Australians at War Film Archive

I was born in Hobart on the 25th of June in 1923. I don’t remember being with my mother at the time. But I do recall at the age of eighteen months, being in a pram, at a gymnasium. My father ran his own

gymnasium for underprivileged people and one of his friends came to see me. And they put me in a side room off the gymnasium, in a dark room, he came in, one of the students, and I remember seeing him, he picked me up. I remember vividly being picked up at the age of eighteen months. That’s all I recall, just the dark room and not being happy in the dark room. At the age of eight, my father….at my age of eight,

my father took his troop of students on a holiday visit one Easter to a place called Kingston, south of Hobart, and part way down there’s a hotel called the River View Hotel. An old dirt road going from Hobart to Kingston, about twenty-one miles. About five miles south of Hobart there is this hotel, at a bend in the river, and at that point the road would be four vehicles wide

to allow for the hotel being recessed into the bend. And a drunken driver coming from the opposite direction ran headlong into the truck that my father had hired, with all these students on the back, all the holiday camping gear. It was my mother, my father, and the driver in the front. And in those days there were no side curtains, just a plain glass windscreen. The windscreen shattered, a piece of glass went into my throat leaving this scar here.

My mother, fortuitously, pushed my head onto my chest. My father got out, went into this hotel, there was a taxi parked outside the hotel, and he found that he knew the taxi driver and he implored him to take me back to hospital. The taxi driver said yes so they got into the taxi and raced me back to the Stawell hospital. And the driver did sixty miles an hour, for the first time ever in that cab.

These days that’s not fast, but apparently it was then. And he was in the same unit as my father, and they'd both been shellshocked…blown up by shells during the First World War. So he was a bit nervous. So the following day after that trip he resigned his job as a taxi driver. When they got me back to the hospital there was a Doctor Crowther on duty, who later became a family friend. And over on my left there is a photograph of a cup and saucer that I donated to his museum years later.

But because my mother pushed my head on my chest and kept it there, the piece of glass was….nobody knew it was still in my throat. As the doctor laid me back on the operating table, the glass nicked my jugular vein. That gives you a second and a half to live. Only three people I understand have survived that. Anyway he put his thumb on it, his face was covered in blood, he put his thumb on the wound

the nurse helped him to obviously sew up the throat. At some stage later on in the interview, I will tell you about a coincidence, about a German who was part of Hitler’s bodyguard who had a similar situation; he worked for me in Germany.

Yes. I was eight years old. Three months later I was at

Sunday school with a friend of mine, the son of the rector of Trinity Church in Hobart, and afterwards we were playing in the back yard of the rectory. He was chasing me, I'm in my best Sunday suit with a frond that had all bits of fluff on it. it was a couple of hours in cleaning my suit off. I climbed up onto my fence and I was walking around the rail on top of the chicken roof,

it was a chicken pen. And he climbed up and chased me so I jumped off, not seeing the clothesline, hanging just below me. It caught my head and pushed it back and tore it all open again. Fortunately it was not the jugular vein at that stage, just the throat. Then a few years later, at about the age of ten, there was an epidemic of poliomyelitis in Hobart.

I was one of the victims and Dr Crowther, the same doctor, again came to the house, there were no beds left in Hobart in the hospital, to treat me and he didn’t really know what to do. In those days the treatment for poliomyelitis was not really well known. No antibiotics. Sulphanilamide was about all they about at that point. So he treated me for about two or three weeks…

For some fortuitous reason I also got some other disease which affected the nervous system. So while polio was trying to kill the nerves off the other disease was trying to make….a bit like conjunctivitis. Anyway, one counteracted the other. Of some three hundred odd students, friends of mine, schoolmates, I was the only one

that came out without any detrimental effect to the rest of my body.

That’s only three of about seven.

No, I don’t recall any danger at all. It was something that as a child I don’t

think you stop and think of those things. I know my next-door neighbour was a cyclist and I had an old…before I went to hospital with this injury to my throat, I wanted a bike. So my parents bought me a bike before the accident happened. It was what they called an old 'galloping bedstead.' It was a G and B bike, but it was so heavy, I could just lift it up. Getting on and riding it was a bit difficult.

My friend had a racing bike and lo and behold all round the spokes had been soldered. It had been a racing bike. So I brought it from him while I was in bed, I saved up the money and bought it. And I think my parents paid him some more for it. It was stood beside my bed for three or four weeks while I was there in bed for three or four weeks, in hospital, bed at home. But it reminds me of a story that when I was a child,

I guess I’d still be round ten or eleven, I was learning the violin. I had to walk about a mile from home to my tutor, down the main street of Hobart, down Elizabeth Street, I had to pass a shop called Davis's, a hardware shop. Charles Davis. And I saw in the window a truck. These days it would be nothing, but it had a battery in it, it had electric lights and you could steer the steering wheel,

and I decided I wanted that. So instead of catching the tram I decided I’d walk and save my money. Twice a week I would go for my lessons, and I’d watch this truck. Was it going to be there? Had it sold or not? So for three months I kept this up until I had enough money to pay for it. So I took it home after my violin lesson…Ronald McKay was my teacher. And he asked me to do a performance

once at the Hobart City Hall. I was not much of a violinist, but anyway…When I got home and I showed my truck to my Mum, proudly, she said, “Where did you get the money to buy that?” Typical mother expression. And I told her what I'd done, I saved up the money. But that taught me a lesson, that I was prepared to wait for something and pay cash for it rather than…Well we didn’t have the never never in those days but I've done the same thing all my life.

And it's paid off. I now own everything that I have.

I learned that later on as a stockbroker.

Yes, I was an only child.

At the time, no,

but in retrospect I had an incident later on in life in an army camp, where there was a bad fire in my quarters and I had to rescue my daughter. I was badly burned in both hands, through to the bone, and I was raced off to hospital. But that’s another story.

Well what happened there…It was interesting because a kerosene heater caught alight in the married quarter,

this happened in 1959 or 1960, and I smelt the smoke, and this would be at two or three o’clock in the morning, and I was on the left hand side of the double bed. I jumped across my wife and yelled out there was a fire. And the curtains and the carpet in my daughter's bedroom, she was two years old, were alight. So I grabbed her, gave her to my wife, my then wife, and they went out of the house,

the house was full of smoke and I raced back. I grabbed the burning heater, picked it up and put it down several times up the passage and out through the laundry and threw it in the backyard. I raced back in, and I didn't realise that I'd burnt my hands, at the time, everything happens in such a hurry. When I raced back in through the smoke I ran into the side of the laundry door, tore the side off my face, ran into my daughter’s bedroom

pulled the curtains down…..I couldn’t throw them out the window because there were fly wires on the outside. So I grabbed those and the carpet…Well, I tried to, but my hands were burnt, so I had to kick them along the passage my feet, bare feet, out through the laundry door. My wife went next door to the doctor, the army doctor, who happened to be our neighbour. He opened the door and saw the tear marks down the face and he laughed. Anyway they raced me off to hospital and I was a bit…

annoyed with myself that this could happen. But then in a bed next to me at the Heidelberg Hospital, there was a chap from Puckapunyal that I knew very well, a chap called Dick Gower. Now, he was a temporary major and he had cancer from a bomb blast, and a progressive problem from the Second World War. He was a temporary captain,

which meant that then pension for his wife, if he died as a temporary captain he would be the rank of a captain. So I told the sisters about this so the doctors and the sisters, they knew he only had a few days to live, but he had three days to become a permanent major before his qualification came through, his temporary had expired. And they kept him alive by blood transfusions.

I’m sorry I get a bit emotional at times.

You see my problems were nothing.

That’s the thing that made me appreciate what they must have felt.

To me it didn’t mean much. It was just an inconvenience, no playing…it was something which passes. At the time I don’t really remember what I thought. It was inconvenient, it was unpleasant being in bed for such a long time, my mates were out playing, I could hear them outside. But the feelings of my parents? No.

But I have a better understanding now.

Extremely lucky because they’re really were seven incidents in my life, I really should not be alive now. Do you want to talk about things that happened later or just the early time?

Very happy. I guess I was spoiled, being an only child, if you have one then you understand what it's all about. But…my father, from the First Word War, belonged to a number of different army organisations,

post war army organizations, the Artillery League and so forth. He was a sergeant in the artillery in the First World War. And he was keen to help other people. And one interesting thing that happened, because Hobart was a small place, everybody knew my father. He was a champion footballer in the Tasmanian League. And as a gymnast he was outstanding, and so he ran his own private gymnasium for underprivileged people.

And he worked at the Repatriation Department, in a semi-legal state, representing soldiers who deserved a military pension but were not getting one. And he formed a syndicate to buy a ticket in Tatts. Tatts was an lottery that started in Tasmania, in Hobart years ago, and my grandfather, who was smaller in stature than I am, he was in the Boer War

in South Africa. My grandmother died two years after my father was born, giving birth to a brother. And so my grandfather virtually brought, my aunt, my father’s sister, he brought them up as a sole parent. And he had a friend who … My grandfather, despite his size, loved boxing.

He was walking up Campbell Street past the Hobart jail one day, and saw a man bashing up his wife. So he ploughed in and started beating up the man. And the wife is bashing him, hitting him around the head with her bag for touching her husband. Anyway he … My father and my grandfather…

My grandfather decided he would spend one Sunday, he would walk around the ocean pier, which was a long pier in Hobart, with friends who he played cribbage with, Leo somebody…And after a few yards, Leo picked up a two shilling piece and a bit later he picked up another one and he said to my grandfather …Oh, my grandfather, my father and I, we are all, 'Fredrick William Miller.' My grandfather is Frederick William Miller Senior,

my father was Junior and I was then Minor, but I've progressed to Junior. In fact, I use that signature still. Anyway, Leo said to my Grandfather, after he had picked up about ten shillings, “Fred you’ve got a hole in your pocket." And he said, “No, no, I haven’t got a hole in my pocket." A few more two shillings later, sure enough grandfather checked his pockets and he had a hole in his pocket. My grandfather didn’t gamble, he didn't swear, he said to Leo, “I’ll by a ticket in Tatts and whatever

I win I’ll go you halves." My father and my grandfather bought the ticket, you can probably guess what’s coming. My father and my grandfather brought the ticket, my father for the syndicate. Because he was well known, when the lottery was drawn Dad got a phone call, "Fred! You've won Tatts Lotto!" Or Tattersall in those days. Ten thousand pounds. And that’s a lot of money in those days. A couple of hundred thousand these days. So Dad told the syndicate,

they had a celebration that night. And my mother and my father and myself, were living in my grandfather's house. And Dad came in and he said “Dad, what do you know, I’ve won Tatts.” Grandfather said, "That's funny. So did I." It turned out it was my grandfather's ticket. So he gave five thousand pounds to Leo and something to my parents, I don't know how much. But my father wasn’t very popular with his syndicate when he got to work on the Monday.

The wrong Frederick William Miller.

No he didn’t.

Yes.

He was very active, but that wasn’t the reason I became a soldier.

Oh yes, he told me about it, but not very much, no. I know he was blown up by a shell. And the first time he said to his friend, "I'm dead." He wasn't. He had a piece of shrapnel in his backside and he was covered in mud. He thought he'd had it. But …

My father talked a little bit about war, but not very much.

He was actually in Belgium at a place called Ypres. I visited there later in life, on my way to Germany, and I’ll digress and mention the story because I think it is of interest. Ypres is the home

for the Menin Gate, which is a memorial for the First World War. I decided because Dad had been there, and they had First World War trenches still in the same state they were after the war, grown over admittedly, but they preserved them. And the films they had were the old roller films, and they have a dozen shots of the same thing. And I decided I would go down to the Menin Gate at dawn,

and hold my own dawn service. And when I got there an old gentleman rode up on a bicycle and he played the last post. Anyway, he had been doing it everyday since the end of the First World War.

Yes. A bit different.

I can’t hear you, I’m sorry.

Yes, it was. It still is. I must be getting old, more sensitive.

But a lot of funny things happen in my life, unusual things, and I seem to have been in the middle of a lot of them.

At the age of eighteen months….My grandmother had a soft drink factory near Devonport. Edwards Cordial Factory, and my uncle Ted was driving a truck, something like the one my father used to drive with solid rubber, instead of pneumatic tyres. And the road collapsed at the side of the road, and the truck rolled….My mother and father were in the truck. Everything seems to happen with a truck.

It started to roll over. My father pushed my mother out of the truck when the truck rolled over the first time. He was nursing me. The second time it rolled over he threw me out and Mum caught me. It went over three times, and we all survived.

Not that close. But I can’t remember much about that one.

Yes. Especially when you walk around Montebello

with shorts and sandals on, and a shirt, and exposed to radiation, measuring radioactivity. And all my friends are no longer here. I am. I had another interesting experience in Malaya. That should come later.

Social activities.

Yes, for fifty years every Thursday night, without fail, over the fifty years, he would go to the Hobart Hospital with cigarettes and tobacco and books, because a lot of soldiers were progressively going through medical treatment, as a result of the war. He would give out these cigarettes, initially at his own expense.

But then the RSL [Returned and Services League], the Returned Soldiers League as it was in those days, and of course he was part of it, they decided they would not only contribute but fund it. But he still, together with a friend of his, who joined him about twenty years later, and they continued going round every Thursday night at the Hobart Hospital and later on to the Jellybean Hospital…anywhere there was a returned soldier.

Yes.

As I was a bit older, he started taking me to places.

I had an understanding, but I don’t know that, at that age, it meant very much. When I went off to war it was exciting, in a way, but my parents….My grandfather

had a friend by the name of Henry Jones, Sir Henry Jones of IXL fame, the big international company. They served their apprenticeship with the Rosella company in Hobart and at the end of their apprenticeship, they both decided to set up a business on their own. They bought batches of fruit and made their own jam. I vividly recall my grandfather making the jam. It was an iron,

cast iron pot, enamelled on the inside, about this diameter and about that deep. He's prepared the fruit with a wooden paddle, and he would stir the jam, with the sugar and whatever, and then bottle it. But he, unfortunately, got some bad fruit into two batches, and he wouldn’t sell the jam that would have probably been all right. He stopped making it. Henry Jones continued.

Later in life, I was going to Campbell Street School, which was right next door to Henry Jones’ home. A very big home by comparison with others in Hobart. Henry Jones had progressed very successfully, obviously, with the success of the business and. And he came to my grandfather one day and he said, “Fred, my business has grown so much that I can’t manage both the manufacturing, and the marketing and sales and management.

I will give you half my business if you will take over the manufacturing." My grandfather said, “Thank you, Henry. I won’t take charity from anybody. I appreciate your offer, but no thank you. Thanks, but no thanks.” So that didn’t occur. He also, he war rather stubborn in a way I suppose, some people next door, the children next door were stealing fruit from a tree in our yard, and they wouldn't stop. So he cut the tree down to stop it.

But the sequel to this is….I wanted to become an apprentice. I had always been able to, and wanted to use my hands to make things. So my grandfather said “Let me talk to Henry Jones." I had applied for a couple of positions, but jobs were very hard back around 1930. So he said, "I'll talk to Henry Jones

and see what I can do for you, Fred." He spoke to Sir Henry….well, he wasn’t Sir Henry….I don’t know if he was Sir Henry then or not, I’m not sure. He spoke to his manager in the workshop, and said, “Young Millar will be coming down here on Monday morning for an interview. Give him the job." A close friend of mine from Hobart Technical college, I was a technical student at the time at Hobart Junior Tech, and later went to the senior technical college, when I came back from the war. He arrived earlier than I did,

and his name was Les Miller, M-I-L-L-E-R. And, "What's your name, lad?" "My name's Miller." He got the job, I didn't, it was too late then, it had already been organized. When I turned up it had gone, but I didn’t even know that it was set up for me. I didn’t even get to give my name. So about that time, they were looking for an apprentice for the army. They had an apprenticeship boys system.

They call it the Boys System in England, it was an apprenticeship scheme in the mechanical side. My father heard about this because the repatriation office was right in front of the Hobart Barracks, and some of his First World War friends were still there. I digress a bit, because there was a chap by the name of Tommy Broughton, Broughten’s Cabs in Hobart, but Tommy Broughten was a sergeant in the army. And he looked after the remount depot. The horses that drew the artillery carriages and the gun members.

So he told Dad there was a vacancy coming up. I went up there for an interview and fortunately I was selected. And I became the first army apprentice. And I received twelve and sixpence, but I joined on the tenth of July, 1939, a new tax year, and when I came to draw my first pay I was in debt tax-wise.

So I didn’t get anything. We were paid fortnightly. I couldn’t appreciate it at the time.

It was the Australian Army Audience Corps, with a P in brackets behind it, P for Permanent. It wasn’t until the war broke out that they changed the name and formed the Australian Army Electrical and Mechanical Engineers.

The boss of the corps was Richard Sageard, a friend of my father from the First World War. Hobart's a small place, or was. They then their office down on Castray Esplanade…And I must digress here. Martin Cash, the Australian bushranger, he and his two friends, Cavinar and Jones, they were notorious in Tasmania. My grandfather, my great-grandfather I’m sorry,

was walking along Castray Esplanade near where these offices were, two old stone buildings, convict-like buildings, and there was a laneway that lead up to Battery Point. My grandfather was walking up there and he was held up by Martin Cash. He had a silver watch. It had an outer case that was theoretically bullet proof. The outer case was only glass…so you could look through it, and theoretically bullet proof.

And of course it wasn't really. Martin Cash took the watch and took whatever money my grandfather had. And some ten years later when Martin Cash was finally caught in Hobart, and they sent him off to Port Arthur and Norfolk Island, he got the watch back again. I had the watch for many, many years. In the last move to this house, I’ve mislaid it. I can’t find it.

It’ll turn up somewhere.

Yes. I was, mainly because we were having a hard time. We lived with my grandfather because ... My father had a job with the YMCA [Young Men’s Christian Association] as a gymnast. He was obviously ideally suited for that.

This is not long after the war. He was doing very well there an instructor, senior instructor...The day after I was born, he was running a basketball match, supervising a basketball match in the YMCA gym, that I later attended, more as a teenager, and…

The ball went on the stage; he ran up about five steps to get the ball and had a bit of trouble finding it. Somebody else ran up to help him look for it, and as my father went down the steps they collided part way down the stairs. My father fell over this chap, landed on his right forearm, and rolled over, gymnast, got up. He felt a bit sore.

And after the match finished, he wasn’t feeling the best. So they took him across to the Hobart Hospital, where they x-rayed his wrist for breakages. They said, "No, you've only got a sprained wrist." So he went home, and after ten days of extreme pain, he went back to the hospital again. And the doctor said, “No, I think you’re all right but let’s x-ray a bit higher. And he found a break in the forearm,

the tibula up here, I think it's called the tibula. And he…no antibiotics, they strapped him up, but because it had been broken….by that time for about three weeks, gangrene had set in. I didn’t think it would set in so quickly, but this is what I was told. So they decided they'd operate. And they took six inches of bone from the foreleg down here,

which would grow back again, and grafted it into the forearm. But because of the forearm it wouldn't take, it didn't take. So the rest of his life he only had the one bone in his arm. To some extent, that helped him. Because when he was playing cricket, as the years went by, he was better than Warne, as a spin bowler, because his hand would come right over. So he could make the ball

spin more than anyone else could. He lost his job as a tutor because he couldn’t perform the function anymore. That’s when he went to the Repatriation Department and got a job there. And he became great friends with a chap by the name of Billy McKelwey. Billy McKelwey lost both his legs in the First World War. They were blown off, not very far from where my father was in Belgium. Because they worked in the same office

they somehow or other became close friends, and I grew up with the sons. Billy McKelwey built himself some wooden legs so he could build himself a boat. And because he built wooden legs, he was employed by the Repatriation Department in the limb factory. He ran the limb factory to build wooden legs and wooden arms for people from the First World War. He built this boat, with wooden legs he built this

thirty-two foot boat and we had quite a time sailing in that.

Yes. We grew up together.

Oh, helped with sailing. Mostly for sailing, but he had a standby power motor. I prefer playing around with the motor

than sailing the boat. At about that time, as I mentioned before, I was only sixteen when I joined the army as an apprentice, but prior to that I joined the Sea Scouts. I had been a Cub and a Scout and I just decided to join the Sea Scouts because it was something I appreciated. And I decided I would join…And when I joined the army, I would wear my Sea Scouts uniform

on the Saturday and Wednesday nights, and my army uniform, by day, to go to work. That uniform over there.

Oh, financially mainly. My mother would make things to sell, to try and raise a bit of extra money.

Oh, clothing mainly,

and jams with my grandfather, and sell them. She came from Africa, with her parents, at the start of the First World War. They decided they would leave South Africa and go to America. They got as far as Hobart, the ship went down south because of the German submarines, to skirt those, and they called into Hobart and liked it so much that they stayed there. And my grandfather,

my step-grandfather, my grandmother was an Adamson of 'Born Free' fame, with the tigers in….South Africa, and they decided to stay there. And my great-grandfather on my mother’s side died, and my great-grandmother married again to Edwards, of Edwards Cordial Factory.

He was an entrepreneur and started one of the first theatres in Hobart, and my mother became more of a businesswoman. And she would have very much liked to have had her own shop, of some sort. At one stage, after the war, we talked about doing this but I became preoccupied with other things and stayed on in the army. But my father knew…

His cousin, actually, Fred House, worked at the Premier’s house, and my mother got a job as secretary. She had been secretary to Errol Flynn’s father, who was at the University of Hobart. She knew Errol Flynn as a child, and that was an interesting thing I thought. Anyway, she got a job as secretary to the Premier.

My father went down one day to meet the Premier, for some reason, saw my mother there, ultimately they married.

