Australians at War Film Archive

My name is Leslie Norman Ross Walker I was born Kedron, Brisbane on 9th January, 1926, which makes me 78 years of age. I just had it the other day. I’m state school eduction, I lived in many suburbs, in fact I was born in

Rose Street, Kedron, I lived at Shamrock Street Kedron and in the Kedron Gordon Park area. My father was a wool classer by trade, he had a happy knack of buying and selling houses. We ended up living at Newmarket Hendra in the latter stage of my school life, I went to Hendra and Eagle Junction state school. I was fairly highly educated for my age because

I had a bit of a sense of high intelligence because I was 13 years of age when I passed my 7th Grade and I had to sit for scholarship, Well the education department stopped my certificate for scholarship because I was too young. So I had to 7th Grade again. I didn’t like that, I couldn’t take that so I decided play wag [truant] from school.

I got a job at McPherson’s the butcher at Clayfield tram terminus, of a morning I used to go and deliver meat for him of a morning, during the day I’d go Shaw the grocer of Park Road, Eagle Junction and deliver groceries for him and in the afternoon I’d go in to town to the telegraph office where I was registered No.147 telegraph boy and paper boy and I used to do the rounds from George Street down to Edward Street down on the trams. In those days trams had footboards and you’d jump on at George

Street and you’d ride it down to where it, if someone gave you two shillings for a 4 penny paper you accidentally step off the tram and you’d make a good profit out of it. Our margin was 4 pennies a dozen commission. Leaving school I had a great battle in leaving school because I was far too young, my family have been in the wool industry all their lives, even over in England and Scotland, in the woollen mills and

wool was in my blood. My father was a classer, his father was a classer and I tried to get an apprenticeship but the apprenticeship board said I was too young. So through a friend who was managing director of Australian Estate, he got me a job on Mount Brisbane Station, a cattle station at Esk, they ran about 10,000 head of Herefords [cattle]. They made up a job f or me to go there because part of my apprenticeship

was animal husbandry and all that sort of stuff. So, my Dad felt that if he helped me out in the bush and see how I took to it because your life as a wool classer working in the shearing sheds is one where you far out of town, you only get to town once every two months sometimes depending on the run. So he sent me to Mount Brisbane where I stayed there for nine months. Well I ended up, I started out there as a houseboy I had to clean the bosses shoes,

polish them of a morning, I was very aggrieved at this because this wasn’t supposed to being what I was supposed to do, I was supposed to be a station hand, but I found out that a fellow called Anderson was a gardener for McConnell who owned the property Mount Brisbane, he used to do all that and the milking and the separating and delivering of the cream. So they made this trip up, a jack Russell was sent to do general duties around the house and I did all the dirty

work, the dairy and the milking. Well I’d never milked a cow in my life, I used to have to milk 14 every morning, take to the house and separate the cream and carry the cream to the housekeeper. O’Connell’s were very socialite family, Sir Leslie Orme Wilson was the Governor then and he used to pay visits out there. When the war was on they raised charity money for charity and different things, they had gymkhanas and polo and all that sort of stuff there. I got mixed up with the upper

class at that stage. It went well, but my Dad got dengue fever and I had leave. I came back to Brisbane, in fact the first time I’d I jumped the rattler, the boss Mr McConnell took me in to Ipswich and I had no money, I had a cheque, and it was a bank cheque only and I couldn’t change it so I had to get to Brisbane. So I met a fellow and he said, “Where are you going?” and I said, “I’m going

to jump the passenger train to Brisbane.” I said, “I’ve got a cheque but I’ve got no money.” “No no,” he said, “Don’t do that, come with me I’m going to Northgate,” and we went down and we jumped a rattler on a goods train, 2 door case. Well when we got up to Northgate he rang my mother who lived at Kedron and she came across and got me in a cab. When Dad got well I went out to

Augathella, I got indented to him as a wool student and I went out to a place called Buranda Stud at Augathella, Boyd Guild was the manager and it was owned by a big pastoral company, it was one of the best known studs in Queensland for it’s wool. I started there with Dad and I started there as a piece picker, where they throw the wool on the table, they do the skirtings and you just pick the pieces.

I got very adept at that, very good eyesight and the touch and as I said before, wool has been in the family for about four or five generations so it was a natural thing for me to do that. Out in the bush for about nine months of the year, travelled from Hughenden to Boulia, a fellow called Les Fox, we got a place to share out at Montague Downs outside of Boulia.

We were at Hughenden, Les Fox was one of the shearers and he had an old B-model Ford utility and we got him to give us a ride to Montague Downs, because he was a shearer and he was going there. Anyway it was an old B-model tourer cut down to a utility and we drove from Hughenden right through to Boulia, that was a big trek.

We stayed at Middleton half way through, we stayed at Hamilton then we got to Boulia where we had to stay at Boulia we got there in the middle of the night. The most exciting part of that trip was on the floor at the back of the utility there was a petrol tank, he had a hole cut in the floor and this old Ford Beauty had wire wheels and there was a snake, a brown snake on the road, so Les Fox tried to run over it, which he did do.

And we’re sitting there, I’m sitting there with a mate, another shed hand, and we’re sitting in the back and this bloody snake started to come up through the hole in the floor and straight for us. So Jack jumped off, I hit the little window it had a canvass hood and I hit the window and I yelled out, “Snake!” Well my Dad opened his door and he left and I left and Les Fox left. We had this B-model Ford on the side of the road bouncing up and down and nobody was game enough to go near it to get this blasted snake.

But that was a highlight, that was a real experience. At Middleton, they’ve got a myth there about the headless horseman. I was only young and they were telling me all these terrible tales about this headless horseman that would ride down the street. Anyway we got to Montague Downs, there I saw the Min Min Light, you’ve probably heard of the Min Min Light. One Sunday night we were sitting on the verandah of the shearers,” quarters and saw this, like somebody carrying a lantern and

we got up and went across thinking somebody’s in trouble. The closer we got to this the further it got away, we’d get up to it and it would sort of bounce away, and they said, “That’s the Min Min Light.” That was a pleasant experience. I don’t know whether to tell you this one or not, in fact hygiene was a high part of clean living in the shearing sheds, the basics were very primitive, no ceiling in your hut you used to have galvanised iron

walls, the power cook house was just a galvanised iron shed with a big stove range in it, they had pit toilets away from the quarters. But we had this fellow who was frightened of red backed spiders and would never use the toilets and he’d always go bush, under the salt bush with the blow flies and all that sort of stuff. Everybody started to complain, the shearers had a union rep [representative], they were governed

by the AWU [Australian Workers Union], they complained to the rep and they had a yarn to this fellow and he just took no notice. So a fellow called Les Cain he had quite a big name in the ACTU [Australian Council of Trade Unions] as an organiser, he said to me he said, “We’ll fix up this bloke,” he said, “We’ll get up there early with a long-handled shovel and we’ll just wait for him.” Which he did do and waited in the bushes until the fellow came up and undid his trousers and squatted, Les poked the shovel

underneath his butt and he did it and we pulled the shovel back, he wiped his bottom and it was a usual thing for a man to turn around to see what you left behind and there’s nothing but a urine stain on the ground, but no pooh. He took off like a, well we’d told him that the place was haunted anyway, and he took off like a shot out of a gun. Then he gets back to the huts

and with the partitions of the huts, somebody had rigged up a fishing line with a hook end and tied it to his blanket. He said, “I’ve just been up there, and there’s something strange in this place,” and he said, “What happened?” “Well I did it but I didn’t do it,” he said, “It was on the paper but it wasn’t on the ground.” We had a fellow there that told a very joke, he was a good joke teller and he started this yarn

this ghost story about this little girl, little red riding hood and this girl’s in the forest and she gets lost and she sees this old house, with cobwebs hanging off, he could even do the imitation of the creaking windows, the creaky floor and the creaky door, and he just paints a picture. We only had hurricane lights in those days and very dark, even the hair at the back of my neck started to raise, and this voice comes and he says, “Is that you Mary?”

and she says, “Yes, where are you?” “I’m up here Mary at the top of the stairs.” She goes to the stairs and says, “I don’t think I should come up.” “Oh come up Mary come up Mary,” and everybody’s tense waiting for the punch line, anyway, “Take one step Mary,” creaking of the stairs, “Take two steps Mary,” creaking of the steps and it gets to a stage where she gets to the thirteenth step and this fellow’s mate gives a terrific scream and the bloke yanks on the fishing line, the blanket

flies off this bloke and he takes off to the woods. He never came back. He came back and got his gear and packed up and left. That’s one way of exterminating a non-hygienic person in my mind. I spent many years around Longreach Park Hall and I married a Park Hall girl, my first wife, we had three children. She’s deceased, I have a daughter she turned 60

on the 30th next Friday 60 years old on 30th January. I have a son, Robert, he’s at he works out Rocklea out in the wool industry he’s a wool classer by trade and works with wool thingo out at Rocklea. My other son, Thomas, he’s a purchasing officer at Amcorp City, NSW [New South Wales] purchasing officer. So the three kids, my daughter Margaret is a qualified

social worker, she’s got about three degrees, she went to La Trobe University and she fended for herself. For many, many years she worked for PNG [Papua New Guinea] she worked for them for about 12 years. And she, like me, she had a fitter there the wonder, she went to Western Australia up the Kimberleys [Kimberley Ranges] for three years, then she went up to Collie at the coal mines, she was there for about two years, went to Yeppoon she’s there for about two years and now she’s down at Hervey Bay

where she’s bought a house. The family’s grown up, I hardly see my son, my daughter rings about every other day and now it’s her birthday she rings me every day. But she’s coming down on Friday and we’re having a dinner up at one of the taverns to celebrate that one. See with my time as a wool classer, working in the sheds I got married very young, in fact I got married 30th August 1943

my daughter was born 30th January 1944 so if you’re good at arithmetic it was a pretty quick pregnancy, which I’m not ashamed of it’s just one of those things that happened in those days.

The wedding was, it’s a funny thing you say that, her family were very strict Catholic and my family, my mother’s a Catholic, but my Dad’s a Presbyterian and I said, “I’ve got to do the right thing, I’ve got to marry the girl, I’ve made her pregnant. I’ve

got to marry the girl.” He said, “Not in a Catholic Church,” because in Barcaldine they made all the arrangements to be married in the Catholic Church. Dad said, “No, I’ll give my consent as long as she comes down to Toowoomba and you get married in the St Neil Street Presbyterian Church, the Cathedral there and you get married.” So we had a wedding in Toowoomba and her cousin, Hazel Ryan,

came down because she was pretty, had a very bad pregnancy, so her cousin came down with her and we were only married about a fortnight and she packed-up and went back to Barcaldine and then I, the war was on, I was manpowered [required worker in an industry for the war effort] out because I was in a protected industry, the wool industry and Rutherford used to be the Clerk of Petty Sessions in Toowoomba and he was a Mason as well as my Dad, and I went to Rutherford and asked him is there any way that I can

join up? I wanted to join aircrew.

Well, you were manpowered out, if you worked in a protected industry that related to the supply, like blankets and all that sort of stuff the wool, the classer of the wool goes to the wool mills and you’re part of the war effort. You were in what they called “protected industry.”

You had to get a special sanction to be released from that, well Rutherford tried but couldn’t. They had the Empire Air Training Scheme going at that stage, and they were taking them before they were 18 years of age, they were going down to Sale and Williamstown in NSW and Victoria. So I applied and got knocked back. Anyway, my Dad finally signed the release because I was indentured to him as a wood classer,

he was to sign the release and I went down and joined the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] and I was accepted on the 20th January 1944 and I wanted to be one of those Spitfire pilots over in England in the Battle of Britain, I wanted to be a bomber pilot, aircrew that’s all I wanted to do. So I did all the aptitude tests, psychology tests all that sort of stuff and they sent me home and they wrote me to come back down to Brisbane, Eagle Street which I did do. They said, “No you can’t be aircrew

because you’re colour blind,” and well I didn’t know that, “You’ll be ground crew. What we’re going to do we’re going to send you to Ultimo Technical College and the Sydney University we’re going to make you an electrical engineer.” Well I thought that was great, I get sent down to Sydney, we stayed at the Deaf and Dumb Institute at Darlinghurst, they were our barracks. We’d march to Ultimo Tech every morning.

Did the course. Did a basic fitter course first and did well in that, passed that. Then the electrical side came in to it, this is where I got a chip on my shoulder. They showed us a harness, an actual harness of aeroplane, it’s about that thick and the multimillion colours in it, and I said to them, “How the hell can I

be an electrician when I’m colour blind?” Because it’s a vital part of the connection to the plane. So I failed the certificate, the three of us everybody failed that. My brother-in-law and Marvin Crane, I’m 151238, Keith Smyth, who was my brother-in-law later on, was 151237 and 151236 was Merv Crane. So we joined up together

and we just had continuity of numbers. The three of us failed and the instructor went off his brain because he’d never had fail in his life. We ended up at a work party in Darlinghurst Deaf and Dumb Institute and our job was to polish the floors and banisters and all that stuff, we just mucked about there until we got sent to 6th AD, Aircraft Depot out at Oakey. Well that was a big general

engineering squadron and they had everything. You could even make an aeroplane there and the fact that it was there getting every aircraft back from the Islands for repair, those that were repairable, and England had sent over a flight of Spitfires [fighter aircraft] made out of plywood and glue. They ended up on Thursday Island because the tropical conditions the glue didn’t work and they just fell to pieces. I was there for about

six months I suppose and I got sent up to Townsville to reinforcement unit on the Ross River Weir and there we used to work at Garbutt loading aircraft with engines and spare parts for the Islands. That’s where I first saw the horrors of war with the American bombers coming back and they just the rear gunner out of the tail plane bubble, mid bubble and the rear bubble. I thought

well perhaps this the right way to go I’m not an air crewman because that could’ve been me. From there we went to Noemfoor, in the Dutch East Indies, and from Noemfoor to Morotai.

Yes he was away for nine months of the year.

Well, it worked fairly well. My mother was a very staunch woman, little about 5 foot 10, and about 12 stone and she had the voice of authority and she rule with an iron hand. We survived quite well, in fact we got used to it. I had two elder sisters and I’m between there’s two sisters, me and two other sisters.

I was the meat in the sandwich, I got a very hard time. It worked out alright. The fact is you got used to it. Dad would leave in January and he’d write home, he’d ring up and all that sort of stuff and he‘d come home November and then because of his expertise a few of the growers in Queensland would ask him to go down to

a stud down in New South Wales and buy them a stud ram for their flock. So he’d be away and get home for Christmas. He’d be gone again in January. That part we got used to it. That’s where I was able to do what I did do conning my mother and playing truant and doing all these odd jobs.

The telegraph, the butcher boy and the grocer boy and I also used to caddy out at Royal Queensland Golf Course, Norman Von Vyder was the Pro [golf professional] there and I used to caddy for Bruce Gyper of a Sunday morning. He was Director of Australian Estates and it was he who got me the job at Mount Brisbane. Used to be two shillings a round, 18 holes for two shillings and you got a cold drink when you finished. I used to do three rounds sometimes

and get out there at half past five and do three rounds, six shillings a day caddying. Money was my object. The Depression years were such that they brought that realisation to me without money you either starved or whatever, and I’ve got a favourite saying now and people look at me, I go out to some place for dinner and when we leave I say, “Thank your mother for the rabbit.” That’s what we used to say during the Depression,

the latter years of the Depression, “Thank your mother for the rabbit,” because that’s what ate, you took a rabbit, a shot one or whatever. In fact it, things seemed to fall in to place, you know, not that money was my aim in life but I wanted to feel secure and my Dad, the wool industry went down in to a big slump. They had floods and

drought and all that sort of stuff, and he got put on relief work and we lived at Dennis Street Kalinga and he had to come in to town to the unemployment office and they’d give you a job. You know Freedom Furniture is in Bumbridge Road, that used to be a quarry and the gasometer was there and a porphyry quarry so he got sent out there with a sledge hammer breaking up porphyry rock. His first job was Lutwyche, where the

road splits the low road and the high road there’s a wall there and a war memorial in the centre, there’s a palfrey wall there he helped build that, he became a stone mason. From there he went up to Ipswich where Brisbane Road drives in to Ipswich around the park, that big stone wall around Ipswich Park, part of him there’s a lot of his sweat and toil is there and he worked hard. I thought, you know, in those days his pay was very, very good

but with a big family, seven of us, the money didn’t go very far we had to be fed and clothed and all that sort of stuff. So all my working life in fact it was an obsession with me I get very upset today, we’re getting out of context here, but today the management of young people, in all my working life the longest I’ve been out of work is one week.

I never drew unemployment insurance, I’ve paid it all my life. There’s a job there for anybody who cares to look and I’ve done many, many things.

Well Joyce my elder sister she was born in Sydney and Doreen she was born in Brisbane,

they’re both dead now. When Doreen was, she was born in 1924 she’s two years older than me, as they grew up, Doreen was a beautiful cook and Joyce was a housekeeper, you know, all the house duties were done by Mum and then I came along, then my sister Rae, she’s dead now and Marie and there was about 18 months between those two. So the house was sort of operated by women.

That was the central factor that women ruled the roost. I didn’t like, I don’t say I didn’t like it, but I did and I didn’t like it, meat in the sandwich kind of thing. I had to chop up all the wood and light the copper of a morning for the washing and carry the buckets of hot water up to the bathtub so everybody could have their weekly bath and all this sort of stuff. We had an old Queenslander house that had high stairs, I was

the, “Slave,” as I used to say, I was the slave. I used to get used to it, in fact it was just a happy family, we just bonded pretty well.

Oh in fact

there’s not that much difference between city living, suburban living and country living in those days, because every suburban house had their own vegetable garden, they had their own run of WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s, they used to breed rabbits for eating. Whereas the bush had the same thing, vegetable patch the same thing but on a larger scale because there are more people on the station than what there was in a house, most of them employed a housekeeper, this is the stations, they employed a housekeeper,

a cook, a manager and his wife and kids and depending on the size of the property about six or seven station hands. So there’s quite a large number of people living there, quite a community like a little town more or less, as was Mount Brisbane, it was a little town it employed about 20 people. So the relationship to living in the bush and the city, you could just hop on the tram and go to the movies in the city where you couldn’t do that in the bush.

I know people who used to drive about a hundred mile to have a game of euchre over a weekend, Saturday night dance at some little town a hundred mile down the track and they’d jump in their old truck and they’d drive down there and have a dance and play euchre and come back home in the early hours of Sunday morning, and carry on with their job.

The

atmosphere was such that, I remember little about it, but it’s got, it’s a part of my life that I wouldn’t like to go through again. Money was short, your clothing was short, you’d have shoes and you’d wear out your shoes and Mum wouldn’t have enough money to buy shoes and she used to shop at Paddy’s Market in the Valley, that’s where McDonald’s cake shop is now,

just opposite Brunswick Station, it was a big Paddy’s Market you know, you’d go in there like one of these country markets, you’d buy all the fruit and all that sort of stuff, catch a tram back out to Kalinga or wherever. In fact you had to pull, tighten up your belt a little bit and just do the best you could. Everybody helped each other. That’s one thing I do remember about it, everybody helped each other.

Your next door neighbour, “Are you all right?” And they sort of grouped together as a band and worked really well together. That’s the memories I’ve got of it. The shortage of food, the metering out of food, I’m quite a good eater and I like me spuds and vegies and I’d get plenty of that and very little meat. I nearly turned in to a vegetarian because we grew all this down in the backyard salad and all that sort of

stuff. It’s an interesting space in one’s life but I wouldn’t like to go through it again. Which we nearly did in 1948.

Oh yeah, yeah.

Menzies day I think, Pig Iron

Bob, he sold all the scrap metal to Japan all the old boats and steel and all that sort of stuff, we were big exporters to Japan for all that. So Bob was not a popular man amongst the adults of the population, in fact there weren’t very many conservative people in those days, mostly Labour, mainly because the fact that the Union

had a big say in what everybody did and the AWU was the strongest union in Australia, in Queensland if not Australia. My Dad was a reader and he went to the library at Eagle Junction and he ordered a book written by Lenin. Within a week he had people come to see him and ask him if he was a communist. He said, “No I’m not a communist,” “But why are you reading this book Lenin?”

he said, “Because I want to read it.” That’s how things were and the communist factor came in and when Poland was invaded by Germany that was the end, everyone could foresee that there was going to be a big stir, but they didn’t realise that it would go on for so long. Like Iraq for instance, they thought Iraq would be a month, three month and finish that as they did with Europe, but it didn’t, it went on for a long time.

It went on for six years. Patriotism is one where you, you are an object, in fact when I was manpowered out of the services. I was tall strapping young fellow and…

In 1939?

Yes I was. As I say I left school when I was a little over 13 and did 7th Grade and had to do it again and said, “No you can have that.” I got an apprenticeship then. What was I going to say? Fire me

a question.

My mother started to get abused, because she had a son who should be in the military that wasn’t. In those days the government, if you had a husband or son, they gave you a little badge with a bar on it with a star that said that you had somebody overseas in the services.

Some mothers had four or five stars, father and four sons. I got given white feathers [white feathers were given to people avoiding conscription or perceived as being cowards], there were white feather posted to my mother and it was very distressing, that was main reason why I had to get released from my indentures.

Oh yeah, yeah.

‘Why are you walking around when other boys are being killed?” Milne Bay was on then and our boys

were being killed up in New Guinea, “Why aren’t you there?” and I’d say, “Well I’m manpowered out.” “Rubbish,” they didn’t understand. Anyway, I got sick of this and white feathers, and a girl I knew very well, and although married Betty Erickson, in fact she lived in Bridge Street Toowoomba and I knew her quite well even she gave me a white feather, and I thought I was pretty sweet with her. But I wasn’t apparently.

Of course her brother had joined and he got killed in a car accident in a convoy going from Brisbane to Nambour, a truck rolled and he got killed so that was a very hurtful thing for her. She just took her spite out, I was still alive, I was the same age as John, and anyway. When I joined up, my mother was sent this little badge with this little star on and left her off the hook.

White WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s ordinary, fowl.

No, no.

They were posted. Just a white feather.

Yeah, you wouldn’t have an idea. Sometimes a stranger would come up to you on the street and give you, pass you one. I used to flick them like an arrow, throw them away. That used to cause quite a problem because they used to get

very upset. I’d just say, “It’s not my fault, I want to be in but I can’t, I’m not allowed.” So that wasn’t a good enough excuse.

No, not that I know of.

That’s right. Yeah. In fact it suited them, because the militia sent to Milne Bay. Mickey

Clarke a mate of mine I went to school with him, he was killed up there at Milne Bay. He was younger than I, he joined up when he was 16 and he, in fact gong back in those years I have such a guilty complex that I was doing what I was supposed to be doing for the war effort I was doing my job for the war effort. But individually I felt I should be doing more, I should be out there with them, instead of here in the comfort

of a home, sheets and a warm bed of a nigh time. All the trials and tribulations the soldier goes through, I just had a conscience that I had to do something, and so which I did do. Unfortunately I got let down very sadly by the RAAF by not allowed to enter air crew, I even volunteered as a wireless air gunner and they said, “No, you’re colour blind.” I know white from black, black

from white, green from red, amber, I know all those colours, but the one they failed me on was the book, have you been tested for colour blindness on a book? If they’d explain to me what they were doing, what they wanted me to do, they just get this book about this thick an they flick the pages and it’s all speckled with colours and in amongst those colours is a number and they stand out so clearly. He did it to me, what am I looking, he didn’t explain what I had to do,

‘what am I looking for?” he said, “Numbers,” I said, “Do it again,” and he said, “No, you’ve failed.” I said, “Go on just show me exactly what it is,” and I counted every number because they stood out. “No you’ve failed.” So that, very, very sore. I ended up in the air force as a general hand. Just a flunky. A rouseabout.

I did my training at Sandgate, where the Old People’s Home [Retirement Home] is.

Oh he was quite dirty on it. He was in the First World War but he got a DD, a dirty discharge.

Why? He was out at Liverpool and he was a pretty flighty sort of fellow and he was on parade and one of his

lapels wasn’t buttoned up and the officer just got his baton and lifted up the lapel and said, “Do up you button soldier,” and Dad went ‘punch,” and flattened him and ended up in 21 days in Holsworthy Jail and a dirty-d. So our military background is not very good.

No he wasn’t happy at all because he wanted me, he was going in to business he wanted me to go in with him and I’ve sort of upset his

progress in to the future. When I came back I went with him. I upset his immediate plan.

Oh they’d give him a hard time, yeah, in fact the whole family, my sisters.

He’s just ignored that, yeah, yeah. Yeah because he thought that I was doing

what I was supposed to do and that was it. But as I said before I felt in my mind I was doing the right thing in one way, but the wrong thing in another that I should have been out there, which I finally did get out there, took a bit of doing to do..

The day that I joined up. Well I got a letter from the air force with the rail warrant that I had to catch the train to Brisbane and report to their recruitment officer in Eagle Street. I went there and there’d be about 40 or 50 young fellows older than me some as young as me, and milled around. All interviewed by a, no

firstly we did an aptitude test, it was like you give to a five year old kid giving them square things in a round hole or whatever, you know one of those things? Stupid. I thought, “This can’t be right.” And then we saw some psychiatrists, interviewed by a psychiatrist, and then sent up to George Street with the health department had x-rays, so we went up and got x-rayed and came back. They had, they’d leased an old building on the corner of

Creek Street and Anne Street opposite the Old Brisbane Hotel, it was an old two storey place and there’s room about half the size of this, there’d be 12 blokes to a room, bunks up the wall. We used to get a meal chit and go to a café and have breakfast and we’d go back down to Eagle Street and they sort of phased you out. I went down to about 12th January, but I didn’t get in to the air force until 20th because

you had to go through all these phases of tests and exam and all this sort of stuff to see what ability you had and as I said I was colour blind so they decided that I had a bit of sense so they sent me to the Ultimo Tech [Technical College] and make me an electrical fitter.

Oh yeah, you’re in a train, a steam train and you’re heading west and there’s wind coming from the north you’re heading west at 25 mile per hour and the wind’s coming from the north at 35 miles per hour, which is the smoke going to blow? Stuff like that. It’d go that way. Absolutely stupid. I can’t remember them all, but I was absolutely aghast at what

they asked as if you were a seven year old child.

