those days, so really it was no attraction. So again because of lack of transport and knowing the place we never got a chance to get to the beaches or those sorts of

places. But of course where all the activity was was out in the suburbs and you had to know somebody to be invited to somebody’s house before you could actually go somewhere. So we didn’t cotton on to that until a bit later.

I don’t think so. No, not really. Too much activity going on – I was fairly secure where I was, you know, we had this big organisation that tended to look after you, too much I

thought. Lots of friends, lots of mates, and it was a thing, I guess, that we picked up on early it doesn’t matter that even if he’s not your best friend you go ashore with a bunch of guys. And you looked after each other while you were ashore and then you went your separate ways if you wanted to when you got back to camp. So that took care of that sort of recreational activity.

At recruit school you were kept fairly busy. Always, you know, so cleaning or ironing or washing and not only your clothes but the area that you were in. Also you were, every 4th day and every 4th weekend, you were required to be ‘duty’. And that duty invariably meant that you were in the cafeteria party and washed dishes or mopped desks or stood guard duty somewhere or directed traffic. You know, all of those sorts of things or a message boy somewhere or

cleaned the offices, cleaned office spaces should I say, you know, gardening and all those sorts of things. So you were kept pretty busy there and invariably if you were not doing something specific you were either eating or sleeping.

Very much so. As you said in my earlier life I knew what I wanted to do, join the navy, it was always a focus and then when I got there I was only a young ordinary seaman and I was going to be a chief petty officer which is the highest rank you could achieve in the structure that I joined under, without being commissioned. You know, hurry up I’ve got all this to do and places to

see and those sort of things. So it was very much life at a gallop, it really was. There are other aspects of course. When you were sitting there in the middle of the night, a watch from say 2 to 4, you’re thinking, you know, really this is a “hurry up and wait” situation and I found that as I got on with my navy life, it really was a “hurry up and wait”. Very much so, in a war type

situation, it was either absolute boredom or absolute panic as most of the people who’ve experienced that sort of thing will agree.

No, I wouldn’t put it that way. And I was quite surprised that the structure for the other services was not that way, but certainly the

navy allowed everybody an opportunity to advance to their ability. And maybe age to a certain extent – in my case, my restrictions were certainly my education and to a certain extent my age. I was already 17 before I joined, so there were some restrictions

there. Had I wanted to be an officer, I should have joined earlier, at the age of 14, to join the naval college or have stayed at school which then allowed me to join as an officer right up to the age of 21. But certainly being an officer was not within my scope. I never really thought about it much. I mean if they’d offered to make me an admiral I probably wouldn’t have knocked it back, but I saw being an

admiral probably nearly as good as being a chief petty officer because they were God and that’s what I wanted to be. Not because that’s my striving ambition, but that really was just the end of the line and that’s what you were sort of aiming for, but you know also that you needed the experience and the education and the training and the

experiences before you got there. So, not only the experience within your own trade but you needed to be a bloody good able seaman before you become a leading hand. Because, again, I didn’t know that at the time but the navy had just moved from promotion by seniority to promotion by merit. Now I had not experienced anything else but promotion by merit. So

it stood to reason that you kept your nose relatively clean and you didn’t get into too much trouble but that was only because one day you’d like to be a leading hand. It was good being a leading hand, because you got more money and you got a bit more authority, which meant that you got some more privileges but that was all.

There was probably more of a structure and sense of responsibility by seniors in the navy towards the can I say kids, we were only kids, 17. The navy had just introduced women to [HMAS] Albatross.

When I left recruit school I spent a couple of weeks at Albatross before I went to the troop ship, the Sydney. And I thought the recruits were restricted in their movements, I’m glad I wasn’t a young lady because they were not allowed to be by themselves, they were only supposed to be in the – although they had WRANS [Women’s Royal Australian Naval Service] at service I never had any contact with them, so

I didn’t know. But when I was talking to some of the young girls, I won’t say young either, but some of the girls at Albatross, I thought, I’m glad I’m a male, because they were certainly very well protected. But that was the system. As I say there was a sponsorship scheme. We were not allowed out of any of the navy bases or ships if you were under 18 overnight. And some places,

depending on where you were, for general safety reasons sailors were not allowed out overnight. So they always had to be back before midnight. So very much there was this feeling by us young people that our seniors, and our elders, tended to look after us which generally speaking was quite true.

I had no thought on it whatsoever. I thought it was a good idea because that allowed me to be a bit closer to the young ladies, rather than having to go ashore I might try to chat up some of the younger ladies in uniform. Fairly naïve, when you consider that there were probably 2,000 males at Albatross

and about 100 females – into the queue. And as a young sailor with no money in my pocket, forget it.

It was an aircraft carrier and they converted it to what they call a fast troop

transporter. And they took out all of the things that allowed an aircraft to operate, fixed wing aircraft, but still operated helicopters if it needed to, but mainly for the logistics of moving troops and equipment. But the ship itself could tie up on a wharf. It had aircraft

lifts so that you could move things, heavy equipment, like trucks for instance and cranes and all that sort of stuff, the guns, from the flight deck down into the hangar. And you could get your equipment, the bulk of your equipment, to the flight deck by either a bailey bridge, actually driving it up, or by the ship’s crane or a dockyard crane. So it was geared up for that.

Because there was this massive amount of space the ship still had, it didn’t have bunks, it had hammocks, absolutely fantastic, the best night’s sleep ever. And that’s how they used to do it in the old days, even in the days of Nelson [British admiral in the Napoleonic Wars], but modern ships now have bunks and everybody gets allocated a space of their own. But certainly as a young trainee, I loved the idea of hammocks. But the soldiers when we went to Borneo also were given hammocks and I think they

enjoyed that. The beauty of hammocks of course, you pull your hammock down at the end of the night and stow them into a compartment somewhere, and that left you lots of recreational space or working case or in my case instructional space, because sometimes we would go into the mess decks or areas where people would have their hammocks and actually have formal lessons. You know, this is how an aeroplane flies or this is how an aircraft carrier works, that sort of

thing.

Certainly for me as a trainee I would be allocated to what they would call a part of ship which is where I would work. Initially I worked a part of ship called the forecastle, that’s the sharp end. The forecastle part of ship would have a

crew of seamen, trained people, people who would be in the seamanship branch and they would do ship’s husbandry, chipping the rusty sides and repainting it, moving the equipment from one side to the other, cleaning and scrubbing decks, all of that sort of equipment. Sometimes there would be equipment stored on the

forecastle, so we would look after that. Potatoes for instance were kept on part of the deck that was part of our area for responsibility?

Yes, for food. They needed to be kept in a darker space but out in the open and there’s nothing like the smell of rotting potatoes. So we would be responsible for that sort of thing. From there I was transferred to the

cafeteria party, which meant that I looked after the cafeteria. Most messing for ships in those days was always done on the basis where somebody would go and get your you would get your individual food from a galley where the food was prepared, and then you would take it back to your mess deck to eat. The

larger ships and the more modern ships would have a proper space where people actually sat and ate. And they would have large tables and stools for people or benches for people to sit on and that way you didn’t have food slopped from one end of the ship to the other. You had a large space that was used for eating as well as sometimes a recreational space. You could watch movies there or have tombola or housie [bingo].

Housie? What’s another name for housie? Tombola – where you would have cards with numbers on them and people would call them out and the first person that crossed off all their numbers would win the prize.

Well, we were in the navy and the whole ship, including the army staff, troops that were

going to Borneo as well as the staff that looked after them, so I think there was something like 800 people on board at one stage – they would all play tombola and the idea of the prize was of course money. You would pay, I don’t know, a dollar a ticket or 20 cents a ticket. If you paid 20 cents a ticket, the first prize might be two or three hundred dollars. That would be nice, to have two or three hundred dollars in your pocket when you went to Singapore.

Very much so.

I think I was talking about the

army routine and my own routine, the ship’s routine. With the soldiers that were on board the Sydney, the troop carrier, they were already trained but they needed to keep fit so that was very, very important for all of those guys. And they needed to keep their skills up

for certain things. For instance, those guys that were on anti aircraft guns or Beaufort things, I’m not too sure what they were called, they had to train and keep training and of course the people who were obliged to use their rifles, they had SLRs [self loading rifles] at the time, they needed to practice and they did that at the aft end of the ship. And they would sometimes throw some sort of a target into the water, it would be a balloon

or what they’d call a splash target and try and shoot those sorts of things. That would be the army’s routine throughout the day. They would have a lunchbreak and then work on into the afternoon. Their lunchbreak might be a couple of hours long, to try and compensate for the heat but a lot of the army guys were trying to be acclimatised to that. My own routine as I was saying earlier, working part of ship was the bulk of my working day. And that would be from

8 o’clock in the morning until midday and then from 1 o’clock through until 4. But in addition to that, I would also be part of a watch on deck and that would either be as a look out, be it a look out on the bridge or a look out for a life buoy sentry or part of the ship’s boat crew. So on a rotational basis I would find myself working

watches. The normal watch system starting of say from midnight to 4, 4 to 8, 8 to 12 and so on but then split up, the 4 hour watches would be split up between 4 o’clock in the afternoon and 8.00pm – between 4 o’clock 1600 would be to 1800 and from 18000 through to2000. So that would keep you fairly

busy, but also somewhat tired because you would have to do the normal day’s work as well as in addition you would have to try and do that watch on deck. Very interesting, very challenging, it gave me a sense of purpose and being able to contribute, because I’d only been in the navy less than six months.

Certainly the thick of things in the sense that we

only had a few weeks’ preparation before we left Sydney. We took all the army guys on board and went via Manus Island I think straight to Borneo and disembarked all the troops there. It’s admittedly only a small aircraft carrier, but it’s still a big ship and in amongst all the small islands and coming into the ports there was pretty fascinating for me but a bit challenging I should imagine for

people like the captain and the navigator. We were there for a couple of days and that was not scary, I wasn’t too sure of what was going on – I had a pretty good idea, but I didn’t fully appreciate some of the dangers that could have presented themselves.

Oh yes. Part of the ship’s crew and therefore stayed on board, never went ashore, but by unloading

first of all the troops themselves and then the equipment and the equipment took a long time. All of the ammunition, for instance, for the guys was stored in our magazine departments, all the magazines, which meant that we had to drag all of the stuff out of the magazines. It was all small arms type of stuff. So it’s a physical sort of a drag the stuff out of magazines, take it up to the flight deck, drag it back down and into boats and then, because we didn’t go

alongside, we were anchored off a small bay there. So it was fairly intense during the day. For me of a night it was interesting again being part of the watch on deck. Everybody was doubled up for security reasons and we would work through long hours of the night. Sentry duty, we’d be given hand grenades or scare grenades and

search lamps and things to look out for divers and people who were, smithers, people who were tyring to come on board to sabotage your ships. And I don’t know how true it was, they didn’t sabotage the ships, one of our escorts, but I heard the story later on that whilst one of our escorts was anchored with us some of the locals got on board and stole a whole

roll of fairly thick nylon rope which was used, and very valuable of course, off the forecastle, and that disappeared without trace. So I’m glad they were only after the rope and not anything else.

Excited. A sense of importance in that here I am, six months in the navy and I’m defending my country.

Yes, I think I did. I suspect because of my mother’s ties with Indonesia I was probably a bit more familiar with the set up and somewhat disappointed with Sukarno’s [President of Indonesia] attitude towards his

neighbours. Yes, probably a lot more than say the average sailor. I was very much aware of where all these places were, and again I couldn’t say that most of the other sailors did the same.

Yes. There was no problem there. It was very much the opportunity to defend my country or do my part

and a cause worthy of doing and pride in being able to do this and having almost a sense of honour and privilege in being able to do that.

Not at all. I was more than happy to be able to do this, particularly compared to some of the people who I knew had joined the navy before me and were doing their technical training whereas I am out there seeing the sights and as I said, an opportunity to defend my country. It was a sense of privilege and that remained with me for quite some time.

Even later on can I say in peace time when the sense of privilege of being able to be in the navy and I certainly wasn’t alone I think a lot of people had that same sort of feeling. It wasn’t something that anyone could do and it was fairly important to do anyway.

I can’t remember exactly how long.

I guess it was 3 or 4 days.

Terrible. We went all the way to Singapore and we had a period of self maintenance there. At 17 ½ years I spent a fortnight in Singapore and have loved the navy ever since.

The problems were what they call a tropical routine which meant that we woke up reasonably early and

worked until midday and then had the rest of the day off. Of course, it was too hot to stay on the ship so you would always have to go ashore and find somewhere to cool off. They had a British naval base there and they had some facilities there, quite good facilities, and we started using those towards the end of our stay when our money ran out. Prior to that we would go into all sorts of places, the local village, Sembawang, and have the odd beer or

go all the way into Singapore and see the sights. And it was a reasonably balanced sort of opportunity to see the sights. There were organised bus tours, culture tours I would call them, you would go and see all the local temples and that sort of stuff which was good because if they hadn’t have been laid, I guess, we wouldn’t have got an opportunity to do that. We wouldn’t have known where to go or how to go about it. Of course there’s lots of sport to be played, but there are better things to do than play sport when you’re in Singapore. But just the

sheer buzz of all of these people of all different cultures – different religions and different cultures and all different backgrounds being cooped up in this island state. And Singapore was coming into its own and there was already, I guess, some friction between Singapore as Malaya as they were grouped together as Malaysia and there was this, I

guess, friction between the Singaporeans feeling that they were bank rolling the rest of the country. Nevertheless they were still keen to make as much money as possible and try and get as much from us as possible as well.

Everything being

different. Meeting different people and being exposed to different cultures and different thoughts and attitudes. We would mix I suspect more readily, the Australians would mix more readily with the locals than certainly our British counterparts and some of these Brits were in fact based in Singapore, that may have been the reason why, I don’t know.

In fact I made some friends of locals that I used to look up, young guys, when next I went to Singapore. That was also the case in Hong Kong. But there was always a question of security there as to whether these guys were on the right side or the wrong side or why would they want to befriend a sailor and all that sort of stuff, so it was always tempered with something. A lot of these guys were either

high school students and in a lot of cases guys who were trying to better their English, trying to know a bit more about the world and by sort of contact people like myself and saying, “What do you do and what’s your routine and that sort of stuff.”

In Singapore we did, and that certainly was the case then for two reasons. One is because that was still the routine in those

days and also because we were under 18. A little bit later they changed the routine that for Australian ships visiting Singapore people over the age of 21 I think were allowed to opt for civvies [civilian clothes]. Much later on for security reasons people in fact were required to wear civilian clothing. So things changed over the years.

It depended very much on where you went. In places like Singapore, it was a bit of a pain because you would always be the magnet for the traders and for the hawkers, the kids who were trying to sell everything from beer to their sister and everything in between. But as soon as you got out and towards the city itself and further it was

usually a matter of some respect from the locals, but certainly nothing that fascinated them. They’d obviously seen them all before. They didn’t harass us or worry us but were always polite wherever we went.

