Australians at War Film Archive

I was born in a town called Strahan in Tasmania. It was Depression time. My mother died when I was a young boy of about six, but she had spent some

years in a sanatorium so I didn’t know her very well. I went to Strahan State School ’til I was nine or ten years old. I was then sent to different towns and I was fostered all the time to different people. I left school when I was 11 years old and went to work with my brother and father on the Jane River goldfields and I worked there until I was 14 or so.

And then went back to Strahan and worked on a fishing boat with my brother. And left him and went to work at Tullah in the timber business, cutting for the mines. Life was pretty difficult in those days, it’s 1930 I’m talking about. I finished my working life there on the road, road-building machines we used to have in town. We got burnt

out so after the fire I went to Mt Lyell Company and got a job with the Mt Lyell Company in open cut and then was transferred underground to work underground because I was about 17, 16 or 17. And the war started in that time and we heard there was going to be a Manpower Act passed to say that we were being be kept for, not allowed to join the army or anything. So I left and went down to Hobart to enlist.

They wouldn’t take me without my parents’ consent and of course I didn’t have my parents’ consent; my father I couldn’t find and my mother was dead. So I joined the militia who weren’t so fussy about where you come from. After about six months in the militia they called for a volunteer unit to go and stop the Jap - Germans, specialists was the term used

for anything that had transport and shipping and they were taking over certain ports in the Pacific to refuel and refit all the boats. And we were supposed to be a coastal artillery unit to stop them from doing that in Rabaul. We were transferred to the AIF [Australian Imperial Force] and went to Rabaul where we spent about ten months on the islands building gun ports and gun roads and things like that.

Shortly after the 7th of December in (UNCLEAR) about the 4th of January, we saw these aeroplanes that went up into the sky and we thought “Oh boy it didn’t take the Yanks long to get their flying forces out here”, then bombs started to drop. They were Japanese planes and we didn’t know it of course. We’d been told the Yanks [means Japanese] couldn’t fly high and they couldn’t see and if they dived too quick they passed out and there were lots of different things we were told that were lies.

And the bombing went on for several days or weeks until they invaded the place on the 19th of January in 1942. We then, we were given orders by our senior commander in the force and the second commander in the 2nd Battalion who was in control, “every man for himself.” I feel that was the most terrible order to give an 18 year old boy;

and most of us were 18 or 19 years old, to get told by a senior officer “Every man for himself.” We thought it was a disgusting order. We didn’t know where we were, we certainly wouldn’t surrender because we’d killed a few Japanese and we were fearful of what might happen if we surrendered, so quite a few of us decided to walk back to Australia. That was several thousand miles. This was the jungle and crossing rivers and

different passages, parts of (…uxley UNCLEAR) and then over to New Guinea and then Port Moresby. As I say we were optimistic. We were optimistic but we decided that’s what we’d do. And we did walk for about three months and we were rescued by a little boat called the Lombarda. She was assisted in the rescue by the Coast Watchers [local reconnaissance force] and you

might talk to Eric Foster later on, he was one of the Coast Watchers who helped to save us with the different messages. Some pretty terrible things happened on that walk. One of the worst of course was the massacre at Tol Plantation where 150 of our men tied up by the Japanese in groups of eight to ten and

taken into the bush and shot on or bayoneted and we were laying in the bush and watched as this happened and we could do nothing about it. And no guns and no ammunition and what we did anyway was useless because they were a well-armed Japanese unit. One of the most disgraceful things that happened to me in my life happened then, when the Japanese stopped doing what they were doing, we walked away. We couldn’t run because we were too bloody weak to run, so we walked

away and left them where they were. Still there as far as I know. I never went back, too frightened to. So that was probably the worst thing that ever happened.

Marvellous. Some strange things happened. The people in Cairns were marvellous, they gave us accommodation and charged us nothing. We were taken down to Sydney (UNCLEAR)

and to the barracks, Victoria Barracks I think it was in Sydney where after a few interviews with officers we were given a bill for our lost equipment. And that was so disgusting I didn’t know what to do about that so I tore the bill up and wouldn’t talk to any more officers in the place. And finally they sent us down by train back to Tasmania where I spent several,

I was nearly 12 months in hospital with malaria and several other complaints. We were cured at the Lady Clark Memorial Rest Home, accommodation home at Claremont in Tasmania where they really did care for us. I had not lost my anger for the Japanese so I joined up again and went back to different areas in the water transport.

Went to Biak, Hollandia and Morotai and ended up in Borneo where I spent the end of the war, in Borneo. The war ended in November but we were kept back in Labuan to meet some of the men [prisoners of war] who’d been in Changi prison. We helped them make it to recovery and when they were two weak to travel

we made them fit enough to travel back to Australia. We guarded Japanese prisoners of war who had committed war crimes. There were big war crimes trials in Labuan and our job there was to guard some of the, we each had several prisoners. They showed a different attitude once they were prisoners to what they did when they were soldiers of course. They were very

very remote and I think shame was their biggest feeling, because they’d been captured. We left there in February 1946. I was flown back home to Australia and I was discharged and left the army. I was fairly disgusted with army life,

I was disgusted with authorities and I wouldn’t have anything to do with governments so I joined, I went back with my family and we went to the bush and we worked in the Franklin River Districts and we cut Huon pine for a living. I had 80 or 90 pounds deferred pay and I used that to start a job up in the Franklin River. And because it was my money I was the boss.

Dad taught me all he knew in the finish but it was my job and I kept on going in the bush there, through different stages. We ended up we bought a tractor and we worked that little tractor in the Gordon River. Then we worked up the King River, Bladdon and different places. Ended up with a net of long skinners and tractors and different sorts of bits, sawmills.

And I bought a sawmill off the newsprint mill that was an army mill they called it, ones that the army used and had no more use for. Breaking down saw, a twin saw we used for breaking down. We earned quite well with the mill. But I got sick of the bush and I decided I’d go fishing and with my partner from the bush, Frankie White and my brother Ron, we went

cray fishing on the west coast which we done for a couple of years and then we decided the prices offered to us by the local people were not sufficient, so we decided we’d build our own factory. And they didn’t know who to manage it so I went and managed the factory and I stayed there for over ten years and we ended up buying the opposition out and running our own factory there. Until

the wharves shut down, the mines closed, things got bad commercially in Strahan and I thought it was a bad time to be there now. I had three children grown up, four children actually grown up, so we left there and took my family to Yeppoon in Queensland, central Queensland. And I bought the ice works there, didn’t know anything about making ice either. It didn’t take long to learn.

We worked there for five years, I sold that. My eldest son died in the meantime, back in Tasmania so we went back to his funeral and that was one of the worst days in our life, sitting in the plane with my wife, going back to our own son’s funeral. He was 21. It wasn’t very nice. I sold the ice works, bought a trawler and went

prawn trawling for about four years or five years. Then I got ill, I got muscular dystrophy and it’s very difficult to do anything, get my arms up to do anything in the trawler. Sold the trawler and retired. I thought I had sufficient funds to retire but I didn’t, Mr Whitlam come in then [as Labor Prime Minister] and things changed. Public servants got the right to strike, power went up,

charges went up, water rates went up, electricity went up, everything went up that quick and that fast you couldn’t keep up with it. So I built another little boat, a little estuary boat, that helped out with the finances then until I sold that in the finish and finally did retire when I was about 60. And life becomes very boring when you’ve been very active and you retire. You

can be bored stiff. So we bought a van and trailer, a caravan and we towed it, the wife and I and we went to Darwin and Alice Springs,down through Adelaide and my wife loved Coober Pedy [opal mine]. That was a bugger of a place but she liked it for strange reasons. Then we went back, went back to Yeppoon and I

hadn’t been there long when I thought “Right”. We used to go for a walk in the morning because when the sun come my wife and I would go down the beach, we’d walk up the beach and watch the sun come over the beach. But then I got so that I couldn’t walk and I thought I’ll have to go and see someone about this so we came down to Brisbane to the repatriation hospital where they looked at me and decided that I had this muscular dystrophy, they didn’t know what sort, so I had

to find out because I had children and grandchildren you see and they wanted to know whether they should get married or not because we didn’t want to pass this awful thing on to kids. We never could find out what sort I had. We went to the hospital, the doctor said “I don’t know, there’s something wrong with you that’s not quite right.” Then they ran tests and I found out I had cancer, lymphoma cancer.

We were living in Burpengary my wife and I because when you sold your house and your firm you didn’t get enough to buy a house in Brisbane, so we bought one of those little relocatable homes at Burpengary, which was kind of good. It’s good to end your life living like that. But I got this bloody cancer and my wife suffered from depression and because I was being treated for cancer they took her into repat and treated her for depression. It was a pretty terrible

time, she was terribly sick and we decided that we would go and live with our daughter in Brisbane, sell our house in Burpengary so we could go into a housing commission unit when it became available. In the meantime one of the doctors decided, “I don’t know this sounds,” because I told him I had indigestion when I was going swimming trying to lose a bit of weight. One of the cancer treatments, the steroids, put weight on you when you didn’t work.

So I began swimming. I actually felt pains in my wrist and indigestion and told the doctor about this and he said “Well it doesn’t sound like indigestion, you’d better go and see a specialist”. I ended up with a quadruple heart by-pass which was starting to get a bit annoying after things were going pretty good. So of course that meant arteries were blocked in

my legs and had by-pass surgery on both legs and it worked for about two years but they stopped working again. They told me then that they didn’t worry, I wasn’t going to die with sugar diabetes or anything because the veins in my feet had taken over the blood supply and was pushing it back through. So that’s why my feet weren’t getting cold and dying so I was all right, they’re still the same today.

I had two strokes then and I thought what’s the hell, life’s not worth living when you’re getting sick like this all the time. So I said to the doctors “What’s the reason, should you muck around with me? I’m an old man. Should you try and keep me going when there’s plenty of young people that need treatment?” And they used to say to me “Well look, it’s not

length of life or anything like this, it’s quality of life that we try to provide. If we fix something then you should have a good quality of life.” So I went along with them. And they’re right. We’ve had several good years, four or five good years. Until the bloody strokes come along and of course they ruin things. But I got over them. And then life went along very good again. Went into that unit in Brisbane,

it was comfortable, a big unit, all for disabled. They were very good. The local shop closed down, the corner store where we used to be able to get some milk when we run out of it or a hamburger when we wanted it or fish and chips when we wanted it. They shut it down because it couldn’t compete any longer with Woolworth’s and company. It was all a hilly place and we were isolated. My wife had to walk up hills and down dales

to go anywhere and I couldn’t go with her. I got so disheartened and that’s why we’re out here. It was flat and level and I thought she’d learn to live here and it’d be all right. So that’s my life story as condensed as I think I can.

I didn’t really know anything about it. I knew she was sick, I wasn’t alone when I walked into the room with her. They told me she had TB [tuberculosis] or consumption but I didn’t know how serious it was of course I was only about five years old then. And I didn’t realise that, well I knew there’d been something wrong with my

father and mother, there’d been trouble, because there was ten years between me and my next brother so there must’ve been some sort of strife to have been apart for ten years. We were at war was one of it and my father went to the war. So of course after the war he had mental problems too because he didn’t want to live with anybody again either, so it took him some years before him and my mother got back together again. Once they did they stuck together until she died. I remember

the time that he took me down to see her, the last time. And going through the train, it was only train from Strahan to Hobart then, that was two days. And I got into a tunnel, a big tunnel I thought oh dear I’ve only seen trains coming through this tunnel and then I got a bloody clinker in my eye. A coal clinker you know. Oh boy, terrible. The old bloke held all the way through to get the damned thing out. And we got to Hobart

and I remember she was just pretty poor. And I was staying with my grandmother. I don’t know where Dad was because he wouldn’t stay there, he wasn’t allowed to stay with my grandmother, they didn’t like one another. And we had, not much to eat really. Bread and dripping was for lunch and I was walking past the table and I saw this bread and dripping on the table so I pinched a slice. And she caught me, and chased me

out into the backyard with a broom. There was a big cut out that I climbed up on out the back and she couldn’t reach me. So that was that. But the next day Dad took me out to see Mum. I was allowed to stand on the verandah and wave to her through the window that was all. That was the last time I saw her.

No. More now than she did then. I didn’t know her.

I hadn’t been with her. I’ve got some of her with me, I don’t remember though being with her. I can’t remember her at all.

Pretty good. Very remote in some ways. As I say I was fostered out from then on and I stayed with different families. I’ll tell you one thing that happened to me, I went to Queenstown and

stayed with an aunty there for a while for a holiday or a weekend, then when I came home there was a school ball. And I went to the ball and they served supper. At the end of the supper, when it was finished there was fruit salad which I’d never seen before. And there was little black things in it and I thought the rats have been into this, I thought I’d pick it out and throw them away you see, and the fellow along side of me saw

what I was doing, he knew what I was doing and it was a long time before we found out it was passionfruit. The one on the other side of me was too nice to complain. First time I had fruit salad. Very nice.

He was a private soldier. He went over to Italy and to France.

He was wounded in France. Spent a lot of time AWL [Absent without Leave], why I don’t know. He didn’t like bosses, he didn’t like the officers, he didn’t run away from anybody he just didn’t like them. So when he got a chance he didn’t come back off leave, he just stayed out sort of thing like that you know, but he spent a lot of time in France. And a lot of time in hospital

wounded before he came back home.

Not a thing. Not a thing. There wasn’t one, not one word. He just said “I was in France.” He’d been wounded in the hip and when we were living together in the huts I seen this scar and I said “What’s the scar from?” And he said “Oh that’s when I was wounded during the war.” That’s all he’d say.

I think he had troubles settling down with my mother. I don’t remember them living together. I remember being fostered still when my Dad was there. No. I don’t know what was wrong, I just know that after a year or two they must’ve come back together again and when they did come together again

I was born and he never left her again after that. He devoted the rest of his life to her. Funny business. But so remote, I don’t know. All my brothers are dead and no one I can ask what it was. I just only learned a few things now like my brothers were all left into a home in Launceston, a boy’s home

for wayward boys. They were wayward because my second oldest was rather odd, was challenged to ring the fireman’s bell in Hobart and he was bet sixpence. He raced up to town and rang the bell and got his sixpence but then got banished to the boys home in Launceston as a result. That was it. Terrible things

happened to them in that place. They never told me much about it. My eldest brother told me that they had a punishment they had at one stage was, they had a wheelbarrow, there was a load of bricks or a lot of bricks in one corner of the yard and they’d pick up the bricks and load the wheelbarrow and put it and unload them in that corner and when they finished go and pick them up again and load them up and wheel them back to the other corner. For hours they wheeled these bricks backwards and forwards. They’d run away of course and that was the punishment when they got caught and brought back.

I worked with them after the war.

I don’t remember the oldest brother but I knew my other brother Ron a fair bit, because he stayed and looked after Mum when the others went to the bush. He was the one that looked after me so I remember him quite well. I don’t remember the others though.

He cooked and washed, cleaned and kept the house going, done the laundry, looked after my mother. Wouldn’t let me go in the room where she was. He used to go in and change her bed and look after her that way. He was a proper boy.

Working at the Gordon River.

Three or four times a year.

I think it was love and charity. I was in about five different homes of different people. I can’t remember being abused once or hurt once by any of them. A couple of rotten things happened to me.

Not the fault of the people I was living with but for instance somebody stole a pound out of a teacher’s desk. Now a pound was a lot of money in whatever year it was, 1935 or something like that. And my brothers had given me 10 shillings each when they went away up the river so thirty shillings and one pound ten I had. I didn’t know what to do with it of course, buying up big

and shouted everybody ice creams and bought all sorts of things. So they were thinking because I had this money I must’ve pinched this quid under the desk. I said “No I didn’t do it.” They wouldn’t believe me. Got the policeman around, he took me to the police station, pinched me all the way and locked me in the cells. I always felt bad about that, it was dark in there. Then we come back to the school again, he lined me up and asked me if I was sorry for being such a naughty boy and then a little girl

piped up after that. She said “Please Sir, Gordon didn’t take that money, I did.” And of course there was some apologies all around then and she was such a good little girl, to me, she was my friend then for the rest of my life. I went home to the people I was living with and I run away and went back to live in a little house where my brother and I had been staying before they went to the bush.

I used to have bread and sugar sprinkled over the top of it, I used to think that was a good feed. So I decided to cook some pancakes and I went over into the bush between the house and some other houses, I didn’t want to burn our house down. I lit a fire in the bush and put some fat in the pan, some flour and water and mixed it up and of course it didn’t come out like pancakes did it, it just stayed flat in the bottom of the pan.

It burnt, it wouldn’t rise, it wouldn’t do anything. And I burst into tears, I thought oh bugger then, I was useless. And a lady not far away heard me and she come and found me. She said “What’s wrong with you?” and I told her. She said “You can’t cook pancakes like that, you’ve got to do this.” She goes “You’d better come back to my place.” I did too. She has

grandchildren still in Strahan. Mother’s boys. All good boys. And two (slaunchersUNCLEAR) saw mills.

I didn’t know that I was alone. I knew there was something wrong but what it was I didn’t know. And when you’ve got no peers to talk to, you don’t know much about anything. You don’t know anything about girls for instance. It frightened the buggery out of me. I didn’t know what to do with them, how to talk to them or what. I wouldn’t have anything to do with them. It frightened me.