Oh they delve in to the family history and how far we could go back to our family tree, which we had, our father did go back to the 1400s and

anything stark or anything famous the family had done and achievements? ‘Yes,” I said, “My great-great-great-grandfather was adjutant to Sir Scot Greys Regiment,” I said and, “He had his sights on a little bar girl at one of the pubs in Edinburgh and he shot through with the regimental funds and took

her to Canada.” He left her in Canada and he got a job on a boat and came to Australia and landed in Sydney and lived on ‘Flight Flat’, where the aerodrome is now, they used to call that Flight Flat it was a settlement, lived in a tent there and anyway he married and he had a wool background and got a job in the

woollen mills in Sydney. That’s where we originated from. He wasn’t a convict or any such thing, that’s what the guy asked me, “Did your family come out as convicts?” I said, “No, no, no. He should have been a convict but he beat the gun.”

Well no not really. In fact I was amazed, some questions I couldn’t answer because I didn’t see the reality in what they

were asking, you know, stupid questions. Since then I’ve been under a medical psychiatrist for about seven years and I told him, he said, “In those days they were ratbags.” It was part and parcel of the air force framework of getting people in and if you were gentlemanly

background you got in to air crew, if you come from a common family you went in to ground staff it was a chop up of the two really. I just said what I wanted to do and the more I said that the more questions he asked me, I thought it was like a test trial to see if I could give him the answer that he wanted, although the answers I told him were true,

what I thought, they weren’t what he thought. So it was a cross over of minds, it was a battle of minds really. I spend I’d say an hour and a half with him. Then I got sent home and then I got a telegram with a rail warrant and I got sworn in and took allegiance to the King on the 20th

January 1944. So that was it. The thought of going to a technical college I liked, because I went to the tech in Toowoomba, with relation to my indentures. Then to university, I went there for a while, I thought, “This is great, I’ll do something here,” but when they handed me this harness of this aircraft wiring

that’s where I rebelled. I rebelled within myself. I rebelled against the air force, I really despised them I really should be back there in the wool industry. That’s where I should be, not here. So ended up as a general hand.

The pressure, yeah. Yeah the pressure of the white feathers and my mother being abused and all this sort of stuff and you couldn’t walk down the street,

people would say nasty remarks to you behind your back.

Patriotism was a part of it, yeah patriotism was part of it. Not so much the adventure because the life I’d had in the bush, I had a lot of adventure, floods and droughts and all that sort of stuff. A lot of adventure there. Patriotism was one thing I’d say yes. Fight for ‘King and Country’

and I felt honoured to do that and not so much in Australia but when I went overseas that really struck home to me then what my job was, that I had to defence Australia because the Japanese had down through Singapore, as you know, and in to Indonesia and all these sort of things, you’re doing something that was constructive. Although I was just a flunky, I

did a few courses, I did an explosive course, demolition, stupid things but things I felt I should do.

Yeah. I did. Yeah. At least I can say I have served the King and I’ve served the Queen. In Australia it was something

that didn’t mean much, you’re in uniform you’re part of the crowd, you’re sort of mixed in and in those days the Americans were in Brisbane and in fact I was in Brisbane on the big riot that they had. When, 9th Divi [Division] came home from the Middle East and were sent up to New Guinea, and they came home and TAA [Trans Australia Airlines] on the corner of, opposite

the Gresham Hotel there’s a TAA building there that they turned in to a PX [Postal Exchange – American Canteen Unit] and with a big showcase windows you could see all the Yanks [Americans] sitting in there with their long lagers and Australian girls on their arms and the old diggers walking outside with old shabby old khaki dress and they wouldn’t let them in. Anyway the thing blew up, there were a lot of problems,

there were times I stayed in camp, I didn’t bother going to town because I wasn’t game.

Yes I did. I did. When I was going to school there was a fellow called Kevin Keeler and he was a school bully. He was as tall as me but he always picked on me because I was meat in the sandwich two sisters either side and he thought I was a sissy.

I’d rather talk than fight. If I’ve got to fight I’ll fight but I’d rather talk. Well Kevin Keeler was a bloke that just went “Punch” like that. There’s three of them, they lived down at a place called Fogg’s Hollow in Hendra. They’d walk up to school and I walked across the paddocks to school and they’d just come straight for me the three of them, the three Keeler boys, and I’d have to go home and get changed if there was a pool of water or mud they’d get me and just throw me in that

and I’d go home ‘I don’t want to go to school,” “I’m all wet.” “Get dressed and got to school.” So I said to him, “One of these days Kevin we’ll meet, we’ll meet,” and I said, “It’ll be on even terms, one on one not three on one,” they went three, his brothers. At Darlinghurst it was a transit centre for the RAAF and we were on meal parade one night, about half past five, we got our Dixies [tins]

lined up for tucker. I look up in front and I saw this fair haired fellow and I said, “Gee I know him.” So he got his meal and went to a table, so I went down to the same table and said, “Would your name be Keeler?” and he said, “Yes Kevin Keeler,” I said, “Where are you from?” he said, “Brisbane, Hendra.” “Oh are ya? So you know who I am?” ‘No,” I said, “I’m Les Walker I’m the bloke you used to beat the crap out of all the time.” And, “Oh,

how you going?” I wouldn’t shake his hand. So I knew the PT [Physical Training] instructor there, I knew a lot of training, I saw the PT instructor and said, “Can you put on a grudge bout on Wednesday night?”, they had a gymnasium there with a boxing ring and everything,, “Could you put on a grudge bout on Wednesday night,” an he said, “Who for?” “For me,” I said, “See that bloke over there Kevin Keeler I’m going to go over and challenge him to a fight.” He said alright. So I went over to the table and said to Kevin

I said, “Wednesday night in the gym, the ring, gloves on three minutes,” he said, “Oh haste it up.” I said, “No I’m serious I told you years ago,” I said, “There will come a time when our paths will meet.” So the PT instructor got in to his ear and said, “You’ve go to do it.” So the word went around, “Grudge fight,” “Grudge fight,” “Grudge fight.” Well, we got in to the ring I was scared, I was shaking

I was so nervous. I sat on the stool and the PT instructors was my assistant and says, “Settle down,” and got the cloth and wiped the sweat off and he said, “Just settle yourself down,” and he put a cold hand washer on top of my head and cooled me down and got the blood slowing down a little bit. He said, “You just get up and just feel him and see how he goes.” I said, “He’s a dirty fighter,” he said, “Well the ref [referee] will stop the dirty part, Queensbury [boxing rules] rules here’.

Well we got up and I belted the living hell out of him. Truly. That was the proudest part of my life that over all those years that this fellow had given me such a hard time that I said I’ll beat you one day, which I did. It was a dream come true. Oh yes I was a hero for about a month down there then. But things like that, in the civilian

giving you a hard time, in uniform out of uniform, as I said I‘d rather talk than fight and I could manage to talk my way out of a lot of things. In fact I tried to talk me way out of a charge for being AWL [Absent Without Leave] at 6 AD Oakey. My squadron commander was Wing Commander De Millino and he was ex-RAF [Royal Air Force] First World War,

should have been retired but they gave these old fellows these jobs, they sit at the table all day and they’ve got all these subordinates doing all the work. My wife came down from Barcaldine to Toowoomba and I got a telegram to say that she’d be arriving and Toowoomba is 19 miles, Oakey is 19 miles from Toowoomba. In those days no motor cars

and my mate had a push bike and so I got a loan of his push bike and I got weekend leave from Friday afternoon until 23:59 midnight on Sunday night. I rode this push bike in to Toowoomba. Took my wife to a dance at the memorial hall on the Saturday night, went for a picnic on the Sunday. My Dad had a short wave radio and he used

to listen to foreign stations because he was very much interested in what was going on and he could understand, he could speak about three or four different languages, Italian, German, French. We came home and turned the radio on, our bedroom was just off from the dining room and I got a local station and it was out of Adelaide. So, I didn’t know it was Adelaide, so I set the time set the alarm clock went to bed, had a cuddle

leave to get back in to camp by midnight. Well I leave and it’s nearly daylight, I was three hours behind. I got in there and had to report to the guard at the gate. He said, “You’ve got to report to the guard,” I said, “What for?” he said, “You’re AWL.” So I wheel the bike over to the guard room and the sergeant there said, “Go to your quarters and

get changed and go up to your section,” I was in the electrical engineering section at this squadron at Oakey, believe it or not. And to make things worse my job was to remove the batteries out of air craft, to replace the batteries out of air craft they’re about 24 hour batteries and they’re about as big as that esky and ten times as heavy and to put in the most awkward of places,

that was the job I did. It made me pretty strong and healthy. So I had to front up to De Millino, he said, “You’re AWL. Why? What reason?” I said I had a telegram to say that my wife was coming down from Park Hall and I had to go and see her. I said, “We went to a dance, I set the clock to the time on the radio and now I realise it was South Australian time.” In those days not many people had high powered radios,

like short-wave that pick up Adelaide, whereas Dad did. He said, “Of all the rubbish and bullshit me for excuses that would be the best,” he said, “14 days CB [Confined to Barracks],” I said, “Oh sir,” he said, “And a month’s penalty guard.” I said, “Thank you.” So I did my 14 days CB and I did every night for a month penalty guard.

So I had six weeks of purgatory, my wife went back to Barcaldine because came down and thought that I’d be able to see her every weekend or whatever, take a bit of leave. So that was the only part of a discharge, in fact they have it on my discharge certificate, service satisfactory. Whereas my service in the army, it was exemplary because I’d never had a charge. De Millino I could have punched his head in. Things

like that, people don’t believe the truth, you know, it’s so miniscule that you hear the radio you set your time to the radio, you don’t recognise the station and you’re in the pooh. That really upset me. Then these 24 batteries, they were monstrous things, monstrous things, heavy, heavy, heavy.

My training was good. We trained out at Sandgate. Foot drill, marching and all that kind of stuff then we went out the back of Deception Bay where Moreton Downs is now and in the bush out there we used to camp out there for about three weeks. Do live firing, grenade throwing and all that sort of stuff, crushing barbed wire, running up to a roll of barbed wire and just falling on it and

let people run over your back. All that sort of stuff. Sergeant Lord he wanted to teach, he wanted some volunteers to do explosives. So a fellow called Lofty Bennett from Rockhampton and I, we put up our hands to volunteer. We got our what they call a, “Red ticket,” for explosives.

Well.

I don’t know really. Just the adventure of it I suppose. They wanted volunteers to test mustard gas, I put up my hand. They test me on mustard gas. They put a drop on my arm and I got a blister about as big as that. Another gas that they had, you had to go a room and they released the gas and I had a gas mask and I had to wait as long as I could before I put the gas mask on.

I nearly died I can tell you. They just wanted to get the reactions of that particular gas that they were using. I used to do lots of silly things, volunteer because I felt that I liked to be a active, you know, I’m not an adventuring or any such thing, but just like to be able to do things as I want to do them. The explosives course was quite interesting and that was because when you went away being a general hand

you’re more like an air force guard, you do perimeter guards. The air field would be bombed, there’d be tree stumps there they’d want to extend the air field you’d demolish the tree stumps, get rid of unexploded objects there blow them up like mines and things like that to clear the way. I enjoyed that.

It was good to get back and watch a big blow. In fact at Morotai, Mick Grace of Grace Bros in Sydney, he was my commanding officer, Squadron leader Mick Grace. And we came up from Munda to Morotai and put up the lines to build all the tents for the officers line and AO [Aerial Observer] lines and Mick Grace wanted an officer’s toilet built just there, ‘I want it there’.

So they got a work party on it and dug it, Morotai is all coral it’s a coral island and they struck a shaft of coral rock and they came to us, Henry Wardell was our WOD, warrant officer of discipline, he was my boss and he said, “Les,” he said, “They’ve struck a bit of coral they can’t through, you get Lofty and some gelignite and give them a

hand.” Well Mick Grace and his plight had been out on a sortie that morning over the (Alberry(UNCLEAR) somewhere and they came back and they were all in their cots snoring. So a fellow called George Thurman he, he’s now dead, he wanted to let go one of these charges, we let go a couple and did no good and Lofty said, “We’ll have to get some TNT [trinitrotoluene - explosive],” to dig underneath and TNT will lift it and blow it out.

We got the TNT and put about six square boxes underneath and dug down underneath and then we put gelignite, about half a box of gelignite around the sides so we were going to implode and explode. 75 Squadron they’re building a big transport shed about from here to the other side of the road from us and I yelled out, “Fire in hold,” that’s we’re going

to make an explosion and they said, “Oh up yours Jack!” No worries they’re hammering corrugated iron on the roof of their garage and George Thurman said, “Can I let this go?” and we used an electric battery to let it go we had the positive wire hooked up and I said, “All right George,” I said, “But lie down on your stomach and just get the earth wire and just push it on the terminal and it will go.” Well, George didn’t do that, he got so

excited he was standing up and he bent down and put the earth wire on the terminal and blew up an blew him back about 30 yards, blew down the transport shed and the blokes on the roof, blew down the officers tents and Mick Grace came out raving like a lunatic,, “What the bloody hell are you doing?”,, “You wanted a toilet sir, you’ve got one.” There was a hole about as big as this room.

He said, “I still want that toilet there.” So we had scrounge timber and rivet the side of it and make an officers toilet out of it. Things like that, it’s quite amusing. Really, really good. Oh no, those memories are really vivid in my mind, I often have a cackle about that.

I’m running out, ask me something.

I did yeah.

I got well, marksman rifle, Bren gun [machine gun], Owen gun [machine gun], qualified in all those.

Patrols, in fact when we landed, when we left Morotai, it was the biggest convoy of boats ever to leave the Halmaheras group and one party went to Tarakan, one party went to Balikpapan another party went to Labuan. That’s on the west coast of Borneo. Tarakan and Balikpapan are on the east coast.

We were in LCI, landing craft infantry, there would have been 150 of us on board. We were shown films of Borneo in itself and what animals were there, what venomous snakes, spiders, caterpillars, scorpions what to look for. They had the boa constrictor there. It’s about that round and it grows about 20 foot long and wraps himself around your body and crushes you and then he eats you.

He used to hang over trails down to the river bed and drop on cattle or kids or people. So, that was well imbedded in my mind so we left Morotai and the night we left there was a volcano there an it erupted, never forget it. This great big plume of smoke, red and green and al the different colours of the world

bubbled away. Anyway our LCI had two engines and one broke down, so we were at the end of the convoy and we had a destroyer looking after us, because we had to go through a strait to go down the west coast of Borneo and they were quite concerned about that because of Japanese submarines. We got through all right, we got to Morotai and

D Day was June 10th 1944 and they had the Shropshire Battle Ship there bombarding, liberating and bombing and we were out in the harbour just watching all this, just spectators and it was absolutely marvellous what was gong on. We had to land D Day [June 6, 1944] plus one, that’s on the 11th. The LCI has landing ramps down on both sides, you just drive up to the beach

and just put the ladders down and you walk down on to the beach and you don’t even get your feet wet. So we came in and struck a sandbank and got stuck on a sandbank and we were sitting up there like sitting ducks. There was great panic, in fact I had a tribunal D Day last year and it’s only that it was an historical even that it was noted in the log of history that this LCI got stuck on a sandbank in

Brunei Bay. We had to jump from the deck of the LCI down on to these little barges, little punts we jumped about 12 feet with all our gear. Henry Wardell had cooking gear, we even had our Bren gun boxes, we had to jump, in fact I jumped down and my hips came up underneath my shoulders. I’ve done my back in I’ve got rheumatoid arthritis. Anyway I had a (pin(UNCLEAR) last year

they put in an osteopenia which is an umbrella for all the rheumatics and arthritis, the only fact that it was logged as an actual event they had to accept it. We got on shore, we had an RV [Recreational Vehicle] with an old clock donated to the people of Labuan by a trader. They used to have coal and oil Labuaners, it’s an island of about 26 mile long and 13 mile wide and

produced a great amount of coal. Our job was to contain the dispersal base at the aerodrome, that’s where the dispersal bay little grass patch where they wheel the planes off and banks of dirt to stop any shrapnel or whatever hitting the planes, so we had to go up there and clear that. So we followed 28th Battalion through and our first stop,

I was section commander because I was a married man with a child I was, dunno why, but they made me section commander, and we came in to a clearing and there three dead Australians on the ground. My heart stopped. They’d been dead for about two or three hours. That really churned, although I’m used to death but seeing your own countrymen lying there dead.

Anyhow we went forward and we got to the airfield. The air field was a dirt air field, it wasn’t a bitumen one, it was a dirt air field and full of bomb hole craters from the Liberators [bombers] and about 700 yards to the north west of the airfield, what they call the pocket where the Japanese had a strong hold of about six or seven hundred Japanese.

But also in the coal mining days they had tunnels that we didn’t know anything about, our Intelligence hadn’t told us that. But there were about a thousand in the tunnels of a day time and they’d come out at night. Just do what they wanted to and then they’d disappear of a day time. So they concentrated all their efforts on the pocket, bombing it doing what they could do but these Japs [Japanese] were still coming out of a night time. Well one day we’d

had a perimeter and we were securing a perimeter and I was told to go forward to see how far forward we could go because they wanted to extend four and five construction of squadron of the air force, they had to rebuild the airport. They wanted to extend the airport so we could land the Liberators. We went forward and we got shot at and went to ground and I got beside a coconut log and

I felt a sting, in fact a lot of bees up there, we used to call them Balmain Footballers. They used to make nests in the coconut trees and they had black and yellow stripes around them, Balmain footballers and they were buzzing around and I was frightened of them stinging my face and I felt a sting in my leg and I thought, “Bloody things.” A fellow called Taylor shot this sniper, he was tied up in a coconut tree, shot him and he fell out hanging by his leg and we moved forward and

they said, “Walks, what’s wrong with your leg?” I said, “Why?” they said, “There’s blood all over your trousers.” I looked down and bloody blood everywhere, I threw the rifle away and got my gear off, and I said, “I’m going home I’ve been shot.” I tell you what I panicked, really panicked. I didn’t feel any pain until I saw what it was that it felt hurtful. We went back to a CCS [Casualty Clearing Station], Bob Taylor and I went back because Bob, it was the first man he’d ever killed, he had a sort of nervous breakdown, he went off his brain,

because he’d killed somebody. So he and I get together and we go to this casualty clearing station about 300 yards back behind us and there’s about six or seven fellows being treated. We had to wait our turn, it was raining, pouring with rain. Have you ever been to Singapore? The 4 o’clock showers, twice as bad. Poor old medic was doing the best he could an he came to me and said, “What happened to you?” and I said, “Oh I’ve been shot in the leg,” so he just ripped

me trousers up and said, “That’s only a flesh wound.” He cleaned it up and plugged it with Pop’s balm and it went in just there and come out above my shin bone and went down my shin bone. He said, “Go back to your unit,” and I said, “No, no, no, I’m going home, I’m shot, I’m wounded.” “No, no, no that’s not a wound that’s just a flesh wound. Back to your unit.” I said, “This bloke’s worse off than me, he wants something for his nerves, his just shot a Japanese out of a tree,”

and old Bob had the ‘heebie jeebies’ [nervous] and so he gave him an injection and some tablets to take so he said, “Back to your unit.” No sympathy there. So we went back to the boys and they said, “You right?” and I said, “Yeah flesh wound,” but Bob Taylor wasn’t right for long time it took him months to get over that.

Gibberish.

Just muttering, incoherent, went off his brain. The needle settled him. About 10 minutes after he had the needle he settled down and he had the tablet and that settled him down, but he had nightmare after nightmare after that. Anyway I healed up and carried on,

soldiered on as they say. Bob soldiered on, we had to. When the war finished on the 25th August or 16th August the Japanese were still coming out of the tunnels. General Suga was flown from the mainland of Borneo to sign the surrender terms at surrender points, where 9th Division had their headquarters at nine

mile beach and sign this surrender terms there and let him go in to a little hut and he committed hari-kari [Japanese ritual suicide] . He fell on his sword. The war was over, but we were still at war because you couldn’t get it in to these Japanese that the war had ended. Their favourite way of getting at you they’d say, they had trouble with their, “R’s they couldn’t say their, “R’s right, but any names like Les

or Jack, “Is that you Jack?” and Jack would say, “Yeah what’s wrong?” and, “Bang”. Fair dinkum. Porky Farnham he got burnt to death after the war. Came in with their hands behind their head with no clothes on to surrender and they’d come up to you and they’d have a hand grenade and blow themselves up, like these suicide bombers in Iraq.

That went on for about, the war finished in August and I came home in February 1946.

Mmm. It went on until Christmas time, but they finally got interpreters in and we dropped pamphlets and all this sort of stuff. But we found that they’d been on the island since 1941 and all the villagers were sympathising with them, they were Japanese orientated and we couldn’t get anything out of the

villagers in the Kampong. In fact we camped alongside of a kampong and there was two Japanese officers there, living there ala Malaysian style.

Yeah, yeah. And we were still the enemy. We were the white buggers from the south. Yeah we were still the enemy. No it was quite strange, but I’ve been back there twice since to Labuan

and went back to Porky Farnham died in my arms and I said to him ‘I’ll see your mother when we go home,” he said, “Don’t tell her how I died,” burnt to death with av-gas [aviation gasoline]. I threw a ground sheet around him but instead of throwing the fabric side I threw the rubber side of him and it sort of seared and just peeled his skin off. I felt, I had a guilt complex with that because I sort of made it worst for him

he would have died anyway, but I felt I was responsible in some sort of way. I said, “When I get back I’ll see your mother Porky,” and he said, “Don’t tell her how I died.” Right so the grave commissioner came and took him away and in fact a very hurtful thing, they dug a hole for him in the civilian cemetery and they couldn’t get his body down, so they jumped on his stomach and broke his back so he’d fit in the grave. That’s true.

Yeah.

Oh shock. I nearly shot these two fellows. Anyway you’re dead you’re dead. That’s how they took it, they said, “Don’t worry about it,” they’ve got to do this all the time. So I went over in 1998 and…

No,

no sorry I didn’t. We came back a on a boat called the US [United States] Sea Cat end of January and a beautiful trip down the South China Sea, down the Whitsunday Passage and we were supposed to land in Sydney but they landed us in Brisbane. And all the one of legs, 15238, that was my air force number, all the ones got off at Brisbane. All the twos got off at Sydney, all the

threes got off at Melbourne or whatever. I got off and never saw his mother. Even in civilian life, well I worked in Sydney, they had that many Farnham’s in the phone an I used to ring a few and I thought, “This is stupid.” So I said I’ll go over. My granddaughter was Vice-Consul in Brunei, Assistant to the High Commission there so we stayed with her at her Bungalow and flew over to Labuan.

And she’d been trying to find his grave and couldn’t find it. They’ve got a roll, a nominal roll in a little booth there and he’s name wasn’t on it. So I kicked up a big stink. The war cemetery was not too bad, and Sandakan that disaster they had where only six people come out of about 3,000, Sandakan was in a terrible

state the war cemetery there, long grass, elephant grass. I put on a big blue. Went back there in ’97 I went there, ’99 I went back. A bloke said to me,” there’s George Firman’s there and there’s Sergeant Coleman’s grave there.” I said, “Where were they?” They’d left them in the civilian cemetery.

I’ve got photographs absolutely beautiful, cut grass there’s a caretaker there. At Sandakan they’ve mown all the grass, really they needed the charge just somebody to wake them up to the fact that these are historical places. First time I went with my son.

’99, yeah. Everything had changed, the cemetery was clean and cut lawn, Sandakan all the area was mown back and the war memorial was prominent. All the overgrown stuff was gone. But on our first trip there, a fellow called Mukha

Singh, he was an Indian, he owned a chain of sports wear shops, Glamour Sports, and he’s the Chairman of the Trade and Commerce of Labuan and also a fellow called Leong he was the Diver’s Association, like scuba diving and all that and he’s on the tourist, he was Chairman of the Tourist Association. So we got there

in the afternoon and we booked in to the Sheraton and my granddaughter had told them we were coming and booked in to the Sheraton and we got corporate rates there and they said five o’clock you can go up to the roof garden and have canapés and drinks at five. And also see the Concierge there’s a brand new Volvo in the garage for your use. I thought this is great. They were interested

in what I to say and in fact they reclaimed, like Singapore, reclaimed part of the island and built a financial centre there. They wanted to make Labuan the financial centre of the South China Sea. I said,, “That’s all different, we came in through there, and there’s a little clock, a low clock, like a cairn for our RV,” and, “Oh no the clock tower,” “No not the clock tower,

the little clock about a metre high.” Anyway Leong’s son, he’s about their age, Dad I remember when I was a kid I used to play there,” he said, “I don’t remember that,” and he said, “Yes.” And I got on to him and said, “Where do you reckon it is?” I got my bearings I said it should be about four or five hundred yards towards

the Sheraton and we found the rocks in the ground.

Yeah! There were high rise buildings all the way around. A bit of a park and a bit of a market and all the rocks were there. We went out in the car and we drove out along Coal Point Road and I stopped and said, “That’s the pocket over there’.

They said, “Yes that’s the pocket.” “Do you know much about the pocket?” I said, “The pocket was my nightmare.” So we got out of the car and we walked, and I had a prothesis then, and I had a long stick and I was walking and found tunnels, found an old wrecked Japanese vehicle that had been blown up, they’d never found it before. I showed them the swamp where you couldn’t get through when we went to go there,

there’s just a patch of ground it’d be a hundred yards long and about 20 yards wide, you’d be up to your neck in water. I showed them that, they didn’t know it was there. Then we went to the end of the air field because they’d put in a new air field there and went down there to the crossroads, or what we knew in those days as the crossroads and I said, “This is where the crossroads used to be,” he said, “Yeah,” “We were camped down there towards the water,

and the crossroads come up,” and I said, “Where that two storey house there are 150 Japanese buried there.” He said, “We didn’t know that.” I said, “Well I do because they used to collect the Japanese and burn them for hygiene purposes and incinerate them and just dig a hole with a bulldozer and bury them.”

Oh picking up bits and pieces where dogs of the villages would be racing down the road with a leg bone of a man or an arm, you’d retrieve that and take it back up.