Very much so, and coming from can I say that coming from a war zone which Borneo was to Singapore, in spite of the fact that

there was still the remnants of the Malaysian Emergency which hadn’t quite, there was some – I won’t say aggro [aggression] but there was certainly some reluctance to fully embrace the Chinese communities. For us it was a dream, it really was. From

Singapore we went on to Penang.

The worst part was leaving because I just loved the whole thing and not having enough money to do all the things that I wanted to do. The image of Singapore, certainly in those days, was it was a great place to

buy things and therefore whatever money I had I certainly tended in the first few days to buy all those so called rabbits that were important to take home to Mum and Dad and sisters in particular, you know, all those horrible sort of touristy things. But there were other things that I wanted to do and places that I wanted to go and after a while the money just ran out, particularly for transport and that was fairly important. And of course you

don’t want to leave entertainment to one side, so whenever you got the opportunity bars or night clubs or whatever you want to – hotels, whatever you wanted to call them and in fact it was pretty easy to get alcohol pretty well anywhere.

It’s difficult to say in that some of the local girls would try and mix with the guys for all sorts of reasons but very much a commercial type of

activity generally speaking. It was very difficult, I guess, for a young sailor to get to know the locals on a pen-friend type relationship. I mean, if I was a parent and I had some young girls I’m not too sure if I would be ecstatic with them going out with sailors,

particularly with the reputation that they’ve got.

Yes, we moved on to Penang and we still had some air force people on board and there being, at Jesselton there, an RAAF base there we dropped – I think it was a couple of helicopters and lots of ground equipment and spare parts and a

few troops which was all part of the deal. I didn’t spend much time there and moved back again through Indonesia which again was a bit of a – it was interesting. We were at action stations most of the time because I suspect that certainly the military had no idea of what to expect. Very much

an unknown quantity. Dr Sukarno, the President of Indonesia, tended to run hot and cold I suppose and certainly we weren’t aware of what his next move was likely to be and good military practice dictates that people are pretty much on the ball as far as their own defence is concerned. We were travelling through international waters

but still it needed to be emphasised on us, the people who were doing the watch keeping, the look-outs, those sorts of things that we pretty much kept on the ball.

Strictly because we were on our way home to Australia, and that meant that from there we went via Fremantle and it was as much as soon as we

left the Indonesian waters, we were back into the training ship mode. And we certainly didn’t forget that, back to the grindstone, none of this sort of being look-out in the middle of the night, it was back to the books and that sort of stuff. I was then able to visit Fremantle and saw my family and my family saw me and saw the big ship that I was on, you know, local boy makes good, and it was very enjoyable. From there we went on to

Melbourne and did the same sort of thing and then back to our home port in Sydney.

There is traditionally the crossing the line ceremony – King Neptune

arrives on board with all his helpers and his Queens and that sort of thing is quite common and the navy really doesn’t have that much of something different it just does it like everyone else. But certainly from a young trainees point of view, no, and I suspect simply because the logistics of doing something like that is huge. We

weren’t, there weren’t quite 300 trainees but there would have been well over 100 trainees on board because we had to make room for the army, but I suspect that the sheer weight of numbers would have prevented anything like that. But certainly in voyages after that I’ve seen the traditional crossing the lines ceremonies and all the things that go with it – painting with soap and dunkings. And it’s usually the

captain and some of the older heads of department that cop that sort of treatment as well as the very young.

Very much so, but also tempered with the understanding that we were very much a guest in somebody else’s country and if you want to get screaming drunk and vomit in somebody’s gutter or do whatever you do – those sort of activities were usually done in places like say Sembawang which was the

little village that was just near the entrance of the base. Very much – not so much controlled but certainly oversighted by the local police and as well of course by shore patrol and the naval police. And every ship had its own – it used to assist the naval patrol or the local shore authorities

by providing manpower from sailors on board to go ashore and assist with naval patrol activities. So they usually kept you in line. A lot of the young blokes, it was their first opportunity to have as much beer as they could possibly buy. And of course some of them did just that. And it was the same case with being able to go out to places of ill repute and all sorts of

other places and that, I guess, was quite natural. It was certainly tempered with respect for local laws and customs. People didn’t really go out and make an idiot of themselves.

Myself included, yes. I don’t know whether it was as much a fear of the repercussions, because it was very much frowned upon by the navy. You were constantly – before you went

ashore you would normally be – in places like Singapore and Hong Kong where the navy’s presence is very strong. The Royal Navy, having permanent bases there, we would get a visit from the local liaison officer or the local military police or naval policeman or whoever and they would then

tell us which places not to go too. Not quite that bad, but certainly they would give you a good brief on what to expect, what to do, what not to do and in general I think that most people, if not all people, used to try and do the right thing. Because, again, we figured this wasn’t the last time we were going to be there and we didn’t particularly want to blot the copy book, so that the next time we arrived in town the police would be looking for us

if the naval authorities hadn’t caught up with us in the first place or both.

Yes. From the training ship we went straight back to Albatross and spent a couple of weeks there. And then we were all posted – I say we, a whole bunch of people with myself were then posted onto the aircraft carrier, the [HMAS] Melbourne. Again, as trainees,

I suspect more like cheap labour in the sense that again as trainees we were required to do things like cafeteria parties, watch on deck, all of those husbandry type of activities, house keeping type of activities. But being on a real aircraft carrier, we were able to take a very close view on operations of aircraft and all of the

ancillary things that occur with that at close hand. We were given the opportunity to sort of see aircraft land and take off and engines being pulled apart and all those sort of things. And even if you were not going to be an aircraft mechanic, you could still wander down and see guys take engines out of aeroplanes. And if you’re not going to be in flight directing crew you could still go up into some areas of the ship and watch

this being done. So it was a real eye-opener. It gave us a much more solid grounding for when we came to do our technical trade. People didn’t have to say look this is what a catapult does and this is what it looks like because we’d been there and seen that. My brother who had joined the navy six months before me wasn’t able to participate in that program. He had

spent 2 ½ years in the classroom before he had actually seen an aircraft carrier, but he had been training all that time to work on one. So I considered myself and our group very privileged.

I had volunteered to be one.

Oh yes.

Yes. As we left

recruit school, we were designated into various categories, there may have been sub categories. In my case I was an aircraft mechanic and they hadn’t told me then whether I was going to be a ordinance fitter or an engines and air frames fitter and they were the only two categories in aircraft mechanic. Other people were slotted in as aviation category people, but there might have been meteorologists, firemen

and directing team people and safety equipment type people. I mean all of these categories were not finalised so these people didn’t quite know what was in store for them as far as their future trade was concerned.

Yes. I was ¾ o f the way there in the sense that, probably more than ¾ in the sense that I wanted to join the navy really. And I was and I’d been overseas and saw all these different types of places and saw a lot of Australia, I guess, too. So

that by the time I got onto the Melbourne I then concentrated on the next step, which was I was to become technically qualified so that I could get on and up the next rung of the ladder and become more specialised in the things that I do because washing dishes and swabbing decks gets a big boring after a while and being able to a certain extent contribute as well. That’s fairly important in the sense that a young ordinary

seaman, untrained, there’s not much that you can do other than under direct supervision. Whereas, I guess, as a young technical sailor, you can be able to contribute a do a few things a bit better and more focussed than you could any other way.

I was on the Melbourne for a couple of voyages. We went to Melbourne and we did a

few trips to Queensland, we stopped off at Brisbane, but it was mainly round the east coast of Australia and basically training up the air crew for another deployment at sea. The air crew are constantly through the training pipeline. Some of these guys might go from training aircraft to operational type aircraft. They might get an opportunity to do some

deck landings with training aircraft on a training squadron. And that’s when the Melbourne, the aircraft carrier or as we would say the ship, the ship would be in the Nowra area and aircraft would fly off at Albatross and provide that facility for them off the coast. So you had constantly people landing and taking off

without necessarily having those people remain on board. So that for guys like myself is a bit of a challenge too in a sense that later on, when I became qualified, we had to look after those aircraft as well. That was only for a few more months, and by that time there was vacancies and instructors for my technical training course which I started just before Christmas. And I did my

basic training on what they call a Sea Venom aircraft, the old British style of all-weather fighter. And I completed my training there.

I did that at the naval base at Albatross. And that took some 4 months I think. And once I had completed that training, as I say on the Venom,

they posted me to a Gannett Squadron which makes sense of course. I knew absolutely nothing about Gannetts but they were short of some people and I was the lucky guy – I guess I was adaptable or something, I don’t know, but I knew nothing about the aircraft. And it was about a week before we went to sea so I had to learn all about this aircraft. But I enjoyed it nevertheless, it was good. It was a bit frustrating at times not knowing as

much as everybody else, but I got there and thoroughly enjoyed it. And lo and behold within I guess a few months, that would have been in the middle of the following year, once again, that’s 57, I was on the Melbourne but this time as part of a squadron, 816 Squadron, flying Gannetts, six Gannetts, B Flight had 4 Venoms, but I wasn’t part of that. We did

all sorts of places – Japan, Hong Kong, Philippines, Singapore, the Philippines again and then West Australia and back to Nowra.

Aircraft maintenance. Initially what we would call the servicing unit

which was basically the sort of things that would be done to somebody’s motor car to a service station. Filling it up with fuel, oiling it, pumping up the tyres, cleaning the windscreen, doing inspections and if anything, small detail type stuff, needed to be done either on a scheduled maintenance basis, or because it had broken we would do that. But anything of a major

concern that required the aircraft to be moved from the upper deck into the hangars then somebody else would take care of that. So most of my existence was up in the fresh air on the flight deck and, you know, it was pretty exciting.

Japan was a bonus. It was a visit, because we hadn’t visited Japan for quite some number of years, I think probably a decade. We were also as part of our SEATO commitments required to do – SEATO is the South East Asian Treaty Organisation – there were joint exercises to be done there.

We did joint exercises with the Americans independently. We did exercises with the Japanese and with the Brits as well. So all these things are planned many years in advance and, I guess, the cost of trying to put one of these things to sea and punch holes in the sky you try and get as much training out of these things as possible.

So we ended up doing as many exercises as possible and after a while it can be fairly hard work and a bit, not tedious, but certainly numbing where day in day out you’re just preparing an aircraft and it just shoots off the end of the ship and you wait for it to come back and then you get into a mad panic to try and fix it up and send it off again. There were obviously days of rest and it’s a good

routine. The ship itself and the intensity – because the ship itself was built – the keel was laid down during the war, the Melbourne’s keel was laid down during the war, originally as an oiler I think but they changed it to a light aircraft carrier. But it was built for the North Atlantic, so it really had no facilities for making it almost liveable in the tropics. It was terrible.

The first time I went on it, I don’t think there was an air conditioning unit on the ship at all and you can imagine all that grey steel up in the hot tropics. Because of the equipment, the aircraft that it operated becoming more and more technical and demanding more support, equipment as well as people, slowly but surely the ship was filling up with more people and gear that it was very difficult for it to remain at

sea for any length of time. So, in the old days when you could send a carrier to sea for maybe a month, that certainly wasn’t the case by the time that I first got there. The Melbourne, I guess, would on an average basis, I guess, be at sea for 14 days at most. So you always had the idea that you’d only got to stick it out for 14 days, and then you’d get a chance when hopefully to stretch your legs. Having said that, there were lots of occasions when we’d pull into a place like Alomopo,

refuel all night, and then disappear again and not even get a sniff of a bar or a beer or anything else.

Albatross in those days did not have very many brick or what they would term as permanent

buildings – by today’s standards very, very primitive. There were still a lot of Nissen huts, those round, half round things that were built – originally built by either the air force, sorry the RAF [Royal Air Force], the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force], the Americans had a crack at it, so you had this hodge podge of stuff there. And like all

air fields what was important was the landing area and some place to park the aircraft. So certainly facilities were not high on the list. Slowly but surely, there was a program to update this stuff. In 1962 the government made the decision, I think it was ’62 or just before that, the government made the decision to disband the fleet air arm completely – get rid of the carrier, get rid of the lot. That was overturned a

year later, I think, or about a year later. As a consequence, as soon as the government made the announcement that it was scrapping the fleet air arm lots of cuts were made. Lots of gear was got rid of, people moved out, you know, because it was just a waste of money and time keeping things on without the thought that maybe the government would change its mind. So until about 1964

people assumed that the place would shut down and nothing more would happen. So it wasn’t until ’64 that there was some thought given to putting some permanent buildings in the area. Conditions were as I say primitive, the bulk of the living was done in Nissen huts. The bulk of the facilities, bar facilities, bedrooms all of that

sort of stuff was all again temporary type buildings, tin huts – cinemas, you know, everything. The only brick buildings there were was an accommodation block which was in fact for the Wrens and rightly so. And there were some other brick buildings there that were a result, they were fairly old but they were a result of some earlier progress. Our classrooms were

tin huts. Very small and hot of course in summer.

That trip on the Melbourne was the last trip of the Gannetts and the Venoms. When I came back I was trained on Iroquois which was the aircraft that I went to Vietnam was.

Life at Albatross. Sorry, life in Nowra. Most of my early time at Albatross as a trainee restricted my movements into

Nowra somewhat. As a trainee when I first arrived I was required to always wear my uniform ashore which was a bit of a damper on some things because you couldn’t chat up a young lady in Nowra if you had a sailor suit on, because everybody knew about those sailors.

Yes, because invariably young ladies’ dads and uncles were invariably sailors so they were obviously

warned. It wasn’t as easy as I would have thought to become part of the community, not that I set out to do that, not until much later. Most of the recreational activities that we needed, most of them, were available at Albatross, so there was no need to come into Nowra. But obviously all of us wanted to get away from the

military environment on a regular basis and as such you would go to Nowra to go to the movies rather than at Albatross. We had a facility called the White Ensign Club, and that was a club established by the donations of or from a group of businessmen in town who wanted to give the sailors somewhere to go where they wouldn’t be hassled, and as such they

established this place called the White Ensign Club. And it had a bar and some poker machines which sort of kept it going, but it also had change rooms facilities so people who had to wear their uniforms ashore could actually change into civilian clothing if they wanted to. It had pool rooms, dart rooms, all of those sort of things. It was in the centre of town, so if you were waiting for someone to meet you it was a good

focal point either for transport or for anything else. But most importantly, it got you away from Albatross, from the military routine, and you could relax and that was fairly important. There were lots and lots of sports and I suspect that certainly myself and lots of other guys in our younger days didn’t appreciate not only the facilities that were available to us but the

absolutely delightful area that we were in. I never appreciated until much later the opportunity to go bush walking, surfing, camping, fishing. It’s only two hours to the snow or three hours to the snow. It’s absolutely gorgeous, but without transport, and I didn’t have a car in those days, and the reason was simple – I was sending half of my money home which, I guess, was

not unusual.