No she stayed on for a while. But with the Depression they dispensed with the services of most people, so she lost the job there, and I don’t know what happened after that, except that I remember as a child,

I’m talking about four, five, six years old, living out in the back of the house my grandfather rented, on a veranda. It had a roof over but no wall, my father built a wall, and with a canvas blind, and I slept out there summer and winter. When I had the polio they took me inside, of course.

I vividly remember …

I was going to say I bet that’s a tape running out.

It was just purely circumstance that Les Miller got to Henry Jones factory before I did. And I’m very pleased it happened that way, because he’s still in Hobart. He’s never left Hobart.

One way or another twenty-six countries. Some passing through on holidays…I followed the philosophy, which is the reverse to most people, I volunteered for everything and if any job came up anywhere in the world they’d say, if they couldn't fill it, "Fred will go." So I finished up going most places.

Oh, yes. In fact, the people in there, in the unit at the time, Vic Gears, Australian Army Ordinance Corps, was really the boss, but he had a civilian moved across from Melbourne, named Gilly Potts, who came back into the army. He was an ex-First World War. But the people that were there were mostly from the First World War.

There was a Sergeant Barwick, who smoked something like twenty cigarettes every hour. He was almost a chain smoker. From mustard gas in the First World War he had lung problems, smoking didn’t help him. But they said, “Okay Fred, you’ve come in here as an apprentice, five-year apprenticeship. You will learn all the trades, fitting and turning,

blacksmithing, tin smithing, carpentry, weaponry, you name it.” Which is unusual. You normally do one trade.

Everything.

The basic position was a fitter and turner, but I learned welding, I learned blacksmithing, and you can weld through blacksmithing, tin smithing, which is a different trade,

carpentry, electrical work, not electronics in those days, that came later…Small arms, we'd pull down, repair and maintain small arms. A bit of canvas work, how to sew canvases, and Artillery, working on recuperators for guns, installing guns. And when the war broke out, three months after I enlisted,

our first task was to bring in guns that had been on display outside RSLs and similar establishments, make them fireable and take off the old wooden wheels and pneumaticise…in other words, you put on different axles and wheels with pneumatic tyres.

Old artillery. Eighteen pound guns

and four point five inch Howitzers. These were inches in those days. Four point five inches, a big barrel.

We didn’t have any guns, or very few guns and weapons. We bought in cameras, we bought in range finders…not range finders, they came later….binoculars, compasses, watches, binoculars,

because we didn’t have them. How else would you equip the Australian Army?

People offered them. The guns were conscripted. The Artillery Leagues had to give them to us. We didn’t have any artillery pieces. The first job I did as an apprentice, I took my wife Linda to see where a month or so back. There was an old five-inch gun

in Fort Nelson, near Sandy Bay in Hobart…When the First World War broke out, they had five gun emplacements in Hobart, up and down the river, to prevent German ships coming in. They were old five-inch naval guns. They hadn’t been fired since the First World War and I think only fired once or twice then, so we had to prepare

those for firing, test firing. So we got them ready and stood back about fifty yards with a piece of rope and pulled the trigger. Fortunately it didn't blow up, it worked. But they had in a tin workshop, a lathe and a few other machines, and I had to do a small job on the lathe, but it was like an old sewing machine. There was no electricity in those days. It was a treadle lathe,

up and down with your feet, and to try and move your hands in two different directions, because you're going that way and this way, and your feet up and down at the same time….it was quite an art. I learned to do this quite well. This sort of thing.

In Hobart.

I was at Anglesea Barracks in Hobart. And the workshop

for the Ordinance Corps was at the barracks, the rest was down at Castray Esplanade, but then they formed the Australian Electrical and Mechanical engineers at Anglesea Barracks. And that was where we started to do the repairs to the guns and limbers. And then they bought in the militia and some fifty odd…A conglomerate mass of humanity, all different trades. And they had been in the militia,

that’s the voluntary army in those days, the peacetime army, like the CMF [Citizen Military Force] now. They had to learn to drill. I showed Linda the parade ground, not very big, and one sergeant tried to decide who would be sergeant and what sort of ranks they’d have. One chap was given the job of marching the troops around the parade ground, and he said, “Now, quick march!" And off they went. Now when they got to the end of the parade ground he couldn't think of what word

to say for halt and he was singing out “Wohh, wohh, wohh." By that time the first two or three ranks had gone down a bank about the height of this room. They didn't hurt themselves. But it happened to be that the colonel who was the commandant, later the brigadier, was watching. This chap wasn’t promoted.

Look. I was a Tasmanian, and I think that Tasmania was my horizon. Yes I knew of Australia, but only from school. But my life centred around Hobart…No, that’s not true. As a Sea Scout I went to Adelaide for a corroboree years before, 1936 I think it was. I’d been to Melbourne by ship. By ship in those days. No aeroplanes.

The old Taroona, which was a model of the Queen Mary physically scaled down. But it rolled like the dickens. They made one mistake. They used the oil tanks for ballast. They forgot to put the petitions in the tank to help to slow the movement of the oil. So the ship would roll, the oil would continue on push the ship a bit further. Not a very peaceful trip.

But my first trip as a Sea Scout was on the Nairana, before the Taroona was enlisted. And I have a photograph somewhere looking down through the water. It was like a millpond, all they way across from Devonport to Melbourne and you could see

fathoms down in the water. It was so smooth.

Fishing, no. Swimming, yes. I finished up on the panel for training as an Olympic diver, after the war. I don’t think I was ever good enough to make the team but

Tom Penny was the Olympic coach and I was training under him. But then I went home to Hobart one Christmas, and my Hobart coach Ray Davis, and my father, and some friends, went over to the Hobart River to do some training, because my Hobart coach was better, I thought, than Tom Penny. But the regatta committee….Once a year, in February, the Hobart population hold a regatta, on the Domain,

and they wanted a diving display tower, so they ordered one, ten metres, but they built it on top of a fourteen foot high pier, plus a three foot rise and fall of tide. So you're talking about over fifty feet. And there was a latter straight up the whole ten metres, no zigzagging as they have these days. I climbed up there to do my first dive,

and Ray said "Do a one and a half." So I took off, and when you get to the five-metre tower, that's the point you know to open out, it's incredible what you can see while you're spinning in the air. It takes about a second and a half to the bottom. The same with a springboard, because you go up before you go down. And when I got to the five-metre tower I subconsciously opened up, forgetting about the extra distance to fall.

I immediately realised what I'd. Instead of being in a ball, my body was flat ready to go head first. I was still spinning, I knew I was going to crash. So I rolled over on my side. I tried to get my hand up to cover my ear, but too late, so I busted my eardrum…black, black black…The same thing with my legs. The left side was fine, it didn't touch the water. So they fished me out of the water. I wasn’t unconscious, but I was pretty sore

and sorry, and then you have to…you don't have to, but you should go and dive again. I wasn’t going to off that tower and the five-metre was too low. The only other tower in Hobart was in Sandy Bay. We all drove down there. You had to swim out to the tower. I was fully recovered by that time, a bit sore and stiff. I was only home for fourteen days, so I wasn’t going to waste it….I wanted the coaching from my coach. I still had ambitions of going to the Games.

But anyway I swam out. And that tower was about seven metres. Not quite as high as it needed to be, but I hadn’t dived there for two or three years. I raced out and did a one and a half somersault, forward this time, and got a nice perfect vertical entry straight in. But instead of eighteen feet of water, there was only about ten. About the height of this room. So I no sooner hit the top of the water,

a bit like dropping a stick in it goes straight down. You normally punch the water as you go in, to stop your hands coming back, but when I hit the bottom of the river my hands were pushed back here. I damaged the backs of both my hands, my lips were closed, but you don’t clench your teeth, and there was enough freedom of movement for my jaw to go up. I broke my four front teeth, one came out,

they were still broken below the gum line and I had fourteen fillings. But I wasn’t going to miss my holiday, so I put up with the broken teeth until I went back to Sydney, a fortnight later. Of course, that fixed my diving.

Oh yes. I finished up winning the Tasmanian championship four years in a row, the high diving championship. But that was later, six months or so later, twelve months later.

No.

I was just thick. Slow learnings, some of us…

Why didn’t I join the navy? Again, just circumstances. The naval depot was right next door to the Sea Scout depot. Yes, I probably … If I hadn’t joined the army, undoubtedly I would have joined the navy. There’s little doubt about that, but life wasn’t meant … It wasn’t meant for be. And looking at the things, the places that I've been, I'm delighted now I joined the army.

Yes, I had the chance to learn a mechanical trade, and that gave me the chance. And that has stood me in good stead with my inventions, because I make all my prototypes. I have quite a machine shop outside in the garage and I make all my own. And in that way,

you're not divulging your invention to someone else by saying, “I want you to make this and this is why." Most people want to know why they are making something. So it's helped me. And it doesn’t matter what it is, I can turn my hand to any trade now, thanks to the army. In fact that brought up my first invention during the war, but that's another story.

At school, of course, I learned geography and yes, I knew of the other countries in the world. I knew of England because my parents came from there. My great-great-great-grandfather came from there. My mother came from South Africa. Obviously I knew about Africa. And my great-grandfather,

who went to the Boer War, I remember a story from him. I never ever saw him, he was dead before I was born, but my grandfather told me that his biggest problem in Africa was the ticks. And they found that the only way from preventing the ticks from infesting the human body, because everything was covered in ticks, was to have a teaspoon full of kerosene every day. And that permeated through the skin and protected them from ticks.

That’s the only story I remember from the Boer War, other than true stories from people who have written about the Boer War. There’s a grandfather clock over by my shoulder. My great-grandfather was a carpenter, he brought out from Scotland with him the timber and some clockwork. He built that cabinet, and a chap bythe name of Goldsmith, in Hobart,

he made up the clockwork, fitted it into the case. And it tells everything that the modern digital watch will do these days. The day, the month, the month of the year, and all the time. The only reason it’s not going is because it makes so much noise when it ticks the quarter hour and the half hour and the hour. It keeps you awake at night. It actually has cat gut for…

The weights are about this long, that diameter. They weigh about ten pounds each. And you wind it up with a handle and just the weight comes down. But it's actually catgut and it's still there, it still works. Poor cat.

It’s a lovely clock. It’s a family heirloom.

A question I’ve never thought about….

No. I just naively accepted what the politicians decided for Australia. School in those days, I think was…not so much limited, but I learned more about Tasmania than most other things. Also because with my grandparents in Devonport, we’d catch the train and go to Devonport.

Plus the fact that when I was a child, we only had candles. No electricity, no radio. Have you ever heard of a crystal set?

Well, I had a crystal set and my mother and my father … My mother used to play the piano, while my father conducted a gymnastics class over the radio at 7ZL,

that was another way of earning some extra money. But that was a bit later when there was electricity. But I remember vividly going to bed, and spending anything up to half an hour trying to find the right position on the crystal set to listen to 7HO. WE had no electricity. There was electricity available in the city, but not in our house. We couldn’t afford to have it on. There was no sewage. There was just the night cart

that would come around the early hours of the morning. So you made a point of not being there. But it wasn’t very far from my veranda bedroom, and there was no door on the bedroom, only a roll down piece of canvas to stop it from being too windy. One night, in the early hours of the morning, I heard a female voice crying out, “Help, help, help! Come and help me." And that repeated, it went on and one. So I went in and woke Dad and it was…

In the back of the yard was my grandfather’s canary cage. It was as big as this room. Quite large. And it was coming from behind there, and we knew that an old lady lived in the back behind us. And the Sunday school was just one door removed. Not the church just the room where we had the Sunday school. My father went round there and found the poor old girl had locked herself in the lavatory, the outside toilet. And the night cart man was due,

She was worried he would come while she was there.

I was in the army, and they were very concerned, and they made sure … I volunteered to go to the Middle East. I thought, 'I'm in the army, I can go.' But they had friends.

Gilly Potts was a friend of theirs, and he was my boss, so they said, “Don’t let him go Gil." So when I applied to go, he tore up my application. It didn’t go anywhere and I didn’t know I could have taken it further at the time. It was some years later when Gilly Potts went off on holidays, on leave, and he was replaced by a captain from the Middle East, who had come back, just for the three weeks he was away. So I was about,

I think I was seventeen at the time, probably pushing eighteen, I don’t know exactly. So I waltzed in to this new officer and said, "Excuse me, sir? Do you think I should join the AIF [Australian Imperial Force]?” He said, “Sign here, son." So I signed the papers and took them home, and it took me another few days to talk my Mum and Dad into it. Dad didn't want me to go, obviously from his experience in the First World War, and mother adamant I wasn’t going to go.

So I got him on side to talk Mum into signing the papers. So when Gilly came back from his holidays, I was gone. I was in the AIF. I had moved away, not out of Hobart at this stage, to a place called Elwick Showground, which is a few miles out of Hobart, but only about a mile from where Gilly Potts then had the workshop.

Yes.

AEME, and later in about‘42, it became the Royal Australian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, RAEME.

Yes. The colour patch was slightly different because of the RAEME, to the normal one. But then you had the Australia patch

across the shoulder here, with the corps below. But once you got into the AIF uniform, you only had the AIF insignia on the collar and a RAEME across here. And then you just performed your job, technically, as distinct from an ordinary front line soldier.

About ‘42 or ‘43.

It was exciting, something different. Dad had been to the war, why shouldn’t I go? All my friends had gone. All my friends, basically, were my school friends, yes, as I said a lot of them had polio then and they couldn’t go. And when my friends came back from the Middle East, it just seemed the right thing to do. I thought I should, but also there it was something. It was different.

I was in the army, why shouldn’t I be there? And New Guinea wasn’t that far away. Little did I know…

Yes. I don’t know that I thought so much about …I was not impressed with the way the Japanese performed, Pearl Harbour, and okay, we were fighting the Japanese. I disliked them. I finished up later working for them, with Mazda.

Yes, I wanted to do my bit, but what it was going to be, I didn’t know at the time. It seemed to be the right thing to do.

I was Tasmanian. That sounds a bit silly, but you grow up in an environment and you know it well, so you think of that. I never ever thought of myself as not living in Tasmania.

After the war I would come back to Tasmania and that was my life. I didn't think about all the other things that life could hold. I have no desire to go and live back in Tasmania, yet it is a lovely place. It’s nearer to England in the colour of the foliage than Australia. Australia is an entirely different type of foliage to Tasmania.

They have gum trees, yes, but the greenery is different.

It is.

The way it happened disturbed me. The fact that,

with prior knowledge, that was not used in America, and they didn't take advantage of it, I thought, "How stupid." I have a queer brain. I can put myself into the mind of other people, or think I can, and try to think the way they do. And that enables me to think, 'What would they do?'

And what would I then do to counteract that. And I believe there are a lot of things we could do as far at terrorism is concerned. I won’t go into that now, but thinking along the same lines I developed a theory of what we could do to prevent it. I can’t do anything about it, but it’s just the way my mind works. I didn’t like what the Japanese did.

Yes. I also was aware that we had a lot of Australian troops there, and it concerned me that they were not evacuated soon enough. Whether they could have been is another matter. Some of them could have been. And in particular what they did to the nurses, when they sank the ship, and didn’t rescue the nurses. Only one or two survived.

Bullwinkle was one of them. My aunt…not really my aunt but another friend of my family, Doctor Porter, his wife, who became a bit like aunt and uncle to me, because they lived in Melbourne when I came across I stayed with them. She was in Singapore at the time. She got out. And it became more personal. I don’t know whether at that stage I hated the Japanese, but I certainly despised them,

And it didn’t concern me that I was going away to try and do something about it. Fear is something that I don’t think you feel. I've got a Royal Humane Society award in my office. I rescued some people from drowning, it was nothing, it was just doing something.

Oh, that happened after the war…Because during the war I was a tradesman, a craftsman, and I had been promoted to the full rank of corporal at the time. Where the workshop was, or is, in Hobart, it’s about a kilometre across to the river. One lunchtime, two of the staff came racing back,

they said, "A boat’s overturned in the river and three people are crying out for help. Can't swim." I could swim and I was also trained in diving at that stage, not very well. And I went over and I had a belt on that had a little bit of a hook, I could easily put it on. We took some rope with us, and we tied it onto my belt,

and I tied that on to my belt and swam out I guess about half a mile….no, it would be less than that, but it would be a fair way. And I know the weight of the rope was pulling me under, and I just…because I could let the rope go, I could have just unhooked it. But I had about the length of this room to go, and I was determined I would try and make it. I got to the boat, and I was then able to hold onto the boat, and enable it to swing around with the current

towards the bank. And we got to a certain point, it was upside down and it was starting to sink. So I grabbed two of them and got them to pull me back in, and I swam back for the third one before the boat went down. And that's about it. A swimming exercise. But the interesting part about it, I think, is that the father rang me sometime later, I think it was the following day, and he said, “Would you please call in and see me? I've got something for you."

His factory starts with a V….Anyway, I called in to his factory near the centre of Hobart and he said, “Here’s a box for you." It was a box full of jams and chutneys. And I thought, “Is that what you thought of your sons?” It was still a nice gesture.

I can't hear you.

Yes. Valentine was his name of all things. Valentine.

No, I determined to do that from the time I first volunteered to go to the Middle East, I was determined to go. I just waited for the opportunity.

There was no doubt in my mind that I was going at some stage.

I was at Elwick Showground for about three weeks, and then they were forming a workshop in Brisbane called the Tenth Motor Transport, TMT Workshop. And a few other Tasmanians were selected to go there. We had people from most states. A major by the name of Simon Mark Moller was the commanding officer.

And I was still a craftsman, but I decided I would like to go to England so I volunteered for the air force. And at that stage, they were doing the training in Canada, but by the time my papers got through, I don’t know whether somebody got at them or whether there were no vacancies left anyway, so I didn’t get to the air force. So we formed the unit in Brisbane, at Mt Gravatt, and then we went to… New Guinea.

The 10 MT Workshop.

At that stage? None. It was just another unit that was going to…We didn’t know where we were going or what we were going to do, but they put us on board a Liberty ship, the John Jacob Astor. It was built about ’42, ‘43. It was built in Portland, Oregon, where my daughter now lives…

Oh yes.

Yes, I had had a lot, because I could pull a gun apart and repair it, I knew what to do. I guess the crucial part is we were trained as infantrymen, not technical. The fact that we were technical was a plus. We did everything that an infantry soldier did,

as far Bren guns, Vickers guns, whatever, and we had to learn to pull them to pieces with our eyes shut, and put them back together. In case you had to do it in the dark.

No. You don’t know anything very much.

Scuttlebutt or rumours. No one tells you. It is the old story of ‘need to know’. One of the most important things that they drilled into us, wherever you get to, wherever you're going, you don't tell anybody. So the enemy doesn’t find out. The old story is that even wheat has ears, it's true. If you say something in a hotel, or whatever, and I didn't drink in those days,

I used to look after my mates; you don’t know who's listening, and who can pass it on. Especially in the early part of the war, Japanese ships were still coming to Tasmania, or just before the war, and loading up with zinc and scrap iron, which they were throwing back at us later on during the war. That’s how dumb our politicians were.

There was but I can’t think of it.

Pig Iron Bob. Yes.

No idea. They had no idea either.

More traumatic for them than for me, obviously. But yes, it wasn’t something that I thought,

'Yeah, gee this is good I'm going.' No, I made up one thing in my mind, I wouldn't come back maimed, I had no intention of coming back home if I was injured. I’d seen all my father’s friends from the First World War with legs shot off, arms shot off….Not for me. That was my thought. What one would do in the realistic situation, I don't know, because people have survived. This chap in America, caught by rocks,

cut his arm off with a pocket-knife. Live or die.

Yes. You don’t think about things like that, they just happen.

Yes. "Keep your head down," facetiously. He said, "Look, we'd love to know where you are."

So he gave me some numbers. Now each one identified to a part of New Guinea…. Well, we assumed New Guinea because the war was over in the Middle East, so it had to be New Guinea, or one of the islands, not just New Guinea. So I had a means of letting them know where I was, surreptitiously, and of course I knew they wouldn’t pass it on. And of course they had blackouts in Hobart in those days. My father was an air raid warden. We dug a big bomb shelter in the backyard, just in case.

As it turns out, it was probably unnecessary, but you don’t know that at that time of life. I know, come night time, the first thing we’d do is draw the curtains before we turned the light on. We did have electricity by then.

No.

I’m just trying to think back

about a poem my father gave me by Rudyard Kipling, 'My Son,' I think it was called.

That’s the one.

Yes. And he gave me a First World War diary, that told you all the things you could do in Europe, in war-time.

It’s out in the other room.

My great-grandfather’s watch….I didn’t take it with me. That’s the one that Martin Cash stole and he got back again, and it was a hand me down as an heirloom. I must find it somewhere. It’s only a … I want to hand it on to my descendants.

No. But I got a present on my twenty-first birthday. When my mother and father were married, they had a wedding cake. They kept one tier in a cardboard box and put it away for my twenty-first birthday. I didn’t know this, of course, at the time.

We had a very big mulberry tree in the backyard, and there's a story about that. When I was this high…And Mrs Gult lived across the road and kept on complaining to my parents about the mulberry stains on the front of her house, and that you Freddy Millar was throwing mulberries at the house, which I wasn't. And she came across one particular day, very much upset, and I happened to be standing with my father. And she started yelling at me about throwing these…mulberries.

It just so happened that one of the birds that was the culprit flew past and dropped one on the path right beside us. Dad said, “There’s your culprit. Up there!” So she apologised. But that mulberry tree, my mother made some mulberry wine. When? I don't know. But in the mail, in New Guinea, came a big parcel, for parcels in those days. Rectangular…

Square in shape and rectangular. And I wondered what it was, it was reasonably heavy. And there was a sticker on the outside coming from the post office, having been passed through the examination, it had been inspected. And when I opened it up it was a loaf of bread. And when I opened that…Oh, there was two boxes. One was a rectangular one,

obviously with some cake in it. When I opened up the loaf of bread there was some wine inside. You see they had hollowed out a loaf of bread, let it get hard, go stale, and put the wine inside and put some string around it. But there was only that much wine left in the bottom of it, and a little note stuck on the side, 'Have a happy 21st from the posties in Brisbane.' The cake, they didn't open that one.