Yes there was. Yeah, but I don’t think they wore meat tags like we did. They had their identification in a little wallet and I’d say a lot of those would not have been identified as,

not that the Australian is a cruel person, they’re very sensitive to their well-being and to have these rotting carcasses around the quickest way to dispose of them was to get rid of them. So I’d say there’d be a lot of Japanese that there were ever recognised by name or, anyway the

meat tag [identification tag] was the way to go. But as I say they didn’t wear meat tags they just wore a little wallet and I’ve seen a couple and photo of their wives and family like we had, they were serviceman like we were, but they were a little foul fella, we didn’t like him very much because of his strange ways of getting at you. In fact there were about six or seven hundred killed there, probably up to a thousand Japanese

killed on Labuan. The pocket when we finally go to the pocket it was concreted bunkers with tunnels underneath and as I said before being a coal mining island there’s plenty of tunnels, plenty of places to hide and that was our biggest problem. So after the war, when the war finished what we did do we went around and old Lofty and I we used to blow in the entrances to the tunnels so probably in

there there’s remains that will never be found. Then when I went over in 1999, we stayed at another hotel but the family, everybody’s names is ‘J,” Jan, John, Jean, June you know the ‘J’ family, and we went down to the beach, nine mile beach, and had a barbecue and they don’t eat chicken legs they eat chicken wings only. We went down there and had a few beers

and went for a walk up towards Coal Point itself and I started to, you seem to recognise little things, and my son’s with me, my son is about six foot four and he’s 130 kilos, he’s a big boy. Anyway Johnny said, “What you look for? What you look for Les?” I said, “There’s a tunnel here somewhere.”

“Somewhere there’s a tunnel.” “No, no, no tunnel,” and just up on the top of the hill and there’s some workmen there and he’d spoken Malay to him and the workmen up there said, “Yes, tunnel. Tunnel down there.” It would be about two foot six circumference and I said, “I’m going to go through here, just for old time sake Jimmy.”

I had shorts like this, I had a shirt and I came out like a bloody black fella, but at the other end it was where they built the ladder to climb up, but on the way through I lost my prothesis. Jimmy was in front, they had candles and for some unknown reason they burn incense the Malays for religion, and Jimmy collected all these candles and he’d go up front and light the candle and put it up on a rock and we’d

find our way through and crawl through. I came to a bend, a very narrow and I lost my prothesis. So I had to crawl up this ladder on my knees and oh god, painful. I had to get my leg and clean off all this coal grit. Suffer, suffer. So and like that rice ad where they say, “Me think that amazing.” “How do you remember?”

It’s just a feeling that you get, you’ve been there before and it’s a feeling you get. Out in the garage there’s a, we made the centre page of the papers my son and I. It’s out there in the garage, behind the bar. How we found this and we found that and all this sort of stuff. We made names for ourselves, in fact they still write to me, people over there.

The

first time I went back I was very upset because I couldn’t find my mates grave. I accepted the others because, well this relates back to my younger days because death, I’ve killed sheep, I’ve killed cattle, I’ve killed kangaroos I’ve skinned kangaroos so that was, you lived you died. It didn’t worry me that very much. But going back to find Porky’s grave, that really upset me, that’s when I started to put

on a turn. Out of that came the goodness. I found him and Sergeant Coleman and Porky got killed in October 1944, after the war, and anyway here’s there now. I’ve got a photograph out there of his grave. I’ve still tried to get on to the Farnham’s he’s mother would be now well and dead. So Coleman and his.

The only two graves, only two serviceman they found that weren’t interred in the war cemetery .

In fact we were on guard duty up on the POL, petrol oil and lubricant place, and we heard a noise and after the war the Japanese’s main object was to demoralise the troops that were there and to

do damage, like sabotage. See with the av gas we had four flights of mustangs then and each flight was independent of the other, they had their crews and ground crews so we had quite a big collection of av gas and diesel and kerosene, you name it. We were up there and heard some noise and looked about,

you’d get very edgy, very edgy and 75 Squadron was camped across the road from the POL so we went across there and asked their perimeter guard had they seen anything, hadn’t seen anything. Porky somehow or another, I don’t know whether it was a phosphorous flare or a grenade or, I don’t know what it was, next thing there’s a big

‘whoosh,” and he got covered in petrol. He took off. I chased him and I had the ground sheet on, it was raining, and I chased and I wrapped the ground sheet around him, rubber side in of course which I should not have done, that was it. So our POL got blown up, 75 Squadron mess got burnt down. They caused a lot of damage

and of course took a life. That’s one conscience I can’t get rid of because I feel as I owe him something and I’ve never been able to fulfil what I promised him.

Well we presume, yeah, we presume. Nobody saw anything, probably they just dropped a phosphorous flare over there and just let it burn until it heated up something and then away it

went. They set up booby traps and all that sort of stuff, we used to have a movie, we got the dozers to level out a flat space and we’d take our kerosene tin up or our wooden box and had a screen up and we’d sit down and watch the movies. A couple of Japs [Japanese] would come in with their hands behind their head, the perimeter guard would just shoot them. They’d shoot them and they’d fall down, bang. Everybody’s cowering

on the ground, you know, a weird way a silent war like it is in Iraq now, it’s a war that’s gone and finished but it’s still going.

Oh in fact we’d, I can tell you one night I got the fright of my life. It rained and rained and rained and we were four to a tent, we had tent line, my tent was nearest the road, the last

tent in the line. The guard was protected, there was a road check road block up the top, whereas the jungle just came in but we had that pretty well pared off with mines and booby traps. It rained and I rolled over in my bed, little camp stretchers, I roll over in my camp stretcher and something cold hit my shoulder. It’s that bloody hot you don’t wear any gear and what had happened the rope had sagged and the fly got full of water

and when I touched it there was bloody water all over me. Come straight through. I thought, “Oh God.” When we first landed there we got some trucks and we put flies between, and mosquitoes they were incredible and everybody had a mosquito net, and one bloke had just come off guard duty and very, very nervous, very tense and very intent and he came off guard duty and after he’d had something to eat he got in his cot

on the ground and with mosquito net over him and he went to sleep. He must have touched the mosquito net, well he stood up and he took off like a banshee wailing and away he went. A fellow called Lindsay Webster was a corporal here with headquarters and he was guard commander and he said, “You stay here,” and this is where we found out that they call your name, he said, “Anyone calls your name don’t answer’

and I said, we had little shovels and picks so I dug a fox hole and had me tin hat and I went down at ground level and just looking like that, no one could see me. Anyway I was there for about two hours I suppose, nothing happened you could hear gun fire, but it was away from us. But everything you saw moved and anyway Lindsay came out to give me relief, “Hey Walk, Walk, Walk where are you?”

No way I was going to answer him, ‘Walks,” and I look and here’s a boot with a putty on it, he said, “Walker where are you?” I said, “Here!” I nearly took his boot off he jumped that high. Oh Lindsay, he’s from Corowa, still alive. Things like that, in fact you’re frightened yet you make light of things. You see the funny side. Another time we only got

bombed once, and Lindsay’s out in the open with no steel helmet on. I said, “Get your tin hat!” and he said, “Oh it’s alright,” so I jumped up and gave a good old league tackle and brought him to the ground. “Bastard,” grazed all his back and goodness me, but those little things were quite humorous.

Yes.

Oh yeah we knew we were going overseas. We knew we were going, we had to be allocated a squadron and Oakey was a like a complete factory. I was head of the electrical section because I’d done this basic course, electrical fitter, which I failed but I still got head of the electrical department. It was just a

matter of time that, we’d reinforcements rolling over all the time. And from there you’d go to Townsville, to Ross River Weir they had a holding camp there and until they had enough people to make up a flight or make up part of a squadron that’s where you’d stay. You’d do work parties out at Garbutt air field, load the coaches with engines and spare parts, all that sort of stuff and as I said before that’s where I saw them hosing

tail gunners out of their bubbles and mid gunners out of their bubbles. You knew you were going overseas but you didn’t know when. Merv Crane, he was lucky, he went to Italy. Whereas my brother-in-law, Keith Smyth he went up to Nadzab, he stayed at Nadzab all the time, whereas I had a roving commission sort of thing, moved from Morotai and Borneo and of course to Brooktown. Yes you knew you

were going but you didn’t know when.

Well I didn’t mind it actually. In fact realisation comes when it’s too late. If only I’d have, well I was a fool to myself really, that I should have passed that electrical fitter’s course and in fact one bloke passed it and

he’s LAC [leading aircraftsman] and he applied for air crew and got it. He was in charge of Vietnam, he was the commanding officer of the transit and all that air control in Vietnam. The opportunity was there, but being stupid you don’t realise it, but the opening’s there.

Much of a muchness. The camaraderie in a shearing shed is much the same as camaraderie in a unit. You make the best of what you’ve got, in the services you’ve got more advantages because you’ve got other units you used to steel generators from for light and all that sort of stuff, you’d knock off there booze, you’d knock off their rations

whereas the shearers, he makes his own fun. We used to have a lot of fun, we used to black market booze, I didn’t drink beer, I smoked but I didn’t drink beer. You used to get two bottles of beer a week and I used to save it up and get a dozen and sell it to the Yanks [Americans]. Make a few bob out of that. Then we’d dive for pearl shell and we’d make foreign orders, even at Oakey we made foreign orders there.

Well that’s a job that you’re not supposed to do. That’s a personal thing.

We used to make, get the 50 cal [calibre weapon] and the 30 cal bullets and make lightening fighters out of them, and make aeroplanes and use Perspex to make picture frames and all the stuff we made out of ammunition we had a chrome and nickel plating place there, we’d go and have it chromed and have it on the stand.

Oh yeah. Yeah. You’d be working on a bench, all manner of

sparks with my officer in charge, as long as you were at your bench rewinding motors and all that sort of stuff, you’d have a motor there being rewound, but you’d be secretly making a foreign order. Ashtrays and all that sort of stuff.

In Australia, not very much in Australia. In the islands

with the pearl shell well we had lathes, grinders, polishing machines and all that sort of stuff. We used to dive down in the lagoons and bring up a big pearl shell, big beautiful colour and cut it and it was like an opal. We’d buff it and shine it up and sell it to the Yanks for about 50 bucks. Did quite well.

Oh yeah well you see when the Americans came to Australia,

the Australian soldier, I used to draw two guineas a fortnight, that’s all I used to get. That had to buy me shaving gear, my tobacco, we used to get an issue of tobacco when we went away, but go on leave, go to a dance, two guineas didn’t go very far. So when the Yanks came out and they

were very highly paid, what was the name they gave them, “Over here, highly paid and oversexed,” that’s the Yanks, that was the proverb in those days. It was pretty right, they had double the money we had. They had better facilities than we had. On the boat coming home, we went across on the Lake Charles Victory, a Liberty boat, about 1500 of us alone, unescorted

in 1944, up to Dumpu, went to Biak first, then to Dumpu, unescorted. We were supposed to have air cover, surveillance, Catalinas and Sunderlands [flying boats] but never saw one. Target practice there’d be mines floating around, these horny mines, floating around and they’d get us out and we’d have to do rifle practice and we’d have to hit one of those things there on those horns to blow them up because that was where the detonator is. We didn’t hit many.

Oh saw quite a few, quite a few. In fact, they had a big cyclone in the Coral Sea, not long after the Battle of the Coral Sea and they had a big cyclone, thousands and thousands of mines there and of a day time you’d see twenty or thirty just bobbing like barrels on the water. Yeah.

Area reconnaissance used to track them and the mine disposal blokes used to go out in the boats, if they were near land they’d go out in the boats and let them off.

By train.

It was on a, not a troop train, it was a supply train, a freight train. Steam engine. I was put up on a flat wagon with a GMC [General Motors Corporation – automobile manufacturer] truck,

and that was my responsibility. The OC [Officer Commanding] of the train was a real mongrel. He brought out the good things in you to say. You’d stop at a station and you weren’t supposed to leave your post, you stayed there, the cabin doors were locked and you just sat outside and if it rained you sat underneath it. Anyway he’d say, “Holt who goes there? Friend or foe?” “Friend,”

“Password?” “Billy White,” you know, “Pass friend.” This bloke got up one night, we were just outside of, oh hell where they make the pies out just this side of Townsville,

No back this way of Home Hill, but near Home Hill. Anyway we

No. Home Hill is one side and Ayre’s the other. I forget the name of the place, Laura [actually Larrimah]? Laura, I think. Not really sure, but anyway we, it was bitterly cold it was raining we were wet and they’d stopped for a tucker break and you’d go to get relief. So you’d go and have your meal. I had my meal and I came back and the officer had caught some of the blokes had got in to the

trucks and were asleep on the seats. He did his lolly, he got really nasty, really snarly and he came around and, “Holt! Who goes there?” “Who wants to know,” I said, “I want to know, who goes there friend or foe?” he said, “What do you reckon?” and he had an Australian voice and I said, “I reckon nothing, give me the password and I’ll let you through and if you don’t I’ll shoot you.”

Not that I would have. He gave me the password and he patted me on the back and told me what a great fella I was and how long had I been on the back of this train, I said, “About three days.” “Oh no you’ve had enough.” So I was back to the caboose with the conductor, there with the guard. I’ll never forget that. Yeah Laura, they used to bake great pies there.

Our stops, in fact our first meal was at Gympie, sausages and mashed potatoes our next stop was at Rocky sausages and mashed potatoes, and at Rocky we were in the station and a troop train came down bringing Yanks down on R&R [Rest and Recreation] and they started to say, “Don’t worry Digger, we’ll look after your wife, we’ll look after your girlfriend,” oh dear big blue there. They had to get the police in

the bloody provos [Provosts – Military Police] and everybody. It was a big stink. That was the worst trip of my life. Your eyes are all full of coal dust, dirty you’d have a black neck from the shirt, when it rained you had your ground sheet, I’d never get me, I had a grate coat but I never got that wet I used to put that up under the mud guard, because you could never dry

it, once a grate coat gets wet you can’t dry it and it way about ten tonne. The train would do about five mile an hour and then it would do about 40 mile an hour, and you’d be freezing to death, oh my God. It was the worst train trip of my life.

Garbutt was a big American base, mostly Americans a few Australian squadrons.

Liberators [bomber aircraft], Vengeance [Vultee Vengeance fighter], Bostons [bomber aircraft], there’s Beaufighers [fighter aircraft], there’s about every type of air craft you could find because Townsville was the base because it was close to, well you could see New Guinea from Cape York. That’s where all the action was and in the Solomon Islands, Guadalcanal was going then and that was in flying range back and forth. There’d

be thousands of planes, not thousands, hundreds, every type you could possibly wish to see.

I did yeah, yeah.

Yes that’s right I wanted to be one of these big ace pilots, you know, all the swastikas out the side of his cockpit.

I’ve always been interested in flying, in fact I used to make model aircraft when I was a kid, make gliders and I’d make motor planes.

I had a fascination for it. In fact, in my bedroom I had model aircraft hanging down from the ceiling on fishing line, just something that I liked.

Well in those days it was always the air force, because of the Battle of Britain, the bombing of Europe, Pearl Harbour the islands it was an

air war because of the distance and I felt that the army was be a bit too tough for a soft living bloke like me. I thought the air force was just the thing, I had the intelligence to do it and unfortunately things went against me. They wanted me in ground crew and that was it. So I stayed right down the bottom of the ladder. I was AC-2 [aircraftsman second class] then I was made AC-1 [aircraftsman first class] and

then they made me a LAC, yeah they made me a LAC out at Oakey, leading aircraft.

Ah, 1942 ah. We would be

living at Newmarket Street Hendra, yes it was Hendra. Pearl Harbor. It amazed everybody. Next thing we were inundated with Americans, Doomben and Ascot Race Course was a very good camp with Yanks everywhere.

That happened within six months.

Yeah that happened, Pearl Harbor was in December and I’d say by March, April of ’43 Brisbane was an American base. They built a road through to Darwin, they had black labour team that built a road through to Darwin, because there was no direct contact with Darwin. As you go up through Augathella, Jambo [Jamboree Heights], Blackall,

Barcaldine, back of Bunburra and up through the, the black the American Negro did that, the Afro-American. They drove all the trucks and they were camped on the south side of the Brisbane river over at West End was the black area, and the whites were on the eastern side, Victoria Bridge. So there was a

demilitarised zone that they couldn’t cross that bridge.

Oh yes. In fact at Montague Downs at Boulia all the staff there at the station of Brooks [Brookstead?], the owner, they were all Aboriginals and they used to take over the shearing quarters when the shearing was finished. When we got there they’d just move themselves out to their humpies and that sort of stuff.

I didn’t like it at all. I didn’t like it at all. In fact I, I learnt, I was there for about 10 weeks at Montague Downs and I learnt a bit of Aboriginal language, I forget it now, but I could talk to the Abos [Aboriginals] in their language and communicate quite well. Whereas when the Americans came and the segregation of black and white

was such, I’d read about it and I seen movies about it but it didn’t really strike me, but when you see it actually, unreal. Also, when they built the road up there, there were that many roadside graves of Negroes that had been playing up or they raped a woman, they just court martialled them and hung them. In fact at Hughenden they hung at Hughenden Tower, they’re buried there and at

Barcaldine, outside of Barcaldine they hung a fellow near the Alice River, buried him there. So there’s no love between the whites and the blacks in those days, in fact it was very bitter. The only black you saw would be a bar steward where he was just a surf, a lowly peasant. He bowed and scraped to you and that was it. That was really

not part of our life you know, we’re so multi-cultural now, we’re more multi-cultural than America I’d say. Yet it still goes on there whereas here it goes on to a certain extent but not as badly. The Aboriginal is not a bad bloke.

Ah no but in the army I have. Half castes in the air force, yes, half castes. A fellow called Marks from Black Hall, Darkie Marks from Black Hall, was in the air force. I camped with him in Townsville actually. Darky’s habit was, he was a very, he’s a gambler and very deft of hand playing cards. He’d deal from the bottom of the deck, you’d play poker with Darkie

and Darkie would always win. Four of us Macka McElhoun, Les Walker, Darkie Marks, and Bluey Thomson always be together. We’d thumb a ride in to Townsville on a Friday night, we’d have weekend leave, and we used to sleep on the Strand at Townsville and Bluey Thomson was a thug and Darky Marks was a very gentle docile sort of person, he’d go up to a Yank he’d have a cigarette in his mouth and he’d

say to the Yank, “Would you have a light please?” and the Yanks used to bring out these big Zippos [lighter] and big flash of flame and Bluey used to thump them behind the ear and take their money off them. I was part of that, in fact I used to, I didn’t do anything but I used to enjoy the relationship to what the money gave us. We used to always go up to the Wintergarden, a dance hall in Townsville

it’d cost a few bob to get in there because it mostly for Yanks. Yeah that was Darkie. Kelly’s pool, used to make money. We used to pool our pay, two guineas a fortnight and out of the two guineas I’d put in about 10 shillings I suppose and the four of us we’d have two or three pound and we’d give it Darkie and he’d play poker or Kelly’s pool and Darkie would go away and come back with

plenty of money.

Yeah, yeah. They absolutely took over. Absolutely took over. Even stop civilians, the provos would stop civilians. In fact I worked at, where was I working then, worked at, no I was in the sheds, but I came down to Brisbane and I’d worked for Radcliffe and Son at South Brisbane, yeah, and that’s where I became familiar with the Yanks. I found them quite nice, the Afro-Americans quite nice. I liked their drawl, their southern drawl and their big white teeth. I made quite a few friends. I could not understand, and they didn’t

either, why? ‘You’re white, me black why are you talking to me?” “Well it makes no difference to me, you’re a human being the same as me,” I said, “No matter what colour you are. It’s just one of those things some are born white some are born black.” I’ve got a funny joke I can tell you about that, but I can’t on TV [television].

This relates to the west of Queensland, a sheep station, pretty large property they run about 100,000 sheep and they’ve got boundary houses. And Jackie, he gets married to this nice lubra [Aboriginal woman]. The boss comes and he says, “Jackie, I’ve got to send you out to the 40 mile,” he said, “You’ve got to be out there for a month,”

he said, “A lot of fencing out there and there’s a lot of up sheep up there so you...” “But boss I just married!” “I’m sorry about that. You can’t take her with you, she stays here. Out you go.” Anyway Jackie goes out to the out station and after a month he comes back in. About 8 months later his lubra has a baby and the baby’s white. He said to his wife, his lubra,

“How come the baby’s white?” “Oh,” she said, “You’ll have to ask the boss,” “What’s the boss got to do with it?” “You ask the boss.” So he goes over to the house and knocks on the door and, “Boss, I want to see you,” “Yeah what’s wrong Jackie?” “Mary just had a baby and the baby’s white! I don’t understand,” and he said, “She told me to see you, you’d tell me why she’s white.”

“Well Jackie,” the boss puts his arm around his shoulder and takes him out to the verandah he said, “Look at all those sheep out there, look at them. How many black sheep do you see Jackie,” “There’s a lot of black sheep out there,” he said, “That’s how it is.” “Boss,” he said, “I’ll say nothing about you if you say nothing about me with the sheep!” End of story.

We just lay in our tents on the ground for a couple of days. Until they documented us and got us in to work parties, you were in the same work party, 12 blokes on the back of a GMC and out to Garbutt. It was very hard, very hard work. In fact I collapsed a couple of times through heat exhaustion.

Mmm.

No, no just loading stores and engines in to Dakotas [aircraft]. They were just aluminium skin and oh about 40 degrees outside but inside these aircraft it would be about 140. Sweat boxes. We used to take four salt tablets a day about 30 grams each four a day to maintain the fluid. We worked very hard there and

worked at that until one day we went back to camp and they said, “You’re going, you’ve been allocated to 82 Fighter Squadron who have just flown out to Biak and all you guys are the ground crew of 82 Squadron.” So we went to Biak, but Biak was all over so the squadron flew to Munda, the plane flew to

Munda so we went to Munda and we disembarked there and found the squadron.

No in a boat, no we went up by boat, in the Lake Charles Victory and we found the squadron. A fellow called Flight Lieutenant Tuckwell was the administration officer. Well he was the biggest wimp ever, I’ve had anything to do with. A person you couldn’t talk to because he didn’t understand you and you didn’t

understand him, he had his own way of doing things. But anyway they sent us all up and I ended up on hygiene, because I was a general hand. All of the things related to the electrical side of things I was pulling hygiene. There was Stan Cousins, Bob Taylor, Porky Farnham and me, hygiene. So all we had to do was

clean the rubbish up around the camp, burn out the toilets, do any odd job anything Henry wanted. That was it. Every day, the toilets were pits, oh I came up with a good invention. Cutting 44 gallon drums in half and cutting the square in the top and putting wooden boards on and make it look like a toilet, make it more comfortable.

Put rooves over them, put hessian around the walls so you weren’t out in the open like the country ones you know. We’d burn them out every day and to do that we’d go to POL and get some diesel and petrol and mix it together and just get a buck and pour down each hole then we’d get a roll of toilet paper and wet it with petrol and just roll it in and get a wick light

and blow them up. They’d hit the ceiling. True story. We had a padre, a Church of England padre and all the toilets were out of bounds when you did this. We had a bit of dysentery going through the camp at this stage and Stan Cousins, they made him a corporal, and the old padre was racing across to go to the toilet in the officer’s lines

‘no no sir you can’t go there!” he said, “I’ve got to go, I’ve got to go,” “No sir please don’t go there!” And of course the fuse was already lit so he got in there, lifted the seat sat on it and, “Boom.” He ended up in the base hospital. Yeah. Things like that, things you didn’t expect to be stuck to the ceiling and old Tuckwell

would come around and do an inspection and, “Oh good work,” looking at all the drums six holes, “Good boys,” all scrubbed and polished bright and he never bothered to look at the ceiling, until somebody told him too. He said, “What’s that?” “That’s shit sir, that’s shit’.

So he stopped us burning off like that and we had to do it slowly in fact we got to a stage where we had to take the drums off the stands and fill them up full of dirt and get a truck and load it full of dirt. The more you did that, you had to go down to get another one. That was the hardest part of it. Then they’d have, we found some spring water, beautiful fresh spring water.

Yeah Mick Grace was our CO [Commanding Officer] and he said, “Go down to the wharves and get a tank and build a tank stand and we’ll pump up some spring water in to a tank,” a gravity feeder. So we did that, got a pump and we used to cut down coconut trees and drag them up with an old Massey Ferguson tractors, put them on top of each other and put this tank there, got the pump going. Oh it was absolutely beautiful water. A cup of tea,

it was the best cup of tea I’d ever tasted for a long, long time. That could be still there that tank and stand. Because we were camped alongside of a kampong [village] and the head man’s daughter used to do my washing. They were after some money and she came in to the camp and Henry Wardell, WOD, said,

“She’ll do your washing, give her some mullah [money].” I thought all right. Saw them down at the creek and they’ve got this bloody rock, clothing rock and they’re, “Bash, bash, bash.” Well, all my khaki shirts went white! As white as that. In fact there’s a photograph of me somewhere around, everybody is wearing khaki and jungle greens and here’s me walking around

with a white shirt on. I felt real good. Oh no in fact the native there were sympathising with the Japanese because they’d been there for so long, they’d been there for five years and they were all on side. That was our biggest problem. Morotai was good because, of course, the black battalions of the American army they were up in the front line and

all us fellows are back on the beach on little coral atolls swimming, fishing. We had a perimeter guard there, only along the water to make sure no one knocked off our pearl shells. Morotai was a dream. It was really a holiday, like Hayman Island [holiday resort]. Wore no clothes, coconut oil and black as black.

In fact I enjoyed Morotai very much, we weren’t there very long because they started the, MacArthur [Douglas MacArthur, American General] started the island-hopping bit. They’d just done the landing at Leyte, whilst we were at Morotai, and then they decided they’d, see Labuan was the deepest water port in the South China Sea. It could take the Queen Mary II that’s how deep it was. Tarakan was oil and Balikpapan was oil.

They were dependent on those and the port for their supplies. So Tarakan went first and then Balik [Balikpapan] and Labuan went at the same time on either side of Borneo so that sort of cut off his, well he didn’t have the range for his air craft, we’d captured the aerodromes at Tarakan

and at Labuan. Our nearest base was Morotai where the Libs [Liberators] used to fly from within flying range and they sort of throttled him and he had to go back and go back and go back to the Philippines and that’s when the thing really started to roll on. But that was MacArthur’s island hopping scheme. Nobody could understand why it was, but when you look at it in hindsight

it was a rather a good move, actually.