I have no idea what half of my wages were at the time. As a young 18 year old I was making adult wages and I think they would have been, I don’t know, 15 pounds a week or something like that, I’m not too sure about that but as I say that’s not unusual most of us did the same thing.

No, to help my parents and let the other kids do whatever. They spent it on whatever they spent it on. As I got older it was just a habit I suppose that I got into and at one stage my parents wanted to buy a house, another house, they had some major problems with the first one, and I just kept doing that until just before I got married.

Other activities that were around Nowra at the time were things like horse riding, archery, skin diving, rock fishing – nobody told me that you could go and catch marlin off the rocks, but you can here at Jervis Bay. These are the sort of things and I’m a bit frustrated that I wasn’t aware of that. I guess as a sailor we tended to be dominated very much by

other sailors and there was possibly this disconnect. As a trainee we were very much looked after but as we got a bit older and started being either a senior trainee or being part of an operational squadron our elders who lived ashore went ashore every night and did their thing. And the other people who were left at

Albatross and lived at Albatross obviously weren’t interested in doing anything ashore because otherwise they’d be living ashore. So it was a bit of a catch-22 situation where it took us a while to catch on to the fact that there was all these recreational facilities available where we could easily take advantage of and didn’t. So it was a bit boring, if I could put it that way.

I was trained on the Venoms and I did my basic course on the Venoms but I was then posted to a Squadron 8161 just before they left to go to sea and they operated Gannetts so I had to try and learn, I guess, as I went along all about that particular aircraft.

One was an all weather fighter aircraft, two-seater, very small and very fast relatively speaking.

The Sea Venom. And the Gannett was an anti submarine aircraft – twin engined, counter rotating props, big, three people – pilot, observer and radar operator. One was a pure jet and the other was a gas turbine engine.

So pretty much cheese and chalk, and it took a bit of a steep learning curve to become familiar with it and become confident with it really so I knew what I was doing. But one of the reasons, I guess, I never trained on the Gannetts was that there were no Gannett courses available because there wasn’t a need for them, because they had a reasonable enough amount of people for them to

last a while and for some reason or another they moved away or got promoted or something. And they weren’t prepared to set up another course because that trip that I did with 8161 on the Gannetts was the last seagoing operational flights of the Gannetts. We did this cruise around South East Asia, came back and as the aircraft flew off the ships they went straight to

Albatross and they were grounded and the Albatross got ready for the new aircraft, the new American aircraft and they were Skyhawk Jet Fighters and Grumman Trackers, anti submarine aircraft. So during that period there wasn’t too much emphasis – we were just keeping the aircraft in the air as best we could.

That’s right, yes.

They were fairly old, and like all of these things, technology is fairly important particularly for that style of activity that they were designed for, anti submarine stuff and to a certain extent the fighter aircraft as well. Although they were a reasonable aircraft and certainly could come

up with most things in the area, it was important to stay technically advanced from the opposition and, I guess, that’s probably what makes people keen to keep upgrading on a constant basis. There are lots of other reasons, one of the primary ones I can guess or I can think of is a lack of spare

parts. When these things get old the manufacturer is not manufacturing spare parts for older aircraft because he’s busy building new ones, that sort of thing. It was a change of thinking within the navy, within the defence force generally. Traditionally we had always acquired our military equipment from the Brits, from the UK, that changed

in the early ‘60s, when the government decided that it was acquiring some DDG destroyers, guided missile destroyers, the [HMAS] Perth, [HMAS] Hobart and the [HMAS] Brisbane – that was the first of the American ships and they were fairly big destroyers and whacko missile guided anti aircraft systems and all sorts of wonderful things. I guess that led to the trend of looking to the

United States for equipment, probably because the British industry was not regarded as well as the American stuff. There was sometimes a problem of supply of spare parts and because invariably the bulk of our association with other navies was with the Americans. In our corner of the world

it was more training with American and American equipment. You know, if you went to the Philippines or Japan or any of these sorts of places then invariably they were equipped by the Americans. So that was basically the thinking behind that I presume. When the Gannetts and the Venoms were scrapped the

announcement was made of course well beforehand that the aircraft would be replaced with Trackers and Skyhawks. We already had an anti submarine helicopter, the Wessex, and that Wessex was upgraded, that was a British Aerospace Westland Wessex, a British aircraft.

That operated dunking sonar so that was very efficient as an anti submarine detector and also as a destroyer. It was capable of carrying torpedos and that sort of stuff so we had a bit of everything.

Dunking sonar is basically a helicopter that looks for submarines using its sonar, and they would have a sonar

head which would be winched down on a cable from a hovering helicopter and immersed into the oceans at various depths and the operators can then listen to any underwater sounds and hope to detect a submarine from its noises, the propulsion system or whatever as it travels through the water, be able to detect a submarine through that. And the beauty of the sonar is that it doesn’t require

any activity, although it has an ability to send out a ping, a signal, that might bounce of something like a submarine and that allows people to judge distances from the object or directions. Dunking sonar is probably a lot more efficient than the traditional method of sonar buoys, which are

a small sonar device which is dropped from an aircraft. It then falls apart and the sonar head is at a certain depth and its responses are then sent by radio signal from the floating head to an over flying aircraft.

The Gannett, the Gannett originally was using that. So the

Tracker used a similar scheme, but we had the Wessex so we had the best of two worlds, a dunking sonar for close in work and then the Tracker for being able to sweep big areas far ahead of the fleet. So that was the reason for those sorts of aircraft.

The Tracker is a twin-engined, high winged aircraft. It has two large

propeller piston engines, propeller driven. It has a crew of four, two at the front, a pilot and tactical operator, if I can put it that way and at the back you have the two operators and they would equip things like your sonar detection equipment, your sonar buoy detection equipment, your radar

and various other weapons and devices for looking for submarines. And they can vary from what they call a MAD, a magnetic anomaly detector, which is basically this magnetic device, sorry, this device that picks up the earth’s magnetic field and the theory is that a large metal object like a ship or a submarine would distort the natural patterns of the earth’s magnetic fields.

So if you can then fly over an area and check these things out and then find an anomaly in this field, then there’s obviously something there. And if you look out of the window and don’t see anything on the surface, there might be something under there. That’s the sort of thing. The people at the back also operate the various offensive

capabilities of the aircraft such as the torpedos, depth charges. The aircraft has rockets, not very successful but that’s good. So in a nutshell it is pretty much a fairly sophisticated and the aircraft itself, the air frame itself is not that modern but it’s just jam packed with all this pretty

fancy electronic stuff that you can keep updating. You don’t have to change the air frame you just keep updating the sonar and the radar and all that sort of good stuff so it’s a good way to go.

No, the last voyage of the operational – the last operational flight of the Venoms and the Gannett

aircraft. The aircraft then returned to Albatross and were scrapped and the ship, the Melbourne, then went into dry dock and was prepared and strengthened. The flight deck was strengthened and all sorts of things were done to it over a period of two years to get the ship ready for the new aircraft, that is, the Skyhawks and the Trackers.

Not at all because I had only

just – it was only a matter of a couple of years that I had sort of tagged on. And I was looking forward to working on the American aircraft, because they were several generations ahead of what I’d been used to working on those British aircraft. And they were a lot more maintenance or maintainer friendly. The British aircraft because they were old style

and designed pretty much during and just after the war all sorts of bolts and nuts and horrible things that you’d have to try and join and it would take a crew of people say 10 or 12 hours to change an engine on a Gannett. You could do that pretty much in half the time or a quarter of the time, if you wanted to change it on a Tracker or on a

Skyhawk. Very much a much better aircraft to work on from that point of view and also the fact that it was far more capable

The difference – there was a reasonable

tolerance by the ship’s crew, the Melbourne’s crew, towards the people on the squadrons. But when you consider that the aircraft carrier was built for probably 800 people to be on there and towards the end of its time we had something like 1300 people on there, I mean really it was just so overcrowded it wasn’t funny. And it was interesting that one of the first

times I brought my wife, she’d never been on a ship before, she’d never seen inside a ship, she’d only seen pictures and heard me telling her stories. And one of the first times I took her on board the ship and showed her where I worked – and I was quite proud of it and where I lived because I thought, you know, it’s pretty good. And she started to cry and I thought, “What’s going on?” And she said, “You don’t live like this, this is terrible.” And I said, “No, it’s pretty good in fact.”

What I’m saying is because she wasn’t used to it – the facilities were pretty Spartan [basic].

Yes. And I thought certainly that the Melbourne had a lot more facilities and a lot more room than some of the submarines that my brother had served on. But because it is so crowded there’s always some friction. And the Melbourne was a great ship until the air crew were on there and then it just got so

crowded, you know, it was like hospitals – hospitals are great except for the patients.

I met her in Nowra after I came back from Vietnam. I was very fortunate that I wasn’t tied up emotionally with anyone when I went to Vietnam. And I’m very pleased about that, because I certainly saw a lot of heartache and

trauma for people and some of the conditions that the wives and children in particular had suffered because of the circumstances. Guys who went to Vietnam didn’t come back for twelve months.

It wasn’t disbanded, it was just simply overtaken by events I suspect. I don’t know. Don’t forget I’m just an able seaman or aircraft mechanic. I suspect that as a result of things happening

with Indonesia that as a result of that and the British pull back east of Suez. Then there was a commitment to the then Malaysia, that’s Singapore and Malaya, to keep the bases in Singapore and Hong Kong open. But certainly in Singapore there was an ANZUK [Australian, New Zealand and United Kingdom]

Treaty, something similar, I’m not too sure, but there was this an Australian, New Zealand, UK treaty that required us to defend certain places up there.

No, that was the American one, but ANZUK was the one up there. And then that just got changed to something and

there were, you know, all sorts of treaties. But as I say certainly in answer to your question SEATO I think that was just overtaken by something else that belonged to that. SEATO was American sponsored and that involved all sorts of countries and by that time there was more emphasis on – because it was I suspect a very loose commitment, that, particularly with Vietnam. People

finding out that things were happening in 62, 64 and 65 in Vietnam that things were starting to hot up. Although confrontation had died off certainly with Vietnam as I say it was starting to hot up and people were interested in a more considered commitment from the democracies.

None, none whatsoever.

No, I was trained on the aircraft, the aircraft being the Iroquois, the UH1C or 1 Charlie

which is the model that we had, sorry, 1 Bravo which is the model that the Australian Navy had brought with is a training aircraft to get people from fixed wing to helicopters and then from Iroquois they would move on to the Wessex, and that’s the reason we had the Iroquois. At that stage the navy was, the fleet air arm was in a period where a lot of people were at loose ends and they had lots of pilots and ground crew doing

nothing, because the new aircraft hadn’t arrived and the ship was in dry dock, the carrier was in dry dock, and there was nothing much that they could do.

We’re probably talking about ’66 and sorry ’67, ’67. So by that time the Australian government had given a commitment for

troops to Vietnam. The Americans were employing a different style of warfare by this time they were in combat operations rather than just as advisors and they were moving their troops about in helicopters. The Americans had great difficulty in finding and providing the army with

helicopters and trained air crew. They just couldn’t produce them fast enough. Helicopters are easy you just tweak the factory and you just keep shipping out. A helicopter pilot is a bit different and they found that when the Australian army arrived with 9 Squadron as part of its task group, but 9 Squadron,

the RAAF 9 Squadron, had I think 12 aircraft, 12 Iroquois, which when you come to think of some 8,000 troops on the ground for the Australian task force 12 helicopters doesn’t go very far and certainly 12 helicopters isn’t able to provide even a company on the line with adequate aviation support particularly not for those tactics that they were using. So the Americans found themselves again

with the difficult task of providing air support that is aircraft and air crew for their allies when they had difficulty in providing that support for themselves let alone the people who were supposed to be helping them. There was a tremendous amount of pressure put on the Australian government for political reasons to provide troops for Vietnam as, I guess, we are all aware. And that was so it

could be seen by the Americans or by the world in general as not just being an American war but as a free world commitment. Because the Australians had sent troops and because they were inadequately provided with air support facilities, air logistic facilities, people started looking around for other ways of solving the problem. Here’s the fleet air arm sitting around doing

nothing, why don’t we get all of these navy pilots that are not doing anything and just ship them to the air force and, you know, they can help out. The air force for whatever reason wasn’t keen on that. I really don’t know what the reasons for that are. I suspect it’s more to do with politics than anything else. But that idea had then

gathered momentum and when the air force showed its reluctance and started dragging its feet the Australian Army, but more importantly the American Army, was very keen to say, just look just get here and help us out, we’re not interested in the politics. So then there was a memorandum of understanding signed between the United States Army and the Royal Australian Navy for the navy to provide

assistance with helicopter support. And initially they sent some 12 pilots, 4 observers and 35 aviation support as well as some additional people like a medical orderly and a few other people – a clerk and a few other people who were able to support the unit so that it was

a self supporting sub group. They were trained in ’67 and they found themselves in Vietnam in October ’67. Originally they were as I said to be integrated with the air force, that didn’t

happen.

With the Australian Air Force, so they were integrated with the 135th Assault Helicopter Company of the United States Army. The aviation company at the time the 135th was operating some 30 aircraft, all helicopters, all Iroquois. They were all delta models which is the troop carrying version of that particular aircraft

and some 8 Charlie models which were used as gun ships. I’ll explain that a little bit later on, but just to give you a rough idea there were 30 aircraft and they had nearly 300 people in the company and we’d provide the additional 40 something plus people. The Australian Navy personnel were fully integrated into the American Aviation Company. So here we have the situation where navy guys and army guys flying

helicopters in support of initially the Australian Army but you couldn’t have exclusive support for the Australian Army. They were an aviation company and whoever sort of got on the telephone first that wanted them they went out and if they could do the job did it. Very similar to a taxi, I suppose.

First cab off the rank gets the job, and it really was that way. In ’67 while the people were preparing to go, a group of these navy guys had been selected and they were training and they did some six or seven months training. They’d do all sorts of things – weapons training and long marches and learning how to cook army rations.