You don’t know you’re situation. You just know whether it’s a good day or a bad day. You don’t know why it is or why it isn’t. People saw a chap with his head cut off with a experimental aeroplane boat when we were just a few hundred yards off. A propeller flew off and he chopped his head off, well

that frightened us more than anything. I couldn’t tell anybody that. I couldn’t tell anybody for years after that I’d actually seen this accident. And how I felt and how terrible I felt about it.

Names?

Well I can remember the Weldons who were poor, very poor and they had three boys. One of the boys my age, one a bit older, one a bit younger and they all slept in the one bed. And one of them’s nose used to run. Terrible, he’d vomit on the pillow and all. Oh god. And

his mother used to belt him and threaten him with a belt or something but he still couldn’t stop. So I didn’t stay there long, I don’t know why I left that home but I left there. So I went to some people called the McFagens and they were beautiful people. They had two or three girls and two or three boys and they lived in the old post office, upstairs. They didn’t have a room for me so I had a bed in the hallway upstairs.

But they were beautiful people. They kept me warm and well fed. That was where I nearly cut me toe off. School. It had been raining like mad and I took me shoes and socks of and I splashed through the water and jumped in a big storm water drain and landed on a broken bottle and cut me toe. So they took me down to the doctor and he looked and me and said “I’ll have to stitch it.

You’re not going to cry are you?” I said “No I don’t cry, I’m a cub.” And he stitched it all up and knitted it so it would mend and sent me home. How I got home I don’t know but they put me to bed. Then it got dark, it got dark that quick I thought I was dying and so I started bawling. I’ll never forget Mrs McFagen coming and she said “What’s wrong?” I told her I was dying, I’d noticed it was getting dark. She said “Little lamb” and she come and sat down and cuddled me.

It was the first time I’d ever been cuddled. I can remember that. Very good memory.

One of the boys, Dad or one of the boys would do it before they went to the bush. They knew they couldn’t take me there with me, with them, so they

got a home for me to stay in. One place, I don’t know whether or who’s place it was but a, the dog used to go for the mail and I used to go for the mail and the dog would go too. I didn’t know him very well. So I got me mail and several letters and I’m going out of the post office and this dog wanted to take the mail out of it. He couldn’t get any mail so he decided he wanted to take my letters home. There was no way in the world, so I hold them over my head and he bit me on the bum.

He was frightened that I was going to snitch. Oh dear. He was a little poodle right behind me. I was scared.

From whoever I was staying with. I thought they all believed me as a thief. Everybody thought I was no good,

so I decided I’d live on me own.

Eight or nine. Something like that.

Mrs Morrison.

She took me to her place and she bathed me and took my clothes off me and washed them. Gave me one of her boy’s clothes to go to bed in, then put me in

one of their beds. Next morning she took me to school. And she blew the school up, she went to the Headmaster and she said, I can remember a few of the words, not many but she said “You should never treat a person like this.” And

I fell in love for the first time with Mrs Morrison. She was a big woman, a big strong woman, but by the time she’d finished with him I was pretty right and nobody talked to me any more. That’s when I went to stay with the McFagens and my family was still in the bush.

So the McFagens must’ve taken me without any conversation with any of them, they just took me in. It’s a pretty good town that I was in really. Everyone, I didn’t want to talk to anybody any more. Tell the stories.

I don’t know, don’t even know who they were. I don’t know what family it was.

It may have been Rowlands, but I’m not too sure because, it probably was Rowlands because I don’t remember leaving Rowlands so I reckon that was it. It’s the right age time.

About three or four months, five months. Because the men would be away for that time in the bush and when they came home they’d take me with them see.

I’d live with them while they was home and they’d stay home until they spent their money and then they’d go back to the bush again.

Oh great. Yeah. They knew we had some trouble. We had a fight and they had a fight with one another one day, one had just cleaned the floor, scrubbed the floor and Baz and Charlie came in and they had a row about them walking over his clean floor. And they were fighting away about this, and arguing

about this. So I ran down and got the policeman. And I told him about this fighting business and he come up and that’s when they gave me the ten shillings each. They apologised and they said “No it wasn’t really a fight, it was only just brotherly fights and that it wasn’t real serious,” but I thought it was. And they apologised and gave me ten dollars each, ten shillings each and then they went away next day and I went and spent the money and got into trouble with it.

But a little boy doesn’t understand adults when they’re doing things. And I didn’t know brotherly love from the fighting one minute and loving one minute next. but you can.

I worked on the goldfields, the first job I ever done. I went to Jane River goldfields, I was with my father and my three brothers. The first time and only time we all worked together. And I was a roustabout.

Of course at that age I didn’t know very much. I was an aggravation I know that. They used to stay out there for three to six months at a time and then they’d take turns going into the town, stay a little while and then come back out again. They made big money on the field. Wasted it all. They had terrible bad habits. They had no thoughts for the future, always

just, I don’t know, funny ideas. Later in life they got a different attitude but that was when I was growing up. After the war they changed their attitude, more what’s the word, more careful. They looked after themselves, they looked after their families, they looked after their money.

They never drank any more, they looked after their families when they married they never drank. All their life was spent looking after their families, that’s all they thought of.

Very small in world standards, about 30 to 40 men worked on this field. A fellow named Warne was the discoverer, he had the discovery claim, the Warne Claim

they called it. My father and brothers were the next claim, they were below him on the next creek.

You peg an area out, just a certain size, put a peg in one corner and on the, write on it the details of whose claim it is and you register it with the mines department. That’s to claim your claim then. I never knew

how to do this of course. I was only the boy about the place.

Pick and shovel work. Alluvial in those days hard rock mining, all alluvial mining and washed with water. So we’d wash the water over the ground and wash, shovel and fork, bringing stones off it, then occasionally we’d find this small, very fine

stuff we had in the dish and separate the gold from the rubbish. An average days work there’d be anything up to a pound’s weight in gold which in today’s weight would be 12 ounces to the pound, would be 12 x $400. In those days it was 12 x eight pounds, it was eight pounds an ounce then, fixed price. And, the different stories.

I just eight pounds, 96 pounds a day between four men, very, very big money. They used to give me some too.

In the camp, in a tent. I’ve written a book about the different stories and you can have a look at the book. It gives the details about the tent, the camp and how we lived.

The sort of life we lived, what we ate and how we lived together. How our friends lived and how we made friends on the field. It was quite a big effort, no jealousies amongst the nine of us. That takes a bit of doing, a goldmine with no jealousy. They were remarkable.

I loved them all, they were very fine people.

I used to cut the wood, carry the water, cook the tea. We only used to cook one main meal a day, I used to do that. Dry the clothes because every day there was wet clothes and they had to be dried. It’s amazing how easily wet dungarees will burn.

Boy oh boy, had to be awful careful how you dried them without burning them. Had to dry them in front of the fire, it was a big fire. Tears or worn or frayed cuffs on the trousers, they dried first of course, it would be like just an ignition thing with the flames from the fire. I had to be very careful drying the clothes.

I don’t remember doing the washing, they did their own washing. But I used to have to wash up. Most times I washed and Dad dried and Dad made the bread. Every second day he cooked a loaf of bread. Yeast bread, it was very good and occasionally we had macaroni and condensed milk for pudding sweets. Not very often but on some occasions and when you had it, it was marvellous. Beautiful, sweet

stuff, the only sweets I ever had was this macaroni and condensed milk.

Comfortable. Felt comfortable. I didn’t know that it felt good, it was comfortable and comfortable must’ve been good. We never had a cross word. I don’t remember my family ever having a cross word with one another. And that means when we were home

we played cards together, we told stories together, we listened to one another, we were comfortable with one another. That was great.

I learned lots of things, lots about life, about skills life skills. How to dig for gold and work for gold, how to cut trees down, how to keep a fire and a camp going.

There’s more in keeping a camp going than just eating, you’ve got to get the camp condition in order, you learn a lot of things like that and how to live with men. You’ve got four men and a boy living in a one roomed tent, you’ve got to learn to live with one another. No obscenities, never an obscenity of any description and I never saw either my father or brothers undressed, always done in privacy

some way or another, I don’t know how they done it. I think Dad would’ve died if I’d have seen him undressed. None of those sort of things going on in those days. Very, very… very good.

Ted Masters lived about 50 yards away in his camp and Ted was about 40 years old. To me he was an old man.

When the war come along he was conscripted. He was in the what do you call it, Reserves in the English Army, Indian Army. And he was conscripted back into the Indian Army and he was killed in Burma. The war touched us a lot really, in that place. Like my best friend when I went to school was Laurie Fenier, was one of the people I used to live with,

got killed. My next door neighbour across the road was killed, Tim Hayles. Bobby Truscott who I used to learn to play, to talk Esperanto with, he was killed. All those boys I went to school, all about the age of 18 or 19 years old. Really terrible really, but that made you quite careless of life. You didn’t care much about what went on and what happened anymore.

You didn’t care about – nothing lasted, nothing worth worrying about. You just didn’t worry about it. Here today, gone tomorrow. That’s how it was yeah.

Mostly grog and I suspect women but I didn’t know. But I know one of my brothers

used to be in love all the time and he’d be buying things for his girl. All sorts of things. She didn’t love him but he would buy necklaces and bracelets and he’d spend his money on her. She rewarded him, he liked it, I mean, that’s fair enough.

Oh yes I smoked from the time I was about

12 or 13. I used to use tobacco rations in the bush and when I was working for myself I bought my own.

Not very well. A very lonely life. I enjoyed the company of the men. I enjoyed learning some things, I learned how to shoot a hand gun out there

when I was 12, 13. And a pistol. I was shooting at a kerosene tin, started off at ten paces, ended up at three paces before I could hit the thing. But they taught me how to shoot with a gun.

No. No. They lived rough, they lived in rough conditions. But no

man swore in front of me. I never heard a man swear.

Amongst the men.

No. No jealousy. They were decent good men and I can’t say a bad word about any of them. They were good men.

Down, back down to Strahan to work on fishing boats. I worked with old Wally Weir first of all. Old Wally was a fairly eccentric old man, he wouldn’t pay for petrol you see so I had to push the boat whenever we could. And my brother Ron didn’t like me working there because he was a bit afraid of Wally and he hired a boat and we went fishing together.

We lived quite well then, Ron and I. We lived together off the boat and we earned quite well and we were happy. I s’pose I was 13, 14 then, 13 there about. Then I went to live with my other brother at Tullahh after I left the boat and went to live in Tullahh. That was a funny little town, it was a very rich town, a silver mine.

Everybody worked in Tullahh, there was no unemployment at all. There was always plenty of work. I worked for an old fellow Jimmy Purcell cutting post logs, making timber. Jimmy had emphysema. He used to drive his own horses up the mountain and I used to wait up the top for him with some timber logs and I used to say you could hear him breathing, coming up the hill before you heard the horses.

Poor old Jimmy. And he loved his horses and he talked to them all the time. But then we’d take the logs down to the mine and then I’d split them into logs, into part logs while Jimmy went and done other things. He told me to do it first of course. But that’s where, only in really bad weather, half snow half rain, that the men would say

“Come over here with us, you can’t stand there working in the snow like that,” so they’d be drinking in the shops, the men in the workshops. And that’s the sort of people they were, they just were good people. I’ve never met a man like some of them, I know there once were but I never met them. And I had a particular friendship with Roy, I can’t remember his other name. He liked taking photos.

And we used to go out together, wandering all around the hills on the weekends and we’d take photos of streams and trees and all sorts of animals and things. And then of a night he’d, we’d go and he’d start to develop them, teaching me how to develop them in the dark room, that sort of thing. He had a sister and she was really nice to me. She’d say “It’s cup of tea time boys, I want you to come.”

And she come into the dark room where we were and she kissed me. Oh boy. That was it, I couldn’t go back to that house any more. I was finished. I couldn’t go back.

Frightened the buggery out of me. I wanted nothing to do with it. Bloody hell, she ruined life for me. It wasn’t long after I left for the hills.

I left the town and went to work for the road, working the road works.

No, I never saw her again, no.

I don’t know, just didn’t have anything to do with girls, didn’t know much about them. I’d been to school until fourth, I think I told you I left school when I was in fourth form. We had a famous swimming hole down in the Forth River. A beautiful spot.

And we all used to swim there together, the boys and the girls, all used to swim together, and some day I got separated in the pool with this girl, she was very naughty. She was really naughty. So anyway she said “Well you show me yours and I’ll show you mine.” So bloody hell it took half an hour before I was game and I did. I was so embarrassed I was never game to see what I was looking at. We never did it again either. So I left the community there again,

I thought I buggered that up. Oh dear, yeah.

After Tullah? Queenstown, to the mine in Queenstown.

That was a big mine. Mt Lyell Mining Company, very rich, very big, they had about 1,000 employees supporting the whole town.

They had an open cut mine and underground. I started in the open cut first of all because you had to work your way up. Spot on labour to whatever was going. I went into a gang called Boothberg, he was the manager of the gang, road building gang. There was three gangs they reckoned, one coming, one going and one on the job. Yeah, it was hard work, too hard manual work. One day I remember him

coming up to where we were working and he called around us, he said to one fellow “That’s not how you do it, come with me I’ll show you.” And he got on the floor and instead of hitting it hard, quartzite it was, he just hit it once with it “That’s how you do it” he said. And this young bloke he got really wild, he hit him on the back, got his shovel and flat on the back, knocked him right out he said “You don’t do it like that, you do it like this you old bastard.” Oh dear,

he got the sack. That was a very tough job.

They had what you call an employment office, you used to have to go and report there every morning to get a job. I stayed at a boarding house in Queenstown because there was lots of (UNCLEAR) about so they’d give you free board and accommodation and you paid them back when you got your job. And that’s what I done, I stayed at Mrs

Hunter for about six weeks or eight weeks. I got a job and when I got a job I paid her back, I paid a few extra pounds, paid dividends.

I’ve no idea. I had no idea.

They hadn’t left, I’d left. I was in Queenstown and they were in Strahan. Where they went from there I’ve got no idea, had no idea.

I didn’t know where they were until after the war.

I didn’t mind, we just drifted apart. And didn’t really meet again until after the war.

Well, it was a slow business. We were at war with Germany

but we didn’t do anything about war, there was no fighting, no bombers, no aeroplanes, no nothing at our place so we didn’t know anything about war. We just knew it was no good. We hated Hitler, I don’t know why we hated him, because we hated him.

Oh yeah, we were part of it. Absolutely part of it. Actually still am.

Silly isn’t it. But…

It meant that when she was at war, I was at war. And we didn’t have conscription in those days so we had to volunteer to join up. And you couldn’t join up at 16, you were silly if you did. But at 17 I’d done enough experience to think I was a man. I joined up.

Very, very disappointing job. I went into the Navy first, I wanted to join the navy and they wouldn’t even look at you. Said “Where’s your father and mother?” And I said “Oh fair game mate, cut it out. Mother’s dead, don’t know where Dad is.” “No, can’t get in here then, no parent’s consent.”

So I went and joined the air force, so I thought. And they were the same, “No, parent’s consent.” I said “Well bugger you, I’ll join the AIF.” And they were the same. I was so disappointed. I went back up to a little town called New Norfolk and got a job there. Rotten job it was too. I met a Captain Burns

and he was the area officer for that part of the country. And he enlisted me in the militia, he wasn’t that much worried about parent’s consent see. But from there I went to Port Pearson and learnt a bit about guns. And then I was at Fort Queenscliff in Victoria and did final training at Fort Queenscliff and then from there up to Rabaul.

Quite overpowering. They had terrific uniforms, they were all braided and colours and anchors and all sorts of stripes on your arm, this way and that way. Coloured trousers with stripes on the sides of them. That’s the permanent ones.

When we joined them we were we weren’t nothing, we weren’t anything. Just boys. I was that overawed I didn’t know who to salute. I saluted everyone even the Warrant Officer. Especially one called Warhurst, Robbie Warhurst, Warrant Officer. And he had so much stuff on him that he used to overpower me and I’d see him come and I’d salute before he come. He’d arrive along side and I’d salute. He didn’t like it, he said “Don’t salute me, you only salute officers.”

I said “You look like an officer to me.” He said “I’m not.” He used to take me over to teach me what an officer was and that, what I had to salute. It took quite a while to learn the ropes.

I don’t think I ever learned discipline. I think I joined

the artillery, which was a small unit and no big deal was discipline because we all, well each battery only had about 25 men.

The worst discipline of the lot, well the worst punishment if we did the wrong thing was confinement to barracks. Instead of going on weekend leave we had to stay in the camp all the time. Smaller punishments were incidentals. For instance when I started learning this blasted business of saluting officers, I had to salute every bloody officer I met about 20 times.

I got used to it in the end. It was nothing serious, they didn’t do any of the awful things you hear about, just made you believe what you had to do. Repetition mainly, lectures. We had a quiet life as you could imagine in a permanent artillery unit,

at the beginning of the war when there was nothing to shoot at. So we had a bit of training on the guns, we learnt a bit about bayonet drill which was the most awful thing of the lot.

If you were to stand up with somebody pointing a bayonet at your belly. You’d try to suck it in that far it’d point out the other side of you. It’s the worst thing you can feel, a bayonet pointing at you. Good lord. You’d sooner be shot.