I was scared. A bit scared. Mainly because we were going alone, unaccompanied by aircraft or destroyers. I suppose by aircraft but I never saw one. We used to go across in convoys through the Coral Sea and

the Japanese were pretty thick up there with navel, their submarines and their navy craft. So that was a bit harrowing and also the fact that there was three holes on the Liberty boat and we had a bilge about that high, the bilge around the side of the boat would be a foot deep. And a lot of blokes got seasick, five tiered bunks and the bloke up top would get crook, he’d just drop it on that fella and the

stench was unbelievable. I refused to go down there. The Master at Arms, or whatever they call him, came and said, “Down,” I said, “No.” “Down,” I said, “No, throw me overboard,” I said, “Come with me,” lent over the hole and oh the stench, people had dysentery they were vomiting, sea sick, oh. So he put us up on the foc’s’le

and three of us got up there and stayed there the whole of the trip. We struck a cyclone and the Liberty ship has a fairly high prow and she’s diving through the waves and the waves are going over the top of us and toilets were ropes along the side of the boats, one thing you never did was stand in the middle of the boat and look out at sea because somebody would go to the toilet and whack across your face. No, true. Very primitive. You’d hang

on to a rope and you’d sit on a rope and away you’d go.

Eating. They had a galley. I don’t remember eating very much, because whatever, you sat down to eat something and somebody would get sick and you’d just throw it away. I think, it took us about three or four days to get to Biak and that was

the first I did have when we got to Biak, but on the boat, the meals were fairly good but they were American style meals you’d get that mesh tray with all the stuff on, cornflakes in with your potatoes and onion in with your pudding and all this sort of stuff.

We’d take a cut lunch, sandwiches. When the Yanks would go to their mess, coffee and beer and all this sort of thing. That

was a very sore point. We used to pick up our sandwiches and take them, somehow we’d find something to make a cup of coffee , a cup of tea or something but altogether different. The Yanks were streamlined, we were rough and ready, that was the comparison between the two.

Biak, yeah we landed there late evening and it was a very, what I remember it was a very jungled,

jungly island. When we find out that the squadron had flown on to Munda they put us back on the boat and we slept on the boat. We all slept on deck, nobody went down the hole because we were static, we were moored at Biak. We left next morning for Munda. Munda itself is

another coral atoll very, very coral and jungle and all that sort of stuff. There wasn’t very much action, there were a few Japanese there but they were in a corner they were held in a pocket by the black Americans, again. Our squadron flew out sorties to Morotai and in fact there was a lot of resistance at Morotai with the Japanese troops and forced them back away from

the air field and they flew up to Morotai, we went up first as an advance party in the boat, and made camps, secured the area and we flew the planes in. That was all the ground force did. My part of it was to go in the advance party, well from Morotai I was in the advance party to Labuan

and the squadron would come over about six weeks later.

Oh yeah.

Yeah well. The job I did in the air force was very similar to what I did in the army. Yes. Aerodrome defence all that sort of stuff. Perimeter fence, guard duties,

all, well it was a military function in actual fact, but then again one thing I found out about the RAAF they’re all pretty versatile fellows. You’d get a fitter 2-E, that’s an aircraft fitter, and he’d pick up a .303 [rifle] and he’d go and do guard duty and he’d do his bit. It all sort of meld together, one bit happy family. Whereas the air crew, a different story. They’d go to bed with their sheets, to the hell with the rest, drink their

gin and tonics, “We’re being looked after by our staff.”

Yeah.

Oh in fact when Mick Grace was a great CO. He was one of the boys, you know Grace Bros [department store] of Sydney? He was one of the boys, he really, he spoke to you no matter where you were, he’d say, “Gidday,” to you, “How are things going young fellow?”

and you’d say, “Oh not too bad,” “Got any problems?” “Oh I’ve got a few,” “What are they?” “Oh no they’re too, don’t worry about them boss,” you’d call him boss, “Don’t worry about it boss.” He got sent back home, rotated, and we got a squadron leader, oh dear oh dear, I’ve got his name out there, and he was a Duntroon man,

had been trough the Academy. He wouldn’t even talk to you. He’d look straight through you and you couldn’t go to him, Whereas Mick Grace, if you had a problem you’d say, “Look boss, this is not working out,” and Mick would say, “Well we’ll fix it.” You’d go to this guy, I’ll think of his name,

he was a self opinionated man, but a brave man. He and his flight, flew from Labuan to Kuching with belly tanks, they reckon it was out of the range of a Kittyhawk [fighter aircraft], impossible, it was about 500 miles down and 500 miles back.

They got these belly tanks for the Kittyhawks and he took a flight down, took four aircraft down, bombed, strafed, blew up trains got back and we watched it all in the gun cameras. Proof of the story. Schultz, squadron leader Schultz.

He got a DFC [Distinguished Flying Cross] for that. He was not a mixer. He was a person to himself, he was a superior being, you know one of those, a snob. Everybody hated his guts. He’d take off, “Hope somebody shoots him down,” sort of thing, not a nice thing to say but his attitude to his men was very poor, as far as I was concerned, particularly to me.

Oh yeah. In fact every sortie they go out on, they’ve got .303 canons or 30 cals or 50 cals or whatever, there’s a gun camera with each gun and every time the gun’s fired the camera takes a shot of the target. Their after a train, a freight train, and they follow the freight train and you see all the dirt flying up around the train and the next thing you see, a big, ‘Whoosh’.

Drop a bomb and that was it. They chased a couple of trucks. Blew them off the road, one bloke run across the paddock and they even had a go at him and blew him away. Unreal.

Oh no, no, no. Only just a special few. Special few. You had to know the armourer because the armourer had to take the camera out of the gun and you had to know the

IO, Intelligence Officer, who I was pretty friendly with. In fact at Morotai he invited me to go with him on a flight. I was good at reading aerial photography and he wanted me to go with him to Borneo on a recce [reconnaissance] just on the flight, just for the fun. He didn’t come back, I didn’t go, but he didn’t come back.

I don’t know. I just really can’t tell you that. I can’t tell you that,

but he didn’t come back.

I have a lot of times. I wanted to go, but I said no.

I got flown in civilian aircraft, but in fact I’m getting ahead of myself now, but when the Super Constellation came out, I was one of the first people to fly it from Tokyo to

Australia in the Super Constellation. Staying over at Manila and Darwin. Flying in fact, what I did in the army I wanted to do a parachute course, but because of my leg they would let me do it. My daughter she’s jumps out of aeroplanes.

Strange. But flying is something, oh in fact, my boss my old boss I used to work with at Kings Holdings, we had a flight of Cessna on the Wilbur Smith traffic plan here we got the contract to do the aerial photography for the Wilbur Smith Plan. Flew up with Jim King in his Cessna every now and again.

Took the controls, go from Toowoomba.

Oh yeah, yes. Particularly at Oakey when they refurbished, or renovated or renewed an aircraft they put the engine on a test stand for about 12 hours and they’d put it in the aircraft and they’d roll the aircraft out on the tarmac

and put the chocks under it and hold the wings down and an engine tester to get in a start her up, we’d yell out to him, “Give her full throttle, lift the tail off the ground,” we’d be sitting on the tail to hold it down. I’ve taxied an aircraft from the hangars out on to the strip. I’ve taxied one and just felt like aiming her down and pulling he back and going for it.

In fact they’re not that hard to fly actually. Not hard to fly.

Oh the hidden Spitfires. That’d be the ones that were sent out from England, the plywood ones, plywood and glue. Yeah. And also at Garbutt, there’s a

graveyard of aircraft at the side of the Garbutt Hill. The Yanks tunnelled it out and just cold stored the aircraft there.

No they came down back from there. They got as far as TI [Thursday Island], they got up to New Guinea and they put them on TI because that was a safe place and they were unserviceable. I think they brought them down by boat. Took the wings off and

brought them up to us. Fabric and wood and glue.

Yes it did. It did. Yeah. They used to have what they called, “Red alerts,” you’re on ground and next thing a red tracer would go up and

that’s a red alert that means that there’s trouble around and things like that. That brought you back to the realisation that you weren’t back in Australia, you were in a foreign country and anything could happen to you. When I got wounded I thought that was the end of the world, I thought I’d go home and I’d been over here a couple of months I’m going to go home. It’s just part and parcel of life.

You just put up with it when the red goes up. You just sort of get yourself organised what you’re going to do and you had to plan what you’re doing, where you’re going to go, and that’s what you do it becomes automatic to you. A lot of them are false alarms. A few of them were, but a lot of them were false alarms. You just readied yourself for that.

Oh yes it was very similar to infantry training. The Australian manual on military training was based on that same as the army. That’s when I joined the army I found it very similar. I just fell in to it straight away. Not that that did me much good but it’s based on the small arms and all that sort of stuff, the same

training as the infantry gets. Oh no in fact it was a learning curve for me because I used to go and see pictures at the little theatrette down below the Carlton Hotel, used to have this centre sound news there and I used to go down there sometimes of a lunch time and watch the newsreels from the war. God, how could you live through that you know, and yet there’s hundreds of us have,

and thousands of us haven’t. That’s the difference. It’s a matter of luck I’d say.

Well it was a new experience, new curve line. It was a complete change. You see discipline comes in to it. Whereas in a shearing shed, my Dad was the boss, not that

I did what I wanted to do, but I enjoyed myself. When discipline hits you, I had discipline at home but not to the extent of the services. Well that straightened you out. It’s a bit hard to take at first, you get a bit aggro but you sort of meld to it, come together and you take it in your stride. My favourite saying is, “If stands still salute it,” no, “If it moves salute it, if stands still paint it.”

Another thing I used to do, not so much in the air force but in the army, when things got on my nerves I’d get a cluey board and put some papers to it and hold it in my left hand, and I’d just walk around the camp, saluting officer, “He’s doing a good job, what are you doing son?” I’d say, “Yes sir,” saluting nothing I’d be shirking my duty, having a

rest. Those things did happen in the air force as well. As long as you make yourself look busy there’s no problem.

Oh well in fact we were, our IO [Intelligence Officer] was a good bloke, we had up-to-date news, long before Australia knew what was going on we knew what was going on.

We knew by number of aircraft bombers and fighters and all that sort of stuff what they were going through because they hosed out bodies of gunners and fighters would come back full of bullet holes and they were and you were here, but they were going through the rough end, whereas you were on the easy end of it. We’d just write-off their plane and

fitter 2-E, engine fitter, and a 2-A is an airframe fitter, they’d say unfit for flight, logged it off and that pilot would be grounded until the plane was repaired. That’s what it was all about. Rejuvenating the aircraft so they can get them out on sorties again as well as other duties. You worked hard, you really did, but when I was guard, on perimeter guard around the shore line

it was like being on Hamilton Island, you know, I still didn’t drink but I had me smoke and used to smoke camels and chesterfields and all the American cigarettes and also on the strip the American red cross they had girls driving the coffee jeeps around. An aircraft would come in and these two sheilas would go up and pour them coffee. Also, the American entertainment, I saw Bob Hope,

saw Bing Crosby, I’ve seen Gracie Fields, I saw Gracie Fields at the Tivoli in Brisbane. I forget what they call them now but they were a special troupe that went out, volunteers of film stars, came out, Betty Grable no not Betty Grable, Jane Russell, Jane Russell came out just to give the boys a bit

of an ego spur.

They were good. They’re a complete break away, cut off and you start there. We were sad to see the show finish. Very sad. They’d stay there for a couple of days and they used to mix, go around to the camps and mix with people and more of a morale booster for the Yanks.

Yes very upsetting. They get a bit raunchy and they’d. No. That’s the only bad part of it.

Well they’d wear hardly any gear and show a bit of breast and a bit of bum and all this sort of stuff. The Yanks loved that, where that was strange to us because in my day, when I was going to school, if you saw a girls ankle

you were a bad boy. Over the years times changed and the Yanks sort of loved this sort of carryings on. Whereas it was alien to us and our Australian people used to come across, I’m trying to think of the singer, she was dressed in a long gown and prim and proper, whereas the others would be in mini skirts

with g-strings and all this sort of stuff you know, just for the satisfaction of the Yanks. We enjoyed it. We enjoyed it. I used to see a bit of leg every now and then.

A positive effect for the first couple of days because the morale used to go right up. Then when they were gone, you know, depressed

and just memories, “Oh gee wiz what I would do with her,” and all this sort of stuff and just a flash in the pan sort of thing.

Yes that’s right. I went to a few, I didn’t go to them all because they upset me because I was a young fit married man

and there’s things you can do and things you can’t do. I’d prefer the Australian style where they went and did their entertainment without showing, oh they used to have the chorus dancers with webbed stockings on but not to the extent of the Yanks. Vera Lynne [singer] came over, she was British and staunch

and to me she was my darling you know, and she’d have a long red dress on and wouldn’t show any leg just a lovely face and a lovely voice. In fact I can still hear her sing. That’s the effect that she had on me. Whereas the Yanks had an immediate effect of raising the blood pressure and all that sort of stuff, but that’s about as far as it went.

Oh yes. Oh yes. The (UNCLEAR), the brass. Yes. It was a well known fact.

Oh yes it did. It did yeah and most times when it did happen, particularly at Morotai that particular person would be transferred to another unit, to another

base, because it brought up a lot of resentment, not with the Australians but the Yanks we’re talking about now. A lot of resentment for the Yanks. They are blood thirsty people the Yanks, they’d shoot you rather than look at you if you had something that they couldn’t have. That was a big problem there. There were a lot of court martial there, a lot of firing squads there in the

American Army.

Oh I don’t know capital punishment with me is a no-no as far as I’m concerned. There’s got to be something very wrong to be shot. It didn’t appeal to me. I’m getting off the track now, in Korea I had more to do with the Americans then in Korea in the infantry

than I had during the war because we had our own little units and although we serviced the American planes and we’d talk to the American pilots and staff, was only in our leisure time that we got to know the Yanks because they had their canteens, and that, and we used to make jungle juice and sell them jungle juice. I used to sell them my beer and we’d get the whisky bottles from the

officer’s mess and Darkie Marks was an expert in resealing the aluminium foil around the top of a bottle and fill it full of cold tea, like Johnny Walker Black Label or Black & White Scotch Whisky. And the Yanks, “10 bucks,” “Yeah oh boy,” and they’d open it up and they’d drink cold tea. They’d come back looking for you then. They would, they’d come back looking for you. The jungle juice was one.

Another favourite was mercurochrome, which was the stuff they put on your wound, mycrosol [?] which you’d make, 100% alcohol, it’s pure spirit, 100% alcohol, there was pumpkin you’d make a whole lot of pumpkin, leave the seeds in. And stuff it full or sultanas and raisins and plug it and put a bandage around it so she doesn’t blow up, leave it ferment and then you get it and put it in a,

our cook, our cook used to do all the boiling on the stove for us and then we had a still made of a copper pipe and out the other end came pure spirit.

Yep. Didn’t like it. Too strong for me. I never drank until I was 21. But I was smoked all the other things, but never drank until I was 21.

Yes I got wounded and it was a flesh wound, we spoke about it earlier, and it healed quite well. Came back, got discharged from the air force in February ’46 and went back to my trade and got re-indentured, went to tech and I qualified, it was a six year apprenticeship, so I qualified.

Work with my Dad and worked for myself, my Dad had a business in Toowoomba, we went in that together we were shearing contractors and wool re-packers and sorters, we did everything in relation to buying and selling hide, sheepskin, kangaroo skins you name it. Anyway we had a few arguments because family, you work with family you have differences of opinion. My Dad was an old style accounting person I was a

new breed to do it this way, never the paths shall meet so I left him five times and five times I went back to him. But he was stubborn in his attitude so I said to him, “I’ve given it my best. There are too many arguments, too much friction.” I’d bought a house at McIntyre Street Toowoomba, not far from where he lived, and when I was away my wife got very discontented because, I was

used to it because as a kid my parents were away and I didn’t realise the impact it would have on her. Anyway our marriage broke up and I broke up with Dad and I went my own way. In the interim, this would be about 1948 I was working for a fellow named Harry Jones, he’s a shearing contractor at Barcaldine out a place called Acacia Downs,

wool classing. The big rains of ’48, ’49 came, like we’ve just had up there now, and it wiped out a lot of property’s stock, everything. I couldn’t get a job. Flood bound, no stock, nothing. Little country towns, they were a little click of their own, Harry Jones had his friends so I was an outsider so when things started I was excluded

and I was out of work. I was staying at the Commercial Hotel, McNally’s place, and I couldn’t afford the board, so I said, “Well Leslie you’ve got to get a job.” So I got a job as a fettler on the railways doing flood repair damage, and we worked from Barcaldine right up through to Longreach, number six flying gang we were in. There were only 12 of us in it. The flood had made the rail look like a twisted barbed wire fence, it just uprooted the sleepers and twisted the rail,

they were 80 pound to 100 pound a foot weight the rail that’s how strong the water was. We had to undo all that and they brought us ballast trains and all that sort of stuff, so we re-laid the line. They worked from Longreach down and we were working from Barcaldine and up. We met, “Round about Ilfracombe. The Thomson River was still flowing, and flooded, we had to get to the other side

because Wint [Winton] and Longreach were connected by rail. I started to have a bit of a problem with my leg, you know, I used to throw it when I walked I threw it, just threw it out. People would say, “What’s wrong with you hoppy?” “Nothing wrong with me.” Anyway we went up to Longreach and, I should be given a Victoria Cross for this one, because they wanted somebody, volunteers again, never volunteer, we

loaded up a flat top wagon with sleepers and about eight of us pushed it across the Thomson Bridge, underwater to see whether the bridge was intact. So we got to the other side and there was water up above our knees, they found out the bridge could take this load it would weigh about three tonne I suppose, took us about four hours to push it across, but we got there.

There we stayed, we stayed on the other side. I worked on that for quite sometime. I got a job with the Ilfracombe Shire Council as a truck driver. Then I went plant operating, I was a grader driver. Then we were doing (UNCLEAR) to Ilfracombe Road, then it ran out and we did the Roddy Down to Ilfracombe Road, it ran out and I could see no future for me because I’d been

ostracised by the local, Harry Spong in Longreach contractor, he had his own click, Harry Jones down in Barcaldine had his own click, (UNCLEAR) Association, black listed off them because I would go to a place called (UNCLEAR) and they said, “You don’t work for us anymore.” So I thought, “What am I going to do?” The Korean War broke out I thought, “I’ll join the army. There’s a career there, I’m young, fit,

I’ll join the army.” Which I did do. I joined it in August 1952. I went to Korea and came back from Korea in ’55. I had five years of national service, nasho [national serviceman] bashing, regimental duty NCO [Non Commissioned Officer]. I got called in the army as a regimental NCO, rifleman and plant operator class 3.

That’s my profession in the army. I stayed in the army for about seven and a half years. I was having trouble with my legs, I couldn’t pass my TOETs [Tests of Elementary Training] and I was a group 6, like a PO-6 [?] in government life, I was a PO-6 corporal in the army earning very good money and I failed my TOETs for the year. They said to me, “Well there’s something wrong with your right leg because

when you walk you throw your leg.” So I went and got an appointment with Dr Pozzie, an orthopaedic, he was one of the best, he’s now dead, and he was one of the best orthopaedic surgeons in Australia, in Queensland, not Australia, very, very good. He got Dr Lee a neurologist, I explained to them what happened. They did an exploratory on me in Royal Brisbane Hospital and when I came to he came to me and said, “There’s nothing we can do for you because the nerve centre, where the bullet went through

it just carved a hole like cutting through telephone cable,” but he said, “Over the years, those nerve endings have calcified and Dr Lee said there’s no way in the world they can rejoin them,” so with that I’ve got no feeling in my foot at all. It just hangs there like an arm. They gave me a medical B-2 [state of fitness], they sent me out to 3 Battalion, in Enoggera to go to Malaysia

and Major Smith, he was the adjutant, I knew him from Korea he was a Platoon Commander in Korea, he said, “You’re not going to Malaysia,” I said, “Why?” he said, “Because you’re B-2,” “No,” I said, “I’m alright,” “No you’re not, you’re unfit for tropical service. I just got your memo in from the medics now. You’re unfit for tropical service.” I ended up as platoon, no, orderly room sergeant

for the support company at 3 Battalion. Then they sent me over to BHQ [Battalion Headquarters], and I could type, and I ended up typing up the inventories of all the married families that were going, all the inventories of furniture and that they were taking overseas with them, five copies. So I said, “Bugger this,” so I went to Smith and said, “They’ve got a typist pool at Victoria Barracks why don’t they do it? I can’t,

there’s about 30 sets of married quarter people there you know.” This is in 1959, about ’59, which he did do. I got worse. I got really bad, I couldn’t march, and do exams for O1 [second lieutenant], you had to have a junior

certificate or a leaving certificate, my school got burnt down at Hendra and all my records were burnt, they couldn’t find anything, no Leslie Walker in the world went to school at Hendra. So I had to sit for an education certificate in the army and I took three subjects, English Maths and History, which I sailed in and I got my second class certificate which allowed me to become an O1, which I never did. I stayed

a corporal for, I was seven years, I stayed a corporal six. I ended up in Victoria Barracks in charge of a photo stat machine, it said, “Entry duties only,” that meant sitting like I am now, you want a photo stat copy of your papers, so you’d come to me and say, “Corporal may I have a copy stat [immediately]?” So I’d put it through the machine and sign it and away you’d go. In charge of a photocopier. I got jack of this.

A Major Virtue was in the legal section of Victoria Barracks I got to know him quite well, he said, “I know there’s a job going, you can be the driver for the Brigadier in charge of the military cadets,” I said, “What chauffeur?” he said, “Yes. Sit on your bum all day and stay at first class hotels, good job.” I said, “No, no way,” he said, “Well I suggest you read AMR&O [Australian Military Regulations and Orders], Australian Military Routine Orders’

he said, “There’s a section there that says that if you can improve your financial side of life, improve your life in the outside world, you can apply for a discharge at your own request.” I so I went through AMR&O and found it and I resigned from the army, I asked for a discharge. My army discharge papers discharged at my own request. I got out and bettered myself outside. Anyway,

in 1958 I went to Vet [Veteran] Affairs, I put in a claim for my leg. I went, they were in Adelaide Street then the old taxation building, and interviewed there and they said to me, “There’s no medical evidence that you’ve ever been shot.” I said, “Well, what did you want?” He said, “There has to be a RAP [Regimental Aid Post] chit [signed voucher],” like when you go to see the

doctor in the army they write out a little coupon and it’s like a carbon copy underneath. I said, “No I haven’t got one of them. There’s people I can get to prove it, they’re down in Mosman in Sydney, I’ve got enough evidence.” They said, “No there’s no medical history, we don’t have the RAP chit,” I said, “How the hell could a medical orderly in pouring rain write out a chit and there’s a battle going on about a hundred yards

up front, the wiz bangs are flying,” I said, “There’s about a half a dozen wounded fellows who want to be treated.” They said, “We’ll give it consideration.” About a month later I got a letter to say they gave me 10% on me busted ear drum, tendonitis. And I’ve been fighting them ever since. As I said my last case was February tribunal, I went to the RSL [Returned and Services League] with tribunals.

They put me in a state of high anxiety because of all the turmoil because I, they were the cause of that, as far as I’m concerned and they said, “The cause of that was they operated on your ankle, you got golden staff and your leg was amputated because of the golden staff. It’s not a war wound.” So, Bob Hawke [former Australian Prime Minister] when he was in government he put through legislation that any ex-servicemen that has problems can seek legal aid

to go to the AAT [Administration Appeals Tribunal]. Well I had Neil Rogers, who’s now dead, as my advocate from the RSL, he wasn’t much good. He just sat there and said nothing, at a tribunal you’ve got four people and you sit in the middle and are being interviewed by these four people, and your delegate stands behind you and says, “Yay,” or, “Nay.” I just kept getting knocked back

they gave me 20%, they gave me 30%, then 40%, every time they gave me something, I appealed, appealed, appealed. It got to a stage where the only place I could go to was the AAT. So, I found this about Bob Hawke saying that you get Legal Aid so I rang up Christopher Skase’s [former Australian businessman with legal troubles] solicitor, (UNCLEAR), Shannon and Luten, They do DVA [Department of Veterans’ Affairs] work and I spoke to a bloke called Coburn and told him my story and he said,

“Yes come on in.” So I went on in and he took my case and we applied for Legal Aid, we got it, we got it three times and took AAT to the hearing and Gorman was my Barrister at the hearing. The day before, Coburn asked me to come in to the office just to go through the format, what’s going to happen the next day at the tribunal. Anyway the phone went and he hung up and said, “Go in to the sitting room and I’ll get my secretary to make you

a cup of coffee.” There was a telephonic conversation on with AAT. They had put me, when I lost my leg, they put me on a temporary TPI [Totally and Permanently Incapacitated – (pension)] and then when I came out of hospital they took me off the TPI and put me on 100%. I appealed, and this was what the AAT. Coburn come back in the room and said, “Do you want the good news or do you want the bad news?”

I said, “Give us the bad news.” He said, “You’re a TPI.” “What’s the bloody good news?” He said, “They’ve back-dated to 26 February 1984.” I got seventy thousand odd dollars. What I missed out on superannuation, I picked up on the pay out by DVA. But now they only go back three months. But I had an insurance policy, RSL approved, approved

by DVA and they paid me $22,500 for loss of limb. So like a dutiful person, I related that back to DVA, I let them know of the $22,000 odd paid to me, insurance claim. About six weeks later

I get a letter from a fellow called O’Meara, Veteran Affairs in Brisbane with a bill for $98,000. For all the expenses associated to the amputation of the leg. I had blue nurses and I had theatres and had two operations, titanium pin, they even went down as far as cotton buds, itemised account, $98,000.

Well that really put me in shock. So I went and saw a Local Member, Smith, my Local Member, and took on the Commonwealth Health Commission and they sent me a bill for $7,000, they cut it down to $7,000. I said to O’Meara, “Why from 98 to 7,000?” and I’ve got letters in there from, used to be the National President of the RSL.

I rang RSL and I rang the national office in Canberra, and I said, “This is a national case, it’s RSL endorsed,” and they came back to me and said, “No it’s got to be handled by your state,” I said, “As far as I’m concerned it’s national.” So digger, digger what’s his name?