No, they did the bulk of the training

with the Australian Army and they went to the Jungle Training Centre at Canungra and various other training places and they were trained on the SLR rifle, the M60 machine gun, pistols, Armorlite rifles, all this sort of stuff, grenades. So basically these poor old mainly mechanics and pilots were taken out of the navy environment and turned into army infantry guys in a

matter of you know some six months which was a rude shock for most of them but that was part of the game. In my case I had been on the Gannetts, as I explained earlier, and I was then working to change over. I was trained for the Iroquois aircraft and I was then posted to the Iroquois Squadron and was in fact

used – I was part of the maintenance crew that supported this group that were getting ready for Vietnam. I’m not that dumb, so I figured that if these guys were going and they were already Iroquois trained, I guess, the next guys that are Iroquois trained are likely to go “Moi.” That was fairly – and I was looking forward and most of the guys that had done the training with me

had been with me – these are guys that had joined up with me and had gone to the Venoms and the Gannetts with me on the Melbourne so I was looking forward to being in this little group to be the next flight to go to Vietnam. Some time in February, in ’68 – I think that’s the right date – anyway,

lunchtime. I had just gone back to the squadron after lunch and there was this deadly silence around me and everybody was avoiding me. And I couldn’t understand why I was being avoided, and everybody kept whispering and I thought “What’s going on?” And I felt very, very uncomfortable. And then the big boss came down, the sailor boss came down and the chief aircraft came down and he said, “Frank Eyck, you’re wanted in the commanding officer’s

office right now.” And I thought, “Holy shit. What have I done wrong? I’ve got to be in deep trouble,” because, you know, lieutenant commanders don’t talk to able seaman unless we’re well and truly in the poo because it doesn’t happen. I went to his office and he said, “Congratulations, you’ve been selected you’re going to Vietnam.” I said “Great, who else is going?” And he said, “No one.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “No one. You’ve

got to be in Vietnam within two weeks. Sort yourself out, get some training done and take some leave and make sure you’re in Saigon by the Friday or whatever it was and thank you very much and you’re on your way.” And I thought, “Holy Dooly what do I do now?” One of the things I did want to do was to try and explain this to my parents. My parents were obviously like most Australians, aware of the conflict in Vietnam and whatever else.

And every so often they might say to me, “What’s your chances of going to Vietnam?” and I’d say, “Look, that’s easy I went to Malaysia and that war was easy so Vietnam won’t be a problem.” That wasn’t to be the case and I had to try and explain to my parents that here I was in the navy, I was being sent to live in a tent in Vietnam in the jungle to work with the Americans flying

helicopters. And it just didn’t make any sense to them. It didn’t make much to me but at least I was aware of the background. For them they had really no idea and many years later they said to me that they didn’t quite believe me, and they thought that things were so bad with the war in Vietnam that the Australians were expecting this big domino theory to evolve. You know, the Chinese and the North Vietnamese

were just going to sweep down through Malaya and Indonesia and invade Australia, because why else would the navy be stuck in a jungle somewhere. I spent a terrible week there sort of trying to placate them and thinking to myself, what do I do there. I went back to Albatross to get ready for my training and then found that there was no training to be had. I spent most of my time trying to organise my uniforms because they didn’t want me to

travel to and be in Vietnam with my navy uniform, and rightly so, it would be silly wearing bell bottoms in the jungle. So I had then had to try and organise somehow for the army to supply me with jungle greens, and you know, boots and socks and hats and things. Normally that would not have been my job. I’m an able seaman. I’m the lowest possible rung that you could be,

but I’m left to my own devices and it was very difficult trying to explain. And there didn’t seem to be any realisation from the support people within Albatross, or most people at Albatross, that this is war. I’m not going on leave or going on a holiday camp. I’m going to war. And not only that I’m going by myself as a replacement. The reason, I forgot to tell you, the

reason I was going was there had been two guys who had injured themselves and were evacuated back to Australia, and they needed people fairly desperately to keep up the numbers so they picked me.

Yes, yes. So one was injured in a helicopter crash and the other one managed to get himself into trouble. So I certainly didn’t get the support that I

felt was due to me at Albatross. I had trouble getting – I wear size 12/13 shoes and boots and the most I could get was size 10 sort of thrown at me and sort of, “Get on with it.” I spent many hours trying to get my uniforms. I had no weapons training. It was more important for the weapons instructor to train the colour guard than it was to

train me. So he sent me to the firing range at Albatross with a 9 mill pistol and a box of ammunition.

No, no, maintain helicopters – only maintained. I’m an aircraft mechanic, I don’t fly. But I’m fully trained in Iroquois, and they required

maintainers and pilots as a matter of urgency particularly maintainers that had some experience. The bulk of the people of my rank, my American counterparts I found out by the time that I got there, had been in the army less time than I had been on Iroquois. So I had more Iroquois experience than they had army time. So that’s

sort of the depth of knowledge, technical knowledge was almost non existent.

I don’t think anybody really sat down and thought about it, I think it was because they could. Some guy is going away and I wasn’t given the – I think

there was a breakdown in a fine naval tradition of the divisional system where you have an officer that looks after a group of sailors and he has some senior sailors to assist him to do that. And he’s responsible for the welfare and discipline of those particular people and he’s the father figure or whatever and that’s one of his main jobs.

I was talking about the divisional system. I said earlier that the divisional system is very, very important. You have an officer looking after a group of sailors, he has the assistance of some senior sailors with him and he’s responsible for all the activities – the welfare, the discipline all those sorts of things of his group of sailors and he’s ultimately responsible to ensure that things are happening that are supposed to happen. And I

think that in my case during that particular time and my divisional officer, if I had one, certainly didn’t go through any of the motions. I never saw a divisional officer at the time so because I was posted from that squadron to go to Vietnam and it was so quick the squadron for some reason or another didn’t pick up on the fact that I needed some sort of support. So

we might need to stop this in a minute. So certainly as far as the squadron is concerned they didn’t pick that up. And rather than having somebody official or a piece of paper that I could present to the support authorities at Albatross, to say, “Look this is what I have to do,” I had to try as a young able seaman try and explain to invariably what were my seniors and say look this is what

I need. “Who said you need that?” “Well I think I need that,” and it was terrible. My training, I’d been trained on an old .303 rifle and had never – although I had actually been colour guard and thrown an SLR around, I hadn’t actually fired an SLR. We hadn’t gone through that system yet. So I’m going to be sent to

Vietnam with an SLR, and I’ve never fired it. So I explained that to the gunnery people and they say, “Well, we don’t have time you’ll have to come back next week.” “Well, next week’s no good because I’ll be in Vietnam.” “Oh, look, it’s far more important for us to train the colour guard.” So they sent me to the rifle range as I said with a 9 mill pistol and a box of ammunition and I had to lift my way there dressed in a pair of flying overalls. And there was no safety

number. I had no idea of how to load this thing. I’m a mechanic, I finally worked it out, but I didn’t know if I was doing any good or not.

I was starting to feel almost abandoned. I cried when I was

going back from the rifle range. I had started to fire this pistol and in my mind I conjured up that this is the weapon that’s going to defend me. I’m going to stand on a bunker somewhere and there’s 10,000 North Vietnamese soldiers coming over the hill and this is all I’ve got. And although I’d managed to load the pistol and fire off some round, I didn’t know

whether these rounds were any good or where they were going or any of that sort of stuff. So I tossed all the remaining bullets in the bushes, highly illegal, and I’m standing there with a nine mil pistol in my hand and I have to find my way back to Albatross. And I was hitch-hiking. And here I am standing on the Princes Highway in a flying suit and I’m trying to hide the 9 mil pistol asking for some civilian to bring me back to Albatross because the navy couldn’t be

bothered, really couldn’t be bothered organising things. And things went downhill from that. In my desperation, two days before I left which was the Saturday night – a couple of days before I left, I went to see the army’s ground liaison officer. There’s a major – or

was a major – permanently stationed at Albatross, and he was responsible for any interaction between the army and the fleet air arm and particularly for the Melbourne and that sort of stuff. On this particular occasion he was at Albatross. I went to see him and I said, “Look, I’m going to Vietnam in a couple of days.” And he said, “Yes, what can I do for you?” And I said, “Well, I haven’t had any training, can you give me something?” And

I was horrified at his reaction. He bumbled and muttered and I can picture it now. If somebody said that to me now, I would say, “No, you’re dreaming, this is impossible, this is not going to happen.” But he was in a situation where he didn’t know what to do and whether to assist me. And he gave me some booklets on booby traps. And I can remember as soon as I closed the door

he swore and grabbed his telephone and he obviously rang somebody. But I don’t know what the consequence of that is. I had to find my own way from Albatross to Sydney airport. There was no transport provided. When I got to the airport, because I wasn’t too sure – you don’t get to the international terminal too often as a young sailor – so I didn’t know where it was or what I had to do to get there and all that sort of

stuff. So I was there fairly early. I was there about 3 o’clock in the afternoon and then plane left at about 9 o’clock at night. It was a Qantas charter flight. So when I got there at 3 I just put my luggage to one corner. And one of the things – I had an overnight bag and what was most important in those days is that you had to have a civilian shirt with you. You had to be in uniform, you had to have a civilian shirt with you because the Singapore government didn’t want

soldiers transiting their country on the way to Vietnam. If you were a civilian that was all right, but not as a soldier. So we went through the farce or, before you got out of the aircraft, because we had to go there to refuel, take your uniform shirt off, leave it on your seat, and then put a civilian, like a tropical Hawaiian shirt on. And then you would have

to go into the terminal while they refuelled your aircraft and then back and so on. So I had that shirt, I had an overnight bag with some gear in it and I was clutching a polystyrene box that was about, I guess, 3ft high and it had an SLR rifle in it. They had issued me with this rifle before I left Albatross. And they said to me,

and I saw this in the movies you know, “You never let your rifle out of your sight, this is the way to go.” The problem is with my rifle that I didn’t know how to operate it. I certainly hadn’t fired it. I hadn’t sighted it in but just in case I needed it, they put two fully loaded magazines in the box as well, as well as a bayonet, and they wrapped it all up with duct tape. They gave me this box and said, “Under no circumstances are you to

leave this rifle by itself and look after it and guard it with your life.” So when I arrived at the airport, the young Qantas lady said to me, “Name,” and I gave her my name and she said, “Do you have any luggage?” I said, “No.” She said, “What about that thing?” I said, “No, no that’s got to stay with m.” She said, “Are you sure? It’s quite secure. What’s in it?” I said, “My rifle.” And there was stunned silence everywhere because ICAC [International Commercial Arbitration Court]

law demands, international flight rules demand that no fire arms are carried on board let alone fire arms and ammunition. So this was a bit of a quandary for these poor people, and there was no way in the world that I was going to let anybody touch my rifle. But they weren’t going to let me on the aeroplane, so there was a bit of an impasse there. So anyway the problem was solved by the aircraft captain

personally, by the aircraft captain decreeing that this white polystyrene box was his personal luggage and as such it was free from a search and rules and all that sort of stuff. And he personally charged me to look after it for him. So that’s how I managed to get this thing and

hang on to it. The problem was of course that once I’d boarded the aircraft, I’m the only guy that’s sitting there in the cock pit with a rifle. And most of the people with me were all army, a couple of air force guys, and as I said, it’s a charter flight to Saigon – all of these guys are sort of saying, “Who’s this bloke?” You know, he’s clutching his rifle. Because I’m clutching a rifle I get to sit right at the very back and the back seat you can’t lean them

back so I would have to sit upright the whole journey. It was an overnight thing. So no sleep, clutching this thing, had to hang on to it. Got to Singapore and the Singaporeans almost died on the spot when I left the aircraft with this – it was quite obvious what it was. I can remember I was reading some stuff, some magazines on the aircraft and as we were approaching

Saigon – and the aircraft pressure starts to change a bit and you know you’re heading down – and I’m reading Life magazine, so there’s fairly large beautiful pictures in it and it’s describing Tet Offensive in Saigon. I’m looking at this stuff and thinking, “I’ll be there in about an hour.” I was absolutely horrified. I didn’t know how I was going to cope with this.

Yes, and Life magazine was a week old and this was still going on and the Battle of Hue was still going on and the Viet Cong were killing 3,000 civilians, because they can.

I was a

Catholic, as a professional military person, as an Australian, as an ally of the United States and believing in the domino theory, I had no problem with it from all of those points of view. So having said that, I felt, as I said, totally abandoned.

Even before I got there I was well aware that I was totally unprepared for what I was about to do. I was prepared to fight a war because that’s what I’d joined the navy for. I had no illusions about, you know, it’s not going to happen in my day, wrong. If it happens, it happens, so be it. Take the Queen’s shilling and you take the consequences. That’s not a problem. And professional enough to believe that we’re good

enough to give as good as we get. Also on the principle that we fight – we’re the good guys. We fight for what we believe in and certainly as I say with this Catholicism business, in the sense of communism versus to a certain extent the Catholics, because the Catholics virtually were certainly in power in Vietnam and the communists are the

bad guys. And we believed in democracy and all those sorts of things. So that really is all part of the driving force of assessing that, yes, I’m fighting the good fights and I had no major problem with it. My major problem was is what the hell am I doing here. I’m geared up to fight a war at sea in an Australian uniform and an honourable and visible enemy. What do I

find? I find that I’m about to live in a jungle and fight in the air if not on the ground and I’m certainly not battling an honourable enemy. Make no mistake about it, we were very much aware of the tactics particularly of the Viet Cong [Communist guerrillas], I had no problem with the NVA [North Vietnamese Army], but the Viet Cong were people who lived in the village or the next village and it was guerrilla warfare. And for a lot of people, that doesn’t

mean much but for me it means that people would sneak into villages in the middle of the night and kill – today it’s the mayor and tomorrow it’s the local police constable or hold captive some people. A war by terror. So I don’t believe that that’s a good way to go, so I’m very much against that type of warfare. If

that’s the only way you can win, well you don’t deserve to win and you shouldn’t win and it’s not just all right. So that’s my thinking on that line. Word spread around the aircraft I found out later that because I’m carrying this rifle I must be a specialist sniper. He must be, why else would he be carrying a rifle? So we arrived at Tan Son Nhut airport and we ended up waiting at the end of the

strip for ages and ages and ages. And then they shut the engines down and we were stuck in the aeroplane and they didn’t even open the doors and we’re sitting there and it’s boiling hot and then finally they flashed up an engine or an auxiliary engine and they dragged us to one side and we were told to disembark fairly quickly. And I was thinking, “Oh yes, here it is.” Because as we were sitting in the aircraft at the end of the air

field I’m watching fighter aircraft, Skyraiders, fighter bombers fully loaded, taking off and helicopters zipping around the skies. And this is happening just outside the window. And not only that but these helicopters are actually firing their machine guns. And I’m thinking, “Hooly Dooly!” And it must be right because I’m reading Time and Life magazine and it’s all there. These places that they are talking about are

Saigon and here I am. So I wasn’t a happy chappy, because I’m absolutely totally out of my environment. So clutching my overnight bag and my white polystyrene box we run down the steps, rickety old steps, and straight into this fairly large hangar which was turned into a reception area. And there’s some

activity behind me and some American military police came up to me and it scared the living shit out of me. I thought, “Hello, what’s going on here?” And at that stage I wasn’t attuned to the American accent and I really had no idea what they were talking about. They were saying, “How are you going?” or “What are you doing?” and all this sort of stuff. And I’m uptight, I don’t understand what they’re talking about and they’re trying to take me away and give them some help. And I’m saying, “Certainly I’ll give you

some help.” I didn’t realise – what they were after is they assumed I was a specialist sniper because I was carrying my rifle, and they had some problems with some intruders which they had stuck in some part of the airport and they wanted me to take them out. Well as soon as I realised that – I was there and I had this beret on my head – as soon as I realised I just took my beret off and vomited in this thing and just

threw it away, because I just had no idea that this is the sort of thing that went on. And the interesting point about all of that is when I finally, finally arrived at my destination, some five or six days later after landing in Saigon, because nobody could tell me where I needed to go – I knew that there was this place called Black Horse and that’s where I had to go. And the Americans would say, “Well, where are your orders?” What orders? I didn’t even have a piece of

paper to say – I had a navy ID [identity] card which was a piece of paper written in ink and typed out and had a black and white photograph stuck to it and that’s what I had. I had no orders to order me under such and such authority from here to there – nothing. The army knew that I was on the manifest, my name was on the list, but as soon as I arrived in Saigon, that was their part that had finished. They no

longer had responsibility for me. And I had heard of Vung Tau and I was sort of aware of it, so I figured I was going to make it to Vung Tau. But it took some doing to get from that section to where the RAAF were doing their runs from Saigon to Vung Tau and then around. I ended up in what they call Camp Alpha, which is a large area that for people who are coming into the country and leaving the country that’s where they stay. And I stayed there for several days.