They probably guessed what it was. They obviously wondered what the parcel was, it weighed so much. And when I opened it up, here was this beautiful piece of cake, with all the icing on it, and all my friends were around, "You can have a piece of wedding cake, come birthday cake." I put my knife in the cake and the whole thing collapsed. When I looked at the back of it, there was a small hole where a mouse, or mice, in a cardboard carton for twenty years…

More than twenty-one years? So as far as the present was concerned it wasn’t much use.

Where or when? The date I don't remember, but sometime in…'43. I forget the actual dates now. We were in Brisbane at the time, and we were given the order to move, and of course they didn't say where to. They shipped us by truck down to

Brisbane port, and we got on John Jacob Astor, which I mentioned was built in Portland, Oregon. And it was the first trip of the John Jacob Astor of a wartime nature. But we were in a convoy of about another dozen ships that was going somewhere north, we weren't going south.

We zigzagged most of the way because of the submarine possibility. We had several scares on the way, and because we had been trained in using ack-ack guns and machine guns, we were allocated a couple of guns to man in case of an emergency. There were some other Australian units on board, and some American units down the stern of the ship. The idea was to keep us apart, so we couldn't fight….I'm joking.

Yes…No, we got on well with them. But the bosun of the ship, for some reason, I got on very well with, and became friends. In fact, I finished up helping him with some of the jobs. It kept me occupied during the day. You were given…three meals a day, but all at once, in the same container. So it wasn’t exactly an easy way

of keeping separate from breakfast, lunch and dinner. Everybody had a different way of treating that. But really, we almost ate it all at once because it was so intermingled in the dixies. I had a few jobs that I helped the bosun with on the boats.

Servicing some of the anti-aircraft weapons,

because I have worked on them before. It was interesting. I can’t think of his name now. It probably doesn’t matter very much. Because he is much older than I am he is probably no longer with us. It was interesting talking to him and getting the American attitude to the war.

Oh, yes. They built several thousand Liberty ships. They were all of the same design.

There was a mass production process building the Liberty ships. I just happened to be on the John Jacob Astor, but they were all the same. In Hobart recently I found the museum down there they have a miniature one so I took some photos of that. I haven’t seen one since the war.

With the Americans? No.

I was up in New Guinea. I think that was later on.

In Brisbane there was an antipathy between Americans and Australians because of the Yanks taking all the girls. That was all that was about.

As simple as that.

Yes. We were going the same place for the same reason. And there were no girls on board.

Yes, they were all coming back from the Philippines.

I made some friends with Americans. But…I don’t know if I had any anti-American feeling. I’m not conscious of it now. And the fact that I made friends with some of them there, I think,

probably speaks for itself. They were human beings, from a different part of the world. And I was from a different part of the world, I was from Tasmania. I was not an Australian.

We did, actually….not segregate by states, but if you have someone from your hometown you have more in common to talk about. As time went by, yes,

you made friends with the people that you have some sort of affinity with. That’s something that life defines you. But initially it was by states.

I did have a girlfriend back in Hobart, before I left to go away, but I made a point to break it off completely.

I was very conscious of being injured during the war, and I just swore to myself that I wouldn't come back. As I said how real that would be was a different matter….But I was very much aware of that. When we got to Brisbane, we went to Hendra, a suburb of Brisbane after we left Mt Gravatt, for a final…trying to incorporate the unit, as a unit, because we came from all over Australia. And there was a racetrack.

Hendra Racetrack. And a racehorse owner had a house opposite…They had rented a house, and a vacant block, and we set up our camp there to prepare for the move. And there were lots of dances on in Brisbane, so I took his daughter along to the dances. We were friends, but that was it And I didn’t correspond with anybody much while I was away.

No. I had no desire to….Don’t ask me why I felt that way, it was just as I felt at the time.

A bit of an eye-opener, and a bit of making me aware of what I had let myself in for.

Coming into Gili Gili, that was the landing area, going up the bay, dozens and dozens of sunken ships, blown up, and a lot of them Japanese, some Australian, a lot of landing craft. Blown up…a real mess. And it was my first awareness of what war was really about.

It didn’t strike fear in me. Not that sort of feeling. The conscious thought, 'Well, this isn't going to be a piece of cake after all.' Not that I really thought it would be, but when you've never experienced war, you don’t know what you are going to front. I knew I wasn’t a front line soldier. If I had been an infantryman, it might have been a different matter.

So I didn’t have the same concern as they would have. I wasn’t going to stand up there to shoot and be shot at….I thought.

We learned more technical stuff. I knew how to identify the Japanese aircraft and their ships, but the aircraft was the more likely possibility. As far as the Japanese were concerned, we were taught the tricks

they would get up to in the jungle. But the jungle is so dense. You don’t completely comprehend how dense that jungle is until you're in it. Now, I couldn’t see you from here, it was that thick. It would vary naturally in parts, but in the dense part where we were it was so thick you'd have to use a machete to cut your way through you couldn’t walk through it. In Australia, even in our tropical rainforest,

you can push your way through it. Not there, it was too dense. Not all the same as I said, but that part was extremely dense. They had cut roads, of course. The army had cut roads with bulldozers and there were quite a number of coconut plantations, that was okay, that was open ground, but once you got to the jungle, that was thick.

Just over a year.

Yes. When we actually landed we had some Australians with some Australian trucks, and two and a half ton National trucks there. And we had no idea where we were going to go, because they don't tell you. And I suspect that their officers knew. Remember I am down the bottom of the chain, at that stage. And I vividly recall

my shock at seeing Gurney Airstrip with all the smashed up aircraft from the bombing raids, the strafing raids, that the Japanese…A lot of our aircraft were caught on the ground, and a lot of the Japanese aircraft around the bay that had been shot down. But when you're on the ground, you haven't got much chance to defend yourself. And what Gurney Airstrip consisted of really was metal strips.

Not corrugated, but metal pressed strips that would stick into the ground, they would be about the width of this room, and all interlinked together, just laid on the ground, cleared by bulldozers, and that was the airstrip. Nothing like you expect when you go out to Tullamarine or somewhere like that. It was rather different.

Yes.

I was. I expected to see….No, I didn’t expect to see something similar in a civilization, because we were going to a country inhabited by natives. I’d never been to Moresby, so I didn’t know what that was like. No, I wasn’t really surprised. I was surprised by the fact that that was all they had. Remember, only one aircraft can take off at a time. So if there's a Japanese raid coming over,

which often happened, you haven’t got a chance to get off very much.

I don’t remember in terms of time. But the first few months it was fairly consistent at night. Never by day, by night. And it gradually eased off as the war moved further north. It became less of a problem. One of the reasons that Milne Bay was fairly well serviced

by the Japanese, was because where I finished up later on, at Kuiara, Samarai Island was a Catalina base…So it was obviously like the airstrip at Gurney, it was a target.

I didn’t know how of course.

No, that was something that was my precursor to my going away in my own mind. I don’t think I thought much about it at the time. Despite the raids, we were all invincible while we were young. Nothing can happen to you, until it does.

I guess the first thing is you hear an aircraft coming over. You don’t know whether it's one of yours or theirs, to start with. Then you start to think, 'What's that sound like?' And after a while, I had never heard a Japanese aircraft before, you can pick the difference between the sound of the Zeros and the Australian aircraft.

And then okay, they're coming for us today or tonight. The first thing you do is get down in your trench and put your hands over your ears, and hope the bomb doesn’t come anywhere near you. We were also aware that they had specific targets. Sure, we would be a target by day, but Milne Bay is a long stretch, it's a long bay, and there's a lot of plantations there.

The obvious target was the airstrip, and they knew where it was, because it was easier to identify by night because you’ve got dirt all around and no foliage. And so while there were no lights on, you’d still be able to identify it, so that became a primary target. And despite the Japanese claim of kamikaze pilots, they're not all built the same way. They were volunteers, kamikaze pilots.

But the people who flew the bombers, they were happy to get back home. So they'd drop their bomb loads wherever they possibly could. If they could pick a target, fine. But by night, it wasn’t easy. So our chances of survival, I thought, were pretty good, and as it turns out, I was right. But you don’t know at the time. So you still get into your trench and play it safe.

“That missed!”

Nothing much more than that. “A bit closer tonight!”

I guess there was a certain….We're all human beings, you have some sort of reaction. I'm not aware of fear, concern perhaps, but not the sort of thing where I'd get up and run away, in the hope of protection. I'm not built that way.

But that was me. Others were…yes, they were very concerned. They were frightened stiff. I don’t blame them. If I had been sensible enough I would have been, too.

They were, they just chattered away. You can pick nervous people quite easily. I think part of the reason that I wasn't so concerned; I had nobody back home to be concerned about,

apart from my mother and father, but a lot of them were married and had families. And they were concerned about their families, and what would happen to them. I think family relationships created more problems for Servicemen than anything else. Concerns about the wife going off with somebody else, or whatever. And it happened to some of my friends, my close friends, so I know it's real. I watched one chap in particular

degenerate into…I won't say a sub-human being, into a tearful mess, because his wife went off with one of his best friends, and had the temerity to write and tell him. If she had enough sense not to say anything until he got home, maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad. But when you're in those circumstances, and miles from home, not so easy. That was all he had on his mind.

Yes, a tiny bit. 'Gee, I wish I was home instead of being here.' But I guess the fact that, I kept employed pretty well all the time, doing something, and you didn’t have a lot of spare time on your hands to just stop and think. When I went to bed I was tired enough to sleep. One of the worst things, I think, initially…it wasn't so bad after a while, we'd have to work at night

to keep up with the repair program, and we had lights on, we were a sitting target. And we had no idea whether the Japs were still around the area or not. We knew the planes were, but the Japs didn’t all leave, because they couldn’t evacuate them all, so some were hiding in the jungle. Now they could creep up to the edge of the jungle and pop us all off one at a time, and we couldn't have done nothing about it. We couldn't have seen them; we couldn't have found them…

…After a while, we found it wasn’t happening, but the first few weeks, months I guess, you were conscious of it. It’s just like me sitting here under a light, I'm exposed, you can't protect yourself.

Yes, yes, until you got used to it, and then you just went about your job. Occasionally, you'd…'I hope they're not there tonight.'

Me? Not quite so bad. Everybody had skin rashes of some sort, and I had….Later on when I was doing a lot of underwater work, I got ear problems, which were most unpleasant, when you've got vile earaches to the point where you can’t move your head left or right. Infected ears. But other than that, I wasn't too bad.

But a lot of our people got a form of dermatitis that…Well, the few that are still left alive. There's only three out of about three hundred from Tassie. It was so severe; they had it for the rest of their lives, some of the forms of dermatitis.

Yes. Fungal infections. The call it dermatitis, it's a generic name. But there were fungal infections over the body that no sort of treatment

that we had then, was beneficial. And of course, intestinal problems were pretty common. While we put chlorine in the water….Chlorine itself was used as a gas in the First World War. I know, myself, because I have been subjected to it when I was in [the] UK. And that is a poison, and yet we put it in our water to purify it.

We still do. It’s chlorinated, not to the level where it’s poisonous but chlorine can be accumulative. And if you have it in too strong a dose it’s not good for you.

I don’t know. I’m not a doctor. You see, the chlorine in the water, I don't know what effect it has, but the medical fraternity are now saying this can have all different sorts of different effects,

they can cause cancers. Excess zinc can cause a cancer of the colon. Now, I don’t know that these things have been proven, but they're claimed at the moment. So society is looking at a whole new aspect of nutrition, and I have been taking these things for the last…I'm reasonably fit for my age, and that is because I've looked after myself with extra nutrition. Because the nutrition is no longer in the food that we buy. It’s been taken out of the soil for thousands of years.

The same ten percent of the soil that the world’s been using. There’s only ten percent arable land mass on the world, and it's been the same ten percent we’ve been farming for generations. So we cannot get from food all the nutrients we need.

My major problem is the tinnitus, which is like a

railway train going through my head all the time. The hissing noise it makes. I’ve learned to adapt. That gave me claustrophobia for a while, because it….The doctor said, “Well, Fred, you can't get rid of that, so you will have to bloody well get used to it." That didn't help me. So for a couple of years I suffered badly from claustrophobia, because of the awareness. I’m conscious of it now while I’m talking about it, but I can now put it out of my mind, put my mind onto other things, and not thinking about it.

Bomb blast. Bombs going off, and also the fact, in Malaya, I was involved in artillery shooting up there. No such things as earmuffs in those days, people didn't know about them.

Even firing a rifle. People who sit in front of loudspeakers don’t realize that the continual vibration can physically damage.

If you tap your hand like that twenty-four hours a day for several years, you’d have a pretty bad bruise, yet you can hardly feel it. Vibration, which is the only thing that is universal to everything in the universe…We vibrate as human beings. We emanate a radioactivity, an electromagnetic field. The body is a battery,

we’ve got positive and negative ions in the system. And the actual effect, it can be dramatic. And if you change that effect, the chemical reaction can be different in the system. You see, most diseases are psychosomatic, because the mind thinks about things…Not broken bones, that's different. And yet that can be fixed by vibration. There was an American colonel….A British colonel who did a trip from the source

of the Mississippi to the mouth of the Mississippi. And the first night he was there, he had a guide, going down by canoe, and the first night he was there, in a native village, they stopped off on the canoe trip to spend the night. And a boy was brought in with a broken limb. And I don’t remember now whether it was a leg or an arm. It was a broken limb. And in the morning the young boy was all right. Now, how can it happen? The witchdoctor

wrapped that limb in a leaf, some form of leaf. All that you're doing is…When the bone re-grows, it vibrates, and that's how you get the bone gradually together. In fact, all they did was accelerate the vibrational effect, or the leaf did, and they've found by experience it works.

Curare we use to deaden the eye so the doctors can look at it. He discovered that on this trip down the…

down the Amazon river. It took him months and months. Then, when he got near the mouth they stopped off at a … the river was wider and flatter. And there was a hut, an unoccupied hut. He and his guide went into that hut to spend the night there and there was a snake in the ceiling, a spitting snake, they're well known, they spit into the eyes of the victim

to blind them, and then of course it’s easy for the snake to catch the victim. And they did the same thing with this colonel. He was blinded and the guide said, “I will be back." Their conversation was pretty limited, so he disappeared. The colonel didn’t know what he to do. Obviously the guide killed the snake, otherwise I don’t know what would have happened. So off he went and he came back several days later with a witchdoctor.

The witchdoctor put some leaves over his eyes and two or three days later he regained his eyesight. A lot of things we don’t know about the human anatomy. A lot of the medication has come from that sort of research.

Yes, a lot. We had some working in the unit with us, as mechanics or as tradesmen or as labourers.

They would come around bartering coconuts and whatever for food, exchange of clothing. I found them…Of course the language barrier was a bit of a problem, but of course they were always very pleasant, always smiling. They were as helpful as they could possibly be. They were marvelous.

I was looking after two things. I was using the lathe. We had electric generators built on a trailer, and the machines were all on the back of vehicles. The vehicles stood up pretty high so you were a pretty good target. And I used to use the machinery, look after the machinery lathe. And because I was trained in gun equipments and recuperator systems in particular.

The recuperator is the part of the gun that when the gun recoils from its shot, it pushes it back into a neutral position, so it has to slow the barrel down progressively, so it doesn’t go bang and break something at the back. And recuperators were a bit of a specialty so I did a bit of work on those. A funny incident happened. We had a sergeant by the name of Simmons, Bernie Simmons. He had been a radio announcer in Hobart. How he got into a workshop, I don't know, it doesn't matter…

So they put him in the office as a clerk. One particular gun was giving us some problems. So I got hold of an air compressor, a hand operated one, and connected it to one end of the recuperator, and a rod about the thickness of that tube there, holds some leather cups that seals against the side of the walls of the outer casing.

And it was stuck. So by pumping air into it, I'd hoped to push it out. So we pumped and pumped and pumped, and Bernie Simmons came past, we'd been pumping for about an hour, we had no pressure gauge, we had no idea what pressure was inside it. He said, “Oh, pull it out." And so at the moment he pulled it out, he pushed it to one side, it released with so much force…Fortunately, his hand

was pushed away, and the piece of metal, about that diameter, went right through a palm tree, about…oh, thirty metres away. It went…about halfway through. So the pressure we had in it, I have no idea. But he didn’t lose his hand, he got a few bruises, but that was it. As we got off the ship to go to our first camp...Milne Bay is notoriously rain prone,

it rained every day, very heavily, lots of mud everywhere. We came to a bridge. We could see the handrails, but they had been broken off. What had happened, I don't know, but they'd been blown off somehow. But the bridge was underwater, about that much I guess. The river was playing a banker, which was pretty common apparently. And George Hope was a jockey,

so he wasn’t very big, and the packs we were carrying were very heavy, it had all the stuff there, and beside the kit bag, was on the back of the truck. We decided we'd walk across the bridge and the truck would come after us, just in case. If the trunk went, too bad. So we started walking across the bridge, and George took a step in the wrong direction, on the flow of the river, against the flow of the river. He fell off the bridge,

his pack took him down underneath this….The bridge was only about the length of the room, which would have been about ten metres, no, no…seven or eight metres. So Ken Lampard and myself raced across the other side, thinking of diving in to try and rescue him. And the next thing we saw was George pop up the other side of the bridge, so we grabbed his pack, and between the two of us we were able to pull him out of the river. He survived.

Been off the ship about ten minutes. It was a good start.

Initially we were in tents, until we moved a bit farther away and…We had our vehicles, but we also had some…

The natives built some huts for us. That was a bit more substantial. Then instead of sleeping on the wet ground, we didn’t have stretchers in those days, we had to build ourselves some stretchers…Stretchers were too much to carry. I remember one night sleeping on my rifle to keep my body off the wet ground. Ever tried sleeping on a rifle? A .303? I didn’t sleep too well. I wasn’t the only one, of course.

We just had a ground sheet. It was pouring with rain so I wanted that on top.

They were paid by ANGAU, A-N-G-A-U, ANGAU. Australian New Guinea…I can’t remember.

It wasn’t Auxiliary, but it was something like that. No, ANGAU was a civilian force. They were civilians who

employed natives, not the military. But no, ANGAU looked after the payment of them. They were paid for what they did. How much? I have no idea.

Not too good. Very repetitive. At one stage, we had goldfish for six months. That was down in Kwiara. But we had goldfish,

being prawn-type things in a sort of tomato sauce. What would you call them? Anyway, I call them goldfish. That’s what they looked like at the time. But yes, they were nice for the first day or two, but when you have them every day for six months, it ain’t too good. “What are we having today, cook?” "What do you think? What would you like?"

The cook was an alcoholic. He had a cut right across his forehead from a motorbike accident, when he was drunk, this was before he joined the army or was conscripted or whatever. And he found that by drinking essence of lemon it had an alcoholic content. And I wondered why he kept on ordering essence of lemon, what he was using it for, and he would drink essence of lemon, just to get drunk.

It is very sad.

But you have no choice. He was the cook.

Yes, I did, but that was more of my own decision. Whenever I got a chance I would go down to the airstrip and talk to the air force and see if I found any of my mates there. There was always a naval ship around the place, and yep, you'd go and talk to them.

“Where do you come from?" "Which town do you come from?" "What news have you got of home?" We didn’t know. I’ve got a old copy of New Guinea Gold there. It’s pretty old. We occasionally used to get a copy of that and it gave us some idea of what was happening in other parts of the world. We had no radio. The officers had one in their mess but we didn’t have one. We relied upon other people telling us what was going on.

We didn’t know. Had we lost the war? Had we won the war?

Always. That’s one of the disconcerting factors of military life. There’s always somebody prepared to start a rumour, whether it's right or wrong. Just for the fun of it, just for the hell of it.

Not really. I could probably conjure up a few that happened.

There was always the rumour about, "Oh, we’re going home next month, " or whatever. Or, "We’re moving up to Moresby." Or "We're moving up to Bougainville." One of our chaps, because they had limited technical facilities around the fighting area….I sort of expected we might be required to go and back them up closer, especially with the artillery. But for some reason,

they preferred to bring the weapons back, or some of them, or just leave them and move on. It depends on how badly damaged they were, whether they had been blown up by the enemy. But he went to Barringella [NSW] to do a job there and when he came back he was full of stories about where we were going, what we were going to do, where our next move would be. And the fact that we were going to get rid of our big boss, he was going. He was not terribly popular.

He had had a second hand car yard

when he volunteered for the army, and he told all sorts of stories about his experience and his ability to command a workshop, but he knew absolutely nothing about it.

A bit useless. And of course, because he knew he was useless, he became arrogant and demanding and asking for impossible things to happen. “That job’s got to be done by such and such a time.” It might be a two day and he expected it to be done in two hours. He had no understanding of what was real.

By talking to each other, complaining to each other about it. There was not much you could do, except grizzle. You had between you as another rank, the RSM [Regimental Sergeant Major] or QSM, Quartermaster Sergeant [Major], Warrant Officer Two, or Warrant Officer Class One, between you and the officers.

And you’d grizzle to him, he wouldn’t pass it on of course. And how do you go to your boss and say, “Everybody hates you and you don’t know what you’re doing”? It doesn’t happen.

Not in war-time. If he was doing something wrong, physically wrong, making us do things that we shouldn’t be doing, that's a different matter. It wasn’t that sort of problem. It was one of lack of knowledge, awareness and ability.

The old story is if he’s no good, promote him. Promote him out of the way where he can be useless.