Anyway he and I had words and we took on the Health Commission and O’Meara came back with this $7,000 bill and we argued the toss and they wiped it, wiped it clean then. All my advocacy I’ve done myself since then, because I have nothing to do with the RSL although I belong to it I have nothing to do with it if I have a case I front up on my own, I’m my own advocate.

Generally I take a witness along with me. Like the last one I took an ex-platoon commander from Korea. I won that. I rang up the doctor about my arthritis and that was going back to the 11 June 1944 we had to jump off this LCI [Landing Craft Infantry] on to the barges where I put my hips out of joint and my knees out of joint and I got this osteo [osteoporosis] and rheumatism.

In Korea we lived in trenches there, lived in bunkers and trenches in Korea and minus 28 degrees and of course that didn’t improve things with me. I have had a lot of trouble with my lower back and my hips so I took them on again in February last year. Paddy Kent came in with me and he didn’t have to say anything but the fact of the matter that the ship, the LCI hitting the sand bank was

in the history of the landing at Labuan, they had to accept it. So, yes so with the lateral (UNCLEAR) they said they could pin my ankle with titanium pins, they did the first one and a helix of the titanium pin broke. The doctor hadn’t signed my medication, at the end of my bed on the sheet at the bed, they didn’t give me my drugs

and I went off me brain. They reckon I was an ex-druggo [former drug addict] because I just went berserk. I got out of bed and walked on my leg and did terrible things. They got my wife in and said, “Is he an alcoholic, a druggo [drug user], what is he?” And she said, “You’re not giving him his medication.” The doctor hadn’t signed the medication was in the drawer. I used to plead with them because I was on Prozac, I was on Rohypnol,

all these suppressants. Anyway I came out of hospital, and a Dr David Jenkins, he’s the medical psychiatrist, went to him and he sent me up to Buderim Private Hospital to the Detoxification Tank and I spent three weeks there and I had to go through it all again, do it turkey. Half way through that period another appeal came up and

I had to attend. If you don’t attend they just say bugger you. I got on to David Jenkins and he organised a com [company] car for me to go up to Buderim and pick me up and came to Mary Street to the tribunal and I was half stupid. I won that one, purely on performance! I was a mess, an absolute mess.

Went back to the detox [detoxification] tank. Three weeks I was there and they changed medication from one drug to another and anyway, this is before I lost my leg, and they did the other operation and they took two pins out and left the one that was broken in there. They pinned it from the back behind and I got golden staff.

Broke out in all little blisters, so saw the doctor, Mark Burn was the doctor, and they have me a moon boot, a big round plastic boot like a moon boot, like they wore up on the moon. Full of holes and full of wadding and cotton wool and all that sort of stuff. I used to have to walk around in that. I couldn’t walk around in that. Anyway the orthopaedic surgeon

of the Broncos, has got rooms at Wesley Hospital and I made an appointment to see him because he is quite good because with the Broncos he looked after them pretty well. So my wife and I went to see him and he had one look at it and he said, “My advice to you is to have that leg cut off.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “You’ve got golden staph [Golden Staphylococcus - bacteria],” and he said, “I’d have it done below the knee rather than above the knee.

Above the knee is a problem, below the knee at least you’ve got a chance of a good prostheses and walking. You have to make your mind up, do you have your leg off or don’t you have your leg off.” I said, “Yes, get it off.” Like a fool I went back to Mark Burn who did the original two operations and I said, “I want my leg cut off.” He hasn’t done an amputation since. I just

sort of threw everything back at him. He’s got a very guilty conscience. So with the leg off, this is when all the problems started with $98,000, this bloody insurance policy. Which I still have. Veteran Affairs dropped it and Australian Health Commission took it over then and it was quite a battle, quite a strain. We’d only been here about 12 months and it’s all we owned. We had a few bob in the bank.

We paid cash for the house. We sold our old house and bought this one. My wife, she nearly went off her brain, I nearly went off my brain because we’d have to mortgage the house to pay the bill, that’s how bad it was. Two or three letters a week from Veteran Affairs, this O’Meara, in fact he and I became pretty friendly towards the end, because he resented the way I came back at him then he understood why I was resentful

then when I explained it all too him that the Health Commission must have endorsed the RSL sanction, like the RSL sponsoring this insurance policy for veterans. I said to him, “I’d like to know how many veterans are under the same insurance policy have declared their money and they’ve taken the money to reimburse themselves expenses, on medical expenses.” But I took

the other line, bugger it they endorsed the policy, the RSL endorsed the policy they’d have to do through DVA and then when anything happened like that a $22,000 odd payout so they thought, “Gee this is no good,” whereas it’s normally, you’d lose a couple hundred bucks, but this was big money. Anyway we finally got there, it took about two years.

By that time I’m wreck. Anyway I’m a TPI and they back date it, everything came right and all the money came in and made up for all the superannuation I lost because I was about 7 days short of 20 years service with the company I was with. It was quite good. When I retired they gave me a car, I had an XT [model] Fairmont,

they gave that to me, it had only done about 30,000 miles, they gave that to me. I had second tier superannuation with Bankers Trust, 7.5% non-contributing they made it up in other ways, in fact the old boss came her not so long ago, called in and took me out to lunch at the tavern. We still keep in touch, we email each other. He was

quiet surprised actually because he spent a lot of time at the RSL in Melbourne and he just couldn’t understand and said, “If you want assistance, just let me know I’ll give it to you.” We have a good rapport with each other, I even worked with him for 20 odd years. So we still keep in touch. He’s an ex-soldier, he was a platoon commander, got hit by a grenade

and his bayonet was imbedded and he’s still got it in his leg. Grenade went off and stuck the blade down his leg which is still there. We know what it’s all about, we know what DVAs like. In the old days, at the end of the war, DVA was good because all the returned soldiers they were given jobs at DVA and they understood the person’s problem. Whereas when I went in ’58 they’d be nearly all retired and

all these young acne pimply faced bureaucrats I call them, I get really upset, and no understanding, no understanding of the Second World War or Korea. That’s hard to get through and they got overseers, very bureaucratic and very hard DVA. I know a lot of fellows, I’m Welfare Officer for the

RAAF Association Northern Suburbs District, which I’m also the president of, and I do a lot for the blokes but there’s a used by date as far as the Department’s concerned. Once you turn 70 you’re no longer there. They’ll send you a cheque every fortnight but that’s all we’ll have to do with you. Any old ailments come up, it’s unfortunate. In today’s paper there’s a 49 year old Vietnam Veteran, he’s a TPI he’s trying to get the service pension. Well

the Act says you don’t get a service pension until you’re 60. All he wants is, the DVA pension is not too bad, the TPI pension is not too bad, it’s about $700 a fortnight, but he wants it supplemented with the service pension which he can’t get, the law says you can’t. He hasn’t got a hope in hell.

Oh if he gets a part service pension he would get about $1200 a fortnight.

I get a part pension plus a service pension, that’s why I live in the luxury I live in! It’s pretty hard. The older you get with Veteran Affairs the worse, the harder it is for you. It’s just one of those things, “Age shall not weary them or the years condemn.” Well the years are condemning us. DVA and I get on quite

well, they supply a car if I have to go the hospital or the doctor down at Redcliffe in that respect I get one free first class train trip every fortnight and one second class train trip every fortnight over 45 kilometres. So I could go down to Robina on the train or I could up on the bullet to Rockhampton if I wanted to, it would cost me nothing. So things like that, but that doesn’t give

me my mobility. You’re still half a person. That’s how I feel. Now what have you got now?

R&R. The Americans used to get R&R. They used to go out to Hawaii,

or down to Guam Island for R&R. Whereas the Australian, he just did his day’s work and his R&R was after work, lying on the beach or whilst he was on guard duty around the shore line. As I said we were all black as niggers and absolute lovely life, because we knew there’d be no invasion by the Japanese from the sea, so we were safe as chickens in a coup. So we had nothing to worry about. We had the

Afro-Americans on the front line, pulling back and repelling the enemy and we had the life of Riley. These beautiful girls in Jeeps with their cups of coffee, we’d go along and sling along to them because they’d like the Australian language and we were a novelty to them and they were a novelty to us. Morotai, in fact I enjoyed Morotai. It would have the biggest graveyard of aircraft you’ve ever, ever seen in your life. You’ve seen a car wreckage yard with the cars stacked on

top of each other, well the grave yard there at Morotai would be, well Kelly’s yard down there at Castledine is just like a drop in the ocean. They had planes stacked about 20 feet high, rows upon rows upon rows of them. When they did the invasion of Borneo, they used to overload the Liberators, Americans in particular, and on many an occasion they’d never get off the ground,

they’d be too heavily laden and they’d just blow up, kill the lot, kill people, bits of shrapnel here still. It was just one of those things, they’d just cart them away, and just do what they had to do with the bodies and take the aircraft to the graveyard. I had photographs, but somehow or another they got lost. You’d be actually surprised as to the height of these things, these things were stacked.

Hundreds of them.

Oh well the Yanks were a very gung ho mob, you know, they’d take extra crew, they’d take extra weight on the aircrafts, just their attitude. A real gung ho attitude.

They had a job to do and they were going to do it quick. Like when they did the landing they did a lot of bombing from Morotai. Well in fact one morning there were three of them went in one after the other and the runway there was a perfect runway, coral sand and the bad parts we had the metal strips down for the planes to take off and it was a long strip, no reason for it but they just didn’t get off the ground.

I’d say that would rather related to the ground crew, lack of maintenance on the engines, not having enough power to lift them off the ground. I think they were a bit lackadaisical, if it were the Australians they were more thorough in what his responsibilities were. Like 2-Es and 2-As they were more responsible because they realised you know, that guy that sits in that cockpit his life depends on me what sort of

job I do. That’s the attitude the Australian took in the air force. Aircrews and ground crews come, with a flights, four flights to a squadron and the used to meld pretty well together because each one was dependent upon the other. Whereas the Americans it was a gung ho, something would go wrong with the plane and they’d just drag it away and wouldn’t find the real fault.

That’s why the Americans lost so many aircraft. Even in the Korean War, same thing. In the Second World War when they first came out to Australia they were landing up at Cooktown, landing down in Melbourne they were supposed to land in Brisbane. They had no idea of navigation. When they came to Australia every American plane, every bomber had an Australian navigator because they just couldn’t find their way. That’s fact.

They just had a gung ho attitude. Truly. “I’m John Wayne,” “I’m the Duke.”

Fishing with hand grenades. We used to play volley ball, we used to play football.

You’d just get a belly tank of a Kittyhawk and just paddle it out to the middle of a lagoon and drop a couple of grenades down and they’d go off down there and all the fish would come belly up to the surface. You’d just pick them up. You’d get a good catch. So our diets at Morotai would have been the best diets on the whole island.

We had plenty of fish. And also the atolls there when the tied would go out they had no sharks, because you’re surrounded by coral reef a little atoll and you’d get clear blue water and you could look down and see the bottom, it would only look like from my chair to there but it would be 20 odd foot deep. We used to just dive in and…

Not on Morotai. That’s on Labuan we had a lot to do with the locals. I hardly saw a native on Morotai. They were more away from the operational part. Whereas in Labuan there’s kampongs [villages] all alongside the airport, the airfield. So that’s a different story, that was the bad part of it because, as I said before, they were too

friendly with the Japanese. The Japanese had been their since 1941 and they had a better relationship with the Japanese than they did with us. They were little short people, all of a sudden these six foot giants come in you know, “What the hell’s happening here?” They tended to lead towards the Japanese and they protected the Japanese and although they made friends with the Australians. We talked to them, we fed them and gave them food.

Oh yes on occasions yes. I like as I said before, the kampong we were at they had two Japanese hiding there. They were dressed up as Malayas or Indonesians as they called them in those days. You couldn’t pick one from the other. They just hid them, even after the war, they hid them

and then they sort of mixed in with the people and they could be there now. They could be, I say when I went back in ’98, ’99. I’d say that there’s a good smattering of Japanese amongst them, the island people of Labuan. A good smattering of Japanese.

No, anti-fraternisation. You couldn’t fraternise at all. Although we had a girl doing our washing. Their religion, in fact when we made the movie theatre with our tin boxes for seats, I took Sin Ma, that’s the girl, I called her a different name on a previous tape but her name was Sin Ma, took her

and it was an American romance and they started to kiss and she hid her face and she cried and she went home. They don’t do that. They don’t do that. They brought out an anti-fraternisation law, you couldn’t fraternise with the natives. You had to really, you’d go out on patrol and you’d find a house in the middle of the jungle with women and half a dozen kids, but no men. The men were always missing. “Where’s

the boss fella?” “Work.” “Where’s he work,” “Don’t know,” they could look at you very stupidly and you can’t get anything out of them. That was the worrying part of it. They’d be fed, clothed and living on their own in the middle of the jungle, no men. A lot of funny things happened. In fact probably I might

be making more of it than it sounds, but to me it was a very suspicious thing. I didn’t trust them. I didn’t trust them. The head man I trusted, but I didn’t trust most of the natives there.

Oh no. No they go berserk.

It did yeah. Although Moomvah [?] there were a few Yanks there, not as many Yanks as what was at Morotai, but

at Morotai the villages were far flung from the airfield we didn’t see many natives, but I’d say that the Americans did because they had to go out and enter the jungle and kampongs and do what they had to do. Whereas in Borneo, a different story because the family clan had different kampongs you know, you might be the Smith family in this kampong, a Jones family in this kampong all different named people in

different kampongs. The Yanks at Labuan, the only Yank I saw there was James MacArthur and a couple of naval blokes, being a port there were a lot of navy boats. We used to get the odd American squadron in now and again, but mostly it was British and Australians operating from Labuan.

Tarakan and Balikpapan there’s a lot of Yanks there, engineers because of the oil situation. Labuan was where you saw Americans but not to the extent that you did in Morotai. Morotai was like America, they’re all Yanks, we were the minority there was only, 75, 77 and 82 Squadron three Australians squadrons there at the airfield so

this 16 planes to a squadron, you’d say there’d be about 10 people to one plane so 160 people by three that’s 580 Australians, there’d be 5,800 Americans, that was the ratio. So we were very minuscule in proportion to the Americans. They got all the breaks. They got all the

good times. We enjoyed ourselves. As I say Morotai, I’ll never forget Morotai because it was a restful place, we had no problems, we never got near the front line, hardly heard an angry shot fired on Morotai, had a lot of planes crash both taking off and coming in, that was the only drama we had there.

In fact, the strip would be here and we’d be over there, that would be the beach that’s the strip at Morotai. If anything happened on the strip, we had fox hole trenches to get in when it got a bit heavy, if one crashed you’d fall in to a fox hole or a trench and let it all sail over the top of you. Although on one occasion at our camp which was about half a mile from the airstrip

a Liberator went in and blew up and the bloke that used to work in the cookhouse, I’ve forget his name, he was walking across to have a shower and got smacked in the back with a big piece of shrapnel. Did enter him, just hit him like that and burnt him. So that’s how far it goes, it goes a long way. That one was really, really loaded. They’re the worst things, in fact I’ve seen some

terrible things happen as far as aircraft are concerned which made me say, “Well maybe ground staff was the right place for me.” In Labuan for instance after the war, there was a lot of black marketing going on and there was, number three squadron I think I’m not really sure, but there was a Mosquito squadron there and where the strip was they had a road across the strip

had a sentry box wired up for radio and the tower would say, “Close gate, plane take off, close the gate,” like the boom gate and the plane would take off. We’d just transferred from Kittyhawks to Mustangs at this stage and 77 Squadron had a flight, four Mustangs in a row just over from the control tower, it was a house a two storey house the control tower, and

this Beaufighter or Mosquito [fighter aircraft], I’m not really sure, it was that heavily loaded that when he’s taking off he had to lift his right wing to get over the sentry box where the bloke closes the gate. As he did that the left wing hit the ground and he had a load of petrol on, ignited his wing tanks and set him straight through these four Mustangs. He wipes out a Mosquito and four Mustangs,

a couple million dollars just like that. The pilot was thrown, he died after, had a Perspex windscreen quarter inch thick, threw him through that. He ended up about 300 feet in front of the aircraft. One fellow we found underneath the wing, I was on the fire tender at the time and see the bloke driving up to the crash, he backed up and backed in to a bomb hole and we couldn’t get the hoses

in the bubble at the top. Navigator came up and he just pulled his 38 out and shot himself in front of us, rather than burn to death. That was horrific. That made a mark on my mind. When you look in retrospect, when you look at it, it could be the way to go, because to be burnt slowly to death, he couldn’t get out. He just shot himself.

Things like that, there’s a lot of contraband, there’s gold, gold smuggling, in fact I brought home, Brookes Palace in Brooketown [Jesselton] he was a governor of North Borneo, I brought home tapestry curtains from his palace and gave them to my mother and she made dresses for my sisters and all that sort of stuff. Made nice

tablecloth, nice brocade. A lot of pillaging, not really looting, but you know it’s in disrepair and knocked about so it’s only going to be burnt anyway so you just take it, send it home, which I did do.

Letters were censored. My address was LNR [Leslie Norman Ross] Walker 82 Squadron SWPA [South West Pacific Area] and that was it. All the mail you wrote you had to give in to flight lieutenant Tuckwell, he used to cut it out or get a black pen and go through it. We’d get mail from home and it would be censored.

We used to get parcels from home and in fact when I was a kid I had kidney trouble and I used to take oil of juniper. My mother got concerned about me so she used to send me loaves of bread, you know these little half gin bottles, she used to get of those and fill it with all the juniper and put it inside the loaf of bread and send it over to me. I took that all during the war, five drops and half a teaspoon of sugar

every day and that cleaned up my kidney trouble. Things like you’d get parcels from home and there’d be funny books and jokes and newspapers and uncensored stuff that they’d been writing about us back in Australia. Censorship was there but a lot got through particularly Red Cross parcels, we used to look forward to.

Oh there was chocolates, and there was books, little household items like needle and cotton to sew your buttons on and little things like that, gloves, little mittens not that you wanted mittens in the tropics but the wrong box went to the wrong country, probably. We used to look forward to Red Cross days. Lollies, can of candy all that sort of stuff. It was really nice.

No. No. About once every two or three months. Initially I hardly wrote. When I was in Townsville I wrote. When I went to Biak I wrote there and when I went to Morotai I never bothered much about that. Then went to Borneo and got established there and I wrote from there.

In fact my daughter often reminded me, I didn’t see her until she was eighteen months old, she often reminds me, “You old bugger when you come home you didn’t come home to me and mum you went home to your mum and dad.” Up to Toowoomba. Toowoomba was closer than Barcaldine. Like a thousand miles. She said, “But you went and worked for your father,” “That’s right, I did too I went up to Captains Mountain out at Millmerran and did a job for Dad for three weeks.

I was only home for a short time when I got discharged. I got discharged on the 26th February ’45.

It had a big effect on my marriage because I allotted most of my money to my wife, it was a force marriage initially.

I thought I could handle it. I said before that the Depression made an impression on me that I always wanted to be secure in my home, not in a cocoon but have barriers that would protect me from whatever. My aim was to save, save, save, save, save.

I allotted a lot my money, and as I said earlier, one guinea a fortnight that’s $2.20 a fortnight every fourteen days, sometimes I’d go for months and not draw a pay. Or I’d make an allotment of five shillings a day to the National Bank of Australasia in Toowoomba, like a superannuation fund. Things like that.

I came home and I rang her from home and I said, “I’m back, I’ll meet you at Rockhampton, catch a train with the kids to Rockhampton, book a CWA [Country Women’s Association] house at Yeppoon and we’ll have a holiday there for a fortnight.” So she did that. I met her at Rockhampton station, she met me the train came in.

She said, “We’ve got to go around to the office to the CWA,” I said, “What for?”, she said, “To pay the deposit on the house.” I said, “Haven’t you paid it?” She said, “I’ve got no money.” She was a compulsive spender. So that blew me out the door, that was the start of the rot. All my plans of being secure and financial started to dwindle. Then Robbie came along, my eldest son, and there’s

thirteen months between him and his younger brother and he came along and our marriage really busted up in about, I came back from Korea in ’55, in 1955 we busted up. She’s since passed on. She did of a cardiac arrest, she was an asthma sufferer. So she died, in fact, yes

she died and I thought I’d won the lottery because I was $6,000 in arrears in maintenance. A cruel thing to say but I’d thought I’d won the casket. It was hard. Irene and I got married in 1971.

We came back from South Africa for five years and came back in ’76 then whilst I did South Africa she sued for money maintenance, I asked for an adjournment because I can’t fight for maintenance based in South Africa. She had another child, which is not mine, and I’ll do a DNA [deoxyribonucleic acid – carries genetic information], but she’d dead and gone now so don’t worry about it,

but I don’t talk to the other child, she’s a girl, Beryl. She wanted money for tertiary education for her and no way in the world, I refused to pay it. I came back owing $6,000 and I fronted up to the magistrate, the old magistrate’s court in Brisbane, and said, “I’ll do the time at Wagga Road.” So he dismissed the case. I said, “I’ve got to live. I’m married,

mortgage on the house,” all that sort of stuff. So you know, the first five, six years of our married life, Irene and I, were pretty rugged. But the kids took to it, like the daughter and my sons, she’s their step-mother and they treat her as such, they treat her with great respect. They have a lot of time for her. Reckon it’s the best thing that ever happened to me.

So that’s good coming from your kids.

Well I had a conscience about, well everybody getting mail from their girlfriends and their wives and all that sort of stuff and I didn’t get any mail. I felt a bit left out. I understood because I made that position

myself, that was my own doing. They used to read letters to me and in fact when I came back on leave I remember walking down the street and families having dinner, or out on the verandah with kids playing and I thought ‘I’ve got all that, but I haven’t got it all.” If effected me that way. Morally I was wrong, I did

what I wanted to do and disregarded everybody else. I paid he, I thought she was entitled to be paid that the magistrate said in the first instance, I kept that up. During the war I didn’t worry, I had a photograph of her beside my bed and that’s all I had in her bridal gown. Made a Perspex frame for her, foreign order,

and made a Perspex frame because everyone that had a photo of the loved one, or their parents, or whatever so I thought I better be in it because everybody knew I was married and had a daughter. So I got this photograph and made a fame to put it in. It was a marriage that wasn’t to be in fact, although we had three children. We had some happy times

most of the time it was argument over money, arguing over money. When I got out of the army I handed my keys to the house, and handed the keys to camp commandant and I was working in Sydney and a government car pulled up and two commonwealth police came up and hit me with a summons for 600 pound. Rent on the house at Ware Road. The army let her stay there.

Yeah things like that, little things like that gets me cranky, but that’s part of life. They’re doing their job and anyway I had to pay them off. I couldn’t duck around that one, that was another slug, I’d just bought a 61 1/2 model VW [Volkswagen – automobile manufacturer] I had to sell that and pay them back, rather than garnishing my wages.

A lot of little things. My marriage during the war didn’t count. It had no reflection on my ability or what I had to do. I never thought of it, I never worried about her, I worried about Margaret my daughter because I hadn’t seen her and my mother used to write me and talk about her and what a nice kid she was. All this sort of stuff. I thought this

would be nice when I go home, I’ll have a daughter. But I didn’t see her until she was 18 months old and I’ve seen very little of her since. She always, she lived in Melbourne, she worked for the PMG [Post Master General] in Melbourne. Left Melbourne and went to Tom Price over in the Kimberley’s worked there for about five years, went up the coal mines up at Thierry [Collie], Middlemount, worked there for a couple of years. She went to Rocky, worked there now she’s at Hervey Bay. Now she’s

(UNCLEAR) and she’ll be sixty on Friday. A lot of water has passed beneath the bridge. But of all the kids she’s the one that keeps in contact with me. My one son’s in Sydney and the other lives over at Logan City he rings me once a week and Tommy rings me two or three times a week from Sydney. Margaret she rings quite a lot. When she comes down here, she stays and we go up and stay with her. That’s quite good.

It’s nice having friends at Hervey Bay. Nice place for a holiday.

Oh yes. At Morotai we had a Church of England padre. He wasn’t a bad sort of a bloke actually. At Bearkanoopa [?] we used to have open air services and like at Morotai we’d be there for a long time.

He went to Mick Grace and said, “How about you get the blokes to build me a chapel?” And Mick Grace said, “If you want a chapel we’ll build it. Les Walker and Lofty Bennett will look after you. Go and see them.” So he came and saw us, went down to the Yanks and scrounged some timber and crate packing cases, and all that sort of stuff, we pinched a mill tent from the Yanks, put that up, put a wooden floor in, duck

boards, and we made an altar out of hunks of pine, Oregon pine, and boxes. He came down, we went and got him and he came down and asked him where he’d like the altar and he came and positioned that. He stepped back and said, “This is the most marvellous thing in the world. I never thought this would happen up here.” He said, “What religion are you Les?” I said, “I’m an atheist,” he said, “No

what are you?” “I’m a Presbyterian.” “Lofty Bennett what are you?” “I’m a Methodist.” He said, “Well I’m the Church of England and we’re very close to the Catholic Church,” he said, “We have communion, I’d you two boys to take communion, first communion, for what you’ve done for me.” I said, “No, no I’m not in to that father.” So we decorated it all up. Then he said to me, “Go up to the

queue store, there’s two boxes of wine up there I want you to bring down, that’s communion wine I’d like you to bring down and put it behind the altar.” We made a box for him so he could lock it up. We put that down there and we sat down, we’d made pews, they were very rough, planks of Oregon pine no backs on them just like seats and we sat down there and he said, “I think we’ll have communion now.” I said, “Oh come on,” he said, “No not that

sort of communion. We’ll Christen the Church!” So we Christened his chapel. All got full. That was my first taste of spirits, of wine. I never drank as I said before until I was 21, but I did on that occasion, it was quite an event. I was quite pleased we did that because it made him happy and it made the blokes happy, you see, because they used to go and have their communion. It was a bit

different to standing out in the paddock having it, just having the surroundings.

The wharf mostly. A lot of merchandise carried over by boat and engines, aircraft engines had big long boxes, well most of the times they’d knock the boxes to pieces, get a crane to lift up with the forklift and just carried the engine and put it on the back of a truck and leave the timber there.

Oregon pine mostly, we’d bring fuselages over and we’d just scrounge it. Beg, borrowed and stole. We had a bit to do, bartering with the Yanks, a bottle of jungle juice or a bottle of cold tea Johnny Walker Scotch Whiskey used to come in handy on those occasions. It was a matter of barter. Come to my camp and get some jungle juice or whatever.