And we used to do a bayonet drill, bayonet practice. Don’t know why. Learnt a bit about the guns, loading and unloading.

Four inch quick firers we had, we was employed. They come off submarines and they were very, very high powered. When you fired them

a shell, a four inch shell, it made a crack like a rifle going off right inside your ear. It was a really loud crack. It was quite a terrible noise really and they were, as I said quick firing. You just had, the whole lot was like a bullet. You shoved a shell in the gun and you closed the bridge and fired it.

Later on I went to Queenscliff to practise with sea machine gunners. Well they had, the shell wouldn’t go in the gun this time. They’d put a 22 pound charge of cordite in behind this shell and then fired. That wasn’t slow. And when that went off it didn’t make a crack just a voom, voom instead of a crack. It’d shake you right down to the bones, but it didn’t hurt your ears as much as the 4-inch. But

the most frightening thing was the dreadful power of the six inch guns all bolted down into about 150 tonnes of concrete and you fire the bloody things and the whole world shakes. Terribly powerful.

Loader. Loading the guns.

Well you learnt the…

The shells were placed by other men, where you could reach them. And you had to pick them up with your fists closed. You don’t put, because you could jam your fingers in the bridge and you’d lose your fingers. So you closed your fists and balanced them in your arm and shoved them in with your fist and your other fist sort of thing. That was with the four inch. It was usually a bit

more complicated and two of you loaded it because it was 112 pound shell weight you see, and not too many people can pick up 112 pounds and toss it around. It used to take two of you to load it. We used to load it on to a platform, pick it up from there and then shove it in. You couldn’t lift it up and poke it in, your cordite might move. You used to put the cordite in and then shove that in. So it weighed 122 pounds.

But it was sort of good, a young crew that could load and fire a shell every three minutes so that was very good. I don’t know if we ever did it.

We practised quite regularly, we didn’t fire them very often. They didn’t like to waste the bullets, waste the shells in those days.

Didn’t, you didn’t shoot anything much. I only ever fired one shot in anger. That was at a poor American transport boat, he was afraid to come into the port. And they were interested in the volcanoes, a lot of them just near where we were. They were watching us, signalling us, war ship, war ship you know. I wouldn’t answer and the skipper said “just put one across the bows.” Anyway

we went too close to him, when the splash went across the bow and the water went back on to the boat. It was that close. It was near dark, I wasn’t surprised but I don’t think he understood. The Mako. That’s the only time I fired in anger.

Mates. Your mates.

You made your mates. You made your friends. Gunner Crawford, hells bells. he used to drive the truck when we used to go into town on leave and he was a miracle man. A friend of everybody, mad man behind the wheel, he’d fly across the road. But he looked after you when you got there. I had quite a few friends.

Mostly drink beer. Drink beer. Unload your conscience, drink beer, try to pick up girls. When they picked up me I’d go the other way.

I was still scared of girls, yes. It was quite frightening actually. I don’t know when I stopped being frightened of girls. It could have been,

it was quite a long time later, in my twenties before I stopped being frightened of them. I’m even frightened of her now.

We went to Queenscliff in Victoria and we had our final training there in Queenscliff. Six to eight weeks.

How to load six inch guns instead of four inch.

And we became part of what they called the Lark Force. This was a special force set up to guard against German raiders taking over the port of Rabaul. We didn’t know that of course, we knew it was to guard against German raiders, but we didn’t know where it would be. And we were sent, the Lark Force were sent to Rabaul, Spanish Force was sent to Timor,

Gull Force was sent to Ambon and that’s where the three forces were, the members of the 8th Division.

Fun. I didn’t think it was going to be deadly serious. We were expected to shoot at a few German boats. And we thought that

we were quite capable of handling them. We’d been told that shore guns could handle sea borne guns but that was quite wrong of course. A good sea borne gun can outshoot forts and those type of things. They’re quick, they’ve got better trained crews and more of them. More guns. But we didn’t know that of course, we thought we were going to protect Rabaul.

Well, that’s strange. We were with the AIF and then when they said we were going to Rabaul, they said “Well you don’t have to be in the AIF to go Rabaul, it’s mainly artillery. It’s part of Australia.” So they took our AIF numbers off us and gave us our militia numbers back.

Yes, we were choccos. We were chocolate soldiers.

Soft and washed away easy. Not much use for anything.

We used to dislike it very much. We thought we were the same soldiers as they were. Actually it turned out that we died the same. We shot at the same people with the same guns. But we were

still choccos. The 9th Battalion that first met the Japanese at Milne Bay, not Milne Bay at Kokoda Trail, they were choccos. Stopped the Japanese, the first time they were ever stopped. So it was all wrong, the argument was wrong, but that’s the elite force of the AIF thought that we were choccos.

Oh no, just little hell. We respected of the AIF, we were very respectful of it.

Yes, it did matter. When we were in Rabaul

we were stationed at a place called Parade Point and that was about eight miles from the town, from the wharf. Now our guns were unloaded at the wharf and we had to roll them that eight miles, build roads and put proper gear so we could roll them because they weighed eleven tonnes, because nothing could carry them up there see. But we rolled them that seven or eight miles, and when we were in place we reckoned we were as good, as hard a worker as any

AIF blokes, because we done what we had done. So we just ignored them after that.

Yes. I think they still feel the same today. Just ignorant, I don’t know what you call it, stupidity.

That’s all you can call it. General [Thomas] Blamey will tell you, after they stopped the Japanese at Kokoda Trail, there was one or two battalions had been lined up on parade and General Blamey gave them the talk, he was the top brass in the Australian Army, the best of the lot, the top brass. And he got up there and he said “Well,

only the dead and the wounded are the ones who run away. You’re good men, you stayed here.” And the men were that disgusted with him because the blokes had been killed not running away but running to them. So they turned around and instead of facing their commanding officer, they turned their back on him, when he was giving the talk. Some of the soldiers wanted to kill him and they were stopped. So that was the senior officer.

We never had any respect for him ever from then on.

They told us what Lark Force was, they didn’t tell us what it was all about. They didn’t tell us ever that we were going to Rabaul,

we just ended up in Rabaul. We didn’t know we were going there.

A week. We were given final leave, so we went home to our home towns. We went back to Queenstown and Strahan. We knew then that

we were going to go but we didn’t know when.

In the army?

Oh yes. As I said I lost my brothers, but I kept in touch with my brother Ron. We were friends and mates and I used to stay at his place when I come home on leave.

Yes.

The Manpower Act, the act applied to a certain type of manpower. The men in the mines, they used to feel guilty. We never ever thought they should feel guilty but they did. They thought they should’ve been in the army but we knew they shouldn’t, we knew the reason they were there.

It never worried us, it worried them. And the women were marvellous, Knitting for Britain they used to call it and they knitted all sorts of stuff. Every time that Mrs Coff up in Queenstown met us when I come home, I got off the bus and she met us and she gave us a packet of cigarettes and a nice smile. An old lady, a local lady. When we were going we got a packet of stuff to go away with again.

That was from the women in Queenstown. They were great.

We left by train, we left Melbourne for Sydney. From there we embarked upon the steamship to Newlandia. And you know a few moments in your life stand out in memory, going under the Sydney Harbour Bridge, 1200 blokes on board this ship and I sang the Maori Farewell. Those were the moments,

really.

Oh dear. “Now is the hour we must say goodbye.” You’ve sprung it on me now. We were listening to it, it’s not called the Maori Farewell but it’s a popular song nowadays. What’s the Maori Farewell darling?

“Now is the hour we must say goodbye…

While you’re away I’ll remember you.”

I can’t sing it.

I’d never heard young men sing together spontaneously, hanging on the rigging and rails and all singing some song. And it said farewell, you know. We must say goodbye, soon I’ll miss her. It stands out. Joint memory.

Proud, pride, pride. Pride comes before a fall doesn’t it.

I was proud of my mates. I was proud of their attitude. I was proud it had finally been decided that we were going to war. I was pleased

that we were going to take on the Germans. I was sure that we was going to knock ‘em off and that our mates were going to do it. So definitely, of course we didn’t have any idea then that the Japanese were going to come into the war. They were a long way away and different people to, we knew what to expect from the Germans.

No, not a thing. The first word when we were told about, talked to about the Japanese was when we approached Rabaul, the last day. I think it was a lecture. We had lectures all the time when we were going up there and this one was about the Japanese. Telling us not to worry about them because they had inferior equipment, their

planes wouldn’t last, couldn’t fly above ten thousand feet, if they dived too quick the pilots passed out. All sorts of rubbish and lies we were told.

No, we knew that the Japanese were in a big war with China at the time. There was always a chance that something would happen, we knew that much.

We had no idea that it was going to come like it did. I don’t think anybody did. It was a complete and utter surprise. I think the Americans were more surprised than we were. They got a terrible shock.

Well most of it was

lectures and a bit of phys ed, physical education, which was different in those days to now days of course, jumping and throwing your arms up and down and round about, and jumping up and down on the spot and feeling silly. Lectures mostly about lifestyle of where you were going, what you were going to do, what diseases you would encounter such as malaria and

hook worm and a few other things, and by no means were we allowed to go near the native women because all sorts of things would happen to you. Even your willy might drop off you know. And they told us quite seriously that the native women were quote “quite sick and rude,” not rude but physically

unhealthy. None of these things were true, we didn’t know.

Yes. Why wouldn’t we? This was our officers telling us this. We should believe our officers shouldn’t we? That’s what we were led to believe, the superior officers, they know the truth.

Very little entertainment, it was only lectures, lectures and food.

Made to get hair cuts. Stupid hair cuts. That was funny, it was funny then.

Some of them a bald patch straight down the middle and some had two or three on each side. Some had little tufts on the front.

No. No, no but we had it anyhow.

Oh yes, two-up and crown and anchor.[coin games] Crown and anchor probably was more popular than two-up. It was a game which you could afford. A game which you could see and not have to guess. Not so much anyhow. I liked crown and anchor. And there was our lectures and story telling. That was a pretty favourite thing.

And there was where some of the men told us their life stories and that sort of thing. We’d get into little groups of ten or fifteen and somebody’d tell a yarn and that led on to another yarn and so it goes. So we learned a bit about lifestyles and things like that.

No.

I was probably shy. You’ve got to remember I was a young, 18 year old Tasmanian

mixing up for the first time with fellows from Sydney and Melbourne. They were very… About Sydney and Melbourne, we went to a few shows in Melbourne. Did I tell you about that? Can I?

Went and saw Mo McCackie, [vaudeville comedian Roy Rene] you know. Saw it with Lucky and Mo. And we were pretty young and inexperienced. And Mo was on the

Tivoli [theatre] in the stage. And he done this skit about catching this train you see. And he had this cardboard carton and he’s going to catch the train and he said to this fellow that was standing there “Hold this for me I’ve got to go get me ticket. I forgot me ticket.” And it started to leak. And this bloke said “Oh Christ, what do I do about this. Oh Jesus.” Mo come up to him, he said “Hey Mo, your carton, pickles is leaking.” He said “Thems not pickles, they’re pups.”

That was great. There was a very, very silly joke you know. The Tivoli Girls, they were almost naked.

Oh probably was yes. Yes.

That they were idiots. What they do is nothing. It still isn’t any different. I still think that the country boys did it, inside they know more than the city boys. They know more about life, know more about living, know more about a lot of things than the city boys. City boys only know about the shallow outside things. You see the country boys know more about inside, what’s going on inside.

Yes. And there was no doubt about it, we stayed in our own little groups more than anything else. Occasionally someone would bring a friend in from another group and we’d meet like that. But all the time we were up in Rabaul, I never met with an AIF bloke at all. Just with our own fellows.

We, long time ago you know, memories. It’ll come back.

It was easier to play, it wasn’t so crowded and two-up, despite it’s reputation is not quite as popular as it’s supposed to be. Some people make money out of two-up but most people lose their money.

We had, they had places down below, built especially for carrying troops. That’s a naught question, I don’t remember much about the ship. I don’t remember much about it at all. Our cabin was on the aft deck. We were in a cabin. Whether the poor troops were down in… we didn’t worry about them.

Good question. A beautiful town. We were marched from the ship up to our new camp which wasn’t completed. They gave us a half a day off because of building the tents and we went into town. We saw natives for the first time.

Saw a few Australian women, white women, huge Chinese women and quite a few native women. And of course they said don’t have anything to do with native women but they didn’t have any tops on. So we had a look to see, you’d think our eyes were kept open with sticks. It didn’t take long to get used to it and we didn’t care after a while, but for a while it was a bit of a shock.

But we went down to town and I met my cousin who’d been on the escort and come up with us. From Adelaide. And we had an afternoon together in the town and enjoyed our company. We always had enjoyed one another’s company. Actually, there’s a painting over there on the sitting room corner of the two of us together.

He was in the navy and me in the army. He was ordered back aboard his ship of course and me was ordered back to camp. And we lived in that camp for about three months while our barracks were being built out at Braid Point.

The heat and the beauty. It was very hot and humid, and it was a beautiful town. It was so well kept.

You’d see gangs and that going around all the time with lumps of Hoop pine sharpened up into scythes and they kept the grass mown down, all the big Kunai grass. It was all mowed down level, the paths were mowed, trees were all pruned. A big avenue of trees. It was absolutely beautiful. And four pubs

which was a big attraction, movie theatre and Chinese restaurants. Plenty of Chinese, more Chinese than anything else. Over the months we got to know the Chinese quite well and we were never welcome at the white peoples homes. We were soldiers and as such were inferior, not welcome at all.

So we became more popular with the Chinese than with our own people you see. And the first thing we’d do when we got into town, we only had one night and then a day in there, go to the pictures, a Chinese restaurant and then to bed. I’d gotten over my fear of girls by now and asked to take a Chinese daughter girl to the pictures. And the old Chinese bloke said “No,

no you can’t take my girl out. You can’t take my girl.” Nine months this went on, we were trying to get him to let us take his girl to the pictures and one day he said “Right oh, you take her to the pictures, six hundred pounds.” Where’d we get six hundred pounds from. He said “Six hundred pound, don’t go to the pictures.” Didn’t take his girl to the pictures. I don’t blame him, we were a wild looking lot.

Two six inch guns, that’s all.

They were positioned on a place called Parade Point.

Parade Point was quite a beautiful spot. It was the starboard entrance when you went into the port and fairly steep hill. The camp was on the flat just down towards the house and town.

Quite a good camp with mess huts built, proper huts and everything. The guns we had a range fighter down on the first level then two guns, one above the other and an observation post above them. We had to pour the concrete ourselves and because of the terrible shock when the guns went off, it had to be poured in one pour you see.

No joins in the concrete. So we pick and shovelled up things, shovelled up dirt and rolled and shovelled and rolled and setting concrete mixing by hand, four hundred tonnes worth. And that was a day and a half, two days mixing the cement or concrete and putting it in place to put down. And you had to put the levellings in before it hardened up. That’s the (UNCLEAR)

round on it and have it perfectly level and that was a scientific job. That level, smooth, perfectly clean and smooth and all and of course we done this stupid thing so it was, didn’t wear our shirts. Yes we were sunburnt. Oh boy, you couldn’t feel it happening. But oh boy. Blisters that big in your back you know.

Terrible. No suing anybody because it was against the law to take your shirt off anyhow.

Our army officers. All done by the army, all our officers supervised the laying of the guns.

Not much, pretty hard work. Pretty hard work. Necessary.

We understood it was necessary so we done it without complaint. But not with any fun I can tell you that.

No, no there was no humour there at all. It was just bloody hard work. And we didn’t, the AIF was there, the second 22nd Battalion.

While we were doing all this they had their ordinary training period but they had time off as well you see. They used to go out to plantations and different places. They were allowed to go out to places and got to know a few people. We didn’t know any of them, stuck on our own at Parade Point, that’s where we were.

Well this wasn’t a camp, this was a real barracks. As you went in there was a big,

the first building was on the left hand side as you went in the gate, with a great big roof and that was to catch rainwater. And there were tanks on each side of it, about 2,000 gallon tanks on each, rolled along each side of the hut and inside was the gear and storage room for the gear. Then there was the cook house beside that and three of four barracks. I forget how many barracks we had.

And across the road was the mess halls, the orderly room. The orderly room was a, do you know what an orderly room was? It was the office for the whole unit, that’s where all the office work was carried out. The Quartermaster works out of there, all the administration was done from the orderly room. All the orders were given, all the work of the unit was worked out

and done from the orderly room. And then there’d be a mess hall and another storage room. They were all huts about. Then there’d be a bedroom, a bed on each side with room to walk up the middle and there were about 14 beds on each side, with room between them to put your gear

and the huts were made out of grass. Got a masonite, not masonite, asbestos sheeting and the roofs were made of corrugated iron. They were quite comfortable quarters. Wide lift up louvres for the windows and you could see out through to the moon of a night, when it was showing. You could see out to

the trees, coconut trees and out over the harbour, it was really beautiful.

No trouble. What do you mean, animals or people?

No animals. Never saw a strange animal there. A few snakes not many, but there was no animals, no animals of any strength or size or anything up there.

Boredom. Bored to tears. Bored to bloody tears, yeah. Imagine ten months in a camp like that with nothing to do except work. No entertainment there. Once a fortnight you’d get half a day in Rabaul. That was it.