And I knew there were some attacks and things going on but my memory is so dim of that I really have no idea. I can’t understand why. I finally, finally got to Vung Tau.

No.

More than just gunfire. Regular mortar attacks in some areas. They were still trying to weed out, as I understand it, still trying to weed out in the Chinese quarters some of the VC [Viet Cong]. And I

mean, I got quite used to it after a while. You don’t normally hear gunfire in Saigon but in most other places, with the exception of Vung Tau of course, in most other places there’s almost always letting off steam or letting off their rifles or something. And after a while unless it gets really close, unless it’s incoming, you don’t worry about it. And you can soon tell the difference between incoming and outgoing so – and even artillery and rocket propelled grenades and those sort of things. But it was the complete culture shock. When I was

moved from one area to another, we had to go in a bus and he bus had all this wiring on the side because all the windows were open. And I said to the guy, “What’s all the wiring for?” And he said, “That’s so that people can’t throw the hand grenades in there.” I can remember seeing in my Life magazine book the story about how the Viet Cong would drive around on a little scooter and would have a sachet of some sort or an

attaché case or something with a hook on it and just hook it on to these gratings on the buses. So I mean, it didn’t instil too much confidence in me. And the thing that disappointed me was that there was nobody there to say, “This is what you do and keep your head down.” No Australians whatsoever.

It was very much. It was pressure but the only saving grace that I had was that I had a target. I knew that I had to get to Black Horse and I tried to focus all of my energies on that. And I knew the only way to get there because I would talk to some of the Americans at the reception centre and say, “How do I get to Black Horse?” “Where’s Black Horse, I’ve never heard of it.” And to the average guy, American, in Vietnam Black Horse means nothing. It was a brand new camp in the middle of

a rubber plantation somewhere. And the only people who knew that it was Black Horse was the last guy to draw up a new map and the guy who put the sign above the gate, and that’s about it. So it was very difficult. I then realised I had to get to Vung Tau, and once I managed to get there things were fairly straightforward. I just said to the air force, once I got to the air force, I just said to the air force, “I need to get to Black Horse.” And they said, “Great, it’s not a problem.” You know, do this.

The Australian Air Force. They flew out of Vung Tau – very civilized, very civilized. And they then got me to Black Horse. But the interesting thing was that when I did get to Black Horse, one of the first things I had to do was hand in my rifle, my SLR rifle in my polystyrene box and they gave me an Armorlite rifle. So in spite of all of that, it was all a waste of time.

I never saw that white box again. I’ve still got the receipt for it.

It was a bit disappointing, my arrival in Black Horse in the sense that – I knew some of the guys, some of the junior people there, and I got a bloody good reception. I was a bit disappointed, I suppose with the hierarchy with the exception of one chief petty officer, there were two chiefs there. One of the chief petty officers gave me a welcome and said, “G’day,” and whatever else but certainly again none of the

officers welcomed me or recognised my existence.

These were Australian officers. These were the people that are directly in charge of me. As an interest I went through what they would call, not the log, but a series of documentation that goes from each unit and ship

to the navy office to record the events. I was going through that to look for various bits and pieces and I thought, “I’ll just look and see when it was recorded that I officially arrived,” because to this day I have no idea when I officially arrived because I can’t find any documentation. And it was never recorded, so obviously even as far as the unit in Vietnam was concerned, I wasn’t worth recording.

And yet it was important enough for me to sort of go to Vietnam without any training. So Vietnam was – I was so relieved to get to Black Horse and to be amongst people I knew that I felt quite comfortable and safe in spite of the fact that after about the 3rd day we were there, we had a mortar attack and we all ran for the bunkers. But I could handle that. I just followed everybody else,

so that was pretty good. I felt a bit exposed during some of the activities. My activities on a daily basis – because I was not familiar with a lot of the routines, I was taken under the wing by one of the older guys, a leading hand, and he would show me the routines and I was put into the engine shop. An engine on an Iroquois is

changed every 500 or 750 hours, depending on what type of engines which means that you take the whole engine out and put a new engine in, providing of course you have one to replace it. And sometimes you do hot end inspections which is to take all the ends off and check all the turbine bones and that sort of stuff. I was familiar with that sort of routine so I slotted straight in. Luckily we worked fairly hard and it kept me busy and I had no

qualms about sort of working, can I say it, overtime. So in the morning you got up, you had breakfast, and as soon as you did you were at your place of work and worked until the work was all done or you were too tired and had to go to bed. And that was the routine. You had a break for lunch. The food was terrible. The food was probably the worst food that I have ever tasted. It was slop.

The Americans. The organisation was that we had – there were the 135th Helicopter Assault Company from the United States Army – 300 Americans and some 43 or 45 Australians, totally integrated, flying 30 aircraft – flying and maintaining 30 aircraft. A mobile company, so that if necessary, they can put all their gear

in cars, trucks and aeroplanes and move to a different location. So, there is certainly no emphasis on building anything permanently, because you’re likely to get the message next week that you up bag and hammock and move. And that was certainly the case with the 135th. There were 4 flights, starting with 67, there were four

flights and they all moved during their particular time from one camp to another, which meant not only not a break in their operational routines but in addition to that sort of going to the new location, preparing the site for a big move, doing the big move and decommissioning the old site. And they all need to be guarded so that the enemy doesn’t have the use of the equipment or the facilities that you leave behind,

that sort of thing. So when I say fully integrated, the Australians fully integrated with the American unit, the officer in charge of the helicopter flight was designated the executive officer of the assault helicopter company. So he was the second in charge. So when the CO, the commanding officer, was away, the American commanding officer was away, we had the sort of situation where you would have an

Australian naval officer in charge of, complete, total military charge, of a United States assault helicopter company and vice versa. And because of our experience, total experience, of all the guys there – I was one of the youngest there, but as I say I had worked on the Iroquois about as long as most Americans,

my counterparts, my American counterparts, had been in the army and that was all the way down the line. For instance, our pilots had been in the navy I don’t know – flying – five, six or seven years. Most of the American pilots had never seen an aeroplane 12 months before they – you know, that sort of stuff which is quite horrendous. Fully integrated, so that meant that we were

slotted into various positions initially by rank and as time went on to a certain extent by experience. And in my own case, because I had quite a lot of experience on the Iroquois, I was able to rather than just stick to the engines aspect I moved up and ended up in unscheduled maintenance. So I ended up

being responsible for a team of 23 guys, all Americans in fact. We would receive the aircraft when they came back from their missions and we’d check to see what – and they’d radio through their unserviceability states and what needed to be repaired, wait for the air crew to do their after flight inspections and we’d then patch the bullet holes and you know fix the

engines and fix the leaks and all those sorts of things. Because of my experience I was able to do all of that, simply because the Americans didn’t have the experience in all of those aspects, but also their training tends to let them concentrate on certain areas. One guy would be what they call prop and loader which meant that he would only do things that had to do with rotor blades. Another guy might be in sheet metal. Another guy

might be in hydraulics, another guy might be in engines, which, you know, the Australians could do the lot. One of the difficulties that we had was again a break down in the divisional system. I didn’t have an immediate Australian boss other than a senior sailor initially whilst I was in the engine shop. So that meant that once I moved out of that area I

was pretty much on my own but in this particular case I thrived. I loved it because I wasn’t restricted. Regulations require me to do only a certain amount of things in Australia and I’m constantly – and rightly so, I’m constantly checked and independently checked, checked for quality control and a full range of movement of things and that sort of stuff. The American system doesn’t allow for that, simply because they just

don’t have the time or the resources to be able to do it. So that gave me full scope and after a while I was able to build up some trust within the unit, both the people that worked with me and the air crew. And I was pretty much given a free hand and that encouraged me to learn more about the aircraft, learn more about the technology. The Americans had a system where there was a requirement for

the guy who worked on the aircraft to do the test flight, a good system. We didn’t have the resource to do that. I felt so strongly that I was able to supervise the guys that were working with me – mind you, I’m an able seaman, not anything else – but the beauty of the system there was that they didn’t know I was an able seaman, they had no idea. My clothing was a pair of dark green trousers, some boots and socks and a pair of jockettes and that’s it – and a hat.

We had to carry our arms everywhere we went if we left the immediate dining hall and tent area, accommodation area, which meant that legally if you went to the showers you were supposed to carry your rifle and a flak jacket on and that sort of stuff. After a while these sorts of rules and regulations were totally ignored, but it was certainly an issue. And that’s why you might see photographs, particularly of the helo [helicopter] flight where all of these guys

are carrying .38 pistols and things and you think we’re a bunch of cowboys and, no, well we were. The reason why we carried them was because it was a lot easier to fix an aircraft with a .38 sort of slung near your behind so you could work on the aircraft rather than trying to do so with a rifle either stuck on your shoulder or stuck in an aeroplane somewhere. And one of the problems was that the

weapons always had to be loaded, because they needed to be used very quickly which was a major cause of concern. There’s no such thing as friendly fire, but believe me a lot of people were injured by people who were wearing the same uniform as we were simply through lack of discipline in clearing their rifles or carrying them the wrong way or not checking and that sort of stuff. So that was a

bit of a problem.

Yes. All part of the US inventory. They were initially delta models, troop carrying aircraft. They would have 9

seats in them roughly, but they only had seats in the back for the gunners, that is a gunner on one side and a crew chief on the other behind an M60. There were no seats elsewhere. You just piled in your passengers as best you could and told them to hang on. They had no doors. It’s pretty scary the first time you do that, you fly without doors, and after a while I feel almost restricted with doors now, it’s just one of those things.

They were the delta models and they were replaced with the hotel models that had a larger engine in them. There were also the charlie models, which were a small aircraft, sorry, the same aircraft but not quite as extended as the delta and hotel models. And they were used as gun ships. And by gun ships I mean that they had many guns on both sides, a rock launcher at the front as well as crew chief and

gunner having M60 weapons and usually 16 rockets and pods on either side.

Four. Two at the front and two at the back. The crew chief is a guy who travels with the aircraft. He is responsible for the maintenance of the

aircraft. The gunner can be anybody, and that’s what I used to do at times, simply because the pressure was there that they were short of gunners and they needed them and it was the only way that I was going to get a break in my 7 day a week, 3 o’clock in the afternoon until 7 o’clock in the morning type of routine. When things were slack, I’d volunteer to do that. I didn’t think that was a good idea the first time I did it, but the second and third time

I was getting used to it.

The gunners would be responsible for the guns. The crew chief for the aircraft itself and he would do some minor maintenance and the two guys at the front were strictly pilots. I don’t know why they got paid more than we did. They only did half the work. There is only one pilot who can fly at a time. In the gun ships the

pilots would control all of the weapons – the mini guns, the rockets, the grenade launcher. And in the troop carrying aircraft, we used to call them ships or the army used to call them ships, the two pilots again would be strictly in control of the aircraft. The crew chief would have one M60 machine gun and he would control all the passengers and what they did when they

got out and that sort of stuff. And the gunner just sat there, fat, dumb and happy. He was the junior guy. He used to have to make the brews.

Absolutely fantastic. The aircraft – one of the specifications to have won the contract for that particular aircraft was that you had to be able to do things to the aircraft, like change an engine within a specific time.

And things were what they call quick disconnect couplings, so rather than sitting there with two large spanners and having to change things around, it was just a matter of two twists and you’d have two large fuel hoses connected or you know electrical plugs connects, all these sorts of things and it was all fairly quick and simple. So it was an absolute delight to work on these things. And the fact that you would take the cowlings off or move them back and that might take you – or move them back and that might take you, if you were very, very quick and urgent, that might take you 30 seconds

and there would be the whole engine exposed to do whatever you wanted to do. And you could sit down or kneel down on the engine platform and get to everything you wanted to. So even while the aircraft was running, you’d try not to stand up, but that was all that. And certainly when you compare that to the other aircraft that I’d worked on – mind you, they were totally different aircraft – one was a fairly sophisticated twin engine long range anti submarine patrol aircraft, and the other one was just a what they call a

utility helicopter.

The Americans had a different system to the Australians. The Australians changed as a group and that gave them an opportunity to increase their camaraderie and esprit de corps and most importantly their training. So people got to know each other and that was fairly important. The Americans changed in dribs and drabs and one day Frank wasn’t there and the following day Frank was there, and the Americans would say, “We got a new guy,” and we

did. So for them it was just another new guy, another Australian, and, “How come you’re here?” if they bothered to ask me. And the only people that would ask me in fact were the people that I was working with who would only be interested. Don’t forget there were 300 guys who would rarely see each other than if you were working with them because the maintainers would be maintaining, the cooks would be cooking. I felt for the guys who, for instance, our sick berth

attendant. Although he was part of our unit he was seconded to an army hospital on the base and very rarely saw us. He was just another corps man and he got on with doing what he was supposed to do. And if we went to the hospital for treatment for some reason or another, we wouldn’t see the Australian. We would just queue up like everybody else and just be part of the system. And

that was a fairly unique system.