Yeah I used to sell my beer to them.

About a dollar a bottle. Twelve American dollars for a dozen, that’s the tall ones. Yeah they like it. It was terrible stuff, Tasmanian Cascade we used to get Richmond Tiger, we got Bulimba and West End. Oh none

of the blokes liked it. I didn’t smoke much so I used to give my packet of tobacco for their couple of bottle of beer on occasions, I used to build up a big supply. We had a refrigeration unit there, it was a hole in the coal covered the sand with a 44 gallon drum of petrol leaking on it. You’d put your hand in and pull out a bottle, freezing. Cold beer. Until somebody dropped a match!

Yeah.

Funny you say that. In a shearing team, it was like the air force, you’d be sent to a place and there’d be two or three people there and another four or five would come and

say there might be 14 shearers and 14 shed hands and expert and wool classer and there’d be about 30 or 40 people. Never seen each other before in their life. In those days you used to have to sign a contract, because of the AWU. You’d sign the contract, half past seven on Monday morning they’d start the engine and everybody just sort of did their job, just all team work.

I was a piece picker, we had a classer, wool rollers, had picker uppers, they had cooks, they had shearers you know, people you’d never seen before in your life. You knew what your job was and you just signed your contract and went up and started work. You did what you had to do. I reckon that was a really team

effort, it was effortless it was. You didn’t have to be told because you knew what your job was. You went to the piece picking table, you went to the wool rolling table, you went to the board to pick up, you went to the pen to pen up the sheep, went to help engine driver, might be a coal engine that drove the shearing equipment or an oil burner or an old cylinder, “One lunger,” crank up. But everybody knew

what they had to do and that’s what I found with the RAAF, particularly at Oakey, not so much down in Sydney when I went to school, but when I came back to the base at Oakey it was a general engineering squadron that had every facility and everybody knew what they had to do. It was just happens and that’s been my luck throughout life, even in civilian life at work, teamwork you had a specific job

to do and it just fell in to place. There’s no effort in it. Everybody was an equal, be it the classer, the picker-upper you were all equal, you all ate together of a night time, you slept in the same quarters, shared the same quarters, you shared the same transport. Quite good, a good bringing up, educating a young

fellow, it did well for me.

I had a couple of school mates who went to New Guinea, Danny Forest, Colin Forest they used to live at Hendra and they joined the Papua New Guinean Rifles, they were there prior to the Japanese landing on Milne Bay. They were a lot older than what I was. They are both buried over there.

Mickey Clarke, went to school with him, he died about five years ago with cancer. He was in the militia and he was sent over to Milne Bay. In fact New Guinea was a hard place, in fact, the Kokoda Trail all those places.

A lot of news. A lot of news, yeah.

Well we didn’t know,

we were on Labuan when that happened. We were just told one night. We were sitting around about 9 o’clock sitting around and they said, “The war’s over,” just like that. So we went mad and shot a few pistols in to the sky and burnt down the officers,” mess at 75 Squadron again, it had a thatched roof and a pistol landed on it and burnt it to the ground.

In fact one of the members of the club I’m president of belonged to 75 Squadron, Tony Wells, he was a Kittyhawk pilot he ended up in Japan in the Occupation Force. When he found out I was 82 Squadron, 81 wing first tactical air force we were attached to the Americans, 1st TAF [Tactical Air Force] RAAF, 81 Wing, 75, 77 and 82 were the three squadrons.

He said, “You were an 81-Wing?” And I said, “Yeah Tony,” he said, “I’ve got a bone to pick with you!” I said, “What?” He said, “You burnt down our officer’s mess the night they said war was over.” I said, “Were you in 75 Squadron?” He said, “Yes I was, yes.” Small world. So he went to Japan in the Occupation Force. Of all

the people I met during the war overseas, the only one I’ve met is a fellow called Stan Cousins, he’s warehouse manager for Colgate Palmolive in Sydney, I met him at Central Station. He’s the only one person I’ve met out of all those people I was associated with. Yep. Korea, a different story.

The next day? Jubilation. In fact everybody said well it’s over, it’s finished, like end of a job. We were called on Parade and it was explained to us that we were still in trouble, that there were a lot of Japanese still around and they would give us a hard time until

they were all rounded up. They caught a lot. They overran the pockets, the 28th Division and they made a prison compound for the Japanese POWs [Prisoner of War] and they found all these ex-POW British, Indian, Sikhs and

Dutch there and they were so emaciated, they really didn’t care. So they made the compound, the prison compound and put all these Japanese in and they made the Sikh, the bloke that wears the turban all the time, the fittest one of those they used to make the Japanese run around with bags of cement around their shoulders, “Round and round the compound, and the 9th Divi blokes left the gates wide open with a Vickers gun [machine gun] set up and there’s the gate, if you want to go, go and it’d shoot them.

That part was funny, funny to a degree, but the other part wasn’t so funny because they were still around. Stealth of the night time, hide in the tunnel of a day and come out at night they would not believe that their Emperor had surrendered, they would not have it.

Both actually, whichever came first.

Whichever way you felt. Not that I killed any, but a lot of the blokes did. When they came up with their hands behind their heads with no clothes on that’s a sure sign to say that they’ve got a grenade behind their head. Wearing no clothes, ‘I’m unarmed, I haven’t got any arms, I give myself up.” They then let go of the pin and away you go. That was a

problem more or less right through to nearly Christmas, December or November I’d say we were still digging them out of the tunnels. As I said we went around, old Lofty and I, probably planted a few that are still under the coals we just blew in the entrances of the tunnels. In fact when I was over there I picked out one that we blew in near Tanah Merah, there’s a suburb in Brisbane called Tanah Merah, there’s a Tanah Merah up

there as well. Tanah Merah tunnel it was all overgrown, it had swamps and I said to the Tourist Association, “That’s one of the main tunnels that the Japanese used, it went right under the airstrip and there’s more than one entrance to it, but that’s the entrance they used because we lived on the eastern side of the island, so facing the mainland of Borneo, our airstrip was alongside the water. That’s where they used to come out and

get in. On an odd occasion, they’d call roll call of a morning and, two blokes wouldn’t turn up. And this particular day amongst the 77 Squadron two blokes didn’t turn up had their throats cut, they were in bed they’d crept in and cut their throats. Things like that.

There were hardly any Yanks on Labuan. Hardly any Yanks there at all.

The situation had to be handled. A lot of people stayed. A lot of people went home and they started to call for volunteers for a British Occupational Force in Japan. Which a lot of people did do, I nearly did, but I changed my mind. A lot of packing up to be done. Culling of machinery, equipment, vehicles anything with about 30,000 kilometres you dumped.

Any trucks that had 25, 35,000 kms [kilometres] you’d dumped you pushed them over Coal Point in to the China Sea. Bulldozers. And you just picked the best of the equipment that was left. Just cleaned them, washed them, tropic-back and send them to Japan for the Occupation Force. That’s when, oh what’s his name he

bought all the heavy gear in New Guinea all the armoured stuff that had been deserted there, Theiss brothers. They were a big engineering company, road makers but they bought all the equipment at auction sale or salvage sale for themselves and brought it home and did it up. They had excavators and bulldozers and all that sort of stuff.

In fact at Labuan now there’s still a barge, 43 still being used between Labuan and the mainland.

It was, yes it was. Because you couldn’t, you couldn’t see an end to it. You’d think you had it beaten but it would rear its ugly head again. You might go a couple of nights nothing happens and then something would happen. They used to crawl on their stomachs with

fifty pound bombs on their back and they’d just latex and a bloke with a big block of wood to hit the detonator. They’d just crawl in and let it go like a catapult and them, “Boom,” things like that. I reckon it was more scary then, than what it was when the actual fighting was on because death by stealth, you work around tippy-tap-toe, we all had to do that.

The laws came became a bit stricter really in relation to the search and destroy, search find and destroy or capture, whichever came first. Most of us, as I said on the crossroads there was 150 Japanese, dead Japanese there, just a big hole. It was them or you. You had no chance because they knew the island,

they knew every nook and cranny of the island, they knew where to go, what to do. Whereas we knew the airfield, the dispersal bay, we knew just down to the beach but further on in the ravines and the gorges it was an undulating island. I think the pocket was about 150 metre in height, it was the highest point of the island, but the rest of undulating. With the tunnels and the coal and all that sort of stuff

it was a bit hairy. I didn’t enjoy that part. Although the war was over, it wasn’t. That was a hard thing to get through to your skull, they’ve surrendered why are they doing it? Why can’t they stop. They just didn’t believe old Hirohito [Japanese Emperor] would sign the surrender terms, which he did do. We dropped pamphlets, we got interpreters to go around with loud speakers in Jeeps going through the scrub and telling them to give up their arms.

In fact not very long ago they found a bloke, a Japanese up in the Philippines still thought the war was going. Had his rifle and bayonet and bullets and everything. Had been there for 40 or 50 years.

The propaganda broadcaster? She used to broadcast quite a lot. With the Australian’s she’d say “Australians, you should not be here, the Americans are in your country raping your women, your wives, your children, your sisters.” All this sort of stuff. “You should not be here.” “You go back to Australia, you throw down your arms and

let us do what we want to do.” She’d go on and on and on.

Some of them it would demoralise them completely. Some used to get a lot of dear John letters and that had a demoralising effect on a lot of guys. In fact a lot of the dear John’s happened over there. The Yanks would be out and their sweetheart or their wives would find a Yank and say, “Dear John,” [letter informing that a relationship is over] it’s all over. It did

have a very hard effect on a lot of blokes. Particularly the army. The bloke that did the hard work, the hard slog. It effected them very much, not so much the RAAF boys, the RAAF blokes to a degree but not as much as

All the time, all the time. We sort of worked together. They had their perimeters and we had our perimeters, we had our field of fire they had their field of fire.

The Kiwis [New Zealander], the Australian troops and the air force we were in close co-ordination together, you had to be because they did the landing, the forward force, they had to know where we were in case they were forced back or whatever. Our field of fire, we covered them and they covered us. It was just a matter of co-ordinating which was done quite well, I thought.

I had no problems with it. The only time I had problems with it where we did an advance and the bloody Kiwis had a battery of 25 pounders, were about from here to that china cabinet away, point blank range at the pocket and let blast. I nearly died. Blew us off our feet. About eight of us, flattened us and the ears are still ringing.

Oh good. Good. Good to a sense. In fact a lot of the army blokes used to get a bit nasty. What unit you with, “Oh I’m air force.” “Oh you’re a bloody flyboy,” you know, as if we didn’t give a hand to do anything. I used to say to them, “Just because we’re in the air force doesn’t mean we’re not bloody sissies [weak].”

They used to call me ‘Smiler’ or the ‘flyboys’ they’d call us. But everybody had a nick-name.

‘Smiler’ was mine. Lofty, ‘Beanpole’, ‘Scruffy’, all the funny names, dirty names sometimes ‘Boofhead’ ‘Bighead’, ‘Longhead’ everybody had a name, even the officers. Tokyo Rose she demoralised a few. As I said

particularly in the army. They came back from North Africa to Australia and straight up to the islands with the 9th Divi and they had a hard time. In fact they were Rats of Tobruk and all that sort of stuff. They left a trail of history behind them, but it had an effect on them mentally and morally. Perhaps I shouldn’t say this, but some of them used to really go berserk in a situation, you know,

and just one of those things, something would ‘snaps’ and it happened to men on a couple of occasions and something just ‘snaps’ and you do something stupid. When it’s done, it’s done. You just say it’s behind you leave it there. We worked pretty well together, the navy as well, the sea-air-sea rescue. We were depended on the navy with their patrol boat, we had our planes coming

back from the sortie and they’d crash in to the Coral Sea and the relationship with the air-sea rescue mob and the navy were good because they had the patrol boats, little frigates up there and they’d scoot out and pick them up.

Yeah, Yeah. 28th Battalion.

Yeah. Oh not very much in fact the first

when we first landed, I said, we found three dead Australians they were North African 9th Divi blokes.

Oh yeah blokes from Battle of Britain. We had blokes there, fighter pilots. They’d never talked much about their experiences there, they reckon this was a piece of cake back here. Air craft are fewer and far between not like the Nips

what air force they had were soon blasted with the bombers. In fact they’d say, go for a sortie go for a joy ride over Borneo or could somewhere to see what the countryside’s like there. The gun cameras would give them away, they’d expend a few shells and get the gun cameras out and they’d be shooting up the water or shooting a whale or something. Just for the fun of it.

The old pilot from England that fought the Battle of Britain the bomber pilots that did the bash in Germany, they were quiet fellows. In fact I really don’t know why they sent them up to the island, but they had to do a rotation. Some guys had been up there two years without a break. Most of our pilots went to the European campaign. We didn’t realise, I don’t think anyone realised

that we’d crash so big so quickly. Being attached to the tactical air force the Yanks, the US air force, and the stuff that we had, we had Kittyhawks, Mustangs, Bostons, well not my squadron but they were all there, Hudsons, the Radar mob. It was just a conglomeration of aircraft and people that came with them were experienced people

because they been in the European campaign they’d bombed Dresden, they’d bombed Germany, they’d been through the Blitz in London and they used to talk about it a little bit, but not too much. They said, “It’s like a holiday here.” “It’s lovely up there about 15,000 feet, really nice.”

Being stuck on the LC [Landing Craft]

right in the middle of the bay at the port of Labuan, stuck on that like a sitting duck. All that was needed was the Nips to see us and put a shell or a mortar sitting high on a bank of sand. Sitting duck. That was the most nervous thing that I’ve had. The other stuff you get accustomed to, like our

first night on perimeter guard we dug the foxhole, I felt quite comfortable there because no one could see me. I was just like a turtle, just pull my head in. Lindsay Webster was the one who got the biggest fright there, but my relief was about six inches shorter than me and it rained and the hole filled up with water, he nearly drowned. He got out of that. You’re nervous, you’re really

scared, everything you look at moves, you hear voices and you hear the woodpecker go, “Dack-dack-dack,” and you know by the sound of it how far away they are from you. So, they’re within range so you make sure you don’t smoke or any such thing at night. Not like the Yanks, they’d go out and light a cigarette. Bang. Dead. They were stupid. You did what you were taught to do. A few hairy times but

I was always in a position where if it got rough I could get out of it. You sort of covered your own back or some mate to cover your back, you just worked together.

Well the war finished on the 16th December and I got back to Australia on about the 20th February.

By ship yes. By the US

USS [United States’ Ship] Sea Cat, Liberty boats.

Oh a lot better, far better. It was like a holiday cruise coming home. We come down through the Coral Sea and down the through the Halmaheras, Celebes Sea across the top part of Australia and the Gulf of Carpentaria, boys as big as this room all around the Gulf of Carpentaria, I said, “We’re home.” Then we came down the Whitsunday Passage and we got in to

Moreton Bay about five o’clock and we were told do you want to berth and come in the morning and be welcomed home with a band and all the people, or we could go to Pinkenba and disembark and get off the boat. We had a vote and we said we’ll get off the boat and go to Pinkenba. So we ended up at Rocklea Trots [Racecourse], there was a camp for us. We got off the boat, in to trucks and went to Rocklea Trots and camped

there the night. So I never had a welcome home committee, nor did I when I came back from Korea had a welcome home committee. It was nice leaving, a great feeling leaving but one thing I do remember before we got on the boat, we were all lined up with our kit bags and gear all unpacked and the provos going through seeing that we had no

samurai swords or no revolvers no nothing. Well I had a .45 [pistol], I had American garters, the 45 stuck down the back of that and the long trousers I had a like a hoop so the trousers would hang over the garters and missed that, and I had a Webley .38 [revolver] and I had that down the back, and a few bit and pieces and got on the boat.

I’ll never forget the provo, he went through one kit bag and the fellow had razors, remember those blade razors, he put his hand in and cut his thumb on the razor, blood everywhere and that sort of put the inspection off a bit because we were more worried about this provo with his cut thumb, he was bleeding like a stuffed pig, so I was lucky in a sense that I didn’t get the going over that I should’ve got. I had those two weapons for a long time. I used to use the .45 for pig shooting, when I was working in the bush,

clearing boar drains I used to have to chase the pigs off it,, “Bang bang.” You aim at that cabinet and you’d hit over there, the boar was worn out as was the .38, so I don’t where they are in a rust heap somewhere.

Oh yeah.

Well I’m blowed if I know. I really

do not know. They’d have to know somebody at the port or at the airport to get them through because the provos, no matter where you were, you were searched. They might have thought you’d bring in a live grenade, that’s what they were searching for. A lot of blokes, in fact I know four blokes that have samurai swords and how they got them home I don’t know. They got them home. Where’s there’s a will there’s a way.

When I saw the boy in the Gulf of Carpentaria.

Well in fact they herded us up and put us in to truck and just took us out to Rocklea and didn’t even have a meal. Not even a cup of tea. There it is. Tents, slept on the ground and that’s it. I got up next morning and had a big feed of army scrambled eggs and bacon,

and a cup of tea and a couple pieces of toast.

Oh yes. Yes they documented us that day and I went up to Toowoomba that night. Thumbed a ride up and got a ride up on a milk truck. One of Peter’s milk trucks of Toowoomba. Got off in down in Margaret Street and I got a cab and I didn’t know where my parents lived, because my Dad used to buy and sell houses.

I said to the cabbie, 19 Bridge Street,, “Oh jeez up there?” I said, “What’s wrong with up there?” “Fog!” I ended up walking in front of the cab to find my way home. The fog was that thick, it was right at the top of the range, near the quarry. It would be about midnight, one o’clock in the morning and I saw 19 on the fence post and walked up to the verandah and knocked on the front door. Mother said, “Who’s that?”

And I said, “It’s me Mum.” “Who?” I said, “Leslie.” She opened the door and she felt me fingers and me arms and me legs and all over me, everybody woke up and, “Oh you look hungry you poor boy,” and dishevelled and had a big feed at about two o’clock in the morning. Anyway she said you’ll have to sleep in the sleep out on the verandah. With the fog, this was a spare bed sort of thing when unexpected guests came,

the sheets were cold and wet from the fog. I froze to death. Like coming from the swelter of the tropics and getting in to a refrigerator. Did not sleep. So next morning everything was alright.

A big bowl of porridge, rolled oats, and bacon and eggs.

That thick wholemeal bread covered in butter and black tea. Yeah. That was really nice, good to be home.

Well I broke it off with my Dad and no job, no nothing. So I got a job as a fettler on the railways, truck driver on the council and thought, “Well no future here.”

So I thought I’ll join the army, there’s a future in the army. Got a background, no problems so I joined the army.

I was going to be a career soldier. I was only 29. I was going to be a career soldier, that was my aim. I joined the army and sent to Kapooka for training there and the war ended in Korea, they had the treaty

and although they were still fighting, they had the treaty going. And the Queen was coming out to Australia and I’m an infantry man and they crowded this carter of a thousand troops, there’s engineers, infantry every corps represented and at Liverpool,

and there were warrant officers, and all that, walking around picking out the different people. A thousand sifted down to about 40. I was one of them. I guarded Kirribilli House [Australian Prime Minister’s house in Sydney] when the Queen came. So that was an honour. Then on an old Dakota straight to Korea.

No I wanted engineers. When I worked as a truck

driver, I learnt to operate machines, graders and all that sort of stuff and I wanted engineers. They said, “No infantry corps for you.” “But,” I said, “I’ve just worked as a plant operator,” “No infantry corps.” My mate Bunny

Elwood he joined up the same time as me, he wanted engineers, they put him in armoured corps, he went to Puckapunyal, I went to Kapooka and did our boots training in both places and they made Bunny a gunner on one of these, forget what type of tanks they had in those days, a gunner with a three inch barrel

and he ended up in infantry with me. As a gunner when you’re traversing country you’re supposed to traverse the barrel so if you’re crossing a creek the barrels to the rear so you go up the creek. And Bunny says, “Bugger this, I’m sick of this turret going bang, bang, bang, it’s driving me mad.” So he just lifted the barrel, pointed it forward and buried in the bank. So he got chucked out of the armoured corps.

He’s a painter by trade and engineers painted. Like my background related to road equipment, building roads, so engineers. Not to be, the powers say, “You’re going to be an infantry man.” Fair enough. Did the boots camp at Kapooka, which was very, very hard. I was pretty fit, but I

tell you very strenuous.

Three times as hard. Three times as hard and the rookie training in the RAAF was a bit of cake because all you did was foot drill, small arms rifle, Owen gun, Bren gun, grenade and that’s it. Whereas in the army when you’re start off a rookie you do 25 mile marches, forced marches, traverse in,

everybody who has done the 25 mile march has broken a record and this intake is going to break that record. Things like that. I enjoyed it. Cross country runs. Very active and very fit. Went to Liverpool, got picked for the household guard and when that was over went back to Holsworthy.

Oh yeah, yeah. Old Prince Philip used to sneak out of a night time on his own. Yeah. Say nothing. In fact I’ve never seen a photograph of myself but of all the movie cameras that took photographs of us at the Palace and at the Domain, we marched up in ceremonial dress, the infantry corps the cap and the red bandage around it, the blue uniform

with the red stripe down it and the trousers and silver buttons all polished up. We looked really smart. I’ve never seen a photograph of myself. But apart from that we did that for a fortnight and then we went back to Holsworthy and we were in the mess, had a wet camp we could drink beer now, we’re out of recruit we’re soldiers we’re regular army we can drink beer. In the canteen

and the corporal came around he said, “All yous blokes, all yous blokes in here have got to be out on parade in five minutes.” So we all went out on the parade ground and the officers there started to call names out. “Elwood, Clive.” “Sir,” “Step out, Walker, Leslie,” “Sir,” “Step out,” and we just stepped out and next thing the Salvation Army

bloke come around to see us and gave us all a book, like the New Testament, I said, “What’s this for?” he said, “You’re going to Korea,” I said, “When?” he said, “Now.” Just like that. They gave us half hour to pack our gear and put us on the trucks and took us out to Mascot and they got an old DC-3 [Dakota transport aircraft].

Nothing like a modern airliner, just a single skin. We flew out of Sydney, it was dark, and we landed at Port Moresby. We were in winter uniform, the old khaki shirts, woollen uniform. We get off at Port Moresby nearly died, took off our coats, “Put that coat back on!” We

had our tie, everything on, undid everything. They wouldn’t let us have a drink. So they refuelled the aircraft and we flew from there to the island of Guam, which is an American island, in the middle of nowhere. We got there in the afternoon and the Americans were our hosts, we stayed at the Marine Div Headquarters in their dormitories. They’ve all got steel lockers,

like a little workplace lockers with the door on them so we got our grate coats, our uniforms they said, “You’ve all been invited down to Club Tropicana,” “What’s that?” “That’s a club for American ex-servicemen and their wives. There were a lot of married Americans there. This’ll be great, so down we go to Club Tropicana and we hang our coats over these doors. Anyway during the night the coat would drag the cupboard down and, ‘Bang’.

‘Bang’. Anyhow we didn’t know anything about this. We’re down Club Tropicana, free grog, they really laid it on for us, there was about 30 of us, they really laid it on for us. Danced and jived and carried on like bloody mad men. They sent a Jeep for us to take us back to the barracks and the Master of Arms is there waiting for us, big

old with his arms folded, “Next god dam locker that falls on the floor you’re all in the brig. Bugger me, just as he said that, “Bang.” So we had to throw all our clothes on the floor, they were too heavy for the locker. We had breakfast, had these trays, mush and hash, couldn’t eat it, was terrible, pancakes with maple syrup, your maple syrup is with your porridge and with your stew.

Oh gee. I said, “How can they eat like this?” We went back out to the airport and they’d fuelled up the old Dak [Dakota aircraft] and we’re sick of it. Have you ever flown in a Dakota? Oh the slowest, you think they’re going to fall out of the sky. You look down there to the ground, and that’s still there five minutes later, whereas in a jet now you look down and it’s gone. Dear oh dear.

So we landed at Iwakuni in Japan in the afternoon and they had the Australian air force, the 75 Squadron was there and was part of the Occupational Force also they were part of the Korean and South African air force, New Zealand air force were there and of course the Americans were there with their sabres and all that sort of stuff. From Iwakuni, we had a meal there, and we did the most ‘beautifullest’ trip on a boat ever,

ever I’ve had, through the Indon Sea of Japan, from Iwakuni to Kure. You’ve got no idea, magnificent, majestic country it was beautiful country.

Well I was a bit anti. I had a chip on my shoulder, a bit anti.

I said to the blokes, in fact I was the only returned bloke amongst them, they’re all 19, 20 year olds and I’m 29, 30. They used to call me ‘Dad’ I had a moustache in fact I’ve got a photograph here, they used to call me ‘Dad’. Anyway we got on this boat, it was the loveliest boat cruise ever, took about five hours and we got to Kure late at night and they

took us out to a place called Hiro, to a camp 1 Recruit and Reinforcement Training Battalion and they took us out there. We lived in tents but had wooden walls and wooden floors, it was quite comfortable. There’s an anti-fraternisation thing there, you couldn’t fraternise with the locals, we got a big talk to about it, couldn’t do this, couldn’t do that, couldn’t drink in camp, no liquor.

We’d stay out at Hiro, we’d do group marches, we’d get back in to condition for the week we’ve been sitting around in an airplane doing nothing, you had to get fit again. They had a hill called ‘Sig Hill’ it was about 600 metres in height and they’d take it turns. Hiro camp would hold about 200 soldiers, all reinforcements for Korea.

3 Battalion, then I was with 1 recruit reinforcement battalion. Anyway, somebody lighted a lantern on top of Sig Hill and any smart arse, the sergeant would say, “Want you to go up and put that light out, now, as quick as you can.” You’d race up and put the light out and come down and he’d say, “You. You go up and light the lamp.”