Yes. We were all in the same boat. You get people who disagree and don’t like each other. And as I said, we all vibrate an affinity of some sort.

If you take a cardio encephalograph reading of us three and Linda, we’d all have a harmonic. But you bring a stranger into the room, you subconsciously register this. You do a cardio encephalograph of their brain power, brain wave length or frequency, it's different. So you have some form of antagonism. But you can, by determination, make yourself, not popular, but friendly

with somebody whom you don't really like by your attitude. And making up your mind that you're not going to be an enemy.

I’ve done that a lot throughout my life with people I had to work with. I knew they didn’t like me and I didn’t like them. I didn’t set out to ingratiate myself, but I set out myself to not be thought of as an enemy, if you like. Because some people can be quite antagonistic and you can help yourself that way.

Exactly. It’s very easy to make an enemy of a so-called friend. Unfortunately, our ego is our problem.

Kwiara was a slip yard built by civilians, or some private company or some private individual and the army decided to take it over and man it with army people, because we were getting supplies from Hobart

on military ships, small ships. This was to be able to run them in close to the coast, or around the coast. And the first port of call was Milne Bay, but that was difficult, they didn't have anywhere to slip them there, not conveniently. But Kwiara was built opposite Samarai Island. Samarai Island was initially a … Two brothers, Cyril and Russell Abel, ran a missionary service there

and they had a hundred and fifty odd natives there. But half of the island the Yanks had taken over and used it as a Catalina base. And because it was there and it was on the southern side of the tip and Kwiara was close they felt that as the Japs were moving further north it was reasonably safe to take over that property. And when I say that I’m mean

it was surrounded by jungle, and the whole area of the camp, not including the slip yard itself, which would be probably a hundred and forty or fifty metres long, the slipyard, But it was clear jungle, a small semi-flat area on a very hilly part of the coast of New Guinea. And four or five tennis courts…

…would be the total size of the area.

A hundred odd. We had huts there we slept in. Somehow I was up on the hill and the others weren't. But the camp itself was situated where the small ships could call there for repairs, or servicing, on the way around the coast to drop off supplies, where the bigger ships couldn’t get in. But they were building them in a hurry,

they didn’t have enough. The army was manning these craft, the army watercraft units. They were being built out of green timber in Tasmania; because they didn’t have time to cure dry them. They'd cork them and they'd be fine when they left Hobart, and it may have been weeks or months before they actually got up to us, they’d be leaking like a sieve.

The pumps were only just maintaining the equilibrium. The gaps between the planks was gradually getting greater as the timber…it was still swelling, the wood, the wood was green, so it wouldn’t take on water. They actually started to shrink a bit. So we had to slip them and plug, or cork, the gaps between the planks.

A special corking compound we had up there. In fact, you can almost use paper.

If you put dry paper into a wet environment it will swell. You wouldn’t use it on a boat, but you can use it for other things. So it was a timber-like material. You can even have slivers of wood, and hammer those in. Which I, in fact, had to use under the water. We couldn’t cope with the number of boats coming through, so I decided to … I said to the…

Captain Buckman was our commanding officer. A very different kettle of fish to Simon Mark Moller. And John Buckman he would be… would probably have the best physique of the male that I think I've seen. Very wide, massively wide shoulders and narrow hips. A typical first class rugby player, and he had played rugby, but he was a minister of religion who had joined the army, he was there.

I'll digress and say that I was still a craftsman, I was still at the bottom of the chain, but I went to him one day and said, “I would like to volunteer to do a course for a commission." And he said, “Oh I’ll think about it," and nothing happened for a while. But years later, I was in command of a unit that was going up on an exercise through Sydney and I knew where he was, at a church in Newtown, just outside Sydney, south of Sydney. I was a major at the time

and he was a captain, so I called in to see him. And I said, “Mr Buckman?” He didn’t recognise me, of course. And I said, “I want a salute from you, Captain Buckman." It was just a joke. And we had a long conversation about where, when, why and how but I was there and now I was above him. He was intrigued.

About the same as we did before, although there were different people there. Because I had been a Sea Scout and been involved in watercraft, I was an obvious choice to go there. And a few other Tasmanians came there, just for the engineering side. And I don’t recall, other than the cook creating problems, through drunkenness, that there was any major conflict.

You had to get on with people, there was no alternative, when you were stuck with them year in year out. A bit like a marriage, I suppose.

Very isolated. We would occasionally go across the Yanks for spare parts for whatever we could exchange. And across from us was another long island. It would be probably

half a kilometre away, and it formed almost a bay where we were situated. And it gave quite a bit of protection, weather-wise, to our camp, otherwise you couldn’t have slipped the boats, it would be too rough. And with Samurai out on the other end of the bay, it also helped to keep the waves down, because the roll of the Pacific can be ten, fifteen, twenty metres high, out to sea.

So because we had a surfice of boats to fix, I said, “Why don’t we build a diving set?” He said, “How?” I said, "You just use the gas mask, the respirator, gas mask, and connect it to the air compressor." He said, “What about your lungs, Fred?” I said, “Oh, the job’s got to be done, we’ll forget about that." Because you put oil into the air compressor to keep it lubricated,

so a certain amount of oil would come through the air line, and moisture. Anyway, I put some lead around my waist, and rigged up this diving set, and walked out under the … We had two wharves running parallel, so we could anchor a boat across them. So I could walk out into the shallows, and reach the hull of the small craft and managed to plug the gaps there.

So when we had done one side, when I had done one side, nobody else would volunteer because the place was alive with sharks. So we swung the boat around and did the other side. Linda said to me the other day, "Weren’t you scared of the sharks?” I said, "Yes, I was just after it." But then I walked into the water the first time, and…the schools of fish, the prawn-type fish swimming past, in their millions. This house is fairly big, but if you imagine this area

just a school of little fish, and all turning together. What sort of communication enables that to happen? And the same with a school of birds. Anyway they wouldn’t come in, but I saw this shark…There was so much food there. What would I look like to a shark the way I was? I probably wasn't looking like food, I hope.

Your first reaction is to turn around and run, but you can’t, you’ve got too much lead round your waist, all you can do is stand still. But after a few months of this, I became so familiar with them, that…At one stage, just the once, I reached out and touched the skin of a shark, it was half gone past, it was chasing a school, it was like sandpaper. It was like sandpaper. The skin is so rough.

No, just very, very rough, just like sandpaper.

Oh I don’t know. It was my idea, I wanted to do it. It was something I wanted to do.

It worked all right. With one exception, not exactly an exception…We had a lieutenant down at Kwiara by the name of Bill Pope. You’ve seen a slouch hat with the brim down? If you put a belt

or a tape measure around the outside of a slouch hat it’s a long way round. And his girth was bigger than the brim of a slouch hat. He was a fat man. He had been a lifesaver in the past, but he was a terribly fat man. And he said, “Okay Fred, I don’t need the diving helmet. I want to go down and have a look and see what you’re doing." So we put some weights around his waist and he came up again. He was too buoyant, it wouldn’t hold him down. So we put some more weights around his waist, this time we doubled it.

He said, "I can hold my breath for a minute, not a problem." A minute had gone past and I thought, 'Oh, he's being smart, he's being clever.' He didn't come up. About another twenty seconds went past, so I said to my mate, Nelly Kale, “Let’s see what’s happened." So we both dived in, and there he was, we'd put so much weight on him he couldn’t get back up again. He would push with his legs to bounce up and the weight would take him back down. So we grabbed him and pulled him back up and saved his life.

Some people do some silly things.

Well I had a secondary job. I was a Sea Scout and a Boy Scout, and I'd learned First Aid, hadn't I? So I became the RAP officer, the Regimental Aid Post. We had no doctors anywhere near us, so they would tell me

what was wrong with them and then I’d contact by boat…It was eight hours by boat from Kwiara to Milne Bay, where the hospital was. So I’d send up information that it was such and such a problem and they would send back medication, if that’s what was required. I had a fair kit of stuff that I took down…well, the unit took down with them. But the RAP corporal who had come with us, he took ill and he wasn't replaced, so I replaced him. So I had a secondary job. It kept me occupied.

Yes. Of course. You drop something heavy on your foot, and it doesn't do your foot any good, either.

A sedge block that blacksmiths use, and we had a blacksmith there, it’s about that square, about that thick, cast iron, and I saw one chap one day put his foot on it as a rest. He pushed it over and it landed on the toe of another chap. He didn’t come back either. It squashed his foot.

You don’t use horses for blacksmiths.

I mean, blacksmiths for horses alone. You use that for welding. You can join two pieces of steel by getting them both red hot, to a red-hot temperature, which is about fifteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and you hammer them together and you weld the steel together, at a temperature. So we had to make spikes for boats, all sorts of things. The blacksmith, while he wasn’t working all the time, we could get used for other purposes.

But if you needed one you had one.

There was a forge there. There was one there. Coconut husks are great to get the heat. And your bellows. You could use an oxy-acetylene torch. But if you’ve got that, you don’t need your blacksmith welder. We had a limited supply of gas and we had a generator, to supply a bit of electricity,

and it was just enough to drive the lathe. If we had two machines on at once, it was better to have just one. There was just enough for two. So we had the need for a back up of different types of trades. Nobody really knew. Remember, this was all experimental. Nobody had done it before, so how do you know what you want? The problem with the Australian Army, on the outbreak of ‘39-‘45…

One, the terrain was different; the type of Warfare was completely different to Europe. I know, I had to study the military campaigns for promotion. Once I got to officer’s rank, I had to study promotion from captain to major and from major to colonel. And you do most of … You've got five different subjects, six different subjects held on sequentially in three days, morning and afternoon, morning and afternoon and so forth, and one of them is military campaigns,

‘military history’ it's called, and you study what the generals did. To qualify as a colonel you have to be studying at the rank of general.

Just that there was no comparison between what happened in the First World War, or the Shenandoah Valley campaign in America with General Jackson if you like, which was again

the Confederates and the Republicans. It was no comparison. I guess what I’m saying is that no two wars are the same. So you have to psychologically, technically and physically prepare for a different terrain.

Yes, that was my first invention, the diving set.

Not immediately. I did have one task to perform. Someone needed a watch. A Rolex watch had a wind-on button, you called it a button because it actually wound on. You unwound it and you pressed it in, it was waterproof, and you did all your adjustments on your watch. There was no watchmaker around, there were no parts you could buy for that,

and so I got a piece of three inch diameter Monal metal, that they use for tail shafts for the boats, propeller shafts, and I turned that down to the size of a piece of pencil lead, with the nob on the end, and I hand wound the lathe, increasingly over a period….this is night time, my own time, for about a week, and I finally got it so I could put the thread inside. So I got him his watch back.

It had little squares on. But what I taught myself was with ingenuity and determination you can do almost…you can't do everything, but don’t say no, give it a try. It often works.

Played cards. I’m not a card player. Yes. We played 500. We played….We weren’t allowed to play Two-Up because we…we didn't have enough money for that anyway.

We preferred to leave it in the pay book, not take it. There was nowhere to spend it anyhow. I’ll tell you the story about cigarettes when we get back to Melbourne after the war. That’s another story.

Yes, but I didn't smoke, so I used to sell it. That was good.

Oh we also got a beer ration every so often. I’d sell that as well.

I got rich enough to join a Jewish dry cleaner who taught me to fold and iron shirts properly, and quickly, playing Two-Up on the ship coming back from New Guinea. But that’s another story.

Once a week we would have a parade, but that was only wasting time. What’s the point of standing up in front of a half a tennis court?

There was one double-storey building there, with nothing underneath, it was a bit like a Queensland house, and the office and the sleeping quarters for the officers were up on the second storey. If there was something they wanted to tell us, we would stand out on parade, and probably just to keep us regimentally aware. But then we would just go to work. There was nothing else to do but go to work.

Except one day, we were totally out of work and it happened to be a Saturday, and I said, “I want the day off." I was being facetious, but the sergeant said, “Okay, off you go.” He thought I had nowhere to go, but he was wrong. We had a … Left behind by the previous owners was a gaff-rig dinghy. By gaff rig, I mean it had one post and one square sail and a small jib. But I

didn’t understand that it was sheafed with copper and it was up the bank. So I got some of my mates to help me push it down and I was going to go out for a sail, which I did. I went out towards Samurai. The island is over there, the long island, which formed a barrier, with a coral reef in between, thirty or forty yards to the main island.

Kwiara and main point going up miles out, with Samurai about a mile away from where we were in camp. I sailed out towards Samurai and in the meantime, of course there was lots of sharks around. You see the shark fin everywhere. A fish came towards me. I’m calling it a fish. it wasn’t, it was a stingray or a Manta ray. They'd been jumping out of the water. And Manta rays

are massive big fish. I was watching this and the next thing I know it’s jumping over the boat. Not right over the sail but, over the front of the boat where the jib was. And I thought, “that’s a bit close." And it seemed to take ages to get across but it flew off. Anyway, I put the tiller over to go back towards shore, I'm half a mile off shore at this stage. So I put the tiller over and the rudder broke in half. So there I am with the tiller in my hand,

I’ve got the jib sheet tied around my foot, so I could hold that tight, and the other one in my hand for the mainsail. And I was going to jibe, but I couldn’t. So I had to lean over the stern and try and use my hand to steer with. The pressure on my hand from the water was pretty high, I had great trouble. Anyway, all I could do is head towards this long island opposite Kwiara, but I had the reef,

and the place is alive with sharks. And there was one gap that the … There was an old native living on the island, who would occasionally come across in a canoe. Now whether he cut the hole in the reef, or it was there naturally, I don't know, but I headed for that, and fortunately I was just able to make it. And of course once I got to there I was fine, into the lagoon and across, up to where his hut was. I got him to take me back in his canoe, back to the camp. I left that boat where it was.

It's still there for all I know.

That was my day off. What had happened, of course, was that the copper sheaving was so heavy that the boat was likely to sink at any stage. It was leaking badly. Anyway, I survived.

No. Ducky Duck and this chap who had his hand cut were the only two natives that we had working there.

Because it was such an isolated space and the jungle came down to the waterline of the ocean, and there was no way you could walk around the coast.

No.

Donald, Donald, Donald, sir name I’ve forgotten. Hobart chap. Of course he was from Hobart.

When we got to Kwiara, I could see some huts down on the semi-flat, and I could see a hut up on the hill. I said, “Lets go up and grab a bed in the hut." So we went up there and he was in the bed next to me. And these had been used by the previous owners, so the hut itself was raised up on stilts as well, because it came out from the bank, the hill came down and the front of the hut's up here, with steps.

And I had the one….I got their first and I had a good view, a nice view, not of Sydney Harbour, but o the water. He had the bed next to me. And he’s the one whose wife wrote to him and said she was going off with his best friend. We used to occasionally play a bit of cards, just talking to each other, and I then watched him go downhill. I knew what the problem was,

but nobody could do anything to talk him out of the problem. Of course, his problem was he wanted to go back home and at the time he just couldn't go. We had only been there about six months, and there was another….six or eight months before he was likely to get home. We didn’t know when we were getting home. We didn’t even know that the war was even drawing to a close. So he was my closest friend. But then there was George Hope, the jockey who used to race horses here in Melbourne.

Ken Lampard was a chap about six feet tall. A very good looking chap. He had been an athlete, but he and George became very good friends because they were both mad on horses. He was a gambler on horses so they obviously had something in common. There were a few other Tasmanians. There was Bernie Simmons, six foot six he was. We went swimming one day at an island called Lagair,

another day off towards the end of the war. And six of us went across in a boat. One that we'd repaired, I had to test it out, so we went across to the island and walked across the island to the Pacific and went swimming. And the waves were big. This ceiling’s about eight feet, nine feet, and the waves were bigger than that. I know because I went out to dive in

and Bernie Simmons was on top of one and I couldn’t reach his feet. I'd have to have jumped about three or four feet to reach his toes. Fortunately he slid back off the back of the wave, because if it had dumped him it probably would have killed him. I had a bit of a swim and then came back onto shore, this was not the place for me. The next thing I know Bernie Simmons is crying out for help. He had gone out an extra wave and got in a rip. It was going sideways along the beach,

and where it would have taken him, I didn't know. I was the only one there that could swim much, so I had to go out and rescue him. But the problem was he was so big. To start with he is panicking, which doesn’t help, and I had to stay there with him for several minutes to calm him down and get him to turn on his back so I could slowly get him back to shore. Fortunately, we weren’t dumped as we went into shore.

You don’t expect that sort of thing in war-time. Although it’s not all war anyway no matter where you are. No matter what war front you're on, there's only a certain proportion of you time you spend actually spent fighting. The rest is spent preparing for it, training for it, recovering from it and so forth.

Sleeping. Oh yes.

Yes. I learned to life save in Tasmania.

When I was training for the Olympic Games as a diver, as I said I would never have made it anyway, I joined the Hobart Life Saving Club. And two divers from Sydney came down to give a demonstration, on that tower I mentioned, and I was at a place called New Norfolk, this would have been just after the war in 1946.

New Norfolk had the only other tower in Tasmania. The one hadn’t been built at Regatta Ground. And they were sitting on the bank and my father happened to be sitting beside them. And I climbed up on the tower in New Norfolk, which would have been about seven or eight metres, not a full ten metres, and I raced out and did a couple of dives. I had never done them from that height before, always sort of from the bank of a river or something like that.

My father was a gymnast and as a child I became a gymnast, so I did a few somersaults and what have you. Harold said….or one of the other two boys spoke, the two divers, Dad didn’t know who they were. “Who’s that young bloke up there? He’s not bad." And Dad proudly said, "That’s my son." So they called me over and we had a talk. The Tasmanian Diving Championship was on in three weeks, "Why didn't you train for it?"

I said, “I’m no diver. I’ve just done a few gymnastics things off the tower." “We’ll teach you." Okay. We went back home to Hobart. It was twenty-one miles back to Hobart, I went back there and I arranged to go to the Hobart swimming pool, they had a swimming pool, that's what it was. They had a three metre diving tower, diving platform, so you could do springboard dives, but this was a platform dive. The tower dive is off a hard platform.

So I said, “Where am I going to train." They said, “You’ll train here." Off the side of the pool. Which was that high above the water. I said, "Come on, what do you mean?" They said, "You will do what we tell you in the air, and if it is a somersault, you will complete it under the water. So your body knows what you are trying to do." You had to do six dives at that stage….eight dives, four compulsory and four voluntary…

Yes. Half a dozen.

Yes, they survived the war, but some of them died shortly after through different problems they got from New Guinea.

Mostly diarrhoea-type problems, intestinal problems, which they couldn’t be cured of, and skin problems.

Yes I had the … You mean since then?

Yes, I had to go to hospital in Kwiara, I had to take myself back to hospital in Kwiara. I was there for about a week with ear problems. They couldn’t do much for me accept give me Sulphanilamide.

That was about it. And syringe the ears out frequently. There was nothing much else they could do. Yes. I had intestinal problems from drinking the water or swimming in the water or what, I don’t know.

You dig a hole and you put a bar across the top of it. And when that hole is full you dig another hole. And in Kwiara, it was

a bit of a problem because there wasn’t very much flat space. So we went over the hill, beyond Ducky Duck’s enterprise, and cleared a bit of land over there. And we built some showers and we built some latrines in that same area.

You carried it by hand by bucket. Salt water, not fresh.

Oh, possibly. I don’t know. When something like that happens to you, don’t really think very clearly. A phobia of any sort is something you really seem to have no control over. I'm in control of it now, not a problem. I couldn't even get into a lift at that period.

I kept away from it as much as possible. Occasionally we had to go in to

search for things we thought were in there. It was just a damn nuisance. It was hot and steamy and sticky and because it was so dense, it was so hot and sticky and wet, usually wet, because of the rain, or just plain moisture, that you preferably tried to keep away from it. Yes, we did a few treks in there. We had a reason to go and look for what we suspected might be a Jap camp, but if it was there we didn’t it.

When you're hacking away at very dense foliage, you would frighten anything off, anyway, you make so much noise. Although the noise doesn’t travel that far either. What the Japs used to do, they'd call out, "Hey Joe!" Particularly to the Americans. "Yeah, what do you want?" And they’d know where you were. It was a verbal trap. It was the sort of thing they warned us of before we went up there.

So we tried to keep as quiet as possible. We were convinced there were some Japs there and there probably were, left behind, but we couldn’t find their camp.

You go out in the morning looking around and you’d see something that shouldn’t be there, or shouldn’t be disturbed. Somebody had been in; they'd probably been in pinching food. It wasn't the natives

because we knew where they were. Somebody had come in and been around the campsite. So we assumed that it was Japs. But they were probably just as scared as anybody else and just didn’t want to be found.

Yes.

Yes. Especially at night time.

Well, you worked to about….depending on the job, it might be eight o’clock at night or eleven o’clock at night before you put your lights out. Remember, while the lights were on the generator's going. So there's no way in the world you can hear any noise that anybody makes, plus the noise of your machine, but the generator covers out all of that noise. So when you have finished your work you turned the lights out. Theoretically ten o’clock a night, you'd have to try and be finished by then, but if you're not finished, you go on, which disturbs everybody else, unless they get used to the noise.

But when the light is out, it's just total silence. Absolute dead silence. no birds, you might hear the odd frog, but basically just dead silence. So if you hear anything moving, it's got to be a human being.

Yes. Frequently. One of the huts …

We had six in the hut and we’d take it in turns to go out and see what was causing the noise. But if the Japs were there, the moment they heard any noise themselves, remember there's just no other noise, if they heard us moving….If you rolled on your…it's was only a bit of canvas, with your bed on it, on some bits of wood we’d found. It squeaks. They'd hear it…

Oh my word. You don’t go out any other way. You’ve got a gun for a reason, to protect yourself.