Work. Work, take, you know when you get off work shower and clean yourself up and just lay down and say “gee that was a tough day,” and have a rest. That was it. And of a night time there was no entertainment of a night, just a few card games. Some people had cameras and would take a few films and that sort of thing.

You’d go up, a gunner – you’d go up to the guns for a little bit of practise loading and firing. Only practise, I did no actual shooting. Go down and you’d have to turn on the range finders to see how they found the range out.

On the height, you see you’ve got the exact height above sea level

and then you know the angle between where you are and the object you’re looking at, and with the angle you can work it out with algebra. Certain angles, x=yn and you used to get b which was the distance. It was pretty accurate.

It was interesting down there.

Most of the day, most of the daylight hours.

Well we were.

Just telescopes.

Observation posts had a telescope. Mind you it was a pretty lackadaisical watch, they could’ve steamed in and out and we wouldn’t have known half the time.

You got sick of looking and seeing nothing. There was no night time watches, very, very I don’t know what you’d call it, stupid. Pretty stupid us being there

actually. What good were we. Modern times, aeroplanes. We never had any anti-aircraft equipment at all. Two Lewis machine guns. Have you ever heard of the Lewis gun? It’s a WW1 gun with a round tray on the top with the bullets sliding in it. It jammed about every ten shots.

Get you killed more than anything else, the Lewis gun. There was only two there, that’s all we had for anti-aircraft action. May as well try spitting at them.

Of course we did.

We just asked for better equipment, they’d say “It’s coming, it’s coming.” But it never did come. The marvellous little Owen gun was invented while we were there but we never saw it.

We never saw a, we saw two Vickers guns but the AIF had them, we never had anything like that. We had .303 rifles, we never fired them while we were them while we were there. Didn’t have any rifle shooting practise or anything like that. Nothing. No it was just plain, ordinary, you’ve heard of Colonel Blip [Blimp?] have you? Haven’t you ever heard of Colonel Blimp?.

He’s a famous English Colonel, [cartoon character] does nothing, knows nothing, sees nothing, hears nothing. That’s Colonel Blimp. That’s our bosses, we had Colonel Blimp in charge of us, we reckoned anyhow.

Terrible. When I got, well, what do we do do we keep on talking about

peace time while we were there or do we tell you what happened after the Japanese declared war on us? Which, because we’re just about…

We had very poor morale, plus the fact of being a choco, which

made you feel inferior when you went in where the AIF troops were. We had slightly different uniforms to the AIF, which they could pick at any time they wanted to. It was quite a sad time really, after the first four months anyhow, when we’d done most of the work, when we settled down and we did the training on the guns and boredom.

Not really, a few trips to Rabaul just a few. I got drunk a few times I s’pose, that’s about all. Nothing, done nothing of use while we were there. We were doing no useful things and we served no useful purpose. We were just there. I can’t imagine,

I can’t tell you any more about it because there just wasn’t anything, it was a useless, probably the most wasteful ten months of my life that we were there.

A few yes. But they were all killed you see. There was only three or four survivors. So all our friends,

or all my friends are dead. Good mates.

Oh dear. There’d be Max Hardy from Hobart. This is not going to be broadcast anywhere is it? I still don’t like to tell their people what happened and what didn’t happen you know.

Big Max Hardy was there and he used to bring firecrackers back in from when he went on leave in Rabaul and he’d chuck them behind the cat. And the cat would jump up and do a wee. And he’d think it was a great joke seeing this bloody cat leap like that and do a wee. We used to call him Freckle Duster because all his life he spent sitting on his freckle or jumping up and down peeing. Poor little bugger.

Our famous cat.

God knows. One of the neighbours gave it to us I guess. And Slim Richmond, Slim used to dance with the native dancers when they came around. And they’d do this, you know the native dance where they’ve got their hands up over their heads and then this swish, swish, swish around and leaping about like bloody kangaroos? He used to do it with them and lord he looked funny, he was six foot six high and

about that wide. Slim Richmond. Hero. The only real hero I ever met. He was, Slim Richmond.

No, shocking dancer. Just a good bloke.

Well they had a village just around a bit further from us and they used to come past us every day backwards and forwards.

And market days of course they’d bring their stuff in to market, they’d walk in past us carrying their stuff to market. We’d buy a bit of it on the way. And about two or three times they had what they called a sing-sing. And they had special dances and they dressed up for it. It was a real highlight of their life and part of our lives I s’pose, when they’d do a sing-sing.

We got on well with

them. We got on very well. The local boys were, the local men, we used to treat them as equals whereas everybody else used to treat them as inferiors. And because we treated them as equals they treated us as equals and we were welcome with them and they were welcome with us. And it was good for us. Actually I believe that saved our life in the long run,

because of our friendship with the native boys. We didn’t know any different, we just thought they were coloured but they were decent blokes, they were all right. We never knew any native women, they never brought their women into the camp, we never saw any of the women unless they were going past, backwards and forwards to market. I never met a native women and they used to call them Meris. And used to

see them in the market, talk to them in the market but never anywhere else. If you went near them they went like this, they’d hide. Cover their eyes over. Very, very shy women. I guess if you’d spoke to them they’d have fell over. They just dressed with what they called lap-laps, a piece of cloth wrapped around them, all the way around. There’s a small lap-lap that wraps around the waist or one that wraps from the chest down.

Depends. The men wore a lap-lap, didn’t ever see any dressed in grass skirts, there were a few dressed in grass skirts but we never saw them. Not in the town. They always thought Sydney was the top of the world. They thought the world started and ended in Sydney. Everything come from Sydney.

All the food come from Sydney, all the tinned stuff come from Sydney, all the ships that come to Rabaul came from Sydney. We came from Sydney to Rabaul. Everything in the world started in Sydney and Australia wasn’t Australia, it was the middle of Sydney. They loved Sydney.

Very difficult to talk to them at all you know, they spoke their own language and didn’t speak very good English,

very Pidgin English. They’d speak so fast and the pidgin was so fast that you had to be quick to take it up. And we didn’t talk much Pidgin until we were lost and going through the bush with them. Then we learnt it, we had to learn it or die. When we were in amongst ourselves, we just spoke a little bit amongst us. We’d talk a little bit about pigs, they loved pigs,

they worshipped pigs. I don’t know why. Cowrie shells. Hard to think of anything else that they give us that didn’t have cowrie shells in it. They made their money out of cowrie shells.

Money. Place it all on ropes, there’d be so much in, bananas were that much rope (UNCLEAR).

and so on you know. A finger and a hand of bananas. Hands was just an ordinary piece cut off. What was a bunch? I think a bunch, it wasn’t a bunch, it was a different sort of. Bananas had a hand. We learned a little bit about pawpaw and mango and muli.[lemon]

All the different fruits that come around locally to the market. We learnt a bit about them. They’d chew betel nut which disgusted us.

Make your mouth and tongue go all black. And there’d be a spurt of beetle and it’d just go onto the floor or on the ground and we found it horrible, but they got a thrill out of it, that was their

narcotic. Not a sleeping narcotic, like a native opium. Not really as strong, not strong like opium but that sort of thing. They loved their betel nut and of course as soon as they gathered their betel nut, and in this case they climbed a tree you see, so betel nut tree would be what, about that thick I reckon. A big tree that’d be. And it’d be

60 foot up to the nuts. And he goes. Cut off a bunch of nuts and bring them down. No trouble. And it’s amazing to watch them climb coconut trees. Tie a bit of rope around their foot and off they’d go up. Big coconut trees, no trouble. And there’s what they call the wait-a-while vine, or we called the wait-a-while vine. It’s a big thorn on a vine, the thorn used to grow about that long and about that thick at the base.

And he came sliding down, this thorn catched in the leg and it teared and bloody great hole, gap in the leg and he’d just stand there with blood running down and I pulled the thorns out. Paid no notice of it. And because they’d been eating too much betel nut, they can go to sleep and a twig out of the fire can fall on their leg and burn them. Wouldn’t even notice it until it was well burnt.

Not while we were on holiday. Not while we were first there. No.

We were told not to mix with the natives, that’s all. That didn’t stop us, there just wasn’t any villages to go to. The AIF blokes went into them because they went out more than we did.

They were the natives when the natives were inferior.

Those were the days when you couldn’t trust the natives, a weak thing. You might meet a Japanese, you might be German, you wouldn’t know. That’s what they thought but the bosses, they didn’t know that they were just ordinary people like you and I.

We thought it was stupid. It was stupid.

We heard it the day after they bombed Pearl Harbour. We heard that they were coming down the Malayan Peninsular. We found out that their aeroplanes were pretty good,

that their airmen were just as good as ours. That their young men were just as capable as we were. A lot of things we found out that they’d been telling us were wrong and lies. And so we were distrustful of all things coming from headquarters from then on. We just didn’t trust them. Our first sign of Japanese

was an air raid and these planes come over and they were very high and silver painted. You know when they paint them silver you can almost see through them. We said “By jinks have the Yanks gotten into these flying fortresses,” [bombers] and then the bombs started to drop. So the Japs, that was our first introduction to them, the Japanese in the war. They bombed the local aerodrome.

We were all put on what they called a war footing from then on. No more leave, no more, just man guns and behave yourself. Do you want me to keep talking about that?

Well it didn’t worry us much because they missed.

See they bombed the aerodrome but they didn’t hit us. We went back to our huts and aeroplanes, the mail plane landed while they were bombing. And he didn’t notice any bombs coming. He hurried off though, he didn’t stand around long, he took off pretty quick. The air raids got more often, more of them and more people and more planes. We had a few Wirraway fighters and

a few Hudson bombers they called them. The Wirraways took off one day against a flight of eye level bombers, they couldn’t even reach them. The Zeroes took to the Wirraways and they shot them down, shot seven of them down anyhow. They didn’t all die, some of them died some didn’t. That was

the end of our air defence, we had no more air defence. We had one Akiended [?] which had two guns and their guns were obsolete. They were hoisted up to a certain height and so on, a terrible bloody rigmarole, they shot one bomber down, that was Zinc [?]. W got pretty heavily bombed one day,

around about the 14th or 15th of January or February and then on the 18th of, 17th or 18th we were bombed out of existence. You see the Japs could just bomb away to their heart’s content, there was no defence there for them. They just blew our guns up and left us with no guns and nothing to do.

We were pretty badly shaken by the air raid because it was intense, there was 60 to 80 planes, bombers for about two hours. They were taking their own time. A few men got killed there that day. That was the first experience I’d had of men getting killed and it was pretty nerve racking. The bombers dropped, we were in what they

called slit trenches. The trenches were about four foot long and about 18 inches wide and about four six deep in soft ground, volcanic soil. When the bombs dropped around, they’d cover you up and you’d just stand up to get your head above the ground but you couldn’t get it down again. That was a devil feeling I can tell you sitting there with your head out of the ground and no way of pulling it back down in again.

They actually knocked a few people’s heads off. That’s no good either, first experience seeing your friend’s head lying on the ground. Not very nice at all. We went back into the camp, into, when I say into the camp it was only about 50 yards and everything was in a bloody mess. It

wasn’t all blown up it was just a mess, holes in everything. They told us to go to join the 2/22nd Battalion at Rabuana and that was about a four mile, no eight mile hike. We didn’t know which way to go because we wasn’t too sure what was going on,

so we went around the side of another volcano and down into a tunnel hill where the RAP [Regimental Aid Post] Hospital was for the 2/22nd Battalion. And this was 24 hours I s’pose it took us to get over there, and no food, nothing, not even any water. It was pretty bad then. They fed us and gave us a bit of medicine. They gave us same pills

and I think plenty of water, a feed. It was pretty well dark by now and they said “Well you’ve got to go to, there’s a beach over at Rabuana Beach.” And we did. When we got there we were in a unit called Odds and Sods. There was nobody of anything, a few bloody cooks and

us and a few odd people who didn’t know what was going on or anything and we were a unit. We were stuck on a beach, they said “Now you stop the Japs from landing down here.”

“You stop the Japs from landing here later. That’s your job. Don’t let them land here.” A rifle and 30 rounds of ammunition, a water bottle and nothing else. And

they didn’t land that night. So next morning they come around and they gave us a feed, gave us fresh water and we dug a slit trench in then. We had something to hide in when they come. And the next night they did come and we still had no food, only just the feed they’d given us in the morning when they’d come. And

all of us, there was an awful bloody row of us, bloody lights and ships and motors and noise and guns and bloody God knows what and a few guns going off over where we seen these lights on the Japs so we fired our 30 bullets each. And you don’t know whether you hit anybody or not, you know you shot at somebody but you don’t know whether you hit them so you’ve got no worries about that. You’ve got no guilty feelings. You might’ve killed somebody or you might not, you wouldn’t know. I hope I did.

When our bullets were gone we went and planted it back up across the road, ran around the pastures and sat and talked until daylight. When it was daylight a bloke come along on a motorbike and he said he was from the CO [Commanding Officer] of the older unit, General Scanlon, he said “He doesn’t want any more casualties, it’s every man for himself. You can surrender or you can go, you can run away

into the bush or whatever you like.” So we done what we could. If we surrendered of course we’d be killed because the Japanese, they knew where we were and all the suspicions of what they’d do to us. Because that’s what they’d done to the people in Malaya see. So we decided we’d walk back home to Australia. Eric might tell you how far this is, it’s about 300 miles down the coast of New Britain. I don’t know how far it is across to

Australia between there and New Guinea. Probably 120 miles something like that across the Straits. There must

There must be about 800 or 1,000 miles across there to Port Moresby and we were going to walk there but of course we didn’t get that far. We walked for three months.

Well, that’s the worst order you can give a young soldier. We were 18 years old, average. So imagine what you’d feel like if your boss said “everyman for himself, you can do what you like. I’ve got nothing to do with you.” We felt so bloody terrible, by Christ if we’d have found him we’d have shot him dead ourselves. Terrible bloody order. There were 18 of us talking together and we decided to walk away.

And we knew nothing, we didn’t know whether there was any roads, we knew there was no stores, no plantations, we didn’t know whether there was any missions, we knew about nothing. Didn’t know what you could eat and what you couldn’t eat, nobody had taught us any of these things. We don’t know munitions stores anywhere in the hills, we could’ve fought for months if we’d have had ammunitions and stuff stored but nothing.

We started to walk down the coast. We came to a mission at Sum Sum well that’s where your man got picked up in the aeroplane.

Yeah. There was two or three wounded fellows there, the natives were looking after them beautifully. They gave us a meal, let us sleep there, next morning they said “No off you go. We promised the Lord that we would look after the wounded but we’re not looking after you blokes.

We can’t afford to, we haven’t got the stuff.” So they give us a hand to get us across the river to the other side and then we were on our way. Well I told you that Slim Richmond was a hero, well he was because we were walking for some, a fortnight I s’pose and he got severe Doby’s Itch. If you don’t know what Doby’s Itch is, it’s a rash that you get between

your legs. It gets terribly inflamed and sore and if you don’t treat it you can’t walk, it’s hopeless for you. Slim got so that he couldn’t walk. We made an agreement with one another that if anybody had to stop and couldn’t carry on, we’d leave them and we’d go on because it would be fatal to stop with anybody. Well when Slim was the first one to get incapable, he said

“You go on yourself, I’ll stay here and I’ll bathe myself in the sea water and I’ll come on later on.” We knew he couldn’t and we didn’t want to leave him. So that night he committed suicide. Just for us.

It’s hard to know what a hero is… It’s very difficult to know what a hero is. Somebody committing suicide. To us he was a hero.

We went on as we had agreed to do and after a while we came to a place called Tol, Tol Plantation. Beautiful spot coming up on the headland like, there was a house there right on the headland.

A river there and another river just 100 or so past it, coconut trees, thousands of coconuts, house on the edge where you first come into it. There was little trees, little trees that high and then gradually they got bigger and bigger because as they’d grown they’d just built more and planted more see. Then you got the plantation house with big tall coconut trees all around. When we got there was a lot of the 22nd Battalion soldiers there.

We thought hundreds but there was about 150 of them and we thought to ourselves we wouldn’t like to stay with that many people because it would be tempting to the Japs to catch that many people together. It’d be bingo. So we went and slept, they gave us a couple of coconuts each and we went and laid in the bush just on the edge of the plantation and we had a sleep.

That’s all we did to sleep, you just laid down where you were and slept and the next thing we know is these bloody Japs coming ashore on barges. And of course we couldn’t move then, we didn’t want to let them know where we were. And they gathered up the 156 I believe it was of our men and they tied their hands behind their back like they were

just (greasen UNCLEAR) twine, tied their thumbs like that behind their back in groups of ten. And walked them out towards the bush where we were of course and killed them. They bayoneted them, they shot them, the whole of them, the whole hundred.... They took about five back to Rabaul with them, they killed the rest.

Well that was where we performed our heroic deeds, we walked away from them and left them there, they’re still there, they died there and we done nothing about it. What could we have done about it I don’t know. It wasn’t, there were three survivors of that lot. Eric knows about it. We didn’t know. We didn’t know.

We just walked off, staggered off. We’d been there for three days, we were hungry and thirsty. We had no guns, nothing. I don’t know how, there was only about 12 of us, all of us bare-footed, unarmed we couldn’t take on and control the Japanese, there was no hope, we couldn’t do it you know. We couldn’t but you still feel bad because you done nothing.