Every one of us did it. You’d go and have a shower and you’d just collapse. From there we went to a place called Iwojima. Yep Iwojima was the battle camp. That’s where you did the baptism of fire that was a

commonwealth brigade, 26th Commonwealth Brigade, United Nation forces, there was I’ve got a card out there, there was every nationality in the world and we were under the United Nations flag. Everybody had to go through this (UNCLEAR) and I tell you that was a killer, that was worse than the Second World War. They train you, you do two months up there

and you do patrolling, you’re laying in paddy fields of rice in water covered in water for three or four hours at a time. And in fact I got trained in snatch patrol they call it, strange name, you go out of a night time and your position over there and you work out when they change the bloke on duty and you work out, you know yourself when you’re on duty after

the first hour you’re not too bad, the start of the second hour you start to get a bit drowsy and half way through you start to nod off. We were taught to get up as close as you could to these fellows and try and nab one. Capture him and take him back for interrogation, friendly forces of course it was all exercises. So hair raising, so realistic and they used to use thunder flashes, like for mortars, you’d be lying there and

next thing, boom, go off alongside you. They’d have guns up in the hills they’d send a bloody charge of bullets about three foot above your head just to give you, put you in the mood for battle. Then the big was where you attacked, Hiromira Mountain itself, there were booby traps, there was everything, there’s trenches, there’s booby traps, there’s mines and they had two per cent

casualty allowance. I tell you that was a baptism of fire. You could feel the bullets going that fast, truly, I’m not kidding it was real they had 25 pounders dropping shells about a hundred yards in front of you. They were bringing you in to this hill, and the hill was like that, and you’ve got full battle gear on. You’re cactus. You get up the top there

and it’s all labyrinth of caves and tunnels and all that sort of stuff and you’ve got to secure it and they’ve got observers with little blue armbands on that making notes on how good you were or how bad you were, fit enough for battle, not for battle. We had a fellow called Wolfe and he wore glasses, I don’t know how he got in to the army. A little short bloke about five foot three, Wolfey and he had teeth like that cowboy singer.

You know who I mean?

Yeah! Chad Morgan. He had teeth like that. In the paddy field the water would get on his glasses, he couldn’t see. He’d say, “Les, Dad, where am I?” oh, “Over here mate, towards me,” and somebody would stick a thunder flash at his pack as he went past and he’d, “Boom,” up his pack would go. Oh poor bugger. He ended up a nervous wreck, they had to

discharge him.

Oh it was worse! It was worse because all I got hit with a bullet in the Second World War, no shots came as close to me as they did at Hiromira. No way did we charge a hill with defensive fire like rolling barrages bringing us in. Those things were real, they don’t throw

shrapnel that way they throw it this way, bloody stuff stick out of me everywhere. They’re still digging it out of me. We got to the top and an officer there, lieutenant, he’d hurt his leg. I did the big hero deal, he ended up in politics down on the Gold Coast I’ll remember his name, did a fireman’s lift and just lent down and picked him up and threw him across my shoulder

and carried him down Hiromira. Strange thing, when I came back from Korea I got sent to Liverpool service as an instructor and McBarne was our company commander and the CSM [Company Sergeant Major] said to me, “We call him Burl Ives,” the CSM. Old Bill said, “We’ll be getting a new company commander.” Joe Taggart that’s what it was.

I said, “Who is it?” he said, “A Captain Taggart,” I said, “I know a Captain Taggart,” he said, “Where from?” I said, “Oh I carried him off a hill in Japan, he’d hurt his leg. He’s not a bad bloke.” But being a two pip and getting three pips, they sort of get swelled heads. I was platoon sergeant of 4th

Platoon, an A Company. So all the platoon sergeants had to go up and meet the new company commander. I go up there and in a line he comes up, “I’m Captain Taggart,” shook hands, came to me, “I’m Corporal Walker,” he said, “I know you,” and I said, “Yes sir,” he says, “Where are your campaign medals?” I said, “What campaign medals?” he said, “Next time I see you I want you to be wearing your campaign medals.” They were a bloody nuisance because when you were teaching

the slope arms when you did that your ribbons would tear off and tear your bloody shirt, so I never used to wear them. He threatened to put me on a charge. But getting back to Hiromiro it was the most realistic thing ever, ever I’ve been in. I’d been through the Second World War or part of it, it was so realistic and as I said they had two per cent casualty percentage and that’s pretty high.

Marvellous. Marvellous,

I called it the baptism of fire it really made you realise that you weren’t playing cowboys and Indians. Like we were, compared with what we did in Hiromira playing cowboys and Indians at Labuan.

Yeah, here. There and in the arm.

A bit of iodine. That’s all. We had a first aid kit. That’s par for the course. In fact on ours two got killed and that was par for the course.

Two Australians, yeah. Two Australians. I was attached to a pioneer company at Hiromira to clear mine fields. Of course in my papers from the air force they found out that I was an explosives man. They’re all Poms [English]. Poms and French, Dutch and I didn’t get on very well with them. I bailed up this major, this English Major I said, “This is not my thing,” I said, “I want to go back to my unit, back to my blokes at Hiro and go with them to the battalion., to the regiment.” He said, “Oh are you regular army?” I said, “Yes.” “They’re all national servicemen oh you shouldn’t be here,” I said, “I know I shouldn’t be here, send me back.” So I went back to camp and they made us force march from Hiromira to Hiro and we broke the record. My mate

Bunny Elwood and we used to march for 50 minutes and have 10 minutes spell. We’d march for 55 and have five minute spell originally and as it go a bit harder we’d knock off for 10 minutes. It’s raining, raining, raining. “Rest stop,” and we’d all pull up and Bunny saw this clear bit of stuff, and it was all mud, and saw this bit of shiny stuff there. What it was, was a

sheet of tin over a honey pot. He goes flying for that, he wants somewhere to sit. He flies for that and straight in to the honey pot. We had to get him out and clear his nose and his ears, god that was terrible and at the end of, no way was up front he was right down the tail end of the mob. We broke a record on that one. We beat the Dorset’s [Regiment], we beat

the Dorset’s on that. We got in to camp and we got the hose and we hosed him down and took him to the RAP and they checked him out and they kept him in hospital for a couple of days in case he got a virus or something. But he was alright.

All that you owned you carried on your back. Your great coat, your bum roll, your bed roll, everything you owned, all your clothing in your pack, your kit back over the top. That’d weigh about 30 kilos [kilograms] all up, spare pair of boots, shoes, socks, shirts, trousers, winter uniform, summer uniform. It was a load to carry plus

your basic pouches had spare magazines for the Bren gunners. You were really laden with the gear because where you went you took your gear with you. You might get transferred to another company or something might happen. We got back to Hiro and they gave us a bit of R&R there, they gave us a week off. We went in to Kure, in to Commonwealth house there was a big United Nations canteen,

they had booze and dances and that sort of thing up there. All these young fellows pretty toey and asked me about different things, being a man of the world I said, “Look fellows, I’ll show you what goes on.” I became very friendly with a madam of a beer hall, just around from the Queens Beer Hall there was an English Red Cap [British military police]

of provos post right at the intersection of this street, just down the road was this house with girls. A fellow called Jack Partridge, his father was I think he could have ended up Bishop of the Church of England down in Tasmania, Jackie Dan was his name and he had never, ever had a woman. He was about 22, 23 and

never had a woman and he never drank until he met me and we got him drunk at the Queens Beer Hall and we took him down to this little place down there and I said to the mama san I said, “He’s a cherry boy.” “Oh ok.” So she got one of her very experienced girls and takes Jack upstairs. Anyway the place gets raided by the provos. They had window seats

they had bay windows with window seats so you all hopped in the box underneath the window and they just sat on it, there’s nobody there, you’re there but lying there nearly dying of lack of air. The provos are tramping through the place and they leave. And you get out. But Jack was in another room and when he heard provos he took off with all his gear underneath his arm across the rooves, some had galvanised rooves some had thatched rooves and he ended up on a banquet table of a private party in the starkers [naked].

True. God’s truth I tell you. So the provos got him. That was Jack’s initiation to women. Anyway I made him my Bren gunner, section commander there, and he’d never swore. He had stoppage in the Bren, “Goodness gracious me I don’t know,” I said, “Jack you don’t say things like that, what’s wrong with the friggen thing, fix it up, change the magazine.”

You know, got him riled up. But he could bring you in, you were doing an assault, he could put bullets where that brick wall is just in front of you, he’d bring you right in. Jeez he was good. He didn’t say, “Goodness gracious I’m not sure,” anymore. We made a man of him, yeah, we made a real man of him, Jack Partridge. They say, “We’re sending you to Korea,

you’re going over on a freighter to Pusan and you’re going to join the Royal Australian Regiment and these fellows are three battalion, these fellow are and they all got split up.” It was a freighter, it would be about 300 ton like a big trawler. There’s Kiwis, Australians there’d be about 50 of us I suppose. Well

what a time. Nightime the Kiwis had the guitars they’re singing Maori songs and we’re drinking Kirin beer and everybody is quite happy. We get to Pasan and it’s raining, raining, raining and they put us in a dormitory camp there and we had to wait for the train. This train comes down and they put us in a carriage,

there’s holes in the floor and there’s no wood on the walls and we wondered what the hell had gone wrong, remnants of war. One of the old blokes said, “No,” he said, “It’s so bloody cold here between here and Seoul you go through about three feet of snow in the winter time when it’s cold they just pull the wood off and burn it on the floor.” Which I believed. The coldest I remember was 28 degrees

minus centigrade. That’s bloody cold. So we got to Seoul and went to a holding centre and they lined us up, A Company, I was in A Company 3 Battalion A Company, B Company, C Company, D Company and they put us on the trucks and the truck that took me to A Company went to a place they called

Piccadilly Circus and it was just about a mile down from the 38th Parallel. Why it was called Piccadilly Circus there were all these English army units at intersections of roads, forming a circle, Piccadilly Circus. So I get put in A Company. An officer, Boy Smith, ‘Boy

the Bastard,’ we used to call him. He was a little fellow and had the small man syndrome. He was the platoon commander, old Boy, and he said to me, “How old are you?” I said, “Too bloody old for this,” and he said, “You are in 2 Platoon, Corporal Curtis he’s a section commander

there’s 13 of you,” I said, “Why 13?” He said, “Are you superstitious?” I said, “No, no it’s just a strange figure.” He said, “Oh every Bren gunner has a number two.” Well that’s natural that brings up the thirteenth man. So it had American built tents, had canvass beds, duckboard on the floor.

Well this is in summer time when I got there, about the same as here about 30, 32 degrees hot and dry. You wore very little, you wore shorts, socks, boots and your hat, no we didn’t wear hats we wore caps, the United Nation caps. We got up for roll call next morning

and introduced everybody, had breakfast and went back, it was so laconic, so casual you know, Boy came up to Plonky Curtis and said, “You know I’m not very happy with you?” and Plonky said, “Why sir?” He said, “You can’t do your job properly,” he said, “Private Walker’s the section commander you’re his 2IC [Second in Command].” God’s truth. I said, “You can’t do that.” He said,

“I can do whatever I like.” Plonky hit the bottle a bit that’s why they called him Plonky. Anyway we are doing manoeuvres one day and it was brigade manoeuvres and I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and one of the brigadiers was there and he said, “What are you doing here soldier, what’s your position?” and

I said, “I really don’t know,” which I didn’t, I never had a bloody clue. He said, “Where’s your platoon sergeant?” I said, “Oh he’s back there,” he said, “Where’s your section commander?” I said, “He’s up there,” pointing to Plonky Curtis. He had two stripes on his arms, so he goes up and stripped pieces off old Plonky. I laughed my head off. He said, “You bastard.”

Oh alright. I’d met him at Ingleburn before, I met him prior to when I joined up in the army, I met him prior. No he was alright. He was quite glad because he didn’t want the responsibility. He was more concerned about Plonky than he was about Les Walker or Joe Blow. No he was quite happy with that. That was the laugh

of the battalion really. So they made me a corporal and we were even Steven then. It was awe inspiring the, the terrain there was such that. I’ve got some photographs here, it was trench warfare, we were in trenches, fox holes, we were in bunkers. In the winter

time we’d get about, well the Imjin River would freeze solid, about four feet of ice, we’d get snow falls of about three or four feet, temperature minus 28 and how we survived I really don’t know. All we had was our khakis and our winter uniforms, our great coats, we had no mittens, we soon got mittens.

What I did I seemed to be the only one who show initiative there. There was Prince’s Pat Light Infantry an armoured corps come from England and they drove tanks and they had what they had tank overalls, they are the warmest thing in the world. So I went down there and bummed about half a dozen of them. Got one for meself and gave five away to my section. Then the Americans had their parkers so we conned a few of those and

finally, after about two or three months of winter, we got the WW [Wet Weather] gear, the wet weather gear they called it, the big thick rubber soled boots, had to change your socks about three times a day for frost bite, you had mittens, you had balaclavas, you had manila string singlets like an open weave and parkers

and sleeping bags. Everything came good, but initially it was pretty hard because we got there at the end of summer and it was like it was here last week, bloody hot, and then the cold coming in down from Manchuria would come down and it’d get cold. Of an afternoon about three o’clock it was like that Fremantle doctor of yours in Perth you’d feel it of a night time, freeze to death. We were in tents

and we had a base camp we called Gallipoli barracks on the Imjin River. Our position was up on the Kansas Line and we got bug outs, red alert bug outs we’d have to pack up and run like buggery about five mile up to our position because we couldn’t use transport because it’d be a give away. The hard mile we used to call it. The ground would be that hard the picks would bend, rather than dig a hole.

We took over from the Black Watch and they all average about five-foot-six in height. The Australian average was about five foot ten or eleven. We had to go down another two feet because we’d walk through to the communication tents and our heads would be up here. Things like that. Even the bunkers, the doorways in to the bunkers were too small, it was like a rat hole.

We had problems getting in, but they were well made. In fact one thing about the bunkers the Poms they did a good job, riveting along the side.

Well you didn’t, you just didn’t dig you just lay low. You just lay low. The country was that hilly, movement is the one thing that drags your attention and silhouette is another,

looking at a landscape and something changes, like a head appears, sticks out like a pumpkin. It’s things like that. In fact when the winter went of course work was well made to make the trenches deep. I’ve got some photos here to show you of them in fact I’ve got a Department of Information photograph, an official one of me on patrol

We crossed the Imjin River and we had to do a recce the other side of the river and we got these engineers boats, these collapsible boats with the canvass side and my section had to go across and do a recce and got off the boat, left a bloke to look after the boats and going up a re-entrance and this big, “Flash,” I nearly cacked me pants. It was an official photographer. Took a

flash photograph of us coming up the re-entrance. All you can see is he right boot, he’s looking down like that and showed me after and that, I nearly died, in fact I thought I was dead. I thought that a phosphorous grenade had landed so close that’s how bright it was. Anyway.

Oh I really got in to him. Yeah. I gave him a mouthful, yeah.

Official photograph number 198 I think it is, the Department of Information. Yeah. I got stuck in to him. He was a bloke about your size in fact. Frightened hell out of me. In fact you can see my eyes sticking out like that. Korea was good. In fact I enjoyed Korea. Because the training I got, the self-training that I got in Labuan

seek and search and stealth and all that sort of stuff, that came natural to me that the snatch patrol, in fact one that we did four of us did it.

Yeah, yeah. Four of us did it and we only had side arms, a revolver and bayonets, we left,

we left yeah Intelligence came through to say there’s no Korean patrols in the area. We took a correspondent with us and we went down in to a valley and we stayed there until just on dusk, we went down early afternoon. Stayed there just on dusk, in fact we slept. When dusk came then we moved through the gully

and they had a position up a hill it was like that, it was all bunkered around, sand bags around and you could hear them talk and we just listened to them. You sort of worked out a plan. Every hour and a half they used to relieve the guy, that meant that the guy that would be there would be pretty alert. Waited and waited. This correspondent says, “C’mon, I’ve got to get

this, these shots to Seoul,” he was a Yank, “Got to get these shots to Seoul.” I said, “What shots?” he said, “I’m going to take a few shots of what you guys do.” I said, “Not while I’m here.” He said, “You know I’ve got,” he brought an infra-red type camera. “There’ll be no flash,” he said. So about nine or 10 o’clock I said,

“We’ll go up,” so I left the bloke down the bottom and I sent two blokes on either side as flanks so we would circle this because the escarpment was there and the communication entrance was there so we did the pincer movement with two blokes around, in case someone walked down to he guy here. I come up the front. This correspondent was behind me and one bloke down in the gully I had to yell out

whether it be platoon, company or whatever strength, I’d had to recognise what badge they had. Got there and had to crawl up the sandbags and there’s quietness, this bloke was awake and he was smoking, they used to smoke P cigarettes [?] are Korean, stinking, terrible smoke. I crawled up

the parapet and I just stayed there and I started to get a bit shaky because I wasn’t too good. I though I’ll have to have a look and I can’t think of the two fellows names, not for the life of me because I was more worried about me than I was about them, and they come around, I watched them and when they came around to where I couldn’t see them, they were out of my eyesight meant they were in the communications trench, so I pulled myself up

and I looked in to this fellows eyes, God’s truth, like we are now only closer. He cacked, I cacked I yelled out, “Company,” the bloke down in the gully took off like a rocket back to our line, back to our unit, Company strength, the bloke the Korean bloke had more a fright than me, he did nothing. Well I yelled out, “Company,” the other two blokes broke away and we ran down the hill.

They fired shots at us but the angle was, well it was like that, and they couldn’t get us because they couldn’t shoot straight down they had to shoot at a different angle to what we were. I tell you what that was a hairy one. The platoon commander said, “That’s worth a MID [Mentioned in Despatches],” I said, “Don’t you worry about it. I was shit scared’,, “No it’s worth something.” I said, “No.

that’s the last one I’m doing, no more.” It was the last one I did. Looking in to those brown eyes, holy moley.

He took off. He got a bigger fright than me. He could see this bloke’s head, he took off and he never said a word he didn’t even take a bloody photograph. And to top

it all off the company commander was on another hill watching it all through binoculars. To see what we were doing, had night glasses to see what we were doing.

No. No. Platoon commander did. Oh no the company commander said, “That was a quick getaway, that was a good break, that was very good break corporal.” Blood oath it was a good break.

Ah. In fact we had a lot of problems, a bit like the islands at the end of the war. We didn’t know who was who. They were all slopes all the same colour, same look, and they put the demilitarised zone up. What used to happen the north Koreans used to come through and infiltrate to the villages, the different villages, there’s a village just down from us and they infiltrated there and we used to employ young Korean people

to do the washing and all that sort of stuff. One we caught, I didn’t catch him they caught him Intelligence caught him, with a full map of our camp, our POL, our motor pool, our officers mess, our headquarters, our Intelligence office, our line in detail. So there was

a Colonel Leong he was the South Korean army and he was the boss of Intelligence. They got on to him and he came out and interrogated this bloke and just blew him away. Bang. Like that picture you saw, that bloke shooting that bloke in Vietnam, same thing.

No I didn’t see that. I heard the shot. Just blew

him away. So you didn’t know who was who. They’d come down and they’d incite the villagers, they’d really get them going, ‘British troops are no good, they’re living on everything and you’re starving.” They used to even, the empty beers cans they’d come up and scrounge them and make rooves for their huts out of the beer cans. They’d flatten them all out and tie them together with wire and all this sort of stuff. They had honey pots on their shoulders trotting around the streets and Buddie Chevalier he was a

real, he got dishonour discharge in Vietnam he was a truck driver. He said, “Watch this one go Les,” and he’d just hit one of the honey pots and the bloke would spin around like a helicopter and, “Splat.” One village there, coming down the hill the corner was too sharp, can’t make it so he just drove through a house. You know.

Yes they did. The DMZ [Demilitarised Zone] was scary. In fact you carried arms and we weren’t allowed to fire a shot, but they would but we couldn’t. We’d be in breach of the United Nations Peace Agreement Treaty. We couldn’t do that but they could. Patty Kent my platoon commander

I said to him, this is when I’m in 1 Battalion I stayed on and joined 1 Battalion I liked it that much, and Patty Kent my platoon commander there and he said, “If,” he was very dapper from Portsea, he said, “If the bastards shoot at you, you shoot back,” I said, “Yeah, but who’s going to take the consequences, who’s going to the court martial? You or me?” “Oh,” he said, “That’s to be decided.”

Not very good you know, it’s not a level playing ground is it? No. In fact one patrol we did, Peter Cook he was my Bren gunner, and we were being chased, oh well followed by a North Korean patrol and they’d be about a hundred yards behind us and I said, “Let’s go get out of here.” They were after a bit of a fight. Cookie carried the Bren gun by its head

and he steps on a pheasant and this bloody pheasant goes, “Blaa-blaaa,” there’s feathers going everywhere and everybody hit the ground, I cocked my rifle and I said, “No, no, go, go, go,” and go he went. Cookie never got over that at all, it was a terrible feeling. It was

a bit like the end of war in the Pacific, you sort of had to root them out. We had one operation called ‘Operation Skunk Hunt’. We had to go through all the old positions. All the old positions south of the, or just south of the demilitarised zone, which was just above the 38th Parallel, and go through every position. Climb hills for day in day out and just camp out. We’d find some and we’d take them prisoner.

We’d find where some of them had been, there’s rations there, there’s excreta there, you get to be like a trapper, how old that bit of pooh is you know, couple of days old and this would worry you because you’d walk in to the unknown. That was a hard one. In fact that was a bit eerie, a bit scary.

But we got through that alright. Patty Croddy was another section corporal and B Company at 1 Battalion, the mad Irishman, he was a gypsy. How he got in to the army I really don’t know he could hardly sign his name. I used to call him Scouse, Liverpool Irish, but actually he was a gypsy he lived in a wagon around England, just travelled the plains. He used

used to say, if you apprehended him, ‘Yongy songa’ “Stop or I’ll shoot,” and one the Skunk patrol we got in to position and we heard a scurry of feet at the end of the communication trench and this bloke was taken off and Patty just got up on the embankment, had his Owen gun and went, “Blurrrrt.” Fixed him, shot him. I said, “You’re out of order there mate.” “What do you mean?” I said, “You’re supposed to say, “Yongy

songa,” “Didn’t I say that? I thought I said it.”

Oh yeah, you reported that.

Well in fact my initial LNR in fact when mail call would come they be on the back of a truck and the fellow would get up there and

“Joey Smith.” “Peter Wills,” “Eleanor.” “Yep LNR Walker,” so that’s how they nick-named me, “Dad,” and “Eleanor.” Too high falutin’ [pompous] name. We had our own canteen, we built our own canteen, our own club in Baker Company 1 Battalion. Whereas in 3 Battalion we didn’t. Incidentally in

3 Battalion there’s A Company right at the top nearest the 38th Parallel, and Baker Company was alongside of us and there’s a Corporal Tosh Smith and he won a military medal in Korea. He was picked to go to England, some thing relating to the Queen, and he picked up a venereal disease and

they said, “You can’t go, you’re unclean you can’t go.” So he got on the booze one night, he got a Bren gun and a box of magazines and went up on top of the hill, we were on mess parade, A Company, lining up to get our tucker anyhow up with the bloody Bren. Colonel Buckley, we was our commanding officer in 3 Battalion then, they sent a stick down to headquarters and Buckley come up in his Jeep, and Buckley knew

Tosh because Buckley recommended him for the military medal. “Tosh! Come down at once!” “Why?” “This is your commanding officer here,” “Is that you Buckley?” “Yes your commanding officer,” “Blrrrt.” A fellow called Lofty Perkins killed in Battle of Lon Tan in Vietnam,

he went up and got him. He was his mate Lofty Perkins, he was a fellow bigger than me. He went up and dragged Tosh down. They threw him out of the army, mentally unsound. Got on the grape. There was a lot of drinking. In fact the Australians were drunks. A lot of bad examples of,

certain things. In Japan we’d get up on R&R, you’d do two months in the line and you’d get two weeks leave in Japan. You could either fly over or you go over by boat. We used to get on these heavy transport planes, the star lifters, monstrous things and they’d take about 500 troops. Land at Tokyo, go on leave. There’d

be an area for the Poms, and area for the Canadians, an area for the Yanks, and area for the British and an area for the Australians. We had our own areas, you never mixed because nine times out of ten you mixed there would be fights. Anyway, the Yanks used to come down, we were at Ebisu a little town of Ebisu, about 15 miles north of Tokyo, and Ebisu camp

was an old hospital or an old school, but it had rooms dormitories and all that sort of stuff. The NAAFI [Navy, Army, Air Force Institute], the Pommy canteen fund they made a canteen there and they called it the Kookaburra Club. So that’s where we drank, Allsops lager. We went out and we used to go down to the beer halls, you’d buy a

stubby of Kirin for about 120 yen and you’d go to the beer hall and they’d charge you a thousand yen. You’d have a feed there, it would cost you a fortune. So I used live, on leave, found a little restaurant Foo Yong Ha, I used to eat an egg and fish dish and rice and green tea, 100 yen. A big oval plate of it would fill you up.

Shrimps and everything in it. Foo Yong Ha. I used to get my beer there for about 80 yen a bottle if I wanted one. I used to supply, I’d take it back to camp, back to the hotel, the leave camp. Didn’t do the old mama san very well at the beer halls but charge you an arm and a leg. Anyhow I met a girl there, in fact I got very infatuated with her.

Shiga Sato. Her husband was killed in the Philippines in the Second World War, he was in the navy. She was doing arts at the university and I met her doing casual work at the leave camp and they used to play like a lotto game there, like the old pensioners play.

Bingo. Yeah. She used to play bingo.

She asked me to go with her one night to play bingo. Play bingo in Japanese, you don’t play nothing. It bored me to tears. I got on pretty well with her and started to sleep with her and carry on a little bit.

No not with her. She was pretty well education, had a couple of degrees. She was quite nice.

In fact she married a mate of mine. When I came back to Australia I said to Peter, Peter, I’ll think of his name, I said, “Peter, I’ve got a lovely girl in Tokyo. You’ll be here for a while, I’ll give you her address,” Peter Burbeck he’s an Englishman in the Australian army, ‘I’ll give you her address and tell her Poppa-san,” that’s me

because I had this big long moustache, “Sends his love and for her to look after you.” He ended up marrying her and brought her back to Australia. Yeah.