I don’t know whether I got the chance to explain it before but I did two tours of Vietnam. My first tour was as a replacement and believe it or not, the second tour was as a replacement as well. I went back with all of the Australians in the first group and because I hadn’t spent the twelve

months there, I was fairly keen to complete 12 months in the hope that I would then not be sent back at some later stage, because I suspected that the war was going to last a little while. It was not likely to be over quickly. So hedging my bets, I put in a request through the system saying, “Can I please stay for 12 months.” And they said I could only stay if I

undertook to stay for a further 12 months and not just to complete 12 months. Our posting was 12 months duration. The army’s postings were for 12 months and the air force was for 7 months, why, I don’t know. So I was particularly keen to not put my head on the chopping block for another posting, but I wasn’t prepared to stay another 12 months so I went back with everybody else. But guess what? We came back in

October, I went on leave. It was pretty awful coming back. I don’t know if it was worse coming back than it was going. If you remind me I’ll talk about that later. But certainly we came back in October, I went on leave, I came back just after Christmas in late January and in early February I got a telephone call from the navy office, saying,

how would I like to go back to Vietnam. And I swore and I said, “No way in hell,” I was reminded that the guy on the other end of the telephone line was a chief petty officer and I shouldn’t swear at him and I was going whether I liked it or not. And I said, “Well, that’s not very fair.” And they said, “Sorry, this is war, you were suggested to us and you need to complete your 12 months and you’re going.” And

I asked him, I said, “No, I can’t possibly go because I don’t want to be an aircraft mechanic any longer, I would like to be a photographer and I’ve put in for a transfer of branch.” He said, “Look, if you go we’ll give you the transfer of branch.” And I said, “Oh, you beauty,” so I didn’t put up too much of a fight and went. So then early in 1969, I went back to Vietnam. By that time they had, the 135th had

transferred from Black Horse to Bear Cat. So I was not involved with the transfer, it just was another camp. But it was interesting that really it made no difference. Everything was exactly the same. The same mud, the same dust, the same sort of tents, the same airstrip, the same temperature, everything was the same. And it really must be very difficult

for people who fly all the time that when they go to these different places and stage overnight that when they wake up the following morning possibly with a big of a hangover, they may not remember where exactly they are. It is so regimented that everything is the same. The only difference with Bear Cat was that towards the end they had the opportunity to build some wooden structures rather than exclusively the

tents, which for me was certainly nothing to be joyful about because they stood out like a sore thumb. And whenever I was put on guard duty on the perimeter lines I would like back into the camp and you could see these double-storey buildings looking at you and you’d think they’re very much of a target. So I was very keen to stay out of them, and stay in a tent.

One of the reasons I volunteered to do night work, and as I said earlier start at 3 o’clock in the morning and work through until the aircraft were finished and would then sort of relax but have to wait until the air crew arrived at 6 o’clock in the morning and start turning and burning and then take off, I guess, 7ish for them to go and pick up whoever needed to be picked up. So in answer to your question, was there much difference, no there really wasn’t.

It was very difficult to interpret what was happening. All we were was a virtual taxi service. We would provide air transport for troops to be picked up from wherever they were

usually from their camp, wherever they were camped at the time. But in the case of the Australians invariably at Nui Dat, we would pick the guys up and we would transport them to various parts of the jungles or the paddocks or wherever and for them then to do sweeps. It was frustrating when we worked with the ARVN [Army of the Republic of Vietnam] because

invariably the Viet Cong would know where we were going before we did. There was really no security there and it was as frustrating as hell. But there wasn’t much that we could do about it we were obliged to, you know, play the game and we would try and keep as much information restricted as possible until the very last minute. But there were always some grumblings by not so much the air crew but guys like myself

who would do the gunnery duties, because either we had to, the Americans had to we didn’t, we did it on a voluntary basis, having committed ourselves the night before to say, “Oh yeah, I’ll gun for you,” and then find out, “Shit, we’re going to pick up the ARVNs,” which invariably made it a hot reception. It wasn’t much of a morale booster for the ARVNs themselves. I really felt sorry for these guys.

The Army of the Republic of Vietnam.

The South Vietnamese Army. These guys were the meat between the sandwich. They were stuck between the North Vietnamese and the Americans, the Americans pushing them one way and the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong and the South. Sorry, the difference between the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong is that the North Vietnamese were the people from the North who had an established army and they had infiltrated and

invaded parts of South Vietnam and were carrying out full military operations. The Viet Cong were the local communist cadre, who were recruited fighters who were farmers by day and terrorists or guerrillas by night. There certainly was very much a difference when you opposed them. The Viet Cong

tended to fight or to give some aggression initially and then it was basically a hit and run. And with the NVA, the North Vietnamese Army, they invariably had careful planning, good supply lines, good intelligence and

would sucker either the South Vietnamese army or the Americans into traps invariably. They would recruit Viet Cong to start some sort of a small operation and get them to retreat and hope that they good guys would then follow them and catch them and then find that, “Hey, shit, we’ve walked into a trap,” because there’s, you know,

10,000 regular army blokes here that are likely to blow us to bits. That’s the sort of thing that happened.

No, I didn’t have an aversion for jungle fighting, but it was not

my – it was totally alien to me, I was not familiar with it. My territory is on a steel ship, maintaining aeroplanes as hard and as quickly and as technically competent as possible. And if necessary I could do other things but that was my forte and that’s what I was focused totally to do and trained to do. And all of a sudden to find myself in the

jungles, still doing that basic job, but also in addition to doing that doing my gunner duties in an aircraft which there was intense psychological pressure for us to do because the Americans were required to do that. The Americans were the American Army and all armies teach their people to be part of the

infantry, or to have infantry skills in addition to other skills. So everybody in the army from the cook to the pilot can use a rifle. And here I am in Vietnam, and I’m not only not able to use a rifle but I don’t even know what I’m supposed to look at or to shoot at. So, you know, I had no training in those sorts of things and I find myself in that situation. I didn’t sort of walk through the jungles and do patrols. Having said that, some of my

mates did. Not patrols but they fell out of the sky and would find themselves then sitting near a crashed aircraft waiting out the night trying to set up perimeter lines and defence lines waiting to be rescued. And sometimes because of the weather, be it night time or rain or that sort of stuff, find themselves in a situation where they couldn’t be rescued until many hours afterwards. And that then meant all of those

infantry skills that the army had would be required. You know, throwing grenades and trying to detect where people are coming from and being outflanked whatever that means and all of those sorts of things. So that’s not something that I was very confident in.

It’s interesting that I found that

being fired upon when we were doing insurgence into hot LZs or landing zones, I didn’t find that scary. It’s scary in the fact that I didn’t find it scary and I don’t know why. I suspect it’s because finally I’m at the stage where I’m reasonably confident with an M60 machine gun. I was horrified the first time I ever –

I had no idea – I didn’t know how to unblock this thing, I’d never been trained. But after some practice and after some exposure to using this, luckily my first few flights were not opposed, so could sort of get used to this. I found it was nowhere near as scary. I felt comfortable in the aircraft. I’m not saying the pulse didn’t increase, but I felt

relatively comfortable in the aircraft because when all else fails, you can fly out of there. I don’t have that feeling stuck in a paddock somewhere because I don’t even know where I am. You know, unlike the infantry, at least they walk in and they can walk out. In my case if I’m stuck in a paddock, I have no idea. I’m not a navigator, I could be anywhere. The other thing I found was it was usually opposing forces and they knew that we were going to be there and they knew that we were going to come in and

land and it was almost a fair fight if you know what I mean. So that wasn’t as scary as a lot of other things. I suspect that one of the scariest things was my first few nights in Vietnam. And the interesting thing is, I don’t remember what happened, it’s a total blank. You could torture me or offer me a million dollars, I have no idea.

So I suspect whatever happened was pretty scary because it’s a blank. Some of the other scary things to me were some of the psychological things. It wasn’t scary, but I was horrified that one of the first times we went over a free fire area and there were only two aircraft going out at the time, and we were asked to test our

guns, which was the normal practice, and you give your guns a short burst to make sure that they work. We were going, although the area was specified as a free fire zone and therefore anything you found at that area was supposed to be the bad guys unless you were told about it, the free fire area was in a village which was still a village fully occupied and it had the rice fields and the plantations. And they were growing their subsistence

crops or whatever else. And my opposite number, the gunner, ended up killing a water buffalo that was being used to drag some stuff from one area to another. And there were kids nearby, and there was an old fellow nearby, and he shot this thing dead. To me that was horrifying. Why? Because I suspect that the old fellow and all the kids and all their family had just been turned instantaneously into Viet Cong, because there was no need for this. He could not

see that there was anything – I tackled him about it afterwards. He was a big guy and I didn’t want to push the issue too strongly, but I said, “Why did you do that?” And he said, “It’s a free fire zone, it was perfectly legal.” Had he explained that to the guy who has just lost his only means of transport, his tractor and probably his life savings, that’s impossible. And I couldn’t understand that, the Americans couldn’t understand that. I’m an able seaman, I‘ve got nothing to do with this sort of stuff but you would have

thought that sort of thing was quite obvious but it wasn’t. And I suspect genuinely it wasn’t obvious to these guys. That’s when I started thinking, “Are we going to win this war? I suspect not.” And then exposure to working with the Republic of South Vietnamese Army and seeing how badly equipped these guys

were – I mean World War II rifles. At least the Viet Cong, not the ARVN, but the Viet Cong had Armorlites that they stole off the Yanks, but the Army of the Republic of Vietnam had old rifles, carbines, that the Americans were using in the Second World War and that sort of stuff. The rations and the support that we provided for some people and not for others and

these are the things that horrified me initially and then scared me as a long term thing. Scared me that, “Hey, what am I doing here? We are not going to win this.” Exposure into places like, there was a village outside Vung Tau – I have no idea why I was there. I went there one of the very few times that I had an ‘in country

R & R’, rest and recreation [or recuperation]. And I in fact managed to get myself some civilian clothing and I was able to go to this place and just relax. I had just bought in the PX [American Field Canteen], the big supermarket there, a seagull twin lens reflect camera because photography was my hobby and I was taking some happy snaps everywhere. And I was sitting there in an area, in a

cement, white cement, very cool, because it was a hot day. It was nearly lunchtime, nearly midday, and I was sitting and there was an area that went out that way and I was sitting to my left and the road sort of went around. So I couldn’t see what was behind my left-hand corner, but I could see up the road towards my right. And a young kid was there and he

seemed very young for what he was doing. He had tied a piece of cord and I think it was electrical wire, because I noticed it was very thin and it was cutting into his neck, because he had all these bottles of Coca Cola in a wooden Coca Cola crate with Coca Cola written all over it. And he was trying to sell me this stuff, and I said, “No, mate, she’ll be right.” And I felt that I should

buy something and I felt I’m a bit sort of suckered into this because of the treatment that he had got from some Americans who were in uniform who had told him to “F Off” and “Piss Off” and “Gook” [Asian] and whatever else. But I really didn’t want to get involved, and I was concentrating on my camera and there were some technical things that I needed, so I said, “Thanks but no thanks.” And I saw him go round the corner and disappear around the corner

and it would have been a minute or so later on I heard this ‘voompa!’ It was a grenade going off but to me it was stronger than a grenade, and I really didn’t know whether I should race over there and find out what was going on. And I think I just hung around for a while and see what the reaction was, what everybody else was doing. And these people to my right were sort of running around and they didn’t know whether to run there – they did, they ran towards me in the corner and then ran back because they weren’t too

sure. Cutting a long story short, it turned out that this young kid was booby trapped. Now I don’t know whether he was aware of it. I suspect he was. Whoever bought the Coke in fact got the bottle of coke that was booby trapped, and when he pulled it out of the crate – I suspect it was a lucky dip for both the civilian guy who bought this coke, the civilian guy, and the young

kid just disappeared. And that scared me, because I looked in this kid’s eyes as he walked past and I wasn’t concentrating and that scared me – (1) that people should use an 8 or 9 year old kid for this sort of thing and (2) the reaction of the Americans to that incident. You know, “Lucky it wasn’t us. I told him to piss

off,” and that sort of stuff and there was no empathy for the dead or whatever, they just laughed it off. I felt sorry for the American civilian who had obviously been in the country a long time, because most of them had, and should have been aware that this is not the sort of thing you should do. I wasn’t aware that that’s the sort of thing that I shouldn’t do, because I had never been taught.

And the fact that I realised that I should have picked up, when I looked in this kid’s eye I saw something there but I wasn’t concentrating and I should have been concentrating. And the thing is that you should concentrate all the time. And you should never get tired and you had to be on your toes 24 hours a day. When I realised that I realised then that there is no way that the war being conducted by the allies as it was

would ever be successful.

No. Something was happening and it wasn’t hatred. It’s hard to describe – almost a sense of fate I guess. He was obviously wound up, that that’s what he had to do, but I suspect very strongly that he was aware that

he was likely to die, and c’est la vie. It’s pretty awful for an 8 or 9 year old kid to realise he has no future and that’s the way it is.

I felt trapped because by that stage I still had

not, I didn’t know how long the Australians were likely to be involved in this sort of activity. I was not fully aware of the circumstances, how the fleet air arm got themselves in this situation. I found out afterwards but I wasn’t aware, and I felt that by crikey if it needs the Australian fleet air arm to bail out the Yanks and

we’re not getting anywhere, you know, we really don’t have much of a chance. And really, I guess, that’s the way it was. The aircraft is operated by 4 people and the bulk of the people, with very few exceptions, are under 25, if not under 21. So here we have a situation where

be it gun ships or troop transport, particularly gun ships, gun ships worked pretty much independently although having said that, they do have some supervision of where they go and are told what to do but when they actually do it they are under no supervision whatsoever and people don’t want to know. So you get a situation where in my own environment I’m aware that the gun ships are the cowboys of the

outfit. They were the people that chalk up victories and bodies on the side of the aircraft. And the Americans must have been winning the war, because they kept telling us that their body count was greater than their enemies. And this was important and looking at the history of Khe Sanh and the big battle on the hill top that the Americans won, because they lasted longer because the

Vietnamese retreated before the Americans did. No sooner had that happened when all the Americans said, “Well, we won the war,” and abandoned the hill top that they had fought for with so many lives and obviously the policy was that it was the body count that was important. And that was instilled in most of the people that were fighting on the ground and that then sort of slowly but surely filtered

all the way through. It was body counts that were important. And the headlines that we read in both civilian and service papers were, you know, “We killed, and the body count for this month was,” and, you know, “If we keep going with this in the population of North Vietnam, we’ll have won the war in 23 years.”

No, of course not, and neither did they, but the inference there was – sorry, I assumed that they didn’t and then it dawned on me that most of the Americans did.

And I suspect that it had part of the naivety of the people and the willingness to believe what the system tells you because that’s the only security thing that you have. If you don’t believe that, you’re in pretty dire straits because if that’s the case that means that you’re winning the war. And that’s what, I guess, happened to me and a lot of people that followed, the

Australians, that followed us. One of fairly senior people, commanders in fact, told me in private recently that it took him probably a week to figure out that the allies were not going to win and it really was a fine balance between fully supporting the Americans, but not getting

too many Australians killed. I’m very pleased that I wasn’t in that particular situation, because as a guy in charge of a bunch of blokes, that’s a fairly heavy responsibility.

No way.