We walked away and between those two rivers we heard these bloody, they were shooting and banging around us. We hid in the water just under some leaves in the water, and we saw them bring three fellows down and line them up on the bank and shoot them there and then. Just like that, for no reason. We couldn’t work out why they’d do it, there was no, no, why, just shot them. Bingo.

At least we weren’t thirsty now, we had plenty to drink. We went on, came to a Chinese store that sold stuff to the natives and there’d been quite a few 2/22nd Battalion fellows go through and they didn’t have much left. He gave us some rice and some ginger jam and most important of all

either a knife or a spoon to each one of us so we could eat with it. We couldn’t pay him, we had no money to pay him and he just gave it to us. He was a good bloke. We were losing the occasional man, crocodiles would catch one of them every now and then. You know what, the natives up there were pretty shrewd with crocodiles across the river. They love dogs you know, crocodiles really love dogs.

And they’d have the dogs trailing, cross over behind them except it wasn’t them it was old women. See young men used to cross over first, then the young women and then the older men and then the poor old women had to stagger over last because it was always the last of the party that the crocodiles would get and they’d have the dogs trailing behind them. We never had old women or dogs, couldn’t do anything.

There was a few, not many but I think four I can think of, that’s all that we lost to crocodiles. But, that’s pretty nasty when you’re with some mates and the next thing you know they’re eaten.

Well we used to go as far up the river as we cold, because if

you went down the river, they used to bale you at the mouth of the river as you walked across. See that’s where the big salties [saltwater crocodiles] were, where the bar went across the river. The big salt water crocodiles used to live down there, so we’d go up as far up the river as we could and cross where it was as narrow as we could, and if possible, we’d go to where there was a tree fell across or something like that and we’d cross at the tree or something like that. If worst came to the worst we’d just all get in a bunch and we’d all swim over together. That was

the only way that we knew how to get across. We had nothing to weigh us down with, we had no equipment so nothing really of any weight and so we could just walk into the water, just stay in a group. If there was eight of us together, well eight makes it a bit more confusing for a croc to chase one. We’d go across in groups like that. We had another

unhappy experience a bit further on when we’d gone up one of these rivers as far as we could go and was able to cross it and then all of a sudden it was a terrible place: mangroves and thorns and bloody cuts and scratches and things all over the place. And we come out of it, at the mouth of it and all half a mile down the coast from there was a

beautiful bay. We thought this is delightful, we’ll go in here to wash some of this mud off us and get a swim and get the salt into these cuts sort of thing. So we threw the clothes we had on on the bank and walked out into the water as far as we could safely be. We just stayed there and splashed and paddled and splashed, really enjoyed ourselves. Well some stupid bugger started shooting at us from just up the bank. Of course we had to run away then.

We had to run away with nothing, we were naked. That’s an uncomfortable feeling to be walking through the bush naked. You’ve got nothing then, you feel absolutely, you’ve got no idea. If you’ve got some pants on at least you feel like you’re human, but if you’ve got nothing on you feel something terrible. We were interested, we come across a native, we come across a plantation you know. We come across plantations.

Plantation houses were a life of their own, they had stores, they had quarters for natives to live in, they had barns, they had all sorts of things around the camp, the plantation house. Usually there was something there that you could get. When we got to one of these places I found a mosquito net. Hessian, no it wasn’t hessian, the gauze was no good but the calico top was all good.

So I used it for a lap-lap so I was dressed from then on and it didn’t feel so bad. We found a bag or half a bag of what we thought was polenta, we thought it was WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK [chicken] feed and we made some Johnny cakes out of coconut milk and WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK feed you see and cooked it up on a tin over the fire, shed tin. Cooked it up,

we could hardly eat it, it was terrible. It was a bit mouldy but worst of all it was a thing called barristock, which is calf feed. How bloody calves can eat it I don’t know. But we had it, better than nothing.

Coconuts were the main meal, taro, pumpkin, lizards,

bananas when we could find them, sometimes a mango. This was in the season, there were all these fruits you know in February and January, February, March, April, but we could only find what the natives didn’t want you see. We were, you’d come across a garden that had been abandoned and you’d search through that and you’d find some taro that they’d left. Or there might be a tree of

mangoes with a few left on it and you’d have those. You could only get the coconuts that dropped off the top of the trees, you couldn’t climb the trees to get them so any coconuts that dropped you’d have them. Anything that grew in the gardens you knew it was all right and you ate. We made a few mistakes in the bush itself. We found a bush of red peppers

and he takes them in capsule form now, but they were just little green peppers growing on a tree. They looked good to eat hey? Don’t eat them though, boy. They’re bloody awful, they might burn your mouth out. So we didn’t eat any more red peppers. One more awful experience I s’pose I’d better tell you about because somebody else might get in the same situation, there was a leaf,

a stinger that grew had a big round leaf, it’d be that long and beautiful round like that. Smooth on one side and just slightly rough on the other and we thought ah gee, that’d be just the thing for toilet paper see. And we grabbed it and if you gripped it hard, firm, nothing happens but if you just rubbed it gently oh boy, you don’t want to wipe your bum with it I tell you. Jeez, stinging nettle.

Jeez it was bloody terrible. That’s the worst thing you could do, I only ever done that once, never do it again. But there’s all sorts of things you’ve got to learn you don’t know when you go bush.

We’d been shooting guns together as a group. Shooting rifles off together as a group. We were a company, not a company but we were part of a company, not even a platoon, we were just a section I suppose you’d call us and we were all strangers to one another except we had that night together we fired a few bullets off and that made us a group.

We then went as a group, we walked away together as a group. But didn’t stay together, we separated after a while. When we first went we went back into the Bayoning Ranges, back into the mountains. We didn’t know that that was a terribly wrong thing to do of course. All people just went “Okay, which way are we going?” We went up these mountains, up and down, up, up them, down, down, down.

Straight up, straight down. Walk all day and throw a stone back to where you left. We found the Morongorie [?] River and down into this river, of course it was running fast and so steep on the side we couldn’t get out of it. We followed the Wollongae River for three days down to the mouth before we could get out. It was in that time the boots fell off our feet.

The boots fell off our feet, we had no boots from then on.

And then we smelled the, their beef cooking. It was over the other side of the river, the river stopped running hard so we went across and there was some native boys. They’d killed a calf and they were cooking it on sticks. When they saw us, they were boys that we’d sort of been friendly with up in Rabaul, they built us a shelter, gave us leaves and things to sleep on,

cooked this meat and gave it to us to eat, gave us coconuts. Told us which way to go. You know, they were really, bees knees. They’d liberated this young calf because they didn’t think the Japanese would give it to them. They were right of course.

Nobody would’ve given it to them I don’t reckon. But for some strange reason and I don’t know why, Germany used to control that part of the world you know, before WorldWar 1. It was German territory. And there was a little grave, a cemetery up there where the first Australians were killed in the 1st World War, it was in Rabaul. It was German occupied territory.

There was radio masts at Cockelbow, huge masts. They were set into the ground on cement floating on mercury. And they just sat there and all those little earthquakes used to come every day and no effect. Marvellous idea. Where they got the mercury from lord knows but their floating was most remarkable. They were still standing when we were there after the 2nd World War.

Not after, before war started (UNCLEAR). And those native people had lived through German occupation, then they had a period of Australian occupation and then they had a period of mandated territory life and they still welcomed us. Well I think that shows something for them doesn’t. It shows that we must’ve done something right somewhere along the line. Some of our people must’ve done something right. Some of the

administration, some of the patrol officers, they must’ve done something right. When we were going down the island, it was the patrol officers that saved us even though they didn’t work there any more, they’d gone. But they still saved us with their reputation and the things they’d done. Natives were one generation removed from head hunters.

And I think even to this day there’s a tribe in New Britain that’s still considered unsafe, I can’t think of their names. Oh my god though, they still killed people when I was there, they killed people. If they didn’t like them they just killed them. Funny place. Terrible place to walk.

We had majority rules. Whether we wanted to go left or right or upstream or downstream, majority rules. And because of that we kept getting smaller when some people didn’t like the idea of what was going on, they went their own way, so that’d be three or four would drop out and finally there’d be only about six or eight of us

left, you see. And I only ended up with only two. David Lindfield was with us for a while, he was one lot of the first. I just heard about one old native gentleman we went into his village. It’d been raining, it was raining most of the time, and we went into his village

and he met us at the entrance to the village and welcomed us. Old fellow, his teeth were black like this. He come to me and he took us into his house, his hut, grass hut, about 20 to 24 feet long, something like that, 12, 14 foot wide just built straight up off the ground to the ridge, smoked just seeped out each end

and had a little fire in the middle and they got hot water and they bathed us with, you know the soft fibre of the coconut, inside the coconut fronds? Bathed us and wiped us down with all that to try and clean our skin off a bit. They sat us near the fire and brought us stew made out of vegetable and a bit of pig meat in it.

We had a feed of that, it was bloody marvellous. We slept there that night in comfort, no mosquitoes because of the smoke didn’t get out of the house you see so it kept the mosquitoes out. They stank like buggery because they rubbed pig fat onto themselves to stop them eating them in the daylight. Never washed it off, they just put more on but that didn’t matter because we were being treated like humans. And the next morning he gave us a little bit more of the stew,

a couple of coconuts each and showed us the way to go, on our way. And that was a real gentleman wasn’t it. Six of us, you know six of us, it’d be like you in your house taking 20 strangers in and feeding them up at night.

About two months out. Two months out from Rabaul. We didn’t know

see, we were separate, we didn’t go with the main group at all, we were militia and we didn’t go with the AIF blokes even though Lindfield who turned out to be a friend, he was militia. He was in the anti-aircraft but we couldn’t

feel comfortable with the AIF blokes so we stayed separate. We got down to Palmalmal, Dita, was where I left from wasn’t it. Palmalmal plantation and here was another 120 odd, 130 odd AIF

blokes bailed up. They’d turned the main plantation house into a hospital and all the little buildings around it was hospital quarters and barracks. They started planting gardens. You could plant something there in March, or April, January, it’d grow by March, it was that quick growing stuff. And so they were putting there stuff to plant

just go around the villages, the native villages and gather any medications they could find. And they got a few medications for treating sores and a bit of quinine, a bit of stuff like that and they decided they were going to stay until somebody found them. But my mate, Reg Alto and me we decided we didn’t trust that, we didn’t like it, we’d keep on going. So we left them and we went down

the coast a bit further, about three or four days walk and we got that sick of walking we decided we wouldn’t go any further. Pulled into this village to die. We thought bugger it, that’s the end of it. Old Reg was nearly blind, conjunctivitis, he couldn’t see and I was sick of walking. So we just pulled up, got a bit to eat off these blokes,

hadn’t been there more than a few hours when a bloke come running down the coast with a message stick and in it was a piece of paper about that size. Come to the plantation, there’ll be a rescue boat on the ninth of April.

Come to the plantation, there’ll be a rescue boat on the ninth of April.

This was the eighth of April and we were four days away, so we didn’t know what to do. So I said to Reg “We’ll pinch a canoe.” I’ve never stolen anything all the days before in our life. So we pinched a little canoe, chucked as many coconuts as we could gather up into it and we were off. Well Reg couldn’t see where we were going, I could see where we were going, I steered and he paddled, we paddled our canoe, and

we got back up to Adrena at about four o’clock in the afternoon and she sailed at six. So we were very lucky to get aboard that boat. Yeah, that’s where Eric come into it you see, his mates, he was a coast watcher. It was coast watchers that were in touch with the little boat that found us, the mascot, he was in touch with the coast watchers all the time

and they could tell, pass messages backwards and forwards between the boats and the lower Bardia and the mascot and Port Moresby. They were so important these blokes, sometimes when you’re out of touch the only place you could contact was Western Australia. Radio skip you know. They passed messages over to Western Australia about what was going on in south eastern New Guinea. The Coast Watchers.

You’ve got to thank so many people who live.

Bloody pleased yeah. Very pleased. We got on the boat and they, she was only a little boat really and they allotted us a certain amount of deck space each, about three foot six by about two foot wide. That was your deck space otherwise they couldn’t have fitted us aboard. And they

had one stove and one little cook house for about 160 people, so the only thing they could cook was soup. And they kept hot soup going all the time, whenever you felt like it you’d go around and get a bowl of hot soup. Of course that’s what saved our life, because of that soup in the village. It was great.

Well the first thing we saw was the aeroplanes, they were very dark but they had bright lights shining around underneath the aeroplanes and the ships put their lights on and

there was, to us it looked like dozens of ships but there wasn’t. There was quite a few war ships and about three transports I think, and then the barges started moving the transports. This was all lit up by the aircraft flying around. They had lights on to the beaches, trying to find where the men were on the beaches I guess, and they were stupid. That’s all I can say. We had one machine gun company

just to the north of us, Vickers machine guns. They had three Vickers machine guns. They were fantastic weapons, they were deadly weapons the Vickers guns. And the Japanese put their men ashore in front of those guns and they just piled them up on the beach. God knows, hundreds of them. We shot them and shot them and shot them. I didn’t see this, I only heard of it of course later on. I didn’t hear it. Where we were we had

big barbed wire and quite a lot of barbed wire and it was above high tide and they all landed at about three-quarter high tide. They started to splash ashore and that’s when we got stuck into them with our rifles. No other arms only rifles they, we were and I think perhaps forty rifles

shooting at once is probably more deadly than one machine gun because each one is aimed, each round of ammunition is aimed at one place. We saw quite a few Japanese laying on the wire. Saw one up on the side of the volcano. He started to play his bloody bugle, what a fool he was eh? He must’ve been dead by the time he hit the bottom. Everybody shot him.

But the most memorable feeling I s’pose I’ve had, is fear. And if you’ve talked to any of these people my age about these sort of things, and they told you they didn’t have any fear, they’re bloody lying. You can’t help fear. You’ve got it all clawing up inside you like a bloody snake. You get

the fear. You’ve got to live with it, you’ve got to overcome it but it’s there, all the bloody time. You see all these boats and barges and lights and people flashing and I don’t know, trying to kill you, you’ve got to get fear. We were also mind you, we were all 18, 19 just years of age and you’re not real men yet you know. Nowadays they call them boys. But that was, the worst of it that night anyhow.

Come daylight mostly it was just aircraft bombing and strafing, bullets flying. And we used to hide, they couldn’t see us.

Just when we got the message from the CO, “every man for himself.” Every man for himself means we’re getting out, we’re going. Not where the Japs can find us anyhow.

So we headed south, from the south we went into the Baining Ranges.

Well the people who went to the north coast had a good run, got plenty of plantations. They had good officers that stopped and helped. They were helped in many ways, small boats, lots of ways they were helped.

The ones who went to the south coast, once they got past Tol, a certain Major Owen took over then and he looked after me, he was a good officer, he commanded them and he kept them in order. We went up over the mountains, into the mountains and we were bloody near dead by the time we got out of the mountains. We were on our own, officers were gone, everybody was in front of us. So every time we come into the village to get anything to eat there’d been 120, 150 men in before us,

we were getting the dregs of what was left. That’s why it was a bad decision.

I didn’t know him personally of course. He was a, to me no good. He might’ve been a good bloke I don’t know, but as far as I was concerned his orders were no good and therefore I didn’t trust him. Don’t trust any officer since.

Or very rarely. I thought it was the most disgusting order to give young men. Good Lord, couldn’t imagine anything worse. That’s being abandoned isn’t it.

He might have been fair dinkum about not wanting to lose any more men, I don’t know. But if he was he should’ve gathered them up and surrendered in a group, in a unit.

He surrendered himself with other blokes, with big red tags on his chest and everything to say he was an officer and he surrendered with dignity and was treated with dignity. It was okay for him, nobody else though.

Well it was the shortest way to Australia.

I don’t really know. It was safer because there was no chance of finding Japs there. We were getting away from the Japs. We didn’t know any of the tracks down the other way, we didn’t know any of the tracks where we were going but we didn’t know where the other places led to, or whether there was any Japs on the coast down below us or not. There could’ve been, we didn’t know.

Only hours I guess, because they were ashore by now and where were we? 250 yards from the shore. So we didn’t have much time to make up our minds to go anywhere. I think we’d left it too late to go down the coast anyhow because the coast road, was around past where they were anyhow. It had to be caught.

Everybody else was caught anyhow.

Well we had a bottle of Scotch Whisky and a tin of pea soup. And the first night out we opened the tin of soup and had a teaspoonful of soup each until the soup was empty. That was our

night’s meal. For breakfast the next morning we had water and for lunch and dinner that night we had water until we, three days later we got into this bathing river, this Molonglo. And when we got down that river we had a glass, not a glass, a spoonful of whisky each and I don’t think it done anything for us but we thought

it did. We had a couple of spoonfuls of whisky before it run out, then we smelled the beef cooking. That was good.

I don’t know that we talked about much at all. The talking points mainly were “Christ that’s a high bloody hill,” or “Thank god that’s gone,” or “Do you think we should

cross this river here or go up further?” “Wonder where can we find a coconut?” or if we came across it, “Good tucker coconuts, you know.” “I don’t think these bloody Japs are going to find us now, but can we find anything else?” We were lost, we were, I don’t know there was much more we talked about, mostly about food or lack of it.