Yes. If I thought it was the enemy, if it was a Jap there, sure I would have fired it. Whether I would have fired to hit him at the time, I don't know. I’ve never had to kill another human being, thank goodness. That’s why I’m pleased I’m not a front line soldier.

At least I don’t think I have. I’ve fired off guns in the area, for a test fire, looking for enemy, but I don’t know about it. And I don’t want to know. I don’t know how people who have been face to face in armed combat deal with it psychologically. I don’t know.

I think it would be something that you would be…

not conscious of all the time. But subconsciously, it would come back to you in your thoughts. As you know, things you've never thought of, for some reason something triggers that memory and it comes back again. From the friends I’ve spoken to I know were infantrymen, that's the way they described it. But you don’t talk….While I have a lot of friends who were involved in the front line activities,

We don’t talk about it. They don’t talk about it.

Oh sure, yeah. We expected that somebody would get killed. We really expected that, because you don't know, you really have no idea. It’s like walking down the road, you step off the road, off the footpath,

in the path of a car. If you suspect that the enemy is there, he’s not going to hesitate to shoot you. You were shooting virtually in self-defence. We were assuming they were armed, and they would have been.

Just please talk to Mum or Dad, or girlfriend or wife, or whatever it happens to be, "Just tell them I love them," that sort of thing. Just simple stuff.

We even wrote letters to be handed on in case anything happened.

It’s in a lot of stuff I’ve been looking for in the last couple of days but I haven’t found it. A lot of things I haven’t found. I was in Germany at the Belsen concentration camp and my photos of that I can’t find either. They’re around somewhere but I haven't been able to find them yet.

Would you like me to just mention a couple of things that I have forgotten about previously?

You asked me a question about entertainment at night. Were we bored? I forgot to mention that there were the odd Army Entertainment Group would come around and put on concerts for us. Not often but they were very professional. Mostly American. And we also put on concerts ourselves, occasionally,

to entertain ourselves. When we moved to Kwiara, of course we were so from…and such a small base we couldn’t have a concert party, but Ducky Duck, the one I previously mentioned, he came from a village on the coastline, some distance, I forget how far, but quite a way. And he would go there occasionally in his lakatoy to pick up his supplies or another wife or whatever. They were having what they called a sing-sing.

They were having troubles with a crocodile in one of their rivers, and they wondered whether we would come and try and get rid of it for them. So they invited us around to one of their sing-sings, and a sing-sing can go on for twenty-four hours, or more. Once they start their singing and dancing it never seems to stop. However, we went over there and spend about eight hours with them, actually. About twenty of us went in two separate boats. It was interesting and entertaining. They tried to communicate

with us, with gesticulation and whatever. We got the message and we finally shot the beast and came home. It was an enjoyable sojourn.

We danced a bit but not for very long.

Yes. Arm gesticulation and dancing, stomping the feet with the rhythm. And they would eat…They would chew a fruit called betel nut which

you’ve probably heard of. It’s actually alcoholic and that sort of kept them going a bit, too.

Yes. I tried two things once, and once only. I tried the betel nut, and other than making your mouth very red, it didn’t taste very nice to me. The other was American chewing tobacco. One of the Yanks said, “Here try some of this." And I put it in my mouth and started chewing it, but they didn’t tell me that you don’t swallow it.

It tasted a bit like raisins or dates or something like that, it was sweetened, and I swallowed the stuff. It was a small amount, enough to cover a fingernail. He gave me a big piece to chew on, to take a bit from, and I just took a little bit. But that was the last for me. Not very nice.

No, no.

They were wore their grass skirts. No upper garments at all, just the grass skirts.

And they covered their bodies with different dabs of coloured dyes, paint. More a dye than a paint, but made from vegetables. I presume it washed off.

Men and women mainly. Mostly the men, but the women joined in certain parts. But of course they have things hanging from their ears and stakes through their arms and different parts of the body, which was …

The first time you see it it’s a bit funny but you get used to it after a while.

Yes, it was different, different. It’s the sort of thing that is difficult to describe, you have to experience it. You have to be personally there to appreciate it, but it is difficult to describe in detail. The other thing that I forgot to mention was one day when I was under the water corking the boats, something happened to the air compressor and the air was cut off.

I had fairly heavy weights around my waist so I could walk in but I couldn’t get out quickly. I was near to drowning before I could get to the surface to get some fresh air. I think that probably might have been the catalyst for the claustrophobia later in life, with the tinnitus. I’m assuming this, I don't really know. But the other thing on the medical side that I found

in retrospect disturbing, and I still don’t know the answer, we had an American team come down to our campsite and they injected us for something, but they injected us in the chest here, near the heart. Straight in there. Nope, we didn’t query it. Whether we were guinea pigs for something I don’t know, but no doctor has been able to suggest that there was a particular reason for injecting in there, but when I think about it, so close to the heart,

I don’t remember the length of the needle, I do remember them feeling and trying to find the gap between the ribs. What that was all about, I have no idea.

No. no. Because I was then in charge of the Regimental Aid Post when they were there, giving the injections, I said, "What is this for?" “Oh it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter to you." It was a nonsensical answer, but at the time I was only a private, a craftsman, a tradesman,

and I hadn’t learned to demand an answer at that stage. Too young and naive.

Oh, yes. When you have to rely upon each other you ... It’s called comradeship,

and it’s something that I’ve not experienced in civilian life. I’ve had seven different careers in seven totally different forms of employment, and I’ve never experienced anything like that at all. It was one big family. Sure, you had dissention of some sort at different times, that's human nature, but I can’t recall any time where was a fight. A few arguments and hot words flying for various reasons, that happens in the best of families.

But no, I think it’s part of…When you're all subjected to the same deprivation of things, then you do experience the same feelings, you help each other.

I have no idea. It was never discussed.

No.

Well, remember I was a boy. I was amongst men. I was nineteen or twenty or something at the time…due to my twenty-first birthday there. But because I was still virtually in my apprenticeship until I was twenty-one, I was still a boy to them. And I was, really, in terms of worldly experience. I had gone from a young man, a teenager, to be involved in a war with adults

who themselves were still learning life, too, but I was still treated pretty much as a boy, except technically, because I was as proficient as they were, and more, in some instances. One of the things we did do, we’d get occasionally a film come down on our courier boat, our supply boat brought our supplies down for us, which included beer and cigarettes. Which as I said I didn’t drink and didn’t smoke. But I had learned

to use a projector as part of my army training, so I was the projectionist. There were so many little things like that that I could do, it kept me occupied most of the time. If I wasn’t doing one thing I was doing something else.

That I don’t know, but at least I was contributing something.

Probably, but that just didn’t go through my mind. You just doing your job somewhere and it’s part of what’s happening to you at that part of life.

Oh yes, it was a nurturing situation. If somebody had a… One of the things you asked me yesterday was about disease. I’d forgotten to mention malaria. That was one of the biggest problems at Milne Bay, not so much Kwiara because it was a dry-ish area, the only water was the sea. There was a small creek coming down that provided some fresh water, coming down from the mountains, but in Milne Bay where there was so much rain,

so much dead water, mosquitos were prolific and malaria was a big problem. They gave us Atebrin once a day. We went on parade for that and the Atebrin was put on your tongue to make sure that you swallowed it. Most people probably would because you knew it would help to prevent malaria. And I think about ninety-five percent of us got malaria, at some stage, probably more, at some stage. I know it lasted for two or three years

with me when I came home. It took quite a while for it to dissipate through the system. It is still prevalent in Asian countries, too, I understand.

We did spend a lot of time in Milne Bay putting oil on the water, on the dead water, to stop the breeding, but of course the area was so great. Milne Bay is a long bay and the coconut plantation

where we set our camp in extended for miles. And of course, there were Americans and air force people and army people, for miles…I think, I have no recollection of the ... I was trying last night to visualise a lot of the things that I experienced there. The American camp hospital. It was a very big place. I can remember the marquee and the tents, and little else.

There were some funny stories that come out of there but not to be repeated.

There was one, in particular, relating to the hospital. It stems from a factual situation, but it’s been embellished a bit. Just after they erected the hospital, they obviously needed latrines so some American Negroes were given the job of digging the latrine.

That consisted of a deep hole, about six feet deep, and then for the ladies they had some reasonably shaped seats we'd cut out with no lids. And it came to the point where one of the nurses decided she needed to go to the toilet. So she raced out there and what the Americans had done, they had put a microphone down in the pit, and they waited until the first nurse went in, they said, “Take it easy there ma'am. We’re still digging down here." True.

I didn’t hear what she did.

Not at all. If it was there I was certainly not aware of it. I mean when you are in uniform,

how do you know the difference? It's the same uniform.

We wore an Australia emblem here. The uniform you were issued with was the same. I’m not conscious of any difference whatsoever. When the war broke out and they brought the militia in,

they were issued with the same uniform I was after I got out of the boy’s uniform. Everybody in the AIF had a similar type of uniform, and the militia were the same. Initially the AIF had a grey background to the patch on the shoulder, those in the Middle East, in particular, but when we were in New Guinea we all had that. All front line troops, regardless of what your job was, we had a similar uniform.

I certainly wasn’t. It may have been there but not to my knowledge.

That’s a word that’s hard to define because it is all encompassing. It means friendliness,

support for one another, help when you’ve got a family problem somewhere. Somebody to talk, to who you know will give you a shoulder to cry on, sort of thing. And some of the men did cry, because they were frustrated at not being able to do something about their personal problems. A lot of them would write a letter to the CO asking to be rehabilitated or sent back to Australia

and they’d try all sorts of tricks to establish that they were sick enough to be sent home. Some were, in fact, sent home for disease. It wasn’t only malaria, dengue fever and a few other, not very pleasant diseases like that were present. Not so much in Kwiara, we were able to control the disease through cleanliness there but not in Milne Bay. That was a pretty rugged sort of an area. And there were so many people there. I don’t know how many were in Milne Bay at any one time.

There would have been thousands, but you can’t stop and count them. But comradeship? I don’t think I can define it better than that, except it’s something that doesn’t dissipate. It’s still there after the war. I mean when we went back to Tasmania hoping to find some of my army mates, not just from the war, but from peacetime service, and found only three of them still alive, it was just upsetting. But that's life.

The three that I met, we had a marvelous time together. We talked about old times, but they were peacetime discussions. Some of the funny things that happened. The new workshop that they built out at Dowsing Point, five or six miles outside Hobart, near Elwick Showgrounds, they didn’t allow for water drainage, the engineers who built it.

And, of course, at one stage when we had a prolonged downpour….The concrete floor of the workshop was a very big one. It would hold about twenty vehicles in one spot and about twenty guns, and then another area for storage, and all sorts of other work, and the machine shop….It was all flooded with water. And there was one area where we had a pit to get under vehicles, a vehicle pit and when it was flooded,

the boards floated, so somebody pushed them away to the side of the workshop. And we watched some people walking towards the office, knowing full well they had to cross the pit, nobody told them…Of course they fell in the pit.

That's a place called Dowsing Point workshop, outside Hobart. It's on the banks of the Derwent River, not very far from where I pulled the lad out of the water.

It was built after the war started, because the little workshop we had at Anglesea Barracks wouldn’t cope with the number of staff that we had to have, and they built a new work show at Dowsing Point. It’s still an army establishment now. It is a storage depot as well as the workshop.

Oh yes. Yes. There were some that wouldn’t, but that was the type of personality. They were introverts and that was that person. But the majority of them you knew what they thought about their wives, what they thought about their children, what they thought about their early childhood. Well, there wasn't a lot of alternative things to talk about, except you, as a person

and what you had been through. I remember telling the story about my apprenticeship. And I was a musician as a child. I learned to play the violin and the piano. And the musical group were in the workshop after the war broke out. Wrong. In the Artillery drill hall next to the workshop, and they would practise for only three hours a day.

And the boss called out one day on parade, “Can anybody blow the bugle? We need someone to blow the bugle on parade." And I knew that they had only spent three hours a day practicing, so I put my hand up. “Have you got a bugle?" "No." They issued me with a bugle and they said, “Have you played the bugle before?” And I said, “Yes sir.” I’d never had one in my hand before in my life. But on the way home, I had enough knowledge of it to know I had to spend two or three weeks practising to get my lips firm enough

to be able to blow the bugle. So on the way home I called into a bookshop and I bought that book. So I learned to play the bugle calls, and three weeks later I presented myself to the captain and said, “Yes sir, I’m ready to play." So we’d do route marching two or three days a week. We stopped work and went out route marching. So we formed our own small bands,

I made myself a kettle drum, and used that occasionally, and then I’d stop and blow the bugle. And I learned to play two or three songs within the one octave. You may not know of the Dad and Dave series, okay, well, there was a song there called 'My Mabel Waits for Me.' I could play the song on the bugle, 'My Mabel Waits for Me,' because it’s within the octave.

“My Mabel Waits For Me, underneath the bright blue sky.” That’s enough. But as a result of that I decided I would learn to play the trumpet a few months back, so I’ve now got a trumpet. But I haven’t blown a bugle since then.

That’s the sort of communication we would have with each other.

Not really. They kept themselves very much to themselves. In fact, I wondered sometimes how they got on, because there was only the three of them. There were two lieutenants, and one temporary captain, the CO, John Buckman, and warrant officers and sergeants in between. They communicated with us through the sergeant major, and occasionally we would have a parade, as I mentioned, if there was something particularly

they wanted to pass on to us, they’d do it on parade. But no, there was little association between the officers.

In Kwiara, yes. Bill Pope, the very large chap, who tried to drown himself, he was treated more with humour than respect. But the other two, yes, very much.

Interesting question. No, I can’t say that there were some that stood out as not coping. Probably because they didn’t want to show it.

Wrong. I do now recall two, in particular, who really wanted to go home, for family reasons, and one suffered extremely badly with dermatitis. And he got worse and worse, and I suspect he was helping the problem. He was sent home finally. And the other one, he wasn’t sent home, but I know he was very much distressed about his problem.

No. On the whole it was a reasonably…Under the circumstances, it was a reasonably happy bunch, we got on pretty well together.

The reason that wasn’t quite the case

is because Samurai being a Catalina base, and aeroplane-wise, a few seconds of flight, and their bombing wasn’t terribly accurate. We didn’t know whether we’d be mistaken and bombed or not. We couldn’t see why, although you could see it pretty easily from the air, the only clearing on the coastline for miles. But no, we thought we were pretty safe.

We didn’t have any choice. I had to go where I was told. So I think one of the things I learned to do in the army was to accept what was happening to me, and make the most of it. There was no point being upset about it, I was there. Sure, I would like to have been in other places, but I wasn't, so I made the best of it, and tried to enjoy myself when I could.

Yes, because it was productive. We had a very important role in keeping the army small ships moving around the coastline. There was always a ship with engine problems, and that’s inevitable, especially when you’ve got a lot of small boats. I mentioned the corking problem. They weren’t all that problem, but the newer ones were. We got them back on their job pretty quickly.

Not really. If that’s where they'd sent….We trained to do that, because nobody knew where we'd finish up. It could have been a month earlier, or a month later, we could have gone somewhere else. We don’t even know why we were sent to Milne Bay. Somebody up in the hierarchy decided that, that they needed a workshop there so they sent us there. But others of my friends went to…

Some went to Bougainville, some went to the northern part of Layte, and different places, and Borneo, and they had a totally different type of experience. Some were badly maimed. But the fact they were in a workshop….The enemy doesn’t care what you are, what you're doing. I was just lucky.

No. It was more …

If the feeling was anything it would have been hate rather than fear. I was too young to fear anything.

When you're young, and that age, you don't fear anything at all. I don't I do now, very much. You just go ahead. Nothing can happen to you, until it does.

The word hate probably for me is too strong. I learned that the person who does the hating is the one that suffers most. Because the person you're hating knows nothing about it. What the word I should use I don’t know. I despised them. I disliked them.

They were the enemy, they were killing our troops. And what they had done in Singapore to some of our army soldiers, decapitating them, that type of thing, how could you possibly like them? And yet in later life, when I went to Japan with Mazda, I actually saw an old soldier down at one of the temples begging. And as I walked away from there I had to do a quick take,

'What do I think of this person?' I finished up giving him some coins. It seemed the right thing to do.

Oh yes. I wasn’t sure that I could until I found out.

No, the war ended, so the whole unit returned to Australia.

Sorry, the war ended in that part of the world. peace hadn’t been…We had two peace days. One was VE day and one was VP day. VP was for Pacific.

I had just arrived back in Hobart…We left about a month before the war was physically … It was physically ended, but it just hadn’t been declared as such. And we arrived in Hobart about a day before VP day, so it was very pleasant. There were two funny stories relating to that. When we got to Royal Park, all the Tasmanians had to ... We came home by ship.

We had no aircraft in those days. We had six weeks leave. And I had played Two-Up on the ship coming home, with my Jewish friend, and we won quite a bit of money, so I bought cigarettes, and I thought, 'I’ll take them home and sell them,' as I didn't smoke. We got to Royal Park Camp and we were told, "You can take one kit bag home," and I had four, three with cigarettes and one with my personal gear. 'I can't take them home, what am I going to do?' Outside the office,

there was a small building open on two sides and a couple of forms. So I pushed them underneath the forms and thought, 'Okay, if somebody pinches them, they pinch them, I can’t do anything about it. I can’t take them anywhere. There’s nowhere to sell them here.' And we were due to leave; we were only there for a few hours. I got on the ship home, went home, came back after leave and they were still there, so I finished up selling them.

Which bombs?

Hiroshima? Yes, at that stage. Of course we didn’t know they had gone off. I’ve been to Hiroshima, though, by the way.

I don’t really remember. It was such a long time ago.

Not that I’m aware of. It was just something that ended the war and we could go home. They put us on a ship and off we went.

I had left behind an old Meteor motorcar, it's an Austin, but it had the shape of an old fashioned racing car. And of course, the first thing I wanted to do when I got home was to get my car going. VP day was declared, so still in uniform…and of course a lot of Tasmanians were home on leave.

And so everybody was going to gather at the town hall in Hobart at Elizabeth Street. So I drove my car down, and parked in the street, and I had been there for no more than two minutes….And there were no doors on the car, you scrambled out the side of it, and a roof that you could push back and fold down. So some of my mates said, “There’s Fred. He’s got his car." So half a dozen of them came along, picked up the car, with me still in it, and put it up on the steps of the Post Office, about six steps up.

It was not a very big car, about the size of this lounge behind me and not very heavy. It took me a while to get it down. I couldn’t get it down for two days. It had to stay there. A couple of days later I got some mates to come down with me and help me get it down the steps.

Oh it was fabulous. I think excitement’s the word.

Parents, children. It was nice to be home.

Oh yes, they were delighted.

Yes. There were parties everywhere. You could go from party to party to party. Everyone was welcome. It didn’t matter who you were.

Just that the war was over. It was great. Yes, there was dancing in the streets. You would find people playing musical instruments all over the place. Nothing coordinated, it just happened. Such is life. It was a good part of the war. The best part.

I think I was too selfish to think about things like that at the time. I was just enjoying myself. At the time? No, I don’t think so. Everybody was happy and enjoying themselves and so was I, so that really fulfilled the time for three days. But several weeks later when things calmed down,

and I went back to Melbourne to find out what was happening, where I was going to go and what I was going to do…

Pick up those cigarettes? Oh, yes. Which was quite a surprise. Nobody would believe me until I showed them. And then you started to think about friends of yours who, for some reason, they died or were killed. A lot of my earlier friends from the peace army,

militia, when they came and went off to the Middle East…Yes. I lost quite a few of those. And one of my latter bosses, Hughie Henderson, he was a prisoner of war in Crete and he was pretty badly treated. That sort of thing brings you back to earth.

No, because they were either buried overseas or died interstate. We were a conglomerate lot from all over Australia, so I didn't see anybody…

Wrong. On one occasion I was up at Puckapunyal, this was with a regular army unit, the 101 Field Force after the war, we'd only been at the camp for a few weeks and we had no transport, and I needed to get to Melbourne. So three of us decided to hitchhike. Three Tasmanians.

A chap stopped and picked us up. It happened to be one of my fellow corporals in my unit in New Guinea during the war. He'd been a cyclist. I can't think of his name now, but he picked us up and took us to Melbourne. That was quite a surprise.

No that was just to get to Melbourne.

No. That was back in Hobart.

Well, I enlisted in the army to retire at sixty-five. That was my life. And I decided from the experiences that I'd had that I enjoyed the army, and I could see future potential, because the war opened everything completely. I knew that I could get promotion. I would have been a corporal

if I had been lucky, at the age of sixty-five in the permanent army, as it was before the war. But the war changed everything. I'd learned so much in the way of trades, and there was more to learn, and I decided that that was my life. Don’t regret one minute of it.

Well that’s unusual.

My father married the secretary to the premier of Hobart, and my first wife was also a secretary in the premier’s officer in Hobart. We met at a dance.

That would have been round about 1949, I guess, around about that period. Because I was selected to go to England in 1950 for two years and we married so that she could come with me.

I don’t really think so. It was just that we had a close relationship, and that was what we based our marriage on. It wasn’t till later on that we realised we were so totally different in character, but we put up with it for forty years.

Oh, yes.

But I believed in the sanctity of marriage at the time. But after the children had grown up and left home, there was no real reason for us to stay married so we separated, mutually….Thank goodness, because I found my present wife, which has been marvelous.

Oh yes. On both sides.

Yes it was in a way. The fact that I had been chosen from among all my equals in the Australian army at that time was quite an achievement for me. I had risen to the rank of sergeant and I had been

selected to go to warrant officer, which was quite a promotion for me, having started off with the potential to be a corporal at sixty-five. And I had been selected to…after lots of interviews around Australia….with a major from England interviewing lots of prospective candidates around Australia to go to UK. So it was logical….I was engaged, to get married before we go. We did and within a month we were on the ship and off to UK.