I was quite upset actually. Just one of those things. That’s life isn’t it? Anyway we were talking about these zones and you never went in to an

American zone, but the Yanks used to come in to ours. There’s a beer hall there. It had two storeys and upstairs was air-conditioned with balconies and used to drink downstairs in like the public bar and it was like the saloon bar upstairs. We saw these Yanks on the bit of a porch, and they’re air force. So Buddie Chevalier, Jack McBride,

myself and, and, and no can’t think of his name he’s now dead, anyhow four of us go upstairs. McBride used to fight with the Sharman Group at the showgrounds, so we were pretty full and Jack goes over to these guys, “What are you doing in our area?”

and the Yanks said, “What do you mean, your area? Our area, MacArthur took over this place. We belong to the American army.” Jack said, “What part of the army are you in?” He said, “We’re air force” he said, “Are you fly boys?” “No we’re not fly boys,” and Jack picked one up and threw him over the balcony. He said, “You’re flying now you bastard!,” We had

to get out of there. Things like that. And another time this mob, and this might be embarrassing for you Kylie [interviewer], we were on R&R and Bunny and I go together and we go to Ebisu and he said, “We’ll go down to Shimbashi, the White Horse Hotel there. I’ve to know a guy that knows it and we buy some civilians clothes and we’ll go and have our leave down there.”

So we went down there and we had a Turkish bath, oh God, and a massage and the hot Turkish bath had a cold pool, and I couldn’t walk down the stairs I was that weak. It took everything out of me. After that we walked around a bit and did a bit of shopping and we’d go back to the hotel and we’d have dinner at the hotel and the waiter said, “Want girlie?” Bunny said, “What have you got?” he said,

“You go on the lounge at half past seven, a quarter to eight and I bring some in.” So went in to the lounge at quarter to eight and this bevy of girls come in and there’s a white Russian, like a Eurasian, a Russian Japanese and she was absolutely gorgeous. I said, “That’s,” and Bunny said, “Mine, I’ll take that one.” Which he did.

That really peed me off. I wasn’t quite happy about that at all. I said, I’d lost interest, “That one will do, monkey face,” as ugly as a cat full of monkey’s bums, oh real ugly. So we got adjoining rooms. They’ve got paper walls between the room and we’re in the rooms and you hear old Bunny grunting and rolling and making a noise, the next thing there’s a knock on the door. We’re drinking beer, the girl and

I, I’d have nothing to do with her, I wanted this white Russian. Anyway Bunny knocks at the door, “Les,” he says, “Would you have any Vaseline?” I said, “Why?” he said, “I can’t you know, I want some Vaseline.” “I’ve got some shaving cream there,” he said, “Oh that’ll do.” It was that Ingram’s mentholated shaving cream, in a little jar.

He says, “Thanks mate,” and then disappears. Next thing, “Get off, get off!” Bunny says, “Holy mother.” It burnt him and it burn her. He came in and he said, “You rotten beggar, you did that on purpose,” I said, “I did not, none of us did.”

You going to wipe that one?

Well that caused a real riot. He got dirty on me and I was happy with what I’d done. I hadn’t realised the implications of it, I thought I was helping him out, I didn’t realise that I’d given him methylated shaving cream, which did a lot of damage to both of them, incidentally. He never forgave me for that. We stayed at the hotel, in fact, we were the good Australian boys of the hotel. They really loved us. They told us, they used to say all the time

I was in Japan which was quite a long time, that I never had a bad word said to me by a Japanese person. They bowed their head, I bowed back at them, never had a bad word said to me. Where as others, like Jack McBride, the roughies like the rogues of the trade, they’d have problems because they used to go out of their way to upset. Like us they were sent to war, we were sent to war, they had a job to do we had a job

to do and they’re more fanatical than us, more cruel than we were, but that’s, we were pretty cruel too you know. It cuts square both ways. At first I was initially a bit apprehensive, but after a while you soon, you lose that.

Oh during the war, take no

prisoners, finding a couple of old prisoners of war emaciated and bones and skinny and they used to have these little fat buggers jumping around, full of life, they showed no compassion, just blew them away. That I understood it but I couldn’t have done it myself.

I understood it, but it depends on your nature, your inner mind there’s a point there, as we know there’s only a thin line between sanity and saneness. I’d say sometimes they used to go over the line a little bit for some of them, Kicking dead bodies. In fact there’s a bloke in Iraq, I read in the paper a few weeks back, SAS [Special Air Service] bloke was reprimanded for kicking a dead body.

That I understand, probably his mates have been killed by one of these fellows and you’ve got an anger you’ve got to get rid of whether that’s a way of venting their anger against the enemy. I don’t think I could do it, I might, but I’d say not. In fact I’ve had plenty of opportunities to blow somebody away, but I’ve kept within myself and I knew my limits as to

how far I could go. I’ve knuckled a few of them. That’s about it.

Very, very hard. I tell you, we lived like kings, we ate, we used to go to the Ernie Pile restaurant in Tokyo, you’d pay about 50 bucks for a steak, oh and the Canadian Club we ate like kings drank like kings and

lived like kings. You got two weeks of that and all this lean muscle turns in to fat. You go back, they say, “Well you’ve got to patrol for three days to so and so,” and you say, “Oh jeez,” you go out and the first hundred yards you say, “Oh this pack’s getting heavy,” another hundred yards, “Oh this bloody belts tightening.” Because all your equipment is put together to fit your body so over this fortnight you start to put on weight and everything starts to

hurt, so you loosen your belt, you loosen your straps and you start to chafe and you get sore, chafed and dear oh dear. Big difference, but you two months in line and over you go and the same thing, you never learn. Life is meant to be enjoyed was those days. As far as action was concerned I saw a little bit but not much. Mostly insurgency stuff you know,

infiltration of the North Koreans in to the South Korean villages, Operation Skunk Hunt was one, Snatch Patrol was another one but they’re vivid in my mind. I never showed the fear that I showed in the Second World War because I was attuned to it. I was a different person and I was a lot older as well. A lot older as well. The only thing

I had against Americans there we had facing north, we had first marine division of Yanks on our right flank and we English on our left. We used to get K rations [American ration packs] from the Yanks, we used to get first aid packs from the Yanks and each first aid pack had a first aid kit with a capsule of morphine and a needle, syringe.

You could, nine times out of ten, you would get this first aid pack the morphine and needle’s gone. See you might have someone very badly hurt that needed the morphine injection, you can’t help them. I used to get very angry about that. In fact I had a fight with a Yank in Queens Beer Hall.

He was actually a Canadian. We went down to Top John it was a big store depot and every unit had to do a month’s guard down there, it was full of ammunition and all the necessaries for war. There were a lot of red alerts going on then and a lot of stand-tos. This Canadian fellow I bumped in to him at Top

John, it was a rail junction and he, I don’t know, you get a feeling you look at a bloke and you either like him or you don’t. You either take to him or you don’t. I sort of turned off him straight away. So he did this, we took over from the Irish guards and they left cartons and cartons of stout. And of course we’d been drinking beer and we’d never tasted this stout before.

So we got stuck in to the stout. Bunny was with me. Anyway we go out and we do our rounds we just got to patrol around and the red alert went up. We went to our forward positions, in fact there was a Baker’s oven, like a pizza oven, a big dome thing. Bunny gets on to a Sheila.

He’s in this oven with the Sheila when this red alert goes up. He gets out and hurts his back. I leave him there and stand to and get the all clear. I go back to Bunny and he’s done his back in. So I went to headquarters and got a Jeep and took him down to this Canadian hospital. So next day I went down and saw him, I’ve met this Canadian again. He’s his nurse. They reckon he’s a queer.

So I say, “I don’t like,” “I don’t like him either I hate him coming near me, even when he holds me hand, to take me pulse I can’t stand him,” he said, “I don’t like him at all.” So about a couple months later we’re on leave on R&R and at the Queens Beer Hall. We’re drinking Kirin beer out of these stubbies and this Yank walked in and Checheko

was with me and he come over to her and he said, “What are you doing darling?” I said, “She’s sitting there, that’s what she’s doing she’s sitting there alongside of me.” “Who are you?” I said, “I’m her boyfriend.” Put on a real turn. Then he went in to the toilets. Bunny said, “Go after him Walks, give it to him.” You know, the toilets over there the troughs are squats.

Goes in there and he’s again the urinal and I said, “I don’t like your attitude,” I said, “And that’s my girl. I’ve been going with her for nearly 12 months,” and I said, “She’s not a picker, she’s my girl and that’s that, so don’t go near her.” “You God damn Australians are all the same,” I said, “What do you mean?”. With that he turned around and swung a punch at me, I just put my head back a bit and he just grazed me on the tip of the chin. In fact I’ve got a

scar there still, just there. It started to bleed, and I looked down and saw blood on my shirt and I did my lolly. I got stuck in to him. One of his legs went down this squat hole. I stood over him and I punched him to pieces. Went back, covered in blood and everybody’s concerned about me and I said, “Don’t worry about me, go and worry about that bloke in there.” He went out the back way.

The red caps, English provos they were very strict. Power conscious. Little cockily given a baton and a gun and an arm band MP [Military Police] and he was king of the heap and they used to really give you a hard time.

Oh yeah, they were just as bad. Mostly young fellows,

but mostly they belonged to the Occupation Force. They reinforced them and came over from Australia towards the end of the war and to get their time in they’d join the Occupational Forces in Japan and that’s where, Kure, Hiro and Tokyo the three main places, Iwakuni well there were four places that they’d be. They were big heads. They had the power. I remember one time,

we had those rickshaws there, and we used to have rickshaw races down the main street, they’d have tram lines there and we’d have collisions and overturned, all the fun of the world. The Australian is a real character when he’s out on the street, real fun. When he had time there. Another time when I came back from Japan I got posted to a repair and salvage unit and a

bit of black market, like soap and brilliantine and all this sort of stuff would be on the black market. A warrant officer had had my job before me and he got sent home and I got put in there to take over. I never had a clue. This Japanese fellow came up to me and said, “I’m the foreman, I look after the men,” I said, “What do yo do?” He said, “You’re allowed to write off x amount of dollars a day of unserviceable gear.” He said, “We go through it and see what‘s serviceable and what’s unserviceable and we’ll

bring you the documents and you sign.” “But I want to see the equipment.” “Oh you come and see the equipment.” So did that. First month he said, “In bottom left hand drawer your desk, poppa-san, you find brown envelope, OHMS [On Her Majesty’s Service].” Open it up. It’s full of dollars, pound notes, black money, occupational force money. I went and said, “What’s this?”

“Don’t you worry.” So I never drew a pay for about four months. Then the command pay master sent a signal through to why hasn’t Walker drawn a pay in four months? Most of Aussies were broke, they’d get their pay and there’d be nothing in it, and mine was full. So I had to front up to the command paymaster and we had a Catholic padre there, Fr Pat, he used to run the SP bookmaking.

So I saw Fr [Father] Pat. I said I’m in trouble,” I said, “I’ve got to front the command paymaster,” and he said, “Why?” And I told him. He said, “I’ll be your witness,” I said, “What have I done?” He said, “You’re the best gambler we’ve got in camp you break my hand six times,” he said, “You’ve got a winning streak and I’ve paid you a lot of money in bets,” and that’s how I got out of that one.

Oh yes there was. In fact this padre, Fr Pat, he was a real good gambler and most Australians were good betters and he, through various means, had access to radio contacts with Australia, with different races in different cities and he used to run a book. Everybody knew that. That’s how I got out of that, through him telling lies. I said to him after we’d fronted the command paymaster I said,

“Fr Pat you just told a lie, you’ve sinned,” he said, “Don’t worry about me boy, I’ll go to confession and tell him, I’ll be forgiven. Don’t you worry about that.” But not long after that I got sent home, back to Australia.

I think the command paymaster didn’t believe Fr Pat. Because I found out previously, the warrant officer

previous to me, caught out at the same thin. But you couldn’t control them in fact they were quite cunning. Brass, like shell cases, bullet cases, they’d somehow or other they’d go through check points, security was so good there, you thought it was so good that nothing could get through but they could get it through. Lux soap, in those days Brilliantine, Ingram’s Mentholated Shaving Cream,

all those sorts of things, they went well on the black market. Blankets went well on the black market, what they said were unserviceable were serviceable but they’d flog them off on the black market. I had no contact with their contacts. All this noggy would do is come up once a month and say, “Bottom left drawer boss.”

Yeah. That was it. So I came home.

Went to National service trained there for until national service ended in 1959. Put on list for Northern Command and did various jobs, joined working parties, security green bank, and in charge of photocopiers and printers and barracks and as I said before, Major Virtue said if you look up your AMR&Os and you’ll find a little clause that says if you can better yourself in civilian street, you can ask for your own discharge, which I did do.

I got out and I was like a duck out of water. I didn’t know what to do. Because all my plans of being a professional soldier was all shot by the board through this bloody leg. So I got a job at Kevin Bausch Laboratories as Dispatch Manager. A Mr Love was Associate Director, a nice fellow, and all he did was make pills and put them in bottles. He’d come to me with about a pile of papers this thick and say, “Well

this has to Rocky, that to Gladstone, that’s to Bundaberg, that’s to so and so,” I would have to pack them all up, label them and address them and take them to the inter-state railways or take them out to the airport or take it to Roma Street. That’s what I did. I was the only person there. I was Dispatch Manager, Storeman, did the lot. So my mate Frank Hough was in Korea with me, he rang me from Sydney and said, “Les,” he said, “If you can be in Sydney by Wednesday morning,” he said

‘I’ve got you a job that’ll pay you sixty pound a week.” Now this is back in 1962, 60 pound a week. I said, “Frank you’re having me on?” he said, “No,” he said, “That’s with National Galvanising, he’s just won the snowy river project, all multi-plate to be galvanised,” and he said, “We’re working 24 hour shifts and good money man.” I said,

“I’ll be there.” So I rang up Mr Love ‘Mr Love my grandmother has just passed away in Sydney, I won’t be there tomorrow morning.” He said, “Don’t do this to me,” I said, “My grandmother is far more important to me than you,” “What about your wages?” I said, “Give them back to the deaf dumb and blind, give it to society, charity, I don’t need it. It’s a pittance.” I said, “I’ll leave the keys in the letter box at the factory and I’m gone.”

I got there Tuesday afternoon and he lived at Bondi Junction with this wife and young Michael. He was down at the Resch’s Pub it was six o’clock closing in those days and he gets about six schooners and puts them up on the shelf and down one and down another one and someone say, “Time gentlemen,” and everybody starts to leave, old Frank he’s a tall fellow about twice as tall me, tall and lean and he’s leaning against this thing

and schooner and he throws it down and I’m choked up this time, I said, “I can’t drink anymore.” “Yes you can.” This bloke comes through with a big hose and those that get in his way he just hoses out with a fire hose. Frank said, “Don’t you come near me, I’ve got a couple of beers to finish yet,” “All right Frank, all right Frank.” He knew Frank, thank god. We finished that, I was so sick, so sick. When

I was in the army, Bishops had the contract of dry-cleaning with the army so all my uniforms and I collected quite a few, work clothes they were all dry-cleaned, starched ironed and pressed. I go out with Frank out to Mascot Galvanising at Mascot to get his job. I meet Jack the foreman and he said, “You go and see old Percy down there, that old bloke with the old Fedora on, old Italian,

you go and see him Percy and help him on the acid tank,” I said, “Acid tank?” “Yeah acid tank, sulphuric acid.” And god strike a light ‘I’m Les Walker, Percy,” he said, “I thought yous was a customer,” because I’ve got this nice crispy starched uniform on. Hal Strom was the manager. They had the contract with the Snowy River and also they won the contract with the Milk Board to galvanise all

their wire milk cartons, carry cartons and also they’d moved Red Bank further out a suburb and they got all the balustrade for all the balconies so he was flat strapped. Percy said, “Go up and see if you can find that,” everything was tagged and had a number, say number 89 Housing Commission.

So I go up there and Hal Strom is a Swede and he comes up and says, “Can I help you sir?” I said, “Yeah, Housing Commission stuff, lot number 89,” he said, “Jack, Jack help this gentleman. This lot 89 it’s a big job you know a big job you know.” Jack said, “What are you talking Hal, he works here.”

I worked there nobody knew me for three days before anyone knew me except for Jack and Percy. In fact I brought in some innovative ideas there. Using the steam from the steam engine to boil up the, they had a big body plate would’ve been seven foot high and curved and about four inch corrugates, eight inch thick steel. So I reckoned if,

we had to turn it in the sulphuric tanks you had to soak it and turn it, by the time you turned the other side it had gone rusty again. I thought heat and depth. So, we got some blokes on the weekend, they’d taken a new pit, filled it up with sulphuric acid and water and the steam hose in their boiling and had the gantry crane and just drop a sheet in, half a tonne of sheet, drop that in five minutes

take it out drop it in the galvanises, we were going that fast the bloody in the lead in galvanising tank went hard, it’d cooled. I don’t know, necessity is the mother of invention. I said, “Why don’t you put another oil burner there?” they only had one oil burner there. Put another oil burner down this end. “Oh good idea,” and also they were doing the baskets for the Milk Board

and I said, “Why don’t you use that old pot up there which is cracked? Not the Work Place and Safety, but the Department of Labour and Industry declared it cracked. I said, “Why don’t you get a welder in and weld it up and fill it up with lead and get it going to do all the baskets?” “Oh good idea.” Then they got a big contract with all the nuts of bolts of this multi-plate. Had to be galvanised as well and had to be

galvanised that way that the nut went on the thread. Wouldn’t work. I remember in the army we had those light burn washing machines that went in to a spin dryer, like a cement mixer, remember them. Had the thing to wash the clothes, pull the clothes out and put in the spin dryer. I said, “Gravity, that’ll throw it off,” so we got an old lightning machine and stripped that and made it spin out,

everything was put on pieces of wire, the washers, the nuts and the bolts, put on pieces of tyre wire, we’d just drop them in there and centrifugal force just blew everything off and we’d pull them out and screwed the nut on. I was made Production Supervisor there and I was there for about two years. I was about 78 pound a week net for two years. Twelve hour shifts. That’s where I made my money.

I lived alone had a bed sit in Enmore, paid about thirty bob a week for. Wouldn’t call the king my uncle, used to driver a Humber Super Snipe, black and the governor of Enmore Road they used to call me. Funny how things go. I wanted to go back to the trade. I was sitting on the toilet one Saturday morning at Mascot and an ad came up ‘Wanted. Manager of skin store, Wilcox and Mofflin out at Homebush Abattoirs.

I answered the ad and got a letter back. Meet them out there on a certain time on a certain day. Which I did do. I met the Australasian Manager the Marketing Manager the Skin Manager about eight people. It was a two storey place they’d just built. All this sheep skin they’d bought from the Abattoirs at Homebush and also from the country at Bathurst, country butchers, they were strung out on rods to dry,

naturally.

I think that it, it gave me a broader view of things. I was able to bring things together. Like this place, walked through it, went down to the office he said,

“What do you think Mr Walker?” I said, “What a bloody misadventure, what a wreck!” “My goodness, you’re right,” you see the skins weren’t pointed and all that sort of stuff. Well you see that goes back to my days at the shearing shed, the flaps curl over and the maggots get in and they have to be pointed, I said, “It’s an utter disgrace,” and I went back to Mascot. I get a letter saying I got the job,

can I start 28 pound a week, free house, free expense account, free petrol for my car allowance and I stayed there for two years. I was the first manager to resign in 46 years. I cut their handling charges from five pence halfpenny to threepenny farthing. Nearly by 50%, they had 28 people working there, I cut it down to 16. It all relates back to team work.

I can adjust myself to that. From there I went to Melbourne and joined King’s Holdings which was Kings Packing Company, which is by the board now. I was on staff, I was put on staff after two weeks there. I was relief manager in a month. Blokes going on holidays I relieve those. I was only with them for six months, put on superannuation, put on staff and sent to South Africa for five years. They won

the tender for Yasmatz [?] airport in South Africa. They sent me over because they saw that I had the potential to organise things, which sort of came naturally over the years.

I did up til last year. My leg gave out on me. I did the, no, I didn’t march last year I marched the year before. I got down to the Post Office where they dismissed us and I couldn’t walk another foot.

Last year I rode in the back of a truck and that was worse than marching on my leg. Terrible.

Yes. Used to march in Sydney with my old squadron commander, Mick Grace. He’d take us around to the Tattersalls Club and really lay it on for us.

Well I’ve marched 3 Battalion, I’ve marched with 1 Battalion,

with the air force I marched with the Fighter Squadrons of the South West Pacific a conglomerate of fight squadrons. So, in fact I was 77 when I last marched, well I rode in the back of a truck last year. The year before that I marched and the year before I marched year before I marched, 50th Anniversary of National

service. I marched the 50th Anniversary of the Korean War. I marched ah

No. No in fact not all because I just went from had my leave and then I went straight out to Wacol. This is in the days of the hippies

and the long hair, I forget what they call them now but they’re a mob of yahoos. Your time was filled up with them. In fact I never used to go on leave, I lived in camp, although my wife lived in married quarters I had married quarters in camp. Anybody who had weekend duties and wanted to go, I’d take their place. I was quite happy to do that, to do them a favour they’d do me a favour. I never mixed socially at all,

after I came back from Korea. It was all army, all army. Even when I went to Sydney and left the army, I wasn’t anti-social, but I’d have a few bevies with the blokes but that was about it. I just kept to myself. I was alone. And still am actually, my wife said if she gets, “Half a dozen words out of me during the day she’s doing well.”

Yeah they did. Yeah. ‘Oh young

Leslie from Bridge Street Toowoomba. Good to see you back Leslie.” “You’ve made a man of you.” In fact I was best man at my sister’s wedding and I’m in RAAF uniform and I was black as that, and they’re all in their dinner suits, I’m in my RAAF uniform with this big black face. Remember that Pelaco shirt ad [advertisement]? “Mine tinkit [think it’s] it’s white,” -- same thing.

No. Not really. No. See Korean I went over there as a reinforcement, I didn’t go over there with a regiment. I went over as a reinforcement and I came back and just rotated my time. I just came back and merged with the general public. As I said I was posted to Wacol and it was all army. No social life at all. So I didn’t mix very much with the public.

I had a feeling, when I went about my leg in 1958 and I noticed that my breathing was getting worse and worse I knew that my days were limited. I’d qualified up to Warrant Officer First Class, what was I

I was the longest serving corporal in northern command. Yeah. I had that record. I could’ve got a promotion as a sergeant to be this brigadier’s driver. I didn’t choose that. I didn’t want to be a black boy. I wanted to do my own thing. I didn’t want to be a, “Yes sir no sir three bags full sir,” like being a batman [servant]. Well I had that when I went out to Mount Brisbane when I was a kid cleaning

McConnell’s, until Jack Russell took over from me. But I wanted to do my own thing. In fact people, when I came back from Korea people asked me what it was like. I said, “It was bloody hot and it was bloody cold,” I said, “Two extremes .” Even the storm the other night, I said to Irene, “All that lightning, I used to be in the open paddock with that in Korea,” and in South Africa had the highest fatality rate as far as

shocks were concerned with lightning. I used to love it.

To the mates I left behind. In fact they come, the war cemetery at Labuan is there, comes vividly back to my mind. I left a lot of mates behind, Priestly, JB Priestly after the riot, we called

him JB. He got bitten by a coral snake. We were diving, at Morotai, were diving for pearl shells and a bloody coral snake bit. Went like that. Went black.

Very upsetting. I had to pull him out of the water because he was diving with me. We had a big trochus shell on the bottom, we couldn’t move it, wedged in the sand you could go down for about three minutes flat strap

three minutes and that’s when I burst my eardrum. I came shooting up to the surface and popped my eardrum. I said, “No we’ve got to get a crowbar or something down there,” and get underneath and grab it. It was that thick, beautiful colours, it would make nice foreign orders. He came down with me and got bit by this bloody coral snake. Just about as thick as that, it swam away from us, I didn’t take any notice.

By the time he got to the top he was dead, he was black. Yeah. That cured me of diving for pearl shells I can tell you. Porky Farnham that’s another one that’s on my conscience, that’ll be on my conscience for the rest of my life. It’s one of those unfortunate things. The fallen comrades that we had to walk past, the butt of the rifle on the ground to mark their grave, to mark where they were for war grave commission.

They used to come along behind and pick up the bodies. Break the meat tag, the meat tag would be in two pieces and one stapled to the body and one was sent to war grave commissioner to see who it was. Labuan saw quite a few dead Australians which was upsetting in a sense, death I’d been used to it. Been in the bush, I’d killed and skinned ship and kangaroos and all that sort of stuff.

But an Australian is a different thing, one of your countrymen, lying on the ground dead is a bit rough a bit upsetting, but you’ve got to realise the fact that you are at war. It’s going to happen and it could be you next time. Could be half hour before I get shot. I’m dead as far as I’m concerned.

I’d sum

up my service as very educational actually. I started, in fact, I‘ve had a good education. I was young when I left school, I was pretty advanced for my years as far as education was concerned. I did bookkeeping, accounting, in fact in 1993 I found that my mind was not working properly so I went and did a Justice of the Peace course at

TAFE [Technical and Further Education] at Bracken Ridge, I’m a JP [Justice of the Peace] qualified, I got 78% pass, which for me was quite good. I get a bit brain tired. I started writing a book. That’s reactivated things and kept my mind with things. I could go a week without writing a page and then I’ll go in there and I’ll sit there for two days. What I do I just

centre, I’m at a certain place at a certain time and I’ve got to get things in the right perspective. Irene reckons I’m too, I’m playing things with too much detail. But what I’m trying to do is involve people in reading it the actual circumstances. My doctor’s wife, I gave her a copy and she asked me how it’s going and I gave her a copy and she knows an editor and she

gave it to him and he said, “Oh this is good stuff, good stuff.” I’d written 550 odd pages. He said, “It’s too long,” so I edited it and brought it back to 288 now and I’m only 29 years of age. At this present time in my book I’m at Liverpool waiting to go to Korea.

No I’ll have to do the three score and ten, I’m going to call it ‘Three score and ten

bonus years,” the sequel to it. So I’ll just write my life. Well I’m 78 now so a couple years left. So I’ll just write up to my present time the second book. Close it at Leslie Walker fades away in to the distance. Just waiting for old Charlie to come and tap me on the shoulder. It’s invigorating. As I said I can go back to when I was three years of age.

All the places I’ve lived in. All the fun that I’ve had. All the trials and tribulations of the Depression. In fact it’s an interesting background. I belong to the bowls club and there’s blokes there older than me and they can’t remember yesterday. They don’t know what they did yesterday. You know. I find

that unbelievable. I know my short-term memory is going now, but my long-term is as bright as that light. Let’s hope it stays that way.