What we would do when we got one, had a feed.

I suppose about my age, 19 or 20. I turned 19 the day we were rescued, so I was 18. That was a big birthday present that little boat picking us up at that plantation.

Well, yes I think there might’ve been a leader or two. I think they used to take a bit of guidance from me in a way because I had worked in the bush and I knew the bush a fair bit and I was able to able to take the fear of the

bush away from them. They didn’t know it was fear of the bush apart from me. I think that helped.

I worked in the Gordon and Franklin River systems before I joined the army.

No, no, no, no. Nothing only the knowledge that there was nothing to hurt you in the bush. Only the biggest

fear was fear itself, that’s all. The bush can’t hurt you, you’ve got to just be careful what you’re doing. That’s it.

Well once we got into the Baining Ranges and we got into the Warangoi, there was only one way you could go, down south. The only way the river runs, down to the sea. And when we walked

down to the coast and every time we come to a stream of course it run down to the coast. So if it was running from right to left we were going the right way. If it was running from left to right we’d turned around and were going the wrong way. All the water run downhill to the coast you see. Quite simple really.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Quite a few, carried on a bit. “Why the bloody hell didn’t we, we might as well bloody surrendered, we should’ve surrendered when we got the chance, now it’s too bloody late.” That sort of thing you know. But not many, it didn’t last for long.

Most of them withered up and passed away. The ones that rebelled against the situation didn’t last long. It was only the ones that accepted their lot and made the best of it that survived.

Usually they broke off in groups, yes. Two or three of them would go off on their way, nobody could keep them together.

They wanted to go and they went. Mostly, when the first big break up we had was when the whole lot of us were together, we had a meeting and decided it was too many to feed, 18 and we should break up into two groups of four, I mean nine. So the natives would have a chance of feeding us.

It stunk a bit, a lot of bad smells, when you’re in the worst part of the jungle there’s a lot of bogs. You know bog smells, bloody terrible wasn’t it?

In the swamps and that. There was a lot of mosquitoes and a lot of mosquitoes and sandflies, leaches, they were nasty them bloody leeches. Occasionally you’d smell a meal cooking and you’d “Bloody hell, where’s that?” And you’d find out it was an odour coming off a particular bush and some sort like that.

And you’d transform it into a meal. Wonderful imagination at times. If you got in a real bad patch of bush it was almost like night time, in the real thick of it. There were branches that thick you couldn’t hardly see because of the dark.

More good luck

than good management. Once again we relied on the creeks and streams. It wasn’t very very far from a stream there you know, there’s hundreds and hundreds of rivers and creeks running into the sea. Has to be because it never stops bloody well raining in the joint, well in the summer time anyhow.

I never met much. I don’t think there was any possums in New Britain. Cuss-cuss and wallabies. I don’t think there are any wallabies. We seen cuss-cuss, that’s a type of possum. Nothing you’d be frightened of, no other animals as such, to fear. Wild pigs occasionally. Oh bloody pigs, I forgot about them. There was bloody pigs,

they’re the worst of the lot. They are something to fear.

I did try as a matter of fact, pigs one time. We were on the beach and there was an old hut and we’d stopped here and we were going to shelter for the night in this old hut see. And next thing we knew we heard bloody pigs coming down to the beach and we thought by gee we’ll have one of them. So we opened up

a few coconuts, and spread a trail of coconuts under the floor of this hut, had a couple of bloody big sticks there then, I said to them “the first pig that comes under this hut we’re going to whack him then,” you see. Well we were unlucky, the first one that come in was this big bore. And we broke this stick over his back and he never even felt it, but it frightened the hell out of him. He took off out of the hut and knocked over all this stuff out from under the hut and it fell over. We fell over, the hut fell over, the whole thing it all fell over and we got no pig. It had gone. They had tusks on them, their teeth,

big.

Yes. That would be the first real laugh I think we had because it was really funny.

Well at that time no trouble because it was so humorous what had happened you see. We laughed at ourselves more than anything else because we knew how stupid we’d been trying to kill him anyhow.

When you’re desperate you try anything.

I wouldn’t say there was much humour at the time. No.

Yes, I’d say it was yes. It lets you put a bit of perspective back into your life.

Without humour I s’pose life’s pretty dull. But I think monotony was the worst bloody thing we had to worry about, monotony all the time. You get up you walk, you lay down, you get up you walk, you lay down, that’s all it is. You lay down, where did you lay down? In the bush, under a tree or under a bank or somewhere and then you’re fighting the bloody mosquitoes or the sandflies all night.

And then you get an attack of malaria and you’re shivering and shuddering for 24 hours or so. You get over it and then off you go again, the same thing over and over again. It’s not much to laugh about, not much.

Yes.

Well if there was anything to cover them with we covered them up, if not we didn’t. What could you do?

You could pat them on the shoulder and say sorry mate, you’ve got malaria. That’s about all you could do.

Oh yes, yes. We didn’t walk away from them. I mean you knew that it’d only be a day and they’d be with you.

I told you, I said it was a beautiful plantation. All the points, low level points of land that had been cleared and planted with trees, coconut trees and a plantation house sitting there overlooking the ocean, and different houses behind it, the store rooms, fowl houses, native quarters.

I suppose there was a store there really, I never saw it but there probably was a store there as well. And the young coconut trees impressed me more than anything, the fact that they’d planted so many young trees and they were keeping on planting all the time. Here they were knocking all the bush back and planting the coconuts. They were taming the country really as it went along.

Members of the 2/22nd Battalion, AIF.

Welcome, they didn’t say go away, nothing like that. Oh no, they said “Welcome,” I mean what could we do. “You want to join us, you’re quite welcome to join us if you want to.” No, no, no they didn’t, they’d never kick us away or kick us out or anything like that. But we just felt uncomfortable.

And that’s a feeling you can’t do much about isn’t it?

We were chocolate soldiers in amongst real men. That’s the way it was.

Well, there was a few WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s,

and a few pigs and a few goats all around this plantation and they were catching them and killing them and getting a feed out of them. They said the natives were supposed to have the pigs, but they weren’t wild pigs, they were domestic pigs just let loose. And the goats were the same, they were domestic goats just let loose and they were running around the bush and they were catching the goats and living off them.

That’s when we said “No, we’re not going to join them, we’ll go away again.” They couldn’t give us any meat to take away because there wasn’t quite enough to feed themselves anyhow. But they helped us out with a few coconuts each, but they didn’t give us too many coconuts because if you give a man a green coconut in those circumstances it was like giving him a chocolate. They were marvellous food and drink.

Milky drink and a real, you can pull a coconut and get it out now. Just put your finger like that and your thumb nail and you scoop the green coconut meat out like that, beautiful. But we couldn’t catch, climb the trees.

We decided to wait til night. We were just going to wait til night

and just on the edge of the bush and then move on the next day.

There was no camp.

There was a flat up like that, the trees stopped at the plantation, there was no young coconut trees there, the young ones all went up the coast.

Then started the bush, not the jungle, the bush. And on the edge of the bush was where we stopped and we just lay there because underneath it was a shelter. It wasn’t raining, there was a breeze coming from off the ocean, but there was a shelter from the breeze and comfortable more or less, a bit of bush to lay on. It wasn’t often you got a bit of light bush. We decided to lay there and bunk down for the night. No such thing as a camp

or anything like that, you just lay down in the bush.

About a quarter mile I s’pose, from the house back to where we were.

Quite well hidden when things started to happen, we never moved, we just, they would’ve had to come looking for us to find us.

Well we could see out over the Tol, we looked out over the bay and over the water’s edge, and saw where the barges land, the sea barges. We saw the troops come ashore, we knew then it was too late for us to move anywhere. And then they gradually rounded up the troops and took them into the plantation house. Apparently what happened in the plantation house, they quickly

took all their, took everything off them. They took any religious symbols they had, their religious symbols, they took them off them, their crosses or anything like that they wore, pulled them off them. And as I said tied them up into groups and took most of them out, some that night some the next day. Started shooting them.

You couldn’t, there was no roads as such. Tracks mainly. You could travel up and down the coast on tracks, the main tracks, so we were crossing into the river where they come to the rivers, so you could crossed the river. The Tol Plantation, there were no tracks as such around from the plantation, but as you go towards the river, it would come together and form a track over the river.

That’s all.

There was a track, a bit of a road from the beach where they landed up to the house.

They surrendered, they surrendered. They didn’t want to go anymore, they’d had enough. They surrendered. They had dropped pamphlets from the air

at what’d it say? The men on this island, surrender at once. If you do so you’ll be treated well as prisoners of war. If you don’t you’ll be shot on sight. Signed the Japanese Commander in Chief. Very reasonable.

We wouldn’t have surrendered anyhow, we wouldn’t surrender under

any circumstances, we said “We’d never surrender. Bugger them, we don’t trust them.” Our distrust was well and truly placed wasn’t it? We didn’t trust them at all, we just wouldn’t have a bar of them. And if you want to know the bloody truth, I still won’t have a bar of them. I still distrust them.

Just laying there watching it. We weren’t standing, we were laying there watching it. We could see out under the shrubs, watch the boats land, the barges and saw the troops coming ashore. And the men coming in and surrender, we could see that going on. We couldn’t hear it, we were just too far away to hear it.

I don’t really know there’s much more I can tell you. You see a thing and you can’t describe the detail any further. There wasn’t much more detail to describe.

Well it was afternoon when they come in.

It was morning when we first started to see them doing any damage.

First thing we saw was when we actually saw a group being shot.

Just with an ordinary Japanese 25 isn’t it? 25 calibre rifles.

Anywhere, they shot them wherever they could hit them. They took six bullets a gun but that didn’t make any difference. Sometimes they bayoneted them.

Bastards. All I ever wanted to do from then on was kill Japanese.

We were whispering.

“The rotten bastards. What did they do that for?” That’s all we could say.

With fishing line, fishing line. Two or three of them escaped from that. In fact one bloke was shot three times or five times in the shoulder, in the right shoulder from there up to there, a row. And he got away, he did.

I did, yes.

Down the track further, with the 22nd Battalion blokes, him and Bill Cook and another bloke I didn’t know.

I just asked them about it, talked to them about it and told them where we were. And they said “Good on you mate, that’s all you could do.”

No they were with the 2/22nd

Battalion. We just met up and then we parted again.

There was a only a, Major Holden kept him alive I think, the 2/22nd Battalion CO that formed up with them.

No.

I don’ t know how they could’ve done.

For about three days we were there. It wasn’t going on all three days, it’s just that we were frightened to move for three days.

There was only eight of us at this time you know and we just sort of talked amongst ourselves slowly, quietly.

We didn’t have to whisper because we weren’t that close to them.

Well we decided that if we didn’t move we were going to die anyhow because we were getting hungry, we had no food. We’d been three days and we’d had a feed and then we thought if we didn’t go on it’d be too late, we wouldn’t be able to go on.

Towards evening, not dark, just towards evening. The Japanese had gone, the barges had gone. We just cleared off ourselves, we went straight down to where we knew the river started. We went down straight to the river to get a big drink and that’s what we done.

They had moved on but we didn’t know, they’d still left a few patrols behind them. We didn’t know that until we saw these three fellows in the river, that they killed them there too.

Oh yes, carefully.

We didn’t know they were doing that, it was just a few hundred yards.

We hid in the river that time, in the reeds at the back of the river. I tell you what, that’s an awful, nasty feeling too because the old pook-pook might jump up behind you, the crocodile. He might come up behind you while you lay there too, between the devil and the deep blue sea.

They used to call them pook-pooks.

Only about two hours there.

Not very often no.

You’d see one every now and again but not very often. They’re pretty cunning bloody things you know.

Yes, but we were at the stage where it didn’t matter any more. We just had to go and find some food and that was all there was about it. We didn’t have food.

You couldn’t help it, if there was a crocodile there you couldn’t help it could you, just too bad.

About four or five altogether.

Bloody shocking. Here the yelling and next thing you know they’re gone.

Always the one at the back. Always.

Yes.

Nothing you could say. “For Christ’s sake, let’s go. Let’s get going.” That’s all you could do.

Well, we’re not good gatherers and hunters are we, Australians as a rule? Those, some of the black fellas can, but not many white Australians are good hunters and gatherers. We depended mainly on the natives for help. In one village alone the luluai or Head Chief

gave everybody the part shell pumpkin. I know it doesn’t sound much but if a pumpkin was a hundred and fifty bucks, we treated it as if it was a hundred and fifty pumpkins, and that was more than he had to spare anyhow. So that was pretty good you know. I don’t know whether a pumpkin’s got much life in it or not, but when you’re hungry, you can eat a pumpkin, or a bit of pumpkin.

You cook it over the fire and scratch the burnt bit off the outside and enjoy it.

Yeah, we didn’t light fires out in the open much. We didn’t have any matches and we’d take care of our fire sticks all the time. Of course you know what a fire stick is? You’ve got to keep it moving all the time, the whole time you’re walking,

to keep a fire stick alight. And we were stopping, sometimes you could only walk for three hours because you were too tired and your fire’d go out anyhow, so you’d light a fire have another rest then.

You’d get tinder of palms. Coconut palms are the lifeblood of the country you know. You get a bit of palm frond and put the frond across the palm and blow

the firestick into it and you’ve got a fire.

With great difficulty. We learnt to speak a bit of pidgin English, most of the coastal natives can speak Pidgin English. They are very

very fast talkers. While you’re saying one word they’ll say five, you know? A work that for you or me takes a long time to say in pidgin they’ll say very quickly because they speak so quickly. We learned after a while, how far this place? We’d say “How far this place?” “It be a long way too much?” means it’s a very long way away. So you walk towards it for a week you say “How far this place?” “It be long way,”

means you’re getting a bit closer. Then when you’re “a long way lick lick,” means it’s a little long way, so it’s not that far. You’re getting closer all the time. You know there’s a river down there, you always knew there was a river in front of you because somebody’d tell you it was such, you’d know there’s a river down there. So “Where’s this village?” “It’s topalong habi come,” it’s the river’s on this half, “topalong habi go,” is on the other side of the river. And

you learned to talk to people that way. “What time is it?” “Oh, time long kaikai,” it’s nearly time to eat. Kaikai is the easiest type of, it’s straight, the entire speech. You learned to talk a little bit you know.

Well

we could hardly believe what we saw. He cut his wrists and bled to death. They tell me it’s a painless death, you just go to sleep that’s all. But it made us realise the situation we were in. We were even more determined to keep on now than we had been. Grateful,

because we knew if we’d stayed too long with Slim we’d have all died. So there was a lot of mixed feeling.

Oh well no, there was five or six of us were all within in the area where Slim had a hut. There were some huts on the side of the road you see, side of the track, old village. We’d left Slim in one of them for a bit of privacy to

air his legs. We went in in the morning to give him a drink of water and look after him. We found him then.

We done nothing, he’s still there. What could we do? Throw him in the river. Folded his arms across his chest,

covered him over and left him. What did we do with anybody who died? We left them. No matter what the reason was.

Yes. The most common words was the Lord’s Prayer.

Lord’s prayer. Lord’s prayer.

That was all we knew.

Anybody that felt like it. They’d say “We’re going to say a word or two for old” so and so and his mates would say something and that’d be it.

After they’d left, after we’d left them? Yes. We’d also talk about it, we’d say “Well,” in Slim’s case,

“Oh you’re a bloody hero.” That’s what we thought, that’s what we said.

Oh he stayed, he’s still on my mind hey? Sixty years later and he’s still on my mind. I can still see him. You don’t forget that. Don’t forget those

things, how could you? I still have nightmares sometimes. That’s stupid isn’t it?

Being chased. Where I’m being chased or I’m chasing. Japanese. We used to go to a respite centre in Brisbane, my wife and I.

And they had a habit of inviting Japanese students to the respite centre, to see what they do with old people, they like to know what, how to handle old people you see. And there’d be always one amongst them, a nice lot of fine looking young people, there’d always be one that looked one of them bloody Japanese that I knew. Always one. It’d

bring the whole lot back to you.

Oh horror, you didn’t say, didn’t say anything or do anything. It’s 60 years on, how could you, these poor kids hadn’t even been born. Can’t blame them for their parents or grandparents can you?

No, not really. Not really. Just occasional dreams you know. Back home, they’re crazy you’re dreams. Sometimes we’d do silly dreams like people were sending gum leaves in letters, right, and they’d save them up until we had all these of gum leaves and then we’d light a little fire and burn the gum leaves. Well that can make you dream, you start having trips everywhere

with that. Gum leaves burning.

No.

Probably 30 years ago.

Something triggers you off, a particular story or a happening or a memory like seeing a young Japanese man. I’ll probably have a few after I’ve talked to you.

I guess I feel a bit despondent in the morning sometimes and I do feel depressed occasionally. I’m not very good company sometimes, am I boss? I’ll be good if I can do that unpicking for her no problem. Yeah.

But, different funny dreams. They don’t mean much either. Quite often you dream about things you know nothing about, you know.

Yes. Running away.

In the bush, in the bush. Always the bush.

Never anywhere else. And I’m not getting anywhere, and I’m not going anywhere, and I don’t get anywhere and nothing ever catches me. I’m just there. In the way.

No.

Not much. No. We used to try and forget it all. Main thing we’d talk about was where the next feed was coming from.