Well, not quite, we did do a trip around Tasmania beforehand. On the ship were some people that you may not have heard of but Ian Potter and Co., a big stockbroker, who I finished up being part of many years later. But his daughter Joan Potter was a Ballerina and she married Vassilie Trunov the ballet star with the Borovansky Ballet here in Melbourne,

and they were on the same ship. And as a diver and an athlete, I was always very fit. And going through the Suez Canal, somebody said, “Who’s the fittest out of you? The ballet star or the athlete?” We started doing exercises on the top deck in the early mornings, going through the Suez Canal, in the early hours of the morning, one-arm press ups and all sorts of queer things and finally we agreed we were equal, but we became friends.

We went to see them at the Stoll Theatre in London, and they came and stayed with us at Reading, for a while. It was an unusual relationship. But it was a very pleasant trip. The first day we got there….We had a problem money-wise. The army forgot to pay me for six weeks, or something happened in the administration, and we found a place in Reading…The first day we were in London we

went to Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks, and bought some food, and we found one single bed in a room that we could afford to stay at. And we didn’t have any towelling so we found from a chemist shop a piece of towelling we bought. And we actually had a train pass to go to Reading where I was going to be stationed at Arborfield, and I had enough money in the morning to catch the bus to go to Arborfield.

And we arranged with the landlady that our money would come through in a week or ten days. That was all fine. That was okay with her. But after six weeks, she wasn’t so happy, but I was able to borrow some money when I got to camp to see us through transport wise….The accommodation included one meal a day, and that consisted of a couple of slices of Belgium sausage so thin

that it was about the thickness of a razor blade and that was the ration from there. There was very strong rationing in England at the time. But finally the money came through and that helped us through the rest of the time.

Well amongst the trades….When I came back from the war, instead of continuing on with fitting and turning, I specialised in instruments,

the repair of optical mechanical and electrical/mechanical instruments and I just became a specialist in that field. I was selected to do an instrument course in the United Kingdom, coupled with an Atomic, Biological and Chemical Warfare Course in Winterbourne Gunner in Salisbury. The whole thing lasted eighteen months. Twelve months of one and six months of the other. And then I had six month to spare. Not much to spare,

but they would find attachments for me. But the course in Arborfield, it started off with regimental training and of course with a slouch hat on parade with British troops, you do stand out a bit. Not only that, we were still forming four ranks and the British Army were forming three ranks. So the movement you made to form two ranks or whatever, from there, was totally different. Of course, nobody had told me about this

and I’m on parade and there were two Australian Army officers in the mess. They said, “Oh there’s an Aussie out there.” And of course, I had made a total mess of things. “Hark at him. He’s a typical Australian.” But I picked it up pretty quickly.

They were two officers and I was only a warrant officer so that was a different level.

Oh, they were on the same course that I was on, The instrument course, and we finished up in another place called Blacktown,

and I found a place to stay in a thing called Fir Grove Country Club. It used to be owned by Lord and Lady Cope. They had gone off somewhere living in a smaller place but it was a fantastic mansion. A bit like the Melbourne Town Hall in size. And that’s a story unto itself. That would take too long to relate because of the owners there. The Seekers turned up there one weekend,

but they were not known at that stage. They came and stayed for the weekend.

Yes. A guesthouse.

It was lovely, fantastic. I made friends with the curator of mammals at Regents Park Zoo. He was the top vet surgeon in the United Kingdom, and he actually went to Russia, while we were there, he was away for a month, to perform a caesarean birth on a severed cat.

And that made history in the veterinary world. But he and his wife….His wife was part of a very rich family and the family had died and left her a lot of shares and she would get a check coming through once every two or three months. And they decided they would go off of Monte Carlo. And they bought a Rolls Royce there that had belonged to…not the Count of Monte Cristo, the Prince of Monte Carlo, and brought that back with them. And that was quite a fabulous car.

A Drophead Coupe. The only one of its kind on the world.

Oh, absolutely fantastic and they were fabulous friends, too.

Just before I leave the instrument course, I had to be cleared to top security

before they would even select me for the course. And I found out when I came back from England that this ASIO [Australian Security Intelligence Organisation] or whoever they were at the time, had queried all my friends, and all my parents friends, and the friends of my parents, to find out what sort of a person I was, whether I could be cleared to top security. Obviously I was or I wouldn’t have gone. Then they gave me a green passport which is a political passport. Why? I don't know.

Mainly because of the level of instruments I was going to work on. With the course, the instrument course, they’d give you all the technical information about things, as the Enigma security machine, it was a machine…It was probably the first computer, it was cracking codes. But then you had to hand your notes in that night and they’d all be burned. So it all had to be up here, you couldn't take any notes away with you. Anyway the ABC…

Yes, and for the Atomic, Biological and Chemical Warfare Course. All the courses were covered by that security level, because of the things I was handling and exposed to. What they did at the course, they took you through the whole process of atomic warfare. As you mentioned, it was Atomic, Biological and Chemical.

The atomic part didn’t include exposure to radiation. It included all the technical information about how it was made, how it was dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what the ramifications were if it was dropped over a major city, at ground zero, a mile high, it would cover something like twelve square miles. The sort of thing that when a bomb goes off the explosion and the fire

damages human beings and buildings, but not as much as the implosion afterwards. When a bomb has gone off it burns all the oxygen in the atmosphere, hence the great fire ball. It is the oxygen burning as much as anything else. And the air rushing back in comes back in at a greater rate than the air moving out. There’s nothing in there to resist it, so it all comes back in faster and does more damage than the original explosion to whatever is still alive and left.

They showed me a photo, showed the course a photo of the imprint, the shadow imprint of a woman in the foetal position on a bridge in Hiroshima, very close to ground zero. And there was just enough time for her body to create a shadow from the heat of the explosion and leave a burn around the shaded part of the concrete so you could see her impression there.

Now that stuck in my mind there. But years later when I went to Hiroshima with Mazda, where their factory is, I actually went to ground zero and I have a photo somewhere of that particular shaded woman in that position, which is pretty horrific. But the course consisted …

When I saw the photo yes. That’s the … some of the dramatic effect.

The terror that can be produced in the human being who survives it. How they cope with the problem of the … They didn’t know about the after effects, but they knew about the physical effects when your body suddenly becomes covered in welts that are caused by the radiation and you don’t know what it is…And you suddenly feel extremely ill, but you're still alive,

and there's no treatment for it, no known treatment at that stage, yes. Yes, you feel for them as a human being. That consisted in intimate detail as much as was known of the atomic bomb and the effects of it. And what the army could do by minimising the risk by shielding, different types of shielding which I became involved in later at Montebello.

They progressed then to chemical warfare, together with all the problems that were effected in the First World War by gas. My father was subjected to mustard gas, and he suffered for the rest of his life from that. But mustard gas in an aerosol is heavier than air, and it would lay in the bottom of the pits in Germany in the First World War, in the bottom of the slit trenches, and people would jump in the slit trenches

to protect themselves from shells coming over, and of course they were then subjected to the problems of mustard gas. Now one of the things that they do offer at the course, I say offer because it's a voluntary thing, you can volunteer to be subjected to phosgene, chlorine, mustard gas and another one I can’t think of. So you go through the gas chamber, and I volunteered to go through. As I said I volunteer for everything.

I didn’t expect to die. I expected to find out what it was really like.

I wanted to know what my father had been through. You don the gas mask and go into the gas chamber and with the…not with the mustard gas, but with the others, you lift up your gas mask, you take a deep breath, lift up your gas mask and put it back on. And that’s not very much. It doesn’t let much come in. And then you breathe out and the air in your lungs goes out.

But within a matter of seconds you start to feel the effects of the gas. But how much have you had? A miniscule amount of gas. Now I couldn’t….I tried to mentally feel how victims who had no gas mask and were breathing that, how violently ill…But they didn’t die then, they lived for quite some time. Some survived.

But then after we did the …

I can’t at the moment think of the difference between phosgene and chlorine. There is a difference in the odour and the quickness of the effect is different. I don’t remember now, it’s too long ago. What I do remember vividly is when we came to the test for mustard gas,

we weren’t going to breathe that because they had a small vial of mustard gas, in liquid form. They put a needle in that liquid and they put a miniscule drop on the back of that hand there. Within a matter of two minutes, I had a blister two inches high on the back of my hand and we were told not to prick it, let it dissipate of its own accord. Now if you were breathing that type of liquid,

imagine what it would do to the lungs. You’d suffocate. The blisters would totally fill the lungs. You would just suffocate to death. Which of course is what happened. My father was fortunate, apparently. He must have had a sniff of it, he had the effect of it, he had lung problems for the rest of his life, but not enough to kill him. But those who died must have suffered an agonizing death. Then the other one…

Because it is made from mustard. Somewhere I do have formula, if you want it. Chlorine we use to chlorinate our water. It is the same chlorine we use for chlorine gas. Not in the same quantities, of course, but not exactly the best thing for the human anatomy, I don’t think. The other thing we talked about,

but we couldn’t find any volunteers. was for nerve gas. Nerve gas is one of the things that Saddam Hussein had developed, together with anthrax and a few other types of gases and what it does….You inhale a small amount, or an amount, a small amount is sufficient, and it totally blocks off the nervous system so the body doesn’t function anymore.

I mean you can’t move your hands. Your mind is still working but your body isn’t. And apparently it is pretty painful, I guess it would be. I don’t know the answer to that, because if your nerves are not working, do you still feel pain? I don’t know the answer to that, but I don’t know anybody who’s actually suffered from nerve gas. None of us would volunteer for that. But what they did do … Now this is the story they told us. I have no way

of confirming it, but they wanted to find…They developed an antidote. They do now have an antidote. And this is back in 1951. Whether they had it then or not, I’m not certain, but I think they probably did because they called for volunteers from prisoners on Death Row. If they volunteered, they would be subjected to nerve gas and of course the antidote, and if they survived they would be given a free pardon.

They had three volunteers, and I don’t know how many survived.

Well it was suggested that the alternative….There was no question they were going to be executed. They had a possibility of living by trying

something that gave them a chance to survive. Yes, if it had of been me, I would have taken that chance. And I guess that’s why the three of them did. What they did to warrant Death Row, but as I said I can't…They didn't give us anyway of confirming it, but the way it was told it probably is true. And they would need guinea pigs, human guinea pigs, not just animals, to prove that it’s right.

Exactly. And this is, of course, is what Saddam Hussein did in Iraq. He…Or one of his cousins actually gave the order and what was it? About twenty thousand? I forget the figure. A lot of the Northern Iraqis were killed as a result of the poison.

Which are we talking about?

That was a scientific … We were not scientists. We were the ones who had to learn how to use it, what to do to combat it, to experience it, so we would know what to expect. Come the time of war,

we would hopefully be able to do something to help.

Biological weapons were not tested at the school. We talked about the different forms of biological weapons. They’re the sort of weapon that if you…in aerosol form, you put it into the atmosphere then the wind can carry it across to the enemy,

and hopefully doesn’t blow back again. And the effect is a bit like anthrax. That’s one a form of biological…chemical. One of the things that's always concerned me is the fact that they could poison our water supply, or terrorists could, and that’s the easiest thing they could do. Hence my process of forming an invention to hopefully purify that water so that the effect is not there.

But the biological weapons have been available historically from just in germ warfare. In 1987, the Russians and the Americans had an agreement to destroy all seed stocks of their biological weapons. These are basically just the diseases we’ve had throughout the world that have killed thousands of people.

So neither side destroyed them all. They have now found that some of the scientists have been able to put together the structure, the DNA structure, of some of the chemical viruses, and rebuild them. Now if that sort of technology is available to the terrorists, such as Bin Laden and his group,

which I’ve studied at some length and Saddam Hussein who undoubtedly … He bought in people from Russia with the ability to build atomic bombs. I even know how the atomic material was bought, very simply through a chain of checkpoints into Iraq. I’ve got it on tape. It’s so simple, but it’s not good.

I don’t know that I could answer that, I wasn’t there, but she would go shopping I suppose. There were one or two other officers who came and stayed in Fir Grove. Because we were there, we were able to tell them they could come find somewhere to stay.

It was only about a twenty-minute drive to the regimental training place. And there were two or three other wives there as well. So I think they formed some sort of a relationship. And come weekends, during the…Not so much the atomic warfare course, because I was full time on that, but the instrument course, weekends we could go to London and travel around the country side. And towards the end of that course, when the school closed down for Christmas,

I took ten days and drove all around England, Scotland, the Isle of Skye and Wales. And hence the chance to go to the Isle of Sky and Portree. To the McFarland clan.

Yes, my ancestors. Yes.

The security instruments was the first thing that intrigued me.

A) how they were and how simple some of them were. But the fact that I was not allowed to….keep any notes, and I had to memorize everything. So I would go home at night and I would write my notes, rewrite them. I wasn’t going to remember all the stuff I was given. And I’ve still got some of those around the place somewhere. And the other part was the tour of England.

I’m still bound by the security code. I’m not permitted to talk in detail about them. That was a document I signed that I would never divulge the details of them. But I can tell you this much, that after the end of the war, the Enigma device, that was used to crack the German code, a copy of it was given to each of the Commonwealth governments.

But what the British government didn’t tell the Commonwealth governments…Built into that code that they were given, the Commonwealth governments, was a means of cracking our code. So for many, many years they knew what we were transmitting or doing. They could read our code. That is not generally known.

We are now.

We thought we were then, but they were being kind to us by giving us a copy, but there was a reason for it.

Yes I guess I’ve seen just about every castle in England and visited a lot of the cathedrals. And what it made me think, was with all those stone edifices around England,

what was the labour force that built them in the first place? And what sort of life were they subject to? And how lucky I was. Who was the Scottish prince who hid in the cave? Bonny Prince Charlie? I’m not sure. Anyway, every time we'd go somewhere, I'd look for

historical things that I’d never see again. And one was this cave in the bank of this river. And the bank of the river would be thirty feet high or forty feet high, and to get to this cave which had been cut in by the river many years ago, I guess something like a sandstone cave, they had built a walkway. You had to climb down in those days, but you could walk down in those days. And the floor was at an angle

and there was a bit of a shelf at one point. And we’ll say Bonny Prince Charlie, who it probably was, and he hid there for some weeks. And all he had to sleep on, just the clothes he was wearing, was this bit of an incline to lie on to sleep. Which would have been very difficult. I tried to lie on it. You’d roll off it if you fell asleep. The things like that I found intriguing.

They actually happened in real life.

I think the awareness of the destructive ability of the atomic bomb. When you see, in detail, some of the photos that were taken…I’m talking not what I learned afterwards in Hiroshima, but what they knew at that stage from photos taken by the Americans

which were immediately after the bomb went off. It frightened the heck out of me. I realised then that it was not just the atomic bomb per se, it was the aftermath. Because it doesn’t stop with the physical effect of the bomb. The radiation is much worse as far as the human body goes. If you’re killed, you're not worried too much about it. But if you're suffering from radiation,

and it gets into the atmosphere…The atomic bomb that went off in Montebello, the effects of it….Theoretically it was planned by the weather bureau that there would be offshore winds, at that stage, but they still measure radiation in South Australia and in Brisbane, from that atomic bomb. That’s just the one bomb in Montebello. So we don’t know the extent of the radiation effect.

We think we do, but we’ve never really been subjected to it that badly.

That's a funny story in a way. One of my close army officers,

one of my friends suggested to me, he said, “Look Fred, you’ve got six months to go. Where do you think you would like to go to?” This was just a friendly discussion. "Where do you think you would like to go for your last six months." I said, “Germany would be pretty good." So he said, "Okay. Waltz yourself into German Street, the head office and say, 'Excuse me, sir? Have you got my papers for Germany yet. please?” Which I did, and of course, there was no such thing existed, but the officer I spoke to…

He had so much paperwork he didn't know I wasn’t supposed to go to Germany. Within forty eight hours I had my papers to go to Germany. So I bought a car in Dublin at the time, so I had an old Vauxhall, and we drove across through France and Belgium, and into Holland and into Germany, and I joined the 7 Armoured Division, which is the division now in Iraq. The British Armoured division in Iraq.

I was seconded to the British Army for six months.

Right. It was the British Army Occupation of the Rhine. The BAOR [British Army of the Rhine] controlling the army over there. My first posting, well, the first place that I stayed nearly all the time was a place called Fallingbostel. F-A-L-L-I-N-G -B-O-S-T-E-L.

Fallingbostel. And that had been a German Armoured division base. I happened to be allocated the house that the German general had previously occupied.

Yes, it was lovely. And it had two panes of glass, double paned for the winter. Winter in Germany….the northern part….Fallingbostel is half way between Hamburg and Hanover, or near enough,

so it's fairly north, and it's near the pine forests in northern Germany. But it is also ten kilometres, roughly, from Belsen concentration camp, which is rather notorious. I made a point of going there twice on two separate occasions, and took a lot of photos of the graves, for the want of a better name, because you would find a mound of dirt half the size of

the Melbourne Town Hall in height, but in area about the same. And one sign across the front, 'Five Hundred Russians Buried Here', 'Two Hundred and Fifty Thousand Jews Buried Here', 'Poles Buried Here,' and so forth. And of course, the structure of the concrete buildings where they were burned to death, or gassed, as the case may be.

And I stood there a couple of times and tried to imagine what it must have been like, to know…They didn't exactly tell them what was happening. What they tried to do was tell them they were going through a different pathway or channel, and they would be given food or whatever, so they went in there willingly, but of course it was a gas chamber. They didn’t come out. And it was some time before the message got around somehow.

I spoke to Germans in Belsen and they denied any knowledge of the camp, I guess they would. But because Belsen was not that far from the concentration camp, the odour, the stench, would have permeated the whole countryside. So they must have known. And of course that’s where the labour force came from, to man it, they lived in Belsen.

Disgust, really, that they denied it. They had to know something about it. They couldn’t possibly have not. They were of a sufficient age where they would have been there at the time. I’m not talking about too young to have experienced it, and it was not that long after the war, anyway. I don’t know whether I expressed my feeling or not.

My German wasn’t all that good. It was improving, but it was enough for me to communicate and ask them what they knew about Belsen. Did they know anything about Belsen and so forth. And it disgusted me that they denied it completely. Something that they couldn’t possibly not know about. I guess they were protecting themselves, but it was such an horrific thing. I cannot comprehend human beings doing what they do to other human beings. Animals won't do this, only human beings.

What we do to each other is just unbelievable.

Yes, I must admit I didn’t quite know what to think at the time. It seemed unreal. How can you possibly imagine so many people being

pushed in by bulldozer into the ground, and then being smothered by dirt? And of course, they wouldn’t all be buried. They had to build the mounds up to cover the carcasses of the human remains. I find it difficult to put into words the feelings you get. Disgust, fear, for them, not for yourself.

How can you? You can’t. Not unless you're that type of person. You would have to be the type of person that was an officer, or a person working in that environment, to condone it, to be part of it. If I was ordered to do something like that, I couldn’t, it's just not me, thank goodness….

They were ordinary in appearance, but they certainly couldn’t be ordinary in character. There had to be something in the character that made them be able to do that sort of thing.

Perhaps they were a little bit more than that…

It's been shown that, or it has been claimed that most people can be torturers if they are subjected to, or exposed to it, long enough, often enough, then they can then become torturers themselves. I don't…This a psychological assumption. I don’t necessarily believe that, thinking of myself, and I’m not that much different to other people. There would have to be a special type of person to succumb to that.

Yes it is. And World War I, too. What they did to the Turkish women by bayoneting them. Pregnant women, they bayoneted them. No…I have a sword there, my army sword, which is the sort of thing they would use to bayonet a woman, a pregnant woman.

They’d bastardise the women and then kill them.

The German soldiers. Now what sort of people they were, I don’t know. This is what our troops found when they went into Turkey.

We had an instrument shop attached to the 7th Armoured Div workshop to maintain the instruments, electrical and mechanical, for the division. And I was in charge of that workshop.

I was a warrant officer class two at the time. Still a warrant officer.

The 7th Armoured Division, of course the war was finished, but they were still exercising as though they were at war. Which meant considerable problems with the vehicles, whether it was a tank sight, or whether it was a range finder, or whether it was a pair of binoculars, or a compass, or even a watch. And we had to maintain those instruments. Usually out in the field you didn’t have the full workshop facility and

you had to learn to repair things by using your eyes, where previously in the workshop you were able to use instruments. That became a bit of a technique and an art, in being able to repair things like binoculars….what they call collimation. If you're looking through a binoculars and you're seeing something out there and something out here, and you can’t bring that image together in collimation, they’re not much use to you. And that is a different way of repairing them,

by pulling the face off and repairing them from the inside. It's an art. Compasses, watches and radio sets, which, of course, an armoured division relies upon. That is their means of communication from one tank to another.

Yes.

I had a number of British technicians

and half a dozen German technicians. One of whom, he was the senior of those there; he was a first class on optical work. And after a period of time, when I learned to speak a bit of German, and he learned to speak a bit of English…Because we both had a similar scar, it was obvious that we had something in common to talk about. So I finally got his story, or was able to identify what he was talking about, together with a German interpreter,

to make sure I got it right…He was a tall man, slim, very athletic, and he had been a champion runner, an athlete. And he won an event at the 1936 Games that Hitler was present at. And after he finished the race, and was walking back to where the change room was, two very husky German officers took one arm each and took him aside and he’s tall

but he's not as heavily built as they were apparently. And they said, “You would like to be in Hitler’s bodyguard, wouldn’t you?” So he had no choice, but to be part of his bodyguard. As he said to me, “Fred, if somebody came to you and said ‘The Queen would like you to be in her bodyguard,' what would you think?” I said, “Sure.” It turns out later in life I was, it did happen to me. At that stage I didn’t anticipate that so I

thought automatically, of course I’d want to be. And he said, “So I became part of Hitler’s bodyguard." And I asked, “How did you get your scar like mine?” I had told him previously what had happened to me as a child. He said, “I was on duty outside Hitler’s bunker in Berlin, at the Berlin, when the Russians were attacking from the east and the Americans from the west. We didn’t know who would get in first, but Hitler was in the bunker

and I was on duty outside." He was the only guard outside. The Russians were the closest, they saw him there and took a shot at him, and a bullet went through in much the same line as this crease on my throat. And he, of course, fell down and the Russians thought he was dead and went on their way and ignored him. The Yanks came along shortly afterwards, saw him lying there bleeding, so they decided to treat him and

when they lifted his head up he had a similar problem to mine. The jugular vein had been nicked without cutting it. They carried him back to hospital. They could see the jugular vein, apparently, but as they put him in the operating theatre it burst. So was saved in a much similar fashion. So there was two of us, in two different parts of the world, with a similar problem and both of us survived.