For me, it was fairly simple, because my focus totally was on providing the best technical support I could for the people that were out there fighting on my behalf. And then because of my own sanity and almost a guilt thing

to be involved, to expose myself to risk, if you want to put it that way, that I required of myself to do gunnery duties in aircraft gunnery flights on a regular basis, but most of them were at my choosing. And if I felt that we were in a pretty bad state technically and I needed to be there to fix aircraft,

that obviously took far more importance. And it’s interesting that both the first time I went and the second time I went, I went with the feeling that if I came back alive I would be lucky. If I came back whole, I would be lucky, but I would not at all be surprised if I didn’t come back or if I came back in pieces. And with that attitude, and it wasn’t a

sort of a sense of dread, it was just a black and white statement. That’s the way it’s going to be, more a realisation than anything else. So when I came back the second time whole I was somewhat, and I’ll say this, I was probably disappointed. And I say disappointed because I probably felt guilty. Seven people in the

navy, seven navy people were killed in Vietnam.

A total of 8, my apologies. But two guys got killed on the Hobart off the coast of Vietnam and they were not under threat during most of the time, other than during those occasions when they got in real strife. I mean they had a choice. They could go

inside the range of the guns, the off shore guns, and they would fire and the enemies guns, it would be North Vietnam, the enemies guns would fire back but then they could pull back and have a rest and know that they were fairly safe. There was an incident where the Hobart was attacked by an American aircraft. It fired a missile at the Hobart and it killed two Australian

sailors, a chief petty officer and an ordinary seaman. All of the other Australians that were killed, and that is 5 from a helo flight and one diver, I knew and I knew personally. They were either my friends or my immediate bosses with the exception of – I’m sorry, the diver, a guy I joined up with, who went through

a hell of a lot of hurdles and was finally successful to become a diver and I met him in Saigon once and we had a terrific time. He was killed. And of the 5 Australians from the helo flight they were all killed whilst I was in the country with the exception of the first guy who was killed

can I say it was a fluke. He was killed when he was way up at high altitude and a bullet ricocheted off the instrument panel and struck him in the side of the head and under normal circumstances, you know, it was just a fluke. All the other guys were killed in action. The thing that I found frightening was the response of the Australians,

particularly the Australian senior sailors, at the death of the first guy killed. They seemed almost – and I could see it in their eyes that they didn’t quite believe that. Me, I had arrived in the country assuming that I was going to die because I didn’t know other circumstances. I had looked in the paper and how anybody could survive in these particular circumstances, you know, all these people shooting at you, and you not know where the enemy was coming from and everything else.

And it wasn’t so bad, but I assumed it was so I had this sort of mentality. But certainly from our senior sailors the reaction was, “Shit, one of the Australians got killed.”

No, no, these were the senior sailors in Vietnam. And I think that they felt that maybe for some reason they were exempt, because they were better trained, or they felt they were better trained or whatever. But the realisation – it was a

shock to them I think that, “Shit, one of us got killed” which hurt me because I assumed one of us was one of the 135th but one of us was not the 135th, it was the Australians. And I had never thought of that. I considered that us was the 135th and that was all the Americans there as well as the Australians. This was certainly the case later on some of the stories that I heard that later on in the period

when there was this backing off by the Australians, and it was a bit of an us and them type situation. And that may have been driven by personalities rather than the operations that they did.

The Australians and the Americans.

Yes. Not at my camp, sorry. Later, because by that time, and I’m talking about the groups that followed

me, and that’s only from stories that I’ve heard when we have reunions and we talk about these sort of things, about situations and I sort of follow that up and think I how they got into that situation. So I suspect that there was some friction there as well. Mind you, in that situation the Americans were getting fairly desperate in the sense that they’re looking down the barrel of trying to extricate themselves from the war. And that’s not easy when you’re

providing air transport logistics, because you’ve got to be there whether you like it or not. So that was interesting. But getting back to this body count, it was he constant drive of the body count that was important and therefore for people, if you were in an operational area, if you could find an arm and a leg you could then – and that was not in an

allied uniform – you could then say that, “Shit, we’ve won this battle because we’ve got two bodies, not one,” that sort of mentality. And what was important was killing people because that was a body count and therefore you would be winning. As opposed to saying, “Look, what’s the purpose of the exercise?” The purpose of the exercise is to provide security for the people to run their own country, not to go around killing everybody. I say that tongue in cheek in a sense that some poor guy on the ground,

he’s not going to know where this ARVN guy next to him is an ARVN by day and a VC by night. He has no idea. So he tries to put up walls and barriers to ensure that there is no risk for him and you can’t conduct a war like that. Even as a young able seaman I could see that.

Heaps. And that is to a certain extent when

I say us and them it wasn’t quite the case. When we would receive aircraft and hose out with our fire truck, we would hose out the bits and pieces that the medics didn’t retrieve, or blood and guts if I can put it so crudely.

And sometimes the aircraft just didn’t have time to drop the bodies off, particularly if they were in body bags or if they weren’t in body bags and they were only Vietnamese, or they were Viet Cong, but only Vietnamese meaning if they were ARVN, we

tended to, as mechanics, the people who were back at base – you’d get an aircraft coming in and there were bodies and all blood and guts everywhere, then it became us and them. When I was in the situation of being a gunner and seeing Americans wounded, it was all right because they were ‘only Americans’. Do you know what I mean?

That was my protective mechanism saying I can distance myself from that because they were only Americans and they are not really shooting at the Australians, that’s me. So that was a psychological mechanism that made it seem all right. And then when it got closer to home, that it was only air crew that were being killed and not the mechanics and so it went on.

Oh yes, but that’s the mind playing games and that allowed me to put up psychological barriers, saying, “I know I’m going to get killed but not today, not yet, because they are only shooting Americans today.” The other thing that you find, if you were wounded and if you look at people that are dying, the first thing you think

of is that you don’t feel their pain. Unless you are emotionally involved with that person in that he’s your best buddy – even that at times is easy for some people to turn off – to turn off initially. You know, to be able to get you through the next couple of hours or the next couple of days or to get you through the war. Now knowing things

about post traumatic stress syndrome and various others what it does by suppressing those sorts of things is somewhat dangerous. But of course we didn’t know about those sorts of things at the time. So what happens is that when people die, and people die in your arms you know that they’re going to die and you feel guilty that (1) they’re dying and you’re not, but also that you have thoughts about, “Shit I wish he’d hurry up and

die, so that I can get on with it,” and those are very intrusive thoughts and you think, “Shit, where did they come from?” You want to get the hell out of there but you can’t because you have responsibilities and you think, “Get on with it.” And you know people are going to die, because you take one look at them and you say you’re not going to survive this. And to a certain extent all those thoughts then come back to haunt you at a later date.

For me it was easy, because having – the Americans didn’t know my rank and simply because there was this constant turnover where people would finally be smart enough to go on the flight line and do the unscheduled maintenance, they find this Australian, and he took

charge and that’s the way it was.

Yes, I did. One of the things that I felt fairly strongly about, and I sensed that while I was in the country, it’s not something that came to me afterwards, I felt that most of the combat operations were done by young

people, young people in charge of young people. And I touched on this that body count was the way to win the war or that was the perception I felt that most of the people on the ground had. Not us flying helicopters because for us it was moving people without too much cost, but the people I spoke to on the ground. Because there were lots of opportunities for us to sit around and wait for a while

and talk to these guys, ‘the grunts’ we’d call them, the infantry. But I felt or got the sense that their mission statement was the body count because they saw that constantly as the means of justifying the war because that was the statistic, that was the measure of the war. But I also was very much aware, and it was very obvious, that it was

the change of warfare as I read in the history books in the infantry. What was going on wasn’t people attacking large hills and majors being in charge of battalions and then other people being in charge of all these groups and then large groups going forward and taking territory and capturing the enemy who were in different coloured uniforms and that sort of stuff. It really was

young people in charge of people, and as I said earlier, the measure was the body count and that then became the reason for them doing the things that they did do. None of them seemed to me, even within our group were we under proper supervision. There was hardly any direction. I was a young able seaman, I was in charge of 23 young Americans

responsible for all unscheduled maintenance of 30 aircraft. My counterparts, my air crew counterparts, were people who were aircraft captains, particularly those experienced flyers who invariably were in the gun platoon they had to make command decisions, split second decisions, on whether to shoot somebody or not or to lay down covering

fire. Or if they saw something that was suspicious or whatever else to take advantage of their superior military might So it was a constant pressure to come up with – at the end of the day when you reported in it was important that you showed something for the day’s effort and that invariably was the body count. And that was why there was so much pressure on this

business. And because there was lack of direction, and because there was no direct supervision a lot of people got themselves into trouble, into doing things that in normal circumstances they would not have done.

I can’t speak about the Australian infantry, because I had very little contact with them

at the time. Knowing what I know now I suspect that’s certainly not the case. But for my experience with the Americans and because they always tended to work in small groups it was invariably the young officers being in charge of a whole group of younger and at times not so much younger lower ranked soldiers. And certainly the

Americans had nowhere the discipline that the Australians do. The Australians are streaks ahead in discipline, from self discipline to the discipline of being able to do things under direction and command.

I think so, yes.

I enjoyed my experiences in Vietnam, generally speaking. I felt that most of the time I was doing what I would consider was the right thing. I certainly did all of my

technical things, I gave it my best. I absolutely thrived in the responsibility and being able to do the things that I did do. I was somewhat disappointed at the lack of leadership that I saw from my seniors, both senior sailors and the officers, but that is probably not their fault in the sense that they were diverted to other areas when I expected, probably

naively, that there would be a structure where the Australians would may be serve together or on a basis would meet together to thrash out Australian things which just didn’t happen. And, I guess, that’s probably through lack of time. So by the time that it came for me to come back to Australia, all of us were psyched up.

Having gone through that already because I’d gone back the first time by the time of the second time, I realised that some of the Australians were getting twitchy. And there’s nothing worse in an operational area than somebody who’s a short timer, who doesn’t have long left, because they start becoming very cautious and that’s not a good thing.

That didn’t affect me too much, because by that time I myself was a short-timer and getting more involved in the technical aspects than trying to go up and expose myself. Having said that, there were times when the camp that we were in would be attacked. There would be either rocket propelled grenades or mortar bombs or something people trying to, a

group of usually Viet Cong trying to get through the barriers and test out the minefields and things. And that was pretty scary because again, in our rank structure I was level at that stage with what they would call a buck sergeant. And therefore, although I was an able seaman, I was considered in the American system an NCO [non commissioned officer]. And therefore I would be in charge of, a part of I think every 5th or 6th

night, in charge of part of the perimeter line which is pretty scary when I had no idea about what they were saying over the radio or what they meant when they were talking, you know, infantry speak. It was pretty scary. But I overcame that, that wasn’t a real drama, and got ready to go home. I stopped smoking and tried to scrape off the beard, tried to imagine and

picture what it would be like to live in a country without sort of twitching every time you’d hear the car backfire and that sort of stuff. We had a few sort of good bye parties and we had some welcoming parties for our relief, the Australians. And they would tend to do that in two parts. There would be an advance party for them and they would mix in with us and we would show them the

ropes, and I think it was only a sort of two week period, and then the rest of us would leave on the same flight as these other guys would come in and a shake of the hand and a wish of good luck for these guys. You’d see these blokes for two or 3 minutes as we were passing each other by at Tan Son Nhut Airport was terrifying for me. Knowing what I knew and not

game enough to say anything. And then the long flight home. That total sense of relief that once the aircraft was in the air and you heard the clunk of the wheels going up, and the doors closing, and there would be this enormous yell and scream of people saying, “Yeah, we’re home.” But it wasn’t quite the case for a lot of people, because although

we had left Vietnam for a lot of us the psychological hurdle of finding yourself in a war zone – and don’t get me wrong, I suspect that most of my comrades in arms would not say this in public – but I felt

that Vietnam for the whole of the time I was there, and it made no difference where I was whether I was in Saigon, Vung Tau or any of these bases or flying whatever, it was always a combat zone. You always had to look and be on your guard which can be very strenuous and very stressful.

Some figures that I saw some time ago indicated that the people in the United States, the soldiers in the United States infantry in the pacific theatre of war did an average of 23 days in combat per year. For those people that in Vietnam I suspect that if you were there for a year, you were there for 365 days in combat because that’s the way it was. So unwinding yourself and

trying to get used to being in the real world was a real hurdle. The people I have spoken to who had a good adjustment were those people who came back on the Sydney that were able to unwind over a two, three or four week period. But people who were in Saigon one day and Sydney 8 hours or 12 hours later, was hopeless. And the fact that we arrived late at night and the fact that the reception was

not good. By that time there was certainly, late ’69, there was this anti Vietnam feeling from the general public and the services tried to protect us from that. So rather than have the opportunity to walk down the street in your uniform they said, “You’re not allowed to do that. You’ve got to hide.” And that’s one of the reasons why we came in late at night. And certainly we were very self conscious that we were not –

we expected to go to war and to emulate our forefathers in the Anzac tradition, certainly those people who went to World War II. We had completely forgotten about Korea, but certainly the people that we’d spoken to in World War II. We expected the same reception of course and we didn’t get that and that was to a certain extent more than disappointing, almost as if we were failures. In addition to

that I felt a sense of guilt for those close friends of mine who were very severely injured or who had died. And it’s one of the reasons why people who tended not to get too close to those guys who flew regularly. Not necessarily air crew, but some of the weapons guys who flew day and night simply because that’s what they wanted to do,

because the odds were not very good. And people who clocked up 1600 hours in 10 and 11 months, you know, it’s unheard of. You’re in an aeroplane the whole day, all day. So the odds were not good, and you tended to have this divorce of this system. So certainly that was part of

almost the sense of guilt that, “I came back and I’m whole and these guys didn’t,” and, “Why me, why was I special?” And particularly for those guys who had families. No, they all had families because they all had parents and sisters and some had wives and children and that was pretty terrifying. A problem for me – the first time I came back, my documents, my

pay documents, had not been acted upon. So when I came back the first time I had no money waiting for me at the airport. I had two US Dollars and some Vietnamese money. And we arrived on a long weekend, and I think it was the October long weekend, and the pay officer, a young sub lieutenant, said to me, “Oh well, we’ll sort that out on the Monday,” or if it was a holiday on the

Monday on the Tuesday. I said, “What do I do until Monday?” And he turned to me and he said, “That’s your problem.” So here I am in one item of uniform that was not even navy, it was khaki. No money and no support whatsoever. And because I was the last person – because they had some problems with my pay and because they put me to one side and they said, “Look, we’ll try and fix you up last,” everybody else had

disappeared. And the people who had domestic flights were whisked off to the domestic terminal. And I was there and there were 4 people in the airport, the international airport. The federal policemen and myself and 2 supply people who were supposed to pay me. They found out that I didn’t have any pay and said go away and see us after the long weekend. And I had nowhere to go. I convinced the federal policeman that I should stay in the terminal overnight, and he was horrified, but he did the right thing.