No. It’s a strange thing that isn’t it?

No you don’t, you can’t. They’re there and you can’t get them out. It’s best not to try I think, it only makes it worse.

I think they made me a better person. Well I’ve never deliberately harmed anything since the war, I’ve never killed for pleasure or fun, anything at all since the war. The only thing I’ve killed is fish or things to make a living. I don’t kill birds, I don’t kill anything any more I never could.

I don’t like killing. It’s a bad thing, I feel. I’ve never lifted a hand to my wife and we’ve been married 50 years next fortnight. Fortnight isn’t it love? I’ve been married for 50 years and I’ve never lifted

a hand to her, only to touch her with pleasure. I hate it when I hear of people harming their wives and children. It’s bad.

From Rabaul? I came back an angry young man. Then I joined the army again, I wanted to try and kill some more Japanese. So I must have been a stupid and angry young man.

Only that we were shooting at them and they were shooting at us. But they were at a disadvantage in as much as they were coming up the beach that was protected with wire net, it was barbed wire and there was just so many of them that some of them had to keep coming.

And I don’t know how many we killed, I wouldn’t know whether I killed one or fourteen, I wouldn’t know. Don’t want to know. Just something that happened, but I wouldn’t know.

At the moment?

At that moment? Fear. Still fear.

Yes, only in as much as that I’d wished I’d killed more. I’ve never regretted it, never regretted it. No. I suppose you should but I can’t, I can’t regret it.

As I say I believe I’ve become much more of

a gentler person. I have very, very few ill thoughts about anybody. I would never harm a person of any description, now. I’m a little twerp, a little, just a little sicko, I’m a softie. Can’t help that.

Because I see what being a bastard can do to a man and I don’t want to be like that. Too late now anyhow isn’t it? I can’t be like it now. I’m only me.

Oh yeah, I can tell you, I could show you how I stole it if I could get it out of the water. It was a very small canoe, a little outrigger, lakatoi, is what you called them. The natives used to always

pull them up on the beach away from the high tide of a night. And this was a pretty high style of living we were in too they didn’t want us much. They were, each mature coconut tree drops coconuts, right. So we went around and gathered up as many coconuts as we could find under the trees and put them in the canoe. It was only about ten or eleven feet long this little canoe and about that wide.

And we skidded off the sand into the ocean and off we went. Pitch black dark. Of course it’s never dark on the water, you can always see the land from the water. But we just kept going up the coast.

It was desperately hard. Canoes

are hard to steer and when one’s almost blind and can’t see and he’s got the paddle, you’re left with the responsibility of steering it all the way as well as paddling you’ve got to steer, and it bloody near kills you. It was south-east. You know Eric when you’re up there and the south-easters are blowing, they’re quite a breeze even through the night. Yeah. And

we got to the point of a river mouth, where a creek runs so we could go into it. We needed to have a spell, we couldn’t keep paddling day and night. We’d go in and split up a coconut and have a feed and go up in a creek somewhere.

Wanting to catch that boat. We wanted to catch that boat lad, wanted the boat. She was the lifeline. That’s what we were walking for all these months,

to find. Yeah.

That’s a funny question. Because there was nothing I didn’t want to get back to. I wanted to get back to it all. I wanted to go home. I didn’t have a home but I wanted to go home.

I called Ron, my brother Ron’s place home for quite a while. And I guess that’s what I wanted, to get away from everything else and be alone again. Safely alone. I was a very lonely man,

for several years I never mixed much, never went anywhere much.

I think it might have been, I think it might’ve been. See it wasn’t only just Rabaul,

there was other places after. Quite stupid isn’t it really. Whole bloody issue was stupid. What’s cured by making war? What is cured? What’s cured by terrorists blowing up the Twin Towers in America?

Or the fellas invading Iraq, or what’s secure, any of it? It only makes enemies. Stupid life, stupid people. Oh well, nothing I can do about it.

Oh boy. We didn’t sing, couldn’t sing. I said to Reg, “She’s still here, mate.” He said “Is she?” I said “Yep, she’s still here.” He said “Thank Christ.” He was finished, Reg was finished. If we hadn’t have found that boat that night he’d have been dead the next day I reckon.

Reg Oxley, from Queenstown in Tasmania. Yeah. I didn’t know him pre-war. But we got to know one another in the end I think.

Then when we met up on the track coming down we got together and we stayed together. We made friends then.

I’d like to say lasting but it’s not. We were parted

somewhere along the way during the latter stages of the war, we parted. We’ve never met since. I don’t know way or why or where he is or anything about him. And yet I would’ve given my life for him at one stage. And I think he’d have given his for me, funny isn’t it. I don’t know whether they’re shallow,

feelings, or what they are. I hope not. We spent a lot of time in hospital together in Tassie, I think that’s when we sort of drifted apart because life become so easy and comfortable again then.

We’d play euchre for money. It’s a very very fast game when you play for money.

Yeah. We paddled it to the little jetty at Malmal

and they took, they lifted us out. We couldn’t get out, they lifted us out of the canoe onto the wharf and then they carried us up to the plantation house, they washed us. It seemed to be the first thing anybody done when they could was wash you. Must’ve stank I reckon. No, they washed you and bathed you and gave us some soup and a cigarette and then carried us down to the wharf and

we walked on board the boat. And that was it.

No, no wasn’t bit afraid. I don’t know why because, I s’pose I reckoned because I was on the boat going home that we were going home, nothing would happen. But it was three or four weeks before the boat got to the Coral Sea and Rabaul was the main port for the Japanese. It was full of ships and aeroplanes going up and down

there all these past here where we were, up and down, there must’ve been thousands of them going up and down there all the time. They never saw us. Never saw us. Never saw us. Why they never saw us I don’ t know. But they never saw us. That’s why I wasn’t frightened you see, I knew they wasn’t going to see us. I don’t know why but I just wasn’t frightened any more.

On the Lorabana? There’s not much to tell we just ate and drank and ate and slept and ate and slept and ate and drank. And we looked at the sailors, there was about five sailors on board and they were always looking around, “I wonder what’s wrong with that bloke, he doesn’t look very happy.” They knew what to expect, we didn’t know.

Well it was soup you see, it was marvellous stuff. I don’t know whether it was just tins of bully beef or whatever but whatever it was it was very good.

And they took us down to Port Moresby. We were allowed to send a telegram when we got along the south coast of New Britain, New Guinea, to our next of kin. And I sent mine to my father, he was my next of kin. Of course he never got it did he, he was in the bush somewhere. So nobody got it. They all thought we were dead.

My brothers thought I’d been and died. And then when I got to Cairns I sent him, Ron a coming home, arrive Cairns today broke please wire a fiver. I had a fiver back that day.

I had a fiver back that day, a fiver was five pounds. It was quite a bit of money in those days.

Sad, that was all. Just sad. Wished they were with us. That was all, what could you do? What could you do.

Never. Nobody ever.

No. What it was like at Rabaul, what use was coastal guns or anything, nobody asked that ever or anything.

Yeah, I would like to have told them.

I would like to tell what a useless idea it was to put coastal guns up at a place when you needed (UNCLEAR) against aeroplanes. But that was it, nobody wanted to talk about it.

Yes.

A few shacks.

(Eric: Oos)

There’d been no damage to… A bit of damage to them.

(Eric: Oos)

Not very much.

Not much. One wharf coming, one wharf, the Macdhui was the boat we got on in Port Moresby to come back to Australia. Well she was sunk the next trip back in Port Moresby. So there was a bit of activity in the area. It might have been like Rabaul you see, the Japs never bombed Rabaul.

They wanted to use it, they never bombed it. So they might’ve thought like that in Port Moresby, they mightn’t have wanted to damage the port until they found out they couldn’t get it. It’s probably what it was.

(Eric: Oos)

They didn’t actually land at Port Moresby, they (UNCLEAR) on to Macdhui

On to Macdhui, yes. But they never went ashore.

Well, we had, I had no clothes as you know and so we were given pyjamas. Didn’t have any clothes.

No, no. I had a bit of rags wrapped around me, a lap-lap but no boots or socks or anything like that.

They gave us pyjamas and they let us wash, every time we wanted a wash we could go and have a bath but it was salt water, seawater. It doesn’t wash you very well even with seawater soap. So when we got to Cairns they took us up into the town and turned us loose. First thing we done was I went to a Barber and got me hair cut because I didn’t have a hair cut for months you see.

And when he started to peel it back it was filthy. Oh Jesus didn’t you feel ashamed of it when he showed us. Didn’t you feel ashamed of it when he showed us. But the barbers cut it and then they shampooed us. Oh made us feel bloody normal again, human beings. And they gave us all a toothbrush and toothpaste each. Oh they looked after us marvellously, they were wonderful.

He said, we had two or three days there, they took me out to a cane plantation for a night to meet the people. And they took me for a walk through the local, their own vegetable garden and fruit garden that they kept for the house. And I saw these big long beans and I said what are

these? They said “They’re cascara.” “Oh,” I said “What are they?” They said “Haven’t you tried them?” I said “No.” They were bloody cascara beans. Jeepers, that’s bloody nice that is. Makes you go to the toilet.

Makes you go to the toilet. That’s something I didn’t need.

Pretty low. I was still with malaria every second day. I had two kinds of malaria, benign

and malignant. Well why wouldn’t you, sleeping with the mosquitoes all the time. I don’t know what other things we had, I’ve still got no idea.

The army, that’s all I know. Who were, there’d be nobody of our mob,

none of our units or anybody so it must’ve been somebody in charge of the ship, somebody in charge of the troops on the ship. And they decided what was going on, they were going to send us south on a train. But they decided we were too sick to go by train so they kept the ship for a couple of days then sent us down by ship to Sydney. Which was great, we thought, because we lived like kings on the ship.

They fed us whenever we wanted it, the crew looked after us like we were bloody sore toes. Beautiful it was. And when we got to Sydney it was dark. And a few of us decided we’d go for a walk, so we walked up this big flight of stairs and there was this bugger out in the middle of the road, there was two or three of them there taking money off of cars. We walked over there and said to them “What are you doing taking money off of cars like that?” He said “It’s the toll.” “What toll? What’s a toll?”

He said “Tol for the bridge.” I said “What bridge?” “Bloody hell, you must be mad mate, the Sydney Harbour Bridge here.” We were up on the Bridge and we didn’t know they were taking toll money for the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Jesus.

We only there the one day.

Only there the one day. Got off the ship, taken over to the Victoria Barracks, processed according to the army,

given a bill for our weapons.

I was given a bill for my uniforms, clothing, weapons and anything else the army thought I owed them for they gave me a bill for it. And I tore it up and threw it to the officer that gave it to me. I said “Send me home, I’m not going to talk to another officer here.” And he believed me too because he put me on the next plane to

Melbourne.

He was horrified, but he still put me on the train to Melbourne.

No, I wouldn’t talk to them. That didn’t worry them, they didn’t know anything anyway. I had nothing more to do with them. We went to Heidelberg [Repatriation] Hospital in Melbourne where we had a bit of fever.

Two or three days after that I got a ship to Tassie and went into hospital in Hobart.

Off and on about ten or eleven months. I’d go, be in the hospital, get well and they’d discharge you cured. Of course you don’t cure malaria like that.

Anyway, I’d go somewhere and about four days later, back in again with malaria again. I don’t know how you cure malaria but they done it with Atabrine in the finish I think. And proper looking after. They put me in a rest home, Maggie Clarke Memorial Rest Home in Claremont in Tassie and they looked after us like sore toes.

They gave us proper medicine whenever it was needed, on the hour or hourly whenever it was needed, good food, first class food and rest, sleep whenever you wanted to. They really looked after us there. When I went there I couldn’t lift an axe up and when I left there I could chop wood all day, so they were good you know. I met a bloke there he was

from Goodenough Island. Do you know Goodenough Island? He’d been shot through the hand, this hand, it was all withered up like that, and he used to sweat all the time and he’d lost a leg and something else there, and he was at the rest home the same time as me and we become friendly. When we got a bit well they said “Well you can have the afternoon off if you like.” And we went off, we went off for a walk, him on his crutches and me on his right side. We got

just half a mile up the road and this old bloke out of his house called out “Hey are you blokes from the home there?” I said “Yes mate.” He said “Come and have a glass of cider with me.” Oh boy, we had about ten bottles of cider with him, we got rotten.

He wanted to be with some of the blokes from the home you see. He wanted to meet us and talk to us. He was a nice old fellow.

Just general things.

Not the war, he didn’t want to talk about the war, he wanted to talk about the home and what we thought of this and what we thought of that. He was just a nice old bloke. And when we went back to the home, a couple of hours late, we decided we’d sneak in so they didn’t know our shape you see, and our beds were on the veranda upstairs. We decided to climb up the veranda post, oh jeepers. His crutches too.

Somehow I got him on my shoulders, his arm hanging on to the post at the top, he dropped his crutch and the noise of the bloody thing was like ten zeroes going off. Of course the poor old Matron flew out and she said “What’s going on here?” And she saw us and said “You rotten sods, that’s the last leave you’re going to get from here.” And they took us up and put us to bed and looked after us. They were good. Yeah.

Not really, it was too long ago. Too long ago. I didn’t get real intimate with anybody you know. I don’t remember the nurses names, I don’t remember anybody’s names.

While I was in? Not there no.

When I was discharged from there I went to Brighton Army Barracks and I enlisted in the AIF then. I was finally an AIF soldier then. But I joined the Australian Water Transport, Army Water Transport. Because I thought if I’m going to get killed this is something that’s going to be quick, nice and clean and I’ll never have to walk around the bush. So I joined the water transport.

I wanted to kill some Japanese. And that was the only way you could do it, was to be in the services.

It didn’t seem to have changed. It didn’t seem as thought it had changed. Everybody stayed the same, they were friendly, nice people, they were good people.

No, I never noticed any change. The biggest difference was traffic, more traffic. All the time, traffic, traffic.

And Hobart had changed, trains had gone, had (slotted UNCLEAR) buses instead of trams, I didn’t think they were a very good idea. People were still the same, they were still the same people. They’ll never change I think, Tasmanian people will always be Tasmanians.

He got married not long after. A year or two after, but him and his lady friend were living together

and she had two boys and a girl. And the boys were, well I thought they were young buggers then but not much younger than me, it just seemed that way. And I s’pose when I was 20, Frank would’ve been 18, 15 or 16 wouldn’t he? So they were young. “How many Japs has he killed?”

“What’s the highest…” every bloody time you went home. They wanted to know how many Japs you killed and what was going on.

I used to just bluff them to shut them up, I said “724, call it quits.”

Three months.

Just relaxing mostly, no physical ex, no army drills or anything to do with it.

Nothing to do with army at all, just a complete and utter civilian lifestyle. No getting up and going anywhere you know, no having to do this, no having to do that, just do it because it’s a hospital sort of thing. Very good.

No. Never.

The army?

Hard to say. At that time they hadn’t no, no. At that time, nothing.

No. Only the hospital. But they wondered sometimes why I was in hospital. They’d say “you can’t get

malaria in Tasmania.” Couldn’t believe that you brought it home with you when you came.

Yeah. It’s hard to think now what it was like in those days but tropical medicine was unknown in those days you know.

I can show you my records there,

about every three weeks. It was intense, that’s after I’d been cured. I think I was treated, oh probably more often in that, I’d probably been treated 12 times in the ten months from malaria, in Tassie.

Well before I went into a convalescent home, I had an ambition to become a fitter and turner.

And I talked them into letting me go and do a course at the Technical College just opposite the hospital. I lasted one day then I got bloody malaria and I was back into hospital again and that was the end of that. So then I thought oh well, I’ll go do a Don R [dispatch rider] course. So I went up to Elson Camp and started a Donnar course. I knew it during the final days

tests to become a despatch rider than be there in a hospital. They’re very difficult to become a rider. It went on like that all the time, just, it wasn’t long enough. Three weeks, it wasn’t long enough. I couldn’t do anything.

In the home, they fixed me up.

They classed as a real convalescent home. Yeah they fixed me up.

With treatment, they used the proper treatment. They used to stay with it and didn’t give up just because I felt well today, they didn’t think you were cured, they kept on going until I was cured. They kept me for three months. The other people used to give me treatment and send me home cured, except I wasn’t cured.

I’d be back in there within a fortnight or three weeks. Not at the home, they kept me there and they kept me on medication for the whole three months and they cured me. I’ve never had malaria since.

I don’t think that anybody in Tassie had an understanding of malaria or some of its complications. For instance they gave me a, they used to try the new drugs on me, they tried one

called Plasmoquine. And about two or three days after they I started this program I got the most terrific stomach pains. I thought what the bloody hell is going on. I started to parts bits of my spleen in my water, the Plasmoquine was breaking up my spleen. So you know, a trial and error job that, they didn’t know, they didn’t know.

Because I didn’t want to die in the bush, I wanted to die at sea if I was going to die again. Very simple.

The Water Transport? That’s a very much misunderstood unit. They,

what did they do? They manned landing barges, they don’t have a marine no marine corps in the Australian army or navy, they done the work of the marine corps right? Marines, no marines, so they done the work of the marines. They done, they landed small ships, they carted goods and chattels all around the Pacific in small ships, they manned docks and landing barges, and they made liners, freighting lines, liners and something else, and sometimes we carried water to places that never had

any water. So they were quite, I went from Hobart to Borneo in a 300 tonne vessel. That’s what I mean by the Army Water Transport.