Yes.

Unfortunately I can't think of his name. I've got a photograph of him somewhere, but is name? I'm not sure.

Yes, yes. It was nice to talk to him, we were always friendly, we'd always shake hands each morning and as we left each night.

No. It didn’t occur to me, because he was a conscript soldier, if you like, and his job was looking after Hitler.

Not personally, he was just part of the guard that would have been looking after him at different times.

Of course, at that stage, nobody knew, they were still looking. It's the same as Saddam Hussein. Is he undergoing surgery to change his appearance? Did that happen to Hitler? No, we don’t know.

Oh, he thought he was dead. Of course, he doesn’t really know either, but as far as he was concerned Hitler was dead.

No Eva Braun was with him, Himler, there were other senior officers there.

Yes, I would say that. It was always pleasant to meet him and talk with him. We managed to find a means of communication with our limited language barrier, and we seemed to understand each other pretty well. He was a good technician, too.

Yes. [Speaks in German] “Give me a screwdriver please.”

[Speaks in German] “Speak slowly please.”

No. I would give him a job, or give him a job to pass on to somebody else, and the job was done. And I had too many responsibilities to spend too much time….

He didn’t need supervising. He was an efficient tradesman with himself. And he had been taught by the Zeiss Company, a very well known optical firm in East Germany but he was in West Germany then, and his brother had been in East Germany working in the same factory, but he didn't get out. So he had one of them either side of the then Iron Curtain.

No, from his brother.

He was married and living in Germany, and I don't think he had any children at the time.

No.

1951-1952.

That’s right.

How did they feel? I didn’t ask them.

It was always such a pleasant … there was no … I don’t know that they liked the German regime, the Hitler regime. But when you're in it, you can’t do much about it as an individual. And they had a better life. Coffee was the most expensive item. And when I was going to Germany I was told to take a couple of large containers of coffee, which I did, and you could barter with those. You could almost buy a house

with a big container of coffee. It was more valuable than pretty well anything else, because they couldn’t get it. They had ersatz coffee, which was a nothing made out of vegetables, I think. I’m not sure what it was made of, but it was pretty horrible. That was about the only communication thing, was bartering if they wanted something, or if you wanted a camera.

I was entitled to have a Jeep….wrong, a Land Rover, available to me, with a driver for half a cent a mile German, equivalent now to half a cent a mile, a kilometre, sorry, a kilometre. So I did a bit of travelling around Germany to different army establishments. It was interesting.

Yes. It seemed as though they had always been there and had always been part of the civilian support staff for the army workshop, as we have here in Australia. We have a lot of civilians working for the army here. It didn’t seem different.

Well this, I think, was the most obvious part of the war. At that stage, nothing had been done to repair the buildings. We're talking seven years after the war. In Iraq now they are worrying about the fact that a few weeks after the war they haven’t got everything back working. Five years after the war, seven years after the war, Germany still wasn’t functioning properly.

I've got photographs driving through Frankfurt, and other places, where the side had been blown off a building and the floor was lying at an angle in the room, with the wall off, and you’ve got a bed tied to the wall, the top side, and they're were people living in there, because there was nowhere else to live. This is the aftermath of war that people don’t stop to think about.

It's something that takes time to rectify. You can’t do it in a few weeks. But people were getting on with their lives. Now that’s why coffee was so valuable, because it was the only thing that … you couldn’t buy it in Germany and people who had it were getting money. They were just going through the BAOR currency and getting into Deutschmarks

about the time we were there, and that created a bit of a problem for people who had saved up their money, and didn’t know whether they were going to get their full money back in Deutschmarks, that they had in the BAF currency. But the buildings were left in a real shambles. The rubble had been cleared off the roadways and the pathways, but most of it was still on the blocks.

So you saw Germany as is virtually after all the bombing.

In ruins. Definitely in ruins. Hamburg, Hanover, Dessau, Dusseldorf and so forth. I went to Hamburg, the Reeper Bahn you've probably heard about. Drove down there as a matter of interest to see what it was like. My wife and I

drove through and took photographs of the girls in the outside stalls and whatever, on the verandahs. But Hamburg was a real shambles. A heck of a mess. Almost as though an atomic bomb had been dropped on it. It wasn’t quite as damaged as Hiroshima, in fact nowhere near as bad as Hiroshima, but it was a mess.

How can you stop it?

I'm asking myself how can you stop and how can you prevent war, because nobody wins. Everybody loses in a war. There is no winner. You might find one side comes out theoretically on top, but both sides lose equally, in terms of the civilians, the population, the destruction to worldly effects and whatever. I see no future in war for anybody. However, there comes a point in time,

and I use Iraq as an example, where how…Do we just close our eyes and do nothing and let Saddam Hussein continue in his brutal way to destroy humanity and do nothing about it? It seems to me…No I’ll be stronger, in my opinion, President Bush did the right thing in this instance. In the long term, when we look back on it…We're looking back years on at the problems

in 1950, 1951 when I was in Germany. In another two or three years time, we won’t be thinking about the problems of Iraq. They will have solved the problems. They’ll help to solve it themselves. But in this case, I think war was justified.

Good question. I think it was something that was forced upon us by the Japanese.

They bombed Pearl Harbour and it was an inevitable follow up that if we didn’t protect ourselves, they would finish up controlling Japan. I think if there hadn’t been a war, if we hadn’t stopped them in New Guinea, we would have had them in Australia running and controlling and managing our life. We wouldn’t have been sitting here now. We would have been doing what the Japanese told us to do. We would be employed by them. Because let’s kid ourselves,

they are pleasant enough to deal with now, because they're no longer in control of everything. When they were in control, look what they did to the prisoners of war in Singapore, and Malaya.

Oh yes. I learnt a lot. It was interesting to be associated with people who had been at war in the Middle East, and were then trying to normalise life, military type life, very different from civilian life. And we did this through a love of sport. Because my name was Millar, Keith Miller was an outstanding Australian cricketer…two things in my favour. My name was Millar and I was Australian. So they said,

"Fred, you’re in the cricket team." Now I had played cricket as a child, my father was a first class cricketer and he had taught me a bit about it. But I didn’t enjoy playing cricket. I played football in the winter and basketball, and I was diving and swimming in the summer. So I had to … It happened to one of the chaps, Charlie Street. He was about six foot six tall, a very tall skinny chap, and he had been at County Court and he knew how to play cricket. So I said, “If you want me to play with the team, teach me how to play cricket."

And he did. In a matter of a fortnight, he taught me the rudiments of batting and I finished up becoming the opening bat for the team. When we finished up, we were runners up for the BAOR cup. But it was a matter of okay, it’s a ball game. It’s a matter of using your reflexes, and he taught me what was the right thing to do. A good relationship was developed that way by playing sport. Not just with the people in the unit,

but with the other units around Germany, who we visited and played with them.

Probably. I’ve been exposed to everything, so yes, I have learned. I learnt a long time ago, when I decided to blow the bugle that I had never blown before, that if I was prepared to try, I could succeed, may succeed.

And I learnt that I could and frequently did succeed.

Yes.

In Germany? Again there was another Australian officer there, Ernie Simes by name. He and his wife and family, and they spent a lot of time shopping together.

We had a German maid by the name of Helena. Now her German, my wife’s German, wasn’t good enough because she said to Helena one day, we were going out somewhere, she said she wanted her to wash the clothes. The word for that is 'Vishy varshen.' So she said, something about 'vishy varshen,' this is my wife talking to Helena. When we got back, the dirty laundry was still there but all the windows had been cleaned. She had cleaned something, but obviously our German wasn't good enough.

But the time went very quickly. There always seemed to be something. The British wives were very social, very class conscious. When some of them went to the cricket, you had to sit in the row of the rank. If your husband was a sergeant, you sat in the sergeants’ row, but if your husband was a corporal, you sat down in the corporals’ row.

I thought it was humorous, but because there was one other Australian lady there, they just sat together, or wherever they wanted. And he was a major anyway, so it didn’t matter. As far as our wives were concerned, there was no difference whatever the rank is. The wives are just the wives, and they're friends. And we were friends here in Melbourne afterwards.

Yes.

Oh, very much lower than a major. Yes. But the relationship between Ernie and myself was as of friends, not as of….In fact, it was arranged….He was the one who suggested I go to Germany, because he knew he was going there himself, and he had arranged a dinner the night we arrived there. We were just two Australian families. Rank consciousness is not the same in the Australian Army.

It's there when you're in uniform and on parade, but you can still be friends, not with everybody. Some people take advantage of it, others don’t. But you soon sort that out.

Oh yes, yes. You didn’t do that with the British.

No. We were different, we were exempt from that. Besides, I took no notice.

Yes. I had one funny experience. We had to be duty officer on a cycle of the warrant officers, and we had to close the sergeants’ mess. They set me up. It was my first night on duty after I'd arrived, and of course I'm not very tall. And a lot of these Brits were three times my size and I went in and said, “All right! Close the bar!”

And I have a strong voice when I want to use it, thanks to the army. They said, "Who are you?" I had a slouch hat on….No, I had a warrant officer’s hat on, a peaked cap. “Who are you?” I said, “What’s it got to do with you? Shut the bar." And they ignored me. It was all set up. They were wondering what the heck I’d do. So I stuck my head outside the door and I said, “Charlie! Come on!” Charlie Street, the big chap. “Come in here,

we’re going to fix these blokes." They were having me on so they shut the bar.

Back to England to a place called … Oh, England via Frankfurt, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, France. We did a tour back through…I hadn’t taken any leave for quite some time, so I thought I may as well take it and do a tour of Europe while I can.

And so we did most of those countries, all of those countries, actually. And I guess the most humorous thing was going down to the Brenner Pass. We stopped to pay the….going through the Customs, and my wife left the car to go to the Ladies, and I gave her some money to go, and she came back and I had to give her some more and she came back a third time, wanted some more. “What’s going on?” She had gone in there and for the first time in her life she had pushed open a door

and there was a hole in the floor. She thought it must have been the gentlemen's. She came back, and she went to the gentlemen’s the next time, the second time, the wrong one. The third time she went back and she got it right.

Not at that stage, no. But in China, yes.

Yes. We finished up in Paris.

My Vauxhall car stalled outside the opera house, the Place de l'Opera, and it was on the inside row of…It's a big circle, and there's about four lanes of traffic. And I managed to push it, get through to the traffic and get to the curb, and lifted up the bonnet, and the starter motor had stuck in gear. I’m swearing away like a good Australian, and there was a voice over my shoulder, said, “You must be Australian."

It was a French policeman about three times my size, and he said, “Do you want a hand?" So we rocked the car. You put it in gear and rock the car until the starter motor comes out. So I made a friend of a policeman.

I will briefly run through what happened to me. I got back to Australia, rang from Melbourne army headquarters to a friend of mine there and he said, “What are you doing back here, Fred?” They had forgotten to tell the Australian Army that I was coming back from England. So they thought, 'What are we going to do with him?' So they said, "All right, we'll send you back to Tasmania, give you a chance to settle in there.' My parents were there, my luggage and whatever, our parents. Got on the ferry, went back to Tasmania and I had a phone call after two days,

“Hold yourself at seven days notice to move." I said, "Where?" They said, "Oh, we can’t tell you, it’s top secret." And a few hours later, “Hold yourself at five days notice to move." Noting happened. A couple of days later, another phone call, “Hold yourself at twenty-four hours notice to move," which was changed to twelve hours notice a couple of hours later. And I had a phone call at five o' clock one night, “You’ll be catching the train tomorrow morning at seven o’clock,"

sorry, seven thirty. So I arranged for my father to take me down to the station in my car. Two things were happening. Montebello was…happening and there were some army people going to the South Pole. So I had two alternatives, Tropics or the very cold. I didn't know what to take, so I took something of everything with me.

And the following morning, I sensibly rang up the station, “What time does the eight o’clock train leave?’ "Oh, it left at seven o’clock, it was early today." So I got in the car and I said to Dad, "I'll leave the car somewhere. You'll have to pick it up." I chased the train….I was wrong in time, it was half past seven, there was half an hour difference. I chased the train, right out to the far end of Hobart, Glenorchy.

and I passed an army truck on the way, a three-ton truck. And I tried a couple of stations, but saw the train pulling out each time I was getting closer or it was well up the line. Got to Glenorchy, it had gone. So I got the driver of the truck to follow me down to the station and I raced into the station master and said, “Ring Fred Millar and tell him to pick up the car here," knowing full well that he'd know who Dad was, because of the size of Hobart, I gave him the keys. I got in the army truck and we chased the train.

There's a bridge across the Derwent which is the best part of a mile. There's a causeway and then a bridge section. And the train was in the station as we entered the causeway, on the far side of the river. We got to the bridge part where the bridge was, which meant about two or three hundred yards to the train, and I got out of the vehicle and stood up on the bonnet and was waving to the….not the station master but the guard. So he waved back to me, didn't he?

So we chased the train again. We got to Brighton station and I caught it there. Got to Melbourne and rang army headquarters, “Where am I supposed to go?” With two sets of kit. Same chap, Bert Barker, who organized me to go to Hobart, he said, “I think you’re going … I don’t know." So he said, “I’ll find out.” So he went and found out and said, "You’ve got to go to Royal Park and pick up an aeroplane ticket." Well that helped to clear my mind and I said, "Where to?"

And he said, “I don’t know." I got the ticket, it was obviously to Perth. So I left my kit bag locked away, not under the seat this time. And I got to Perth late at night, about half past eight, or nine o’clock….I’ll go back a bit. The ship had passed through Perth on the way home from England, we docked at Perth, and I got in touch with one of my father’s First World War mates, and his son, who I'd met in Hobart at an interstate football match, for schoolboys.

And when I got there, rang the army headquarters from the airport and they knew nothing about me. They didn’t want to know anything about me at that time of night. They had nowhere to put me up. So I rang my friends and, “Oh, it’s Ron’s twenty-first birthday tonight. Do you want to come round?” I finished up going to the birthday party and staying there over night. I went to the Barracks in the morning and I said, “I’m warrant officer so and so.

I don’t know where I am going but I’m told to report here." They didn’t know nothing about me so they rang Melbourne, “Oh he’s got to go to Onslow." They got me out to the Miller Robertson DC aircraft. There was a lieutenant commander from the navy and myself on board. And we flew up to Onslow. Landed there. No sign of anybody. Thee were probably seventy or eighty tents, empty, and one near a gate,

and there was a lieutenant commander in the navy there. So I told him who I was. First he said, “Who are you? What are you doing here?” I said, “Oh I hope you can tell me." So he said he had no idea. He rang Perth, they told him the same thing. They rang Melbourne and they said, “He’s got to go up to Montebello." The boats had gone so he commandeered a fishing boat. I stayed over night and I had to stay in one of the tents. I was studying for promotion to lieutenant…

The flies were so bad that I piled up sand around the edge of the tent to keep the flies out and then they stopped … It was a tropical climate, very hot and I timed them, it took around about a minute and a half for the flies to burrow their way through the sand to get into the tent. The following day he had this fishing boat and it took me twenty or thirty miles up to the Montebellos and it dropped me off

on the Hawkesbury which was about the same size as the Plym. The HMAS [actually HMS] Plym, which was blown up by the atomic bomb, and I think it was about twenty thousand tons or something like that, and they didn’t know anything about me either.

Oh yes. It was a few days or a week or so beforehand. I would like to have been there when it went off but in retrospect, I’m pleased I wasn’t knowing the probabilities.

I arranged for a boat to take me to the Campania, the HMS Campania, which was a converted vessel into a Liberty ship for the war….into an aircraft carrier, I should say. And when I got on board they knew nothing about me, either. The army had forgotten to tell anybody. They decided they wanted me to go up there and get more experience on atomic Warfare and to use the radiact equipment

and get more knowledge of everything relating to the testing of radiact problems. So they took me on board.

No, no. It was totally hilarious, really, the whole thing, but they took me on as part of the crew which meant I was entitled to a rum ration. And that was another story. If I have time, I’ll tell you. But my job then was to

go ashore with radiact equipment measuring the radioactivity, before, in front of and behind….in relation to ground zero from the bomb. To measure the difference in the benefit of whatever shielding was there. Whether it might be down in a pit or a trench, it might be a mound of dirt, it might be a vehicle, it might be some lead that they had put there to find out the effect of shielding. But I was walking around in sand shoes,

shorts, no socks, I had a hat on and a shirt, and they gave me a personal dosimeter. It was actually a piece of negative inside a piece of white plastic. That was supposed to have been read every day to see out how much radiation I had been exposed to. It never was. I’ve still got it somewhere. So the end result was I stayed on the ship until the exercise was finished

and came back to Perth on the ship, on the Campania.

Theoretically they knew it, but physically they paid little attention to it. You couldn’t eat fish in that area for months and months and months, because of the effect of the radiation on the fish, the residual radiation. And, of course, the residual radiation in some materials can last for years.

All right, a bit of maths. That was fifty years ago. I’ve had skin cancers removed from my body of various types. Some growths that have been malignant, some growths that have been benign. superficial growths, on the average of roughly two to three a week. sometimes it might be seven or eight a week at one time. This is fifty years. How many weeks in fifty years? Multiply that. I had the scalp on my skin removed completely,

at one stage, chemically, it was so bad. I had twenty seven taken off my body by a skin specialist at one stage. Over two thousand, in excess of two thousand. But I’m alive so I’m not worried any more.

No, I was the only one

going around reading the radiation at that time. The others were doing different jobs. But they were … What seems to have been ignored is that radiation is not confined. It radiates. And the only person’s name I can remember is Max Jelly. He died of cancer. The only other army chap that was there. And the naval people, I know most of them are dead.

There were some other army people there earlier on. They’re dead. What they died of, I understand it was cancer. But not knowing them personally…I might have met them there, but I didn't know them once we parted. As I understand, I'm the only one of that group alive, thankfully.

I get a pension,

but I was under the understanding that….the government, from some years ago, in fact last October, twelve months, they made a statement they were going to examine all those effected by radiation, whether it’s Mara Linga or Montebello or wherever, to see whether there should be some recompense paid over and above the pension. But that’s been procrastinated for years now,

and I understand from the last information I got through the local member, it will be 1994 or 1995 before they make a decision. And by that time…

Yes. 2004, 2005, before a decision is made as to whether they will pay something to the people who are still alive. And by that time …

There's a gentleman in Sydney who was very badly exposed to radiation at Mara Linga. He’s the president of the Veterans Exposed to Radiation Group. I don't think he'll live much longer. I know he's very sick from a lot of internal ailments. Mine fortuitously…I’ve had some internal ailments, but not like he has. But I don’t think too many will be alive by 2005. Or not a lot, anyway.

Oh, lead. Wrap yourself in lead. That would be the most effective thing but that’s not very practical. Let’s go back to the HMS Plym,

I think it was around about twenty thousand tons, but they put the bomb down in the bottom of the hull, two British technicians, and they attached a cable to the bomb. Did what I did with the old gun back in Hobart. Went way away with a wire, way away from the ship, and detonated it. But the only thing that is left of that solid steel ship is the radiation to recognise it was ever there.

That ship was disintegrated into atoms and the effect of the radiation was on the island, in the sea…As I said before it has been registered in ... It was registered later. Theoretically, it should not have entered Australian territory at all, the wind was supposed to have been directed out to sea, but they found that they had readings in Brisbane

and in South Australia. Other places probably, too, but they're the two I’m aware of.

No you can’t. This was the problem with using gas in the First World War. The Germans thought they could use the weather to set off their shells, which contained the various chemical, but of course in time it blew back on them. So they suffered from some of their own chemicals.

Yes, that was quite an interesting course, and at the end of the day, there were fifty-three to be commissioned out of about seventy on the course, and there was only one position left. We went through in alphabetical order after the course was finished and there was Millar and Martin,

Keith Martin was a close friend of mine, also in my same corps, and he went first and I was last. And I didn’t know whether he had got the commission or me. We did know…As people went out, thumbs up or thumbs down whether they had got a commission or not, and we counted them. He disappeared, and I was on my way in, so I couldn’t' see what he was going to signal. I walked through the door, I smiled as had been my practice.

They had five senior officers there, and they looked up, and the senior one, the colonel said, "That’s what helped to get you through." I shook my head, “What sir?” And he said, “That smile." Apparently I had helped some of my friends. The tests for officer were very extreme. They put you through some very queer tests to see who was a leader and who wasn’t. They might have ten of you standing around there and the instructor would say,

“Dig me a hole one foot square, one foot deep. You’ve all got big hands." So I said to them, “Let’s find a shovel." So we both raced off and came back with a shovel, so we dug the hole between us. You'd be walking along somewhere in a group and the instructor would say, “That fence there is electrified and if you touch it you will be electrocuted.

But I’ll give you thirty seconds to get to the other side." One or two took a run and dived over, fine, they got over. But the rest of us? "No, no, there's a trap in this." I stood with my back, because I was shorter, with the wooden post behind me, which was electricified and I put my hands down here and helped them to jump over. Then the bigger ones leant over, and lifted me up and pulled me over. So we got over. We were not thinking about leadership at the time.