So he locked me in. And then the following morning I scared the daylights out of this poor, I think she was Italian, woman that was cleaning the place up. And she got there very early, I think about 5 o’clock in the morning, and she unlocked the key and Frank sort of stretched himself from this horrible plastic lounge that was there. And she said, “Aagh, who are you?” And I said, “It’s all right, it’s all right” and I had to explain. I had bought a single lens

reflex camera in the PX in Saigon, and my God it took some doing but it was still in the box and it was in mint condition and I hadn’t been game enough even to play with it. This was my trophy from all of that hard time because I was definitely interested in photography, and this is my thing. I walked from the international terminal to one of the hock shops [pawn shops] in the centre of Sydney.

I got a bus ride and couldn’t pay for the bus because I had no money, and the guy said, “That’s all right.” But I walked most of the way and I waited for the hock shop to open and I hocked my camera so that I had enough money to fly myself to Perth so that I was home at least, I was home on leave, because my parents were expecting me. There was no way in the world that they would have been psychologically able to cope if I said to them,

“Look I’m going to be another few days.” They would not have believed it. I never did tell them the story. Then, once my leave was up, because I wasn’t keen to contact the navy authorities because I wasn’t too sure whether I was going back into the navy. I think I was just prepared to disappear. But I think the logistics of, you know, can I say it, deserting, was probably beyond me in

spite of what I thought about all of this. And I contacted the navy authorities and they put me on a plane back to Sydney, and I don’t think I was every reimbursed for that flight. Anyway, the second flight wasn’t quite as bad as that. At least they had my pay and my ticket there. But again there was this thought in my mind, “Should I go back to the navy?” And I had some real struggle with that. In the end the thing that

drove me was I think the fact that there was a promise there that I was able to change my branch and my training and become a navy photographer, rather than an aircraft mechanic. And of course nobody remembered the conversation and of course, “Who was I talking to?” and I ended up staying an aircraft mechanic. It was a bit disappointing after arriving back at Albatross. I assumed that

having been to war and, I guess, earning the battle honours for the fleet air arm that we as a group would have been accepted with more an enthusiasm. In fact that wasn’t the case. It was the opposite. We were shunned. People were not interested in – certainly not interested in our experiences, but were not even interested in being associated with us.

To my horror, they hadn’t worked out my posting once I got back to Albatross. They hadn’t got to that part yet. I’m not too sure, I had sort of a fleeting thought there well maybe they hadn’t expected me to come back but that’s fine. So as an interim, while I was waiting, while they were getting some postings organised because they didn’t want to send us back to 723 Squadron, because these people were

trying to – they were preparing the people for the 4th flight so they didn’t want us to be in that group. So they wanted us posted somewhere else and I suspect probably out of the way. And as I said to you earlier as a young able seaman I was in charge of 23 people, including 2 civilians. I was in charge of all unscheduled maintenance, flying them 7 days a week, 30 days a month, not

31, because sometimes we would have a maintenance stand down. And I found myself for the following 3 months cleaning toilets. Now that in itself was not a big deal. I’m sort of an able seaman I really should do that sort of thing because that’s what able seamen sometimes do, but only as a temporary duty and not as a full-time duty. But the part that really hurt was that I was cleaning the toilets for the area that housed what was the handlers’ branch. And the

handlers were those guys who did the general duties of the fleet air arm. Those were the guys that did the toilet cleaning and cutting the grass and those sort of general hands that they did. So I found that that was not only a depressing activity but also very much an insult. Having said all of that, I did sit out my 3 months.

I did go on to, I didn’t know it at the time, but I was there because I was awaiting the commencement of a course, an advancement, a technical advanced course. They didn’t tell me that. I wasn’t aware of that. So luckily I stuck that out and I got my course and went on in fact to do two promotion courses back to back. I kept my nose clean,

I worked fairly hard and I was fairly lucky to a certain extent, fortunate in some of the postings that I ended up. And I ended up with a very well worthwhile, a very interesting naval career. I got to be promoted to a leading hand within 12 months of coming back from Vietnam. An almost immediate promotion to a petty officer, totally unexpected, because again the

vacancies weren’t there but there was a change in the organisation and the promotion systems and in jobs it required. And, lo and behold, again in similar circumstances, where I was promoted to a chief fairly quickly relevant to some of the other trades and some of the other people within my branch. I then got caught up with, and I was keen to be promoted to a warrant officer which was the last one on the

ladder. I was then caught up with the demise of the fixed wing element of the fleet air arm. The new Labor government of the time announced that the aircraft carrier would not be replaced. And as such there would be not a call for fixed wing element of the fleet air arm and the fleet air arm as a fixed wing unit would be disbanded and there would be a sole concentration on helicopters.

And that required at least a half to two thirds of people in the fleet air arm to be moved to other areas. Luckily for most of the people within the fleet air arm they were not unconditionally discharged. There was an opportunity for people to move to the other branches of the service, that is the air force or the army if they wanted to stick in the aviation field, or to do something else or to go to other branches of the navy. I

didn’t feel that that was an option. I felt that the only way that I could stay in the navy was to be commissioned. And, with the exception of good old mathematics which I was never able to pass – by that time I had through for one reason or another, possibly to give myself some challenges, I really hadn’t thought seriously about a commission, but I was educationally qualified with the exception of mathematics. Luckily I was able,

again the navy was very gracious, and sent me away for some full-time study. I went originally to Creswell to do some basic ground work and then to the Melbourne Institute of Technology to do some heavy duty mathematics. Once I became qualified that I passed my final selection board, was selected, and went to the UK for 12 months. I was the last Australian course to have the

luck and the fortune to go to the UK, to be posted, not because we needed the training in the UK but it was more of a carrot. It was more of a, “If you become a commissioned officer we’ll send you to the UK for all of the things.” It really was a tremendous posting. They are a very professional outfit but a huge organisation. There’s more people in the Royal Navy than there was in the entire military at the time, so it was huge. And

they were tremendous hosts. We were considered as guests, and professional guests, so they went out of their way to expose us to all sorts of activities that the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm did. And that, plus my earlier time out of the fleet air arm, made me aware that maybe I should not just concentrate on the fleet air arm and go somewhere else. I did some training, and from that flowed on some

training technology and technical training and that sort of stuff. So once I was commissioned, I was promoted to a sub lieutenant. I went to Albatross and became the photography officer, in spite of the fact that I was never good enough to be a photographer. And from there I did all sorts of other jobs from air intelligence, housing, personnel support, again

training technology, analysis and design courses and computer based training and all that sort of good stuff. Sometimes I wasn’t too sure what I was doing but it was very, very challenging. One of the best times that I had was a first lieutenant and long periods of acting executive officer of the naval college at Creswell. A very demanding job.

Creswell was building up again. There were always thoughts of Creswell sort of shutting down but during the period I was there it was building up. A period at the same time there was this commercial sport program set in place, so that allowed me to get involved in sort of contract management and that sort of stuff – very, very challenging. I did the staff course on the basis that I was

going to go on to Canberra. And, I guess, I was getting tired and I figured that my chances of promotion was fairly good to commander, but it was going to be a long haul. And I sat there and worked out my son’s – and in spite of the fact that I had a wonderful career and thoroughly enjoyed most of it. Very challenging too but I enjoyed most of it – that for my

penance of going to Canberra for four years and maybe as I say being promoted to commander. And then having a year somewhere else to be captain or commander somewhere, or acting commander or whatever, I figured that $12 or $13 dollars in addition in my pay, my retirement pay, wasn’t worth the effort and I was getting tired. So I decided that I was going to retire because I wanted to do

other things. So I did, I did other things and got an opportunity to do some reserve work. And the best part about it is that I don’t set the alarm clock, I get up if I have to, but I don’t have to. I do, but I don’t have to. I’ve got my caravan and I’m keen to sort of travel and do all the things and see all the places within Australia that, I guess, I didn’t get an opportunity to see whilst I was taking the opportunity to see all those places overseas.

I honestly don’t know. I have no idea. I have thought about it. Again, possibly because the political climate in Australia at the time may have

drifted over to the military. And not forgetting that I was an able seaman when I came back and the able seamen tend to take their lead from their seniors. And there certainly wasn’t any leader in the RAN that stood up to be counted and said, “Look, welcome back guys.” Unlike you see, you know, from the Prime Minister down. I’m not mocking that all I’m saying is that wasn’t the case in those days. And unless that sort of thing happens, I guess,

people assumed that that was not the sort of thing that was done. There was no parade. There was no nothing. People just went on their way and went off on their next posting. And I was fairly fortunate that I was within the fleet air arm and had some support, I guess, from people and bumped into the odd helicopter flight veteran like myself at Albatross. I felt for all those guys, the cooks and the sick bay attendant, all of those people who just disappeared.

The sick bay attendant was telling me not so long ago that he was even worse. Some of the things that he was able to do in Vietnam, because this is in the days prior to paramedics and he was sort of doing that sort of stuff that doctors in general wouldn’t do here, and he was shunned. And I suspect that was part of the, “Look don’t be such a” – I guess an acceptance by the system and by the professionals that

maybe those people who were certainly unqualified were probably far more experienced than they were and there may have been some aspect of “I don’t want to know.” But other than that I couldn’t give you an answer.

I had no problems with being, in your words, being punished by the community because it is their right to do so. I still had this sort of professional military person attitude about me in the sense that from the point of view that

the military sent me there and that’s what I had to do and I did my job and stuff you because that’s what I had to do. But there was resentment deep in my heart from the lack of support from my superiors. And I don’t mean the guy that I was working for, but I’m talking about from the head of navy all the way down to my captain at Albatross, my commanding officer from the various squadrons that I went to, the school that I went to. There was never a

public acknowledgement that I did the right thing if for nothing else than to keep up the fine traditions of the fleet air arm. So that was always a bit of a sticking point. I felt that all of those experiences in Vietnam did not hurt me and to a certain

extent that was probably the case while I was young. Now, as one gets older, as I get older, and certainly that’s probably one of the reasons why I resigned, I found that some aspects of what I would call PTSD [post traumatic stress disorder] and others would call intrusive thoughts or lack of concentration or possibly the fact that there wasn’t this

drive in me. Although I was physically fit, and made sure that I stayed that way, particularly during my period at Creswell where one of the responsibilities that I had was training. I was responsible for training the ex sailors who were to be promoted to officer. So certainly from that aspect I was physically fit, because that was part of the leadership by example and I was going to be fitter than them. But mentally, I found

things were a burden. Doing the staff course although I found that during exam time there wasn’t a problem there was always this lack of drive, lack of ability to finish the task, those sorts of things. Because of lack of concentration, because of intrusive thoughts, because of other things and it felt that the older I got

the worse the symptoms became, which for me was a bit silly because if I had any problems it should have happened during or straight after Vietnam not afterwards. Then I started to feel that, to put it bluntly, I was not too sure that I could trust myself in a situation where I was in direct command of an emergency situation. And that

horrified me. Not just the aspect of going to sea but in a situation where I don’t know – a bush fire situation, a hostage situation, that sort of thing where being in command and being responsible for all these people. I don’t think I was able to trust myself because of the things that I found out about

PTSD and not knowing whether I had that or not but the symptoms saying there’s an aspect there. Now that’s not something that I would readily have admitted to and certainly not from the period whilst I was an active reservist. But I’ll say that now because I know this film’s not likely to see the light of day for some time. But I need to be up front to say I did suffer, and there is no one that I know of that

shared those experiences with me that I can now not see the signs. And some of those guys will not take that on board, don’t believe in it, and struggle on.

Yes I did. I found that a very good friend of mine was the doctor serving at Albatross at the

time, and we’d talk about various things. And I said to him – and the consultation was finished and we were making small talk because we only tended to see each other in those situations and he said, “Oh, how’s things?” And I said, “Oh great, well, not too bad. He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Well, I’m getting a bit depressed.” And he said, “Why’s that, is it the job?” because he knew that the job that I was in wasn’t the best job I’d ever had. I said,

“No, no. In fact it’s getting near Anzac Day and I always get that way and my wife keeps telling me I get cranky on Anzac Day.” And he said, “What are you doing about it?” And I said, “Nothing.” He said, “It’s not a problem, we’ll give you some pills.” And I said, “No, I don’t want to take happy pills, valium or something.” He said, “No, no, what you can do is go and see a psych [psychiatrist].” And I said, “No way am I going to see the psych.” He said, “No, this is a modern, missile-age navy, we don’t do the things that way. We are far

more acceptable. We accept these things better and you just go and see the psych.” And he gives you some – because even for him PTSD wasn’t a thing, it was more a depression that was setting in. And that certainly for me were the symptoms and I assumed that they were as well. So anyway, he said it would be a good thing for me to see the psychiatrist and to get some of these things off my chest and he would give me some strategies to overcome those sort of things. So I said, “OK,

fine.” But I was not aware that they first thing that they do when you see a psychiatrist is that he writes a little note to your commanding officer and then they check on your security clearance and downgrade it. I didn’t know that, and I was horrified many years later when I found it out. And the other thing that it did was to put a stop on my promotion. So I wasn’t particularly fussed but I probably – and that

then allows me to – things that happened to me particularly while I was at Creswell. The boss would say to me, “Why aren’t you promoted yet?” And I’d say, “Probably because I’m not good enough.” And he used to be the president of the officers selection board and the promotion board. And he would say to me, “No, no, your numbers are good, your reports are great and I just can’t understand why you’re not being promoted.” And I said, “Well, obviously no vacancies.” And that conversation came up several times and I could never

understand that, and I thought he was just pissing in my pocket. And a few other people sort of sounded it out and I could never understand why that wasn’t so and I suspect that had something to do with it which makes me a bit disappointed with the navy. Because what’s happening now, I suspect that PTSD and all of those things are not accepted even now by the hierarchy, not by the people who are on the shop floor, but by the

hierarchy and this will come back to haunt the navy and, I guess, the Australian military in general. So that where you have a situation where some young lady is posted to a ship and the ship finds itself in a situation where it’s giving aid to the civil power and finds itself without an opportunity to train properly off the coast of, you know, Dili, and people have to go ashore as shore parties. And we find that some young ladies in

particular who haven’t had any weapons training because they are not supposed to be combatants or whatever else are all of a sudden given a weapon and told to, you know, go and do your thing, that they’re not prepared for it. So from nothing else but a duty of care situation this is something that the navy and the military in general need to address.

I have no

problems with the old fashioned wars if I can put it that way. I have a bit of concern with the sort of warfare that’s considered now. And it’s a very blurry line now. You know, whether it’s a police action or whether it’s a war. And I feel terribly sorry for those people who find that they have been selected to go to the Solomons rather than go to Timor. You know, Timor was a war, but the Solomons were not. Having said that,

don’t have a problem with recommending the military as a career for any young man or young lady that I’m close to. You know, it’s a tremendous opportunity to strive. Having said that, I think that the navy in particular but the services in general need to be very well aware of the aspects of this type of warfare that’s happening now that they need to address. And, I guess, being

psychologically prepared and the wash-ups and the follow on care that is required.