We were thinking about solving the problem. You’ve got thirty people in ranks of ten and the order is, "With one command, I want you to have these thirty people form a U shape. But you have to give one command." So you work out in your mind, very quickly, who has to step where. It doesn’t matter where they are facing.

It didn’t say which way they were facing. So you’ve got three ranks. You have one rank stand fast, the other two turn, wheel and march and halt. I think I had a more difficult one than that, but that’s the sort of thing, you would get problems to solve. We had a lot of written exercises that were military exercises, what they call a written appreciation of a whole range….You have to know the abilities and capacities of the weapons,

your own weapons, all your own weapons and the weapons of the enemy.

And you have a certain terrain to follow, this is all on a map, and you have to sit down and write out your approach, your reasons for and against everything you do. So you work out the best way of doing it. And that would take you anything up to two days, which means you have to work all night. That was done purposely to wear you out..

That type of thing. They’d come along and say, “That piece of paper, there's a word on that. I want you to give a ten minute lecture on that word."Mine was 'Jets,' J-E-T-S, jet propulsion. A friend of mine had 'Comics'. And this was one of the things when the smiling part came through. He didn’t quite know how to go about it. I had a T-shirt with stripes on it,

and we had a stand with rollers like you had on the buses sometimes. You could turn the rollers over, like they use in churches sometimes with hymn notes and such and such. I took two of the rollers out of the centre and put my head through, and when he opened the curtains to start his talk about comics, I was going on there. That’s all. Pulled the curtains and he went on with his talk about comics. And what they suggested…what they told me about that was that

I was prepared to help somebody else. That type of thing they were looking for. And when I would come into the mess at night they’d have a 'Duty Drunk', a duty officer, determined to get somebody drunk that night. That was his job; he was one of the instructors. He’d come in, “Oh, come and have a drink, Fred." I’d say, “Thank you sir. I’ve got some work to do. I’ll see you later." I'd smile and go off. I never had a drink with him. If I wanted one, I’d have one when I knew it wasn’t going to affect my work. And that I now know helped me, too.

And there was a chap by the name of 'The Duke.' He was a Duke by law, an English Duke. We called him Duke, naturally. But he thought he could manage it but of course he got drunk one night. He was gone the following morning. We woke up to what they were about, but I suspected that anyway. The idea was to find out who would make the best officer in a time of pressure, stress and wartime.

Pleased. I'd put so much effort into it. One of the things they do, they try to wear you out with physical effort. They load you up with a pack that’s twice the weight it would normally be and run you for nine miles, to see whether you would complete it or not. Knowing full well I was fit anyway, I spent the three weeks before I went up there

running about ten miles a night to get my muscles conditioned to it. It was rugged, but it worked.

1950. She is now living in Queensland.

'60, I’m sorry. I’m ten years out of date. Yes, 1960.

Oh wait on. I’ve lost count of dates. 1952, in Hobart. The other one was born in '62, my younger daughter, in Bandiana actually. A few weeks after we came back from Malaya. 1952 in Hobart.

Yes. And built a house in Hobart and taken command of the Queen’s Guard when they came to Tasmania in '54.

I won a competition with the infantrymen. I was with National Service for a period and the guard was to come from National Service, for the Queen’s Guard. So all the platoon commanders competed to be commander. I won the competition. But I didn't do the job because I broke my leg the night before she arrived, in the mess, people jumped on me.

Oh no, no. It was just acting the fool.

But I actually saw more of the Queen than the commander of the Guard, who took my place. I sat in the front row outside the Town Hall when the when the march past took place and the Queen was from here to Rosemary [interviewer] away.

Yes.

I volunteered for everything, because I knew it would take me somewhere and give me more experience. And I hadn’t been to Malaya, why not? Plus the fact it was another war zone and I thought there was something that I could contribute.

Yes.

Yes. It had been going on…In fact, that…we'll call it a war, it was the longest war Australia has ever faced.

It went on for ten years. The longest one we've participated in. Yes, the Communist Terrorists were trying to take over the control of Malaya. The Chinese. And the British Army did nothing about it for quite some time, or did very little about it, to the point where so many Malays were being killed and they were having to build a ten foot high

barbed wire fences around…well, the kampongs, the little villages, and with a gap in between so they couldn’t throw grenades inside. You’d have about a thirty-foot gap between the inner wire and the outer wire. It became unbearable so they decided to chase them out. And that was harder said than done because of the terrain and the jungle. They could hide there so we developed our own tracker dog teams

which were very effective. And we would try our own ambushes and they would ambush us.

I joined the headquarters of 28 Infantry Brigade group, Ghurkha Brigade Group, placed in Taiping, which is say halfway between Ipoh and Penang. If you know Malaya. at all.

And my job was BEME,

or Brigade Electrical and Mechanical Engineer. I had British, Australian, New Zealand, Ghurkha and Malay technical equipment to be responsible for, to see that it was maintained, or the staff to maintain it. And we had a British workshop and a twenty-one-man Australian Light Aid Detachment also under my control. And it was….The domain covered all of Malaya. I have a map of Malaya,

showing the roads that I have covered, and it almost circumvents Malaya and crosses it in a couple of places.

Repair and maintenance. Not road-making equipment, but anything but anything to do with guns, any sort of guns, any sort of vehicle for transport.

No they were the same type of weapons as in the Australian Army.

Some of the equipments were different. The vehicles were different because they came from different sources, whether New Zealand or Australia, were the same, the British rifles were the same, some of the equipments were different….There were some variations, but on the whole it was generally similar. The Land Rovers were the same. The three-ton trucks were the same.

That was the main source

of getting out troops into the jungle. Not the only source, but the main source. There was no road. Gerik operational camp was the base from which all the patrols went out. And we had to get troops there. You could go by road part of the way and I found it was safer to go in my private car than to go by military vehicle. If you go in a military vehicle, you're obviously up for attack. You go in your private car, you could be anybody.

But we ran the supplies up the river in boats twenty-one feet long and three feet wide a metre wide. And there were two Malayan boys, a boatman and an observer up the front. The river was about, close to fifty miles of rapids. And I mean rapids. The river might be flowing at about six knots or seven knots, and in half an hour, it could be flowing at fifteen, twenty….Twenty-one knots is the fastest I’ve measured. Depending on the rainfall in Thailand, overnight,

when it built up and came down the river. But it was full of rocks, and the boats being pulled by thirty-five horse power Johnson outboard motors, they were hitting the rocks and you lose the skeg of the motor and the boat no longer goes forward, it can tip over or just turn around and float back. We lost a few boats that way and a few troops that way. And there was one particular part,

ambush point, where the backup of the water behind, almost a waterfall was such…it was about a metre high, and there was a gap where the water flowed through about six inches wider than the three-foot wide boat. Everybody had…. The CTs [Communist Terrorists] knew this. You had to get out of the boat there, unload the boat of everything, including the spare petrol, and let the boatman

go as fast as he could up the river, at certain speeds of flow he couldn't make it, and get the boat up over this gap….You've got a gap here and the boat coming up. It has to come up fast enough to be horizontal again, but with enough momentum for the propeller to get back onto the water. It was a bit of a risky hair-raising moment for him. We were on land, but we then had to walk across about fifty, sixty metres to get back in the other side.

And that of course was on cleared land. It was all cleared in that area, the rest was jungle and villages on the riverbank. And it was a place where ambushes had been carried out. We were aware of it, we protected ourselves.

With weapons.

I wasn’t personally, though others were. I wasn’t, fortunately.

Dogs occasionally, yes, tracker dogs.

The tracker dog is trained to pick up a scent. Now if you’ve got some clothing or something that belongs to the enemy, and he knows what he’s looking for, the dog will move in and out, a zigzag path, he goes until he loses the scent and comes back into it, loses it again and comes back into it again. And they could track for a period of time,

depending on the weather and circumstances, they could track them pretty well. But the big problem was with the river flowing so quickly, we were losing so many outboard motors that I decided to develop some type of guard to protect them from the impact on the rock. And I experimented on … Taiping relies upon a four o' clock rainfall for its water supply.

It has no reservoir. And if there is no rainfall for two or three days there is no water for Taiping, for sewage or whatever. So they have some very effective drains running through….through the golf course actually, which take the water off the hill after the rains. So I could use these as an experimental base to develop my prototype. So I made up a guard, designed and developed and patented a guard, designed to protect the outboard motors and they worked very effectively.

We didn’t lose a motor from then onwards, a few propellers were damaged, but it saved the motors from being broken.

It has to be the Millar Bridge. And I didn’t name it that. Brigadier Morg, the commander of the brigade, he called it that. Yes, it was a very unusual set of circumstances.

When I was at Puckapunyal, I watched on TV the Redex trials, where they would go to a washout somewhere and they would have to spend hours digging an incline in the bank, an incline on the other side to get out, I thought there has got to be a better way. So I experimented with a toy truck and suspended two wires, or two strings, across an open, and took the tyres off the truck and just pushed it backwards and forwards. I thought, now if I motorize that

you can drive on it because we have a V built pulley. That means you have something round and a V built pulley sits on it, it clamps on it, so you’ve got traction. Now, that's as far as I'd gone. The brigadier decided to demonstrate how the British Army….or have a demonstration by some of the engineers, how they get an army vehicle, a three ton truck, across a river in war time. However, what they did, they had

a large piece of canvas, they had people walk out into the river and hold out the canvas for the vehicle drove on. Then they had to have enough men to push it to the point where the vehicle would float with the waterproof canvas around it, drag it across the river and have a similar way of getting it out the other side. Of course, you could drive it out the other side but you couldn’t drive it on. You could drive it into the water, but so far. And, I'm not tall,

around me were some other army officers and I was not aware of the brigadier standing… Well, I was not conscious of the fact that he was standing about two metres away or something like that. And I said to one of my other army officers, I said, “This is bloody stupid!” And the brigadier said, “What did you say, Millar?” Of course I had spoke at the time; there was a deathly hush. I couldn’t do anything else but repeat what I had said. So I said, “This is pretty stupid, sir. You’ve got to have two degrees of incline on the bank to get the thing in.

It's got to be sand and not gravel, otherwise it will put a hole in the canvas. If it’s flowing at more than six knots the vehicle will be washed away and you’ve got to repeat it at the other side." Everybody’s listening, there were about 150 or 200 people there. They couldn’t all hear but they knew there was something happening. And he said, “Can you do better?” And he was a man twice my size, and again there was a deathly hush. And I said, “Yes sir. I think I can."

And he said, “When can I see it?” And I said, “I haven’t patented it yet, but I would like to have a couple of weeks to organize that." "Okay," and he said to his male secretary there, “Give me a date." And he told me, it was a Wednesday, the date I don't remember. “Wednesday, two o’clock, my office." He was not as abrupt as I am saying, he was a very nice person. He was more friendly than that. So I rang Fred Moyle in Singapore,

a friend of mine. I said, “Look, I want patent papers. I’ve never written a patent before, I’ve never seen one, get them to me as soon as you can." He had them… mailed to me, I got them in about four days, and I spent the next three days….I went blind. I didn’t go blind, but I didn’t stop work for three days. I just couldn’t see any more. I got the papers off in the mail, hoping that I'd done the right thing, drawings and all the explanations. In the meantime, I had a little Chinese chap,

an engineer, turn up these particular devices I wanted made, to clamp on the outside of the wheels of the Land Rover. I then went to my LAD [Light Aid Detachment] platoon and said, “Look. We're going to do something the Brits haven’t done. I want you to help me and I don’t want you to tell them anything about it whatsoever." So we got two logs … Having had these adaptors made, we got two logs

and we used the thing they call a trailer winch. It has a ratchet on it and you can tighten up the wires. You have ground anchors that anchor it both ends. So we tightened these up across a couple of longs, and drove the vehicle backwards and forwards. It worked like a charm. I knew it had to work. There was no doubt in my mind that it'd work. So the following day, the Wednesday, I went in, “Excuse me, sir, I’m ready for the demonstration. Where would you like to see it?”

He stopped for a minute, put his head down and thought about it. He said, “Next Tuesday, two o’clock." And I thought, 'Why next Tuesday? He can come and see it now.' So I then had time to get some longer wires and put it across a river that flowed through the camp area. And it flowed through anything up to eighteen knots at times, so they had to put wooden barriers on the bank to stop the bank washing away.

And I put the wires across there, and I knew he hadn’t seen the invention, I knew none of my boys had told him. But what he'd done, he'd arranged for officers to come from Hong Kong, from Singapore and one or two from England. Now whether they were in Singapore at the time I don’t know, but I know that he had British officers there. So we finished up with about a hundred and fifty odd people. I expected to see him and a bit of his envoy from his headquarters come down. And the family, I had my wife

and the family of my army people down there. And we had the steel wires across. So I got in the vehicle and got on the wires and just drove across, backwards and forwards a few times, then got out. Then I put half a dozen people on it, and set it going, then I climbed out onto the bonnet, nobody at the steering wheel. Once it’s on, the wheel adaptors bolt onto the outside wheels of the Land Rover,

using the same studs and nuts, and you clamp on to the wire, which means that as the wheel rotates you can actually climb a forty-five degree incline with sufficient traction….

What sorry?

You’ve got a round steel wire, which has a twenty-one ton breaking strain. It is the same steel, the best plough steel that they use for lifts in high rise buildings, the same steel.

When you have something round and something at an angle and you put it onto something round, it clamps, the weigh of the vehicle clamps it on. But of course, it's a round, a continuing rotation of that clamp. So you're actually clamping onto the wire, and as it rotates it just moves forwards or backwards. So you can put a trailer on and drive backwards and forwards and you have no jack-knifing of the trailer.

So you can fill up your trailer and shunt supplies backwards and forwards very quickly and easily. Then we had an army helicopter come over to take photos. We set it up in a different location, on the side of the jungle with a track coming in and out the other side. We put the wires across and then we had plane trying to take photos. But all you’ve got to see … If the vehicle is on the wire, it looks like it's cutting across the creek. If there's nothing on the wire, you can't see the wires.

And the other thing is if you want to use it for a minefield, you suspend it across the minefield and you can drive across. You’ve got to make a first passage, of course. But that can be done in several ways. You can fire the wire across, like the ships use from ship to shore. They fire a light rope across and use that to pull the heavy rope across.

Yes, we have what they call ground anchors. They are a piece of steel plate three feet long

with inch holes in it every few inches. Then we have one-inch diameter one-metre long round steel pins. You drive them into the plate crosswise, one down there and the other one down here. That is rated at half a ton per pin. So if you’ve got a quarter ton vehicle, fully laden, say a ton, or a ton and a half, so the number of pins you need is just enough for that.

But of course you always put them all in, just to play it safe. Or you bury a log. Dig a hole and bury a log and wrap the steel rope around it…At one end you have what you call the trailer winch which hooks to a ground anchor to the rope from the other ground anchor and it winds it up, and tightens it up.

It is a portable bridge. As I mentioned, we had a letter from Honiara,

Guadalcanal, asking for permission to use the invention to run supplies to the leprosarium, which was taking twenty-four hours by boat, but only four hours if they had a bridge to cross a ravine that was at the peek of the mountains, but they had road to the peak each side. And it enabled them to supply the leprosarium with medical supplies or whatever with four hours. It works; works well.

Yes. I hadn’t realised until I counted them up the other day, it’s up to twenty-seven now. And I at one stage I was employed by a company called Gibsbra theoretically as a professional engineer. That was the advertisement for a position.

Professional inventor. Yes.

I’m thinking ahead.

Yes. I had another unusual experience there. One of the requirements was to exercise, take the LAD, the Australian people, away on an army exercise, to get them up to date with training and whatever. So I decided to take them to a place called Terengganu on the eastern coast of Malaya. And to do that we had a couple of Land Rovers and trailers and we then drove across

the other side of Malaya, up to Malaya, up to where Japanese had been previously during the war and they had cut tracks through to another area that came out onto a road. So I decided we'd follow our way through these tracks that the Japanese had been on, and we got to a certain point, through the jungle, using compasses. The idea was to follow by compass because you couldn't see much of the track. We had the maps. We got to the point where we stopped for a break

and I decided to relieve myself, so I got a roll of toilet paper and walked into the jungle. I came to a river, and jumped down about six feet onto the sand there. And it wasn’t sand, it was quicksand. I can laugh now, but not at the time. But fortunately, as seems to happen with me, I have a certain amount of luck, there was a root of a tree hanging out of the bank that I jumped down. With one hand I got that in time…

I think, I was down to about my knees at that stage. And I called out to the staff, but with the jungle in between they couldn’t hear a thing. After about twenty minutes they thought, 'There's got to be something wrong,' and they came looking for me. They found me hanging there and pulled me out. Then, not long after that, we were driving along and we got to a bitumen road…what had been, it was just partly a bitumen road and I saw a snake.

It was about that diameter, and the road at that point would be a double lane highway width. It wasn’t all road, a lot of it was dirt and bush. And the snake, you couldn’t see the end of the snake either end. It was obviously a python of some sort. We couldn’t stop soon enough to not run over it. We ran over it and it rolled a few times and just disappeared into the jungle. Then that night, we stopped in the bush,

and one of the problems you have is the elephants create a problem in tearing up palm trees and whatever, and they use guns made out of pieces of round pipe and they put material in the bottom and they go off, bang, to try and frighten them away. We heard some of these going. We found a fairly open space, we set up our camp for the night and I put my mosquito net down beside the bed,

we had a camp bed, about that high off the ground, and the following morning I got up, I had decided in the night that I wanted to go to the toilet and I had changed my mind, I was too tired, fortunately. In the morning when I lifted up my mosquito net there was a gap about this wide, about two foot six wide, I had about that much gone from my mosquito net both sides, and when I looked down there and there were ants,

just a horde of ants going from one area to another….I took a movie of all this. I’ve got it in my movie camera. It started, I guess, fifty yards from where we were and happened to migrate underneath my bed. If they had come up the mattress, there were so many of them that the stings would have killed me. There is no question about that. They went off for at least another hundred yards down the other way.

This wide and just a mass of ants. There must have been trillions of ants. They were migrating from one dead tree to another, I guess. I found the source and where they were. I didn’t bother to chase how far they went.

Yes, I was pleased that I got out of that one because that would have been rather painful. Even just the bites, so many of them. I was so intrigued I took a movie of the actual track.

Oh, that was interesting. Yes, I had to go to Gerik rather urgently, and instead of going by road or by boat, I was arranged to fly up in one of the military aircraft. There was a small landing strip at Gerik Operational Camp and we took off into a very pleasant day, it was sunny in Taiping.

But we hadn’t been flying for more than ten minutes and the cloud cover came in, as can happen in that humid type of country. And it came down to almost tree top level, we came down to a hundred feet, then even lower. We finished up, the pilot decided it was safer to go on than to try and turn around and go back again. If Taiping was clouded in, you couldn’t have landed there. So we went on. But we had to follow the Pirra River

to get to Gerik, and on many occasions that I've got on the film, the treetops were up here and we were down here, about fifty feet above the river. He did a good job of flying that aircraft.

Yep.

Yes. Sure, I’ve made mistakes, and I've had problems. We all have. But as I mentioned before, I don’t live in the past because the past is an experience we go through, it can never be relived. If you learn an experience from it, that's fine. But the future hasn’t happened yet, and never will,

because it is always just the present. And by following that philosophy I don’t worry about the problems of the past. It’s something I hope I learn something from. I don’t plan too much for the future, because I know that a lot of problems are psychosomatic, and they can cause cancer by worrying about the past too much, or using the brain too much for planning for the future. So I try and enjoy the present, enjoy every minute you can.

Probably in many ways. The first one was to take me from a boy and turn me into a man, all too quickly. But in retrospect, it didn’t do me any harm, I don’t think, and

I learnt a lot about the importance of friendship. And the fact that I would go with them, before they went away to war, just after the war broke out, to the hotels and if they got drunk I would take them home. It just became part of supporting other people and friends. As far as the rest of life is concerned, what else did I learn from the army? I learnt enough to trades to be able to do almost anything myself

and that has stood me in good stead, as my wife will agree, to be able to do almost any repair to any device, whether it’s a motorcar, a computer…..I’ve still got an old army rangefinder out there. In fact, I invented a rangefinder for golfers, based on a much more simple principle. It taught me to be positive in thinking. Never doubt yourself and your own ability. If you don’t try you don’t ever know whether you can succeed.

And everything I’ve tried, I’ve managed to make a degree of success of, and sometimes major success. If it doesn’t come out as well as I would like, it doesn’t matter. I’ve satisfied myself. And the other thing I’ve learned is that the worst facet of human nature is ego. The more we let our ego affect our decisions, and our attitudes, the more problems we have.

Look at our politicians. Look at almost anywhere in life, ego is a driving force, and it’s a bad force, and it's hard to control. Control your ego; you'll have a happy life.

Cooperation is the essential part. I’d add one other very important word. If everybody loved each other, we wouldn’t have a problem. But first of all,

if you don’t love yourself, how can you love somebody else? It is important to you to think of yourself as a good human being, be proud of yourself, never criticise your body, it's the best one you're ever going to have, so enjoy it.

Probably quite a lot, as far as my first marriage was concerned, I was away quite a lot, and I don’t know that that is a good thing, for any marriage, being separated so much. I’ve made up for it with my present wife; we enjoy each other's company immensely. But I think the word love is more encompassing than man and woman. It is something that should apply to every human being. There is no question. If we felt love towards other people,

other human beings, per se, we wouldn’t have the problems that we've got today.

It surprised me a bit, but afterwards I realised that, yes, he’s down on his luck. I’ve got nothing to fight with him about. Yes.

Thank you for your help in guiding me.