With the Water Transport?

Very little. I’d been a fisherman at some stage before the war, so that let me in and I joined up as it was in the Water Transport so they

employed me when I joined in Hobart. And I went into a building in a Hotel, Hobart Hotel. Boy that’s an experience I wouldn’t want to go through again. I went, you’ll have to forgive me this time because I never tell it like this in front of women but, I went to the hotel and reported with my gear to the

Captain in charge and he made me very welcome. I went into the bar, about six of the men were there and we got talking and we introduced everybody and we got real matey and talking away after a few beers, and I got drunk. Then they took me up and put me to bed. But what I didn’t know was that it was the Captain’s bed that they put me in. And I woke up and here was the poor old Captain was trying to do nasty things with me. So I thumped him.

That’s a no-no, you’re not allowed to hit a Captain in the army, but he wasn’t allowed to do what he was trying to do with me either. So the next day I was posted to a ship, as far away from the Captain as he could get me. But that’s one of the reasons why I feel a bit uneasy about homosexuals in the army you see. This homosexual captain, he had the power to ship me away overseas

and that’s not very nice really is it? What happens today, if you accuse a bloody officer, he can do anything to you can’t he? Ship you overseas or send you to purgatory, he can do what he likes.

I was shipped on a ship from St Helens in Tasmania, it had just been built, called the Argo. We helped finish her off actually.

When she was launched and fitted, we went cruising to Sydney. There lies another tale. Put her in dry dock in Sydney to be sheathed, the bottom sheathed, to protect her against the (terigie UNCLEAR) you know the ship worm, but she was forever laid in the dock and nobody seemed to do anything to her.

Week after week and I thought this is no good, I didn’t join the bloody army to sit in a dry dock, better take me out of this. So I joined a different unit, I was still in the Water Transport but I joined a holding company and we put land barges together and barges to go up north. Very interesting if you tow these barges down to the concrete docks, 300 tonners and 100 tonners. You lift 100 tonner out of the water and put it on top of a deck 1000 tonner,

then we have to tie them down you see, with a wire rope. Get them ready to make wire slings around them to tow them so we can tow them up north. It’s quite an interesting job. But I soon got sick of it, I started to feel very good now so I transferred to a small ships company. They sent me up to Brisbane. We mucked around up here in Brisbane, Comesley I camped at for a while in Brisbane,

Kangaroo Point and I met a mate of mine who was storing them up and getting them ready for shipping north. I thought well now you’re fit enough now you can get cracking so I asked for a transfer to a ship. They sent me down to Hobart to join this other ship at Hobart and we went to Borneo from there.

We’re getting along nicely now aren’t we? We’re coming from Tassie in smart time. She was a nice little ship that one.

Renina. She, oh we done a few things with her, we stopped at Salama for instance and two of the boys borrowed the motor dinghy

off the deck and went fishing with grenades. They got a bit excited and they started dropping, they dropped the bloody grenade in the boat and the pin over the side. When they realised what they had done they jumped over the side themselves. Of course the bloody grenade went off and they lost, it blew the boat up didn’t it. They had to swim back to the harbour with no dinghy. Silly buggers. Went on to Biak,

you heard of Biak have you? Do you know what went on in the area at all? Terrible things, terrible things happened in Biak. Americans were taken over not long after, before I got there. And the Japs had been sheltering in caves down underground and every now and then they’d sneak out and they’d kill a few Yanks and steal a few provisions and go back in their caves again you see. And the Yanks

said to “Well if you keep this up we’re going to knock you off.” So they left a note there for them: “if you don’t stop this, if you don’t surrender, we’ll kill you, we’ll burn you out, we’ll kill you. You’ve got to come out you can’t do this any more, we won’t have it”. They wouldn’t surrender so there was a big Japanese aerodrome at Biak and Japanese fuel, it wouldn’t suit American planes. So they poured drum after drum down these caves.

I don’t know how many drums and they set it on fire. No more Japs of course but what a bloody hell-hole it must’ve been down in that cave eh? Just to think that you can do that to men. You know? You could’ve bloody walked on me. Terrible business. I went up to Morotai there, we were a bit bored waiting for orders and things

and I was offered a ride over to Halmaheras in a high speed rescue boat, air force boat. I went over to the Halmaheras [Islands] and what did they do? They went up and down the coast, I don’t know how many islands there, shooting at any Jap camps they saw. So of course what happened, the Japs shot back didn’t they. They wouldn’t bloody well, I don’t know it was a stupid idea, getting shot just because you shot at them. So I wouldn’t go over there any more.

Halmaheras? Halmaheras? Near Morotai.

They were cruise boats and they used to just cruise up and down the coast and when they saw a Japanese camp, they’d shoot at it. And the Japs would shoot back. There’d be a good chance the Japs would shoot them wouldn’t there? I didn’t like that. Then we left there,

and this was when the war was ending and General MacArthur didn’t want Australians to be in the Philippines. He wanted them to be all American there. So he sent our people to do the dirty work in Borneo didn’t he? Sandakan and all those places. Brunei. And we were going across the Sulu Sea and

the, we bloody got a notice to say “Listen to this, this is a special warning, special orders. All hands listen to this,” so we listened. It was Japanese, Americans had dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima and the Japs had surrendered. We thought it was great until somebody said “Well don’t get too happy because some of the units of the Japanese navy have refused to accept it and they’ll still shoot you if they see you.”

So we still had to keep quiet and go sneaking in the dark. But when we got over to the Balabac Strait between Borneo Island and Banggi Island to the north of it, a big minefield. And there was a blink on the horizon: “do you want an escort through the minefield?” We said: “oh yes, we’d like”. So this Yankee ship come over and led us through this minefield. When daylight came he saw how big we was, didn’t he go crook. We wouldn’t have hit a mine in that minefield, we were too little for a mine.

But we thought it was safer with somebody guiding us.

How big we were, how big our little ship was, we would’ve safely gone over the top of the mines, they wouldn’t have bloody hit us. But we didn’t know that and we weren’t taking any risks. So we just put up with his abuse and we went home safely.

We were very pleased, very pleased indeed.

We cheered when we heard they’d dropped that atom bomb, we were very pleased. Saved hundreds of thousands of lives. And our biggest trouble was that they took our boat off us when we got to Labuan and gave it to the Indians. And I was given a work boat, this little 40 foot

work boat. I done a few trips up and down the Island, down to Miri and those places and we used to pick up our servicemen from Borneo, from Singapore, they’d been on the Mimatinae Railway and they dropped them over to us and then we give them a bit of a holiday, a bit of a rest in the hospital and then take them on home to Australia. That was a worthwhile job.

Shocking, bloody disgraceful. Just skin and bones. A terrible mess. Some of them died before they got home after we’d left them there. Terrible mess.

Yes, but even worse than that I was then put in charge of some POWs [Prisoners of War], for the War Crimes Trials. I used to go

and pick them up from different places then take them back and take them on to trial. I used to look at them and say “Well you were one of the bastards that murdered people.” You know. One bugger was a doctor and he’d been experimenting on prisoners without anaesthetic, you know. See what he could do to them without killing them. All sorts of awful things.

I hated it, I disliked it intensely. But, I didn’t bloody well spear any Japs, I kept them alive until I got them there as much as I wanted to.

Yes. Yes it was. As I say,

I’ve learnt a bit of self control. I’d gotten over my fear of women by this time too.

I don’t know, I grew out of it I s’pose. And I was in Miri, that was the capital of Sarawak in those days and I went to a street theatre,

beautiful girls on the stage, holy mackerel they were beautiful. And a little bloke tugged on me uniform, he said “Hey, hey.” I said “What?” “Do you like them?” “Oh yes, they’re beautiful.” “They’s boys.” “What?” He says “All boys, all actors on Chinese stage is boys not girls.” Well I felt sorry about that, I went and got a cup of coffee to console myself, it was terrible feeling for these girls and they were all boys.

But, later on a deck hand and I went to shore again and we picked up a couple of prostitutes and then we went back to their camp where they applied their trade and they said “No, nothing, you don’t do nothing here, have a drink of coffee and a biscuit with us. That’s all.”

How’s that for doing business with? “They made it here, the women here for years with Japanese and we’re not clean girls.” They wouldn’t have anything to do with us. I thought that was marvellous. Yeah, wouldn’t earn any money with us because they didn’t want to give us any diseases. I thought that was pretty good. First time I ever

got myself all geared up, all fired up with strength and bigger. Nobody would. Funny hey? Oh well, such is life.

I always had a lot of respect for them.

I had respect for the Malays, respect for the natives in New Guinea. I had respect for all of them. They’re different to me. They had different standards and all but that doesn’t mean they’re not just the same people inside, they are. They had different ideas in many ways, their standards are different, hygiene wise for instance,

their hygiene might not be anything like yours or mine but that’s because they don’t know any different. There were many things about them that are not the same, but it doesn’t mean that they’re not still good people.

No. And yet there were treated something shocking.

Some of them, there’s a book there Eric, somewhere. I can’t think which one it is, might be in Rabaul?

When, just before the war ended, the Australians had a unit in Borneo, an independent company and they were paying the Dyaks five

dollars a head for every Japanese head they brought in. Right? Come war’s end and I was helping with these prisoners of war, there was no gravel on Labuan only coral sand, they used to do all the roads in coral sand right. And the bulldozer used to bulldoze all this sand up in a heap and they used to get the Japanese POWs to shovel it into the truck.

And this Japanese officer refused, he said “I’m an officer, I will not shovel sand into your truck.” And he was a doctor, he’d been accused of all sorts of terrible things and the Sergeant in charge of him didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t very well do nothing to him so he saw these dyaks coming along the road and he called them over and he said to them “give this officer here a whack with a shovel will you

to make him do as he’s told.” So they give him a whack on the head and they chopped his head clean off and laughed.

Yes. I must say I wasn’t disappointed but I couldn’t have done it myself. The dyaks are powerful little blokes you know. Yes.

To cut a head off yes you wouldn’t believe it. You wouldn’t believe it. I’ve got some photos here, sketches a fellow gave me, charcoal sketches with a guy carrying along a head tied up with a bit of string through his hair.

They cheered. The rest of them worked.

Couldn’t get a better way to make them work, that’s for sure.

The Japanese worked, they, head down and tail up and shovelled sand. Made a difference, either shovel sand or get your lolly chopped off, so it’s better to shovel sand. They weren’t asked to do it very much, only about two hours a day or something like that.

Not to the Dayak but the Sergeant was reduced in rank, he got punished. But they couldn’t punish the Dyak because they’d been paying them up until now to bring the heads in.

Nup, nup, no. That was just finish, something finished.

Not much. Not much. Well we didn’t give them much chance, we’d pick them up at the jetty, put them on our boat and we’d go for a picnic to a sheltered spot somewhere. And we always had a bottle or two of beer we saved up for them and we’d go ashore and we’d have a picnic.

And they were, we had to carry them ashore. They would just lay back and enjoy the day, not the day, the few hours that they had with us and the beer, the bottle of beer was only one glass a man and they thought what a great life this is, should be more of it, that sort of thing. But they never talked about what went on before.

How long before they were going home, how they were going home, what sort of transport they were going in. Most of them flew home by aircraft, some went by ship. The ones that went by aircraft were pleased. We’d talk about whether they’d like to go fishing or whether they’d like to do something else. Then we’d start to pack up and go.

What I’d gone through was nothing compared to what they’d gone through you see. Yes I felt as though I was part of them but they didn’t know because when we were doing that I was chubby and fit and round as a fiddle. They couldn’t compare me with them.

About the future?

We were trying to talk about their family if we could. That was the best thing to talk about. Brothers and sisters or husbands or wives, any family you could talk about if that’s what they wanted

to talk about, how they’d be and where they’d go and what they’d do when they got there, how they’d changed. Some had had children that they’d hardly seen before they left and they’d be grown into little boys and girls now and they wanted to talk about them. And we listened more than talked. They really had a lot to talk about. A lot of reminiscing but it was always they reminisced about home, when they were going home,

where they were going to be when they got there.

Oh yes they all were. They were all sick, physically and mentally. But they were getting over it, with each good meal, with each kind act they were getting over it. When we’d take them back to shore that day, they couldn’t thank you enough for the

day out, they appreciated it so much. Yes. They needed, they needed kindness, that’s what they needed, it just meant such a lot.

Just to look after them and be good to them and help them wherever we could, that was all. We were never told what to do or how to do it.

Just to be good with them.

I enjoyed it, I wanted to do it. It’s the only thing that kept me in the bloody place, the war was over now and it seemed to me everybody else had gone back home. I was still up in that stinking place. That was the only good thing about it was that these few trips I had with these four POWs.

Yes I did. I felt important because I felt it was important for that. That was the first stage of rehabilitation wasn’t it? Or the second stage, they’d had the first stage when they first got out but now they were starting to get some of the milk of human kindness again, that was something they’d not been used to. I guess we were doing a good job in that respect.

No, no, no, no, no. I didn’t know any of them. The only one that I remember was my uncle. I went up to Auspin to see him and a notice on the notice board about the patients, and then I knew he’d been shipped home that day. He died on the way home. So they’re pretty sick when they die like that. You can’t save them.

Yeah.

Yes. Bewilderment mostly, how can this happen to me. Acceptance.

Defeat. That’s defeat in that, instead of the arrogant bloody look they had for years and years, they’d sit in the corner and never move, if you were told to sit there that’s where you sat. If you didn’t sit there, that’s where you sat. If you pointed to that that’s where you’d go. They weren’t the big men that they thought they were, poor buggers.

Not really. They all had different attitudes in life to you or me. For instance, I don’t know what you think or what you know, you’re a Christian, I take it you’re a Christian?

I’m a Christian. We’re all Christians here I think. Even Muslims, feel such and such, loss the way we do, true Muslims and there’s a love of fellow man, help for fellow man, that’s our creed isn’t it? That’s the way we’re brought up to believe to help, but they’re the other way around aren’t they? Bugger the fellow man, I am the fellow man.

So that was a difference.

No, I abandoned the Christian. I abandoned Christ. I thought he was not good.

He was, certain things happened that no good man would let happen. Of course I didn’t realise it wasn’t his fault, it was our fault it was going on. It took me a long, long time to realise that and I’ve forgiven him since then.

Yes, I never prayed or anything like that. Nup.

I’ve asked that myself and I can’t tell you. I’ve tried to think of it, you’ve heard mention David Lindfield, I thought for a while it was my experience in the bush and living a rough life, that had

helped me to escape but David escaped the same time as me and he’d never been out of Sydney. He’d been to private schools in Sydney and lived a life of luxury all his life and he escaped. So it wasn’t that was it? I don’t know what it is. I don’t know why it was. I can’t understand it. I don’t accept….

Well I think refusal to stop has perhaps something to do with it. Where I’d been a trier all my life I think, I’ve started different businesses and worked at them until they worked. Never give up. Never ever gave up so I guess that might have something to do with it.

Me personally? Not that I know of. I think there might’ve been. What they are I don’t know. I feel I’ve had my fair share of

illnesses in this age from 60 onwards and I don’t think I earned them all myself, I think some of them were given to me. What they were I don’t know.

Oh yes occasionally, I had dysentery. Yes. But I never was sick if you

know what I mean and I got complaints, but I never felt crook other than what was wrong with me. What was, if I had dysentery I knew that I had dysentery, if I had malaria I had malaria, I knew what it was. I never felt crook from something I didn’t know.

No that was my partner, my mate, Reg Oxley, he had conjunctivitis and that’s a pretty bad thing

with your eyes I believe.

All you could do was wash them in salt water, that was the only thing. If you was near the ocean, seawater. We tried to get in the ocean whenever we could as often as we could to bathe mosquito bites and leech bites and ants and nits and scratches

and tears. We tried to get in the ocean as often as we could. We felt the seawater had some healing effect.

You just sting and pull them off the leaches. They’re buggers of things you pull them off and they leave itchy spots on you.

Sleep? Very short patches all the time you know, sleep, sleep, sleep, little naps. You had to lay down under a shrub or something like that, it’d be raining and you’d get wet and you’d be, I’d wake up after a few minutes sometimes. Sometimes you’d sleep for an hour or two. We didn’t walk long days, we couldn’t walk long days, you were too tired, you just had to stop and sleep.

Right. I went to Strahan where my brother and his wife had taken up residence and we were travelling in a service coach

from Queensland to Strahan and there was four or five school children on the bus and my wife was one of them. So I met her when she was a schoolgirl. I’d just returned from the war. It’s not as bad as you think, I’m eight years older than her. So it was a few years before I got mixed up with her.

Just asked her who she was.

She told me. Asked the school kids who they were and that was it. And then…

No I was in the army still then. I went out to my brother’s home and he wasn’t there and his wife said “He’s down the bay going gold fossicking.” Told me where he was, he was with Dad and another brother, so I went down

and got put off at the beach where they were and I went back in and found them and they had just cleaned up a paddock with a nice bit of gold in it. Really nice gold. They said “Well you can come in with us if you like, be a partner.” I said “That’ll do me.” So right, I went back and got my discharge from Hobart and come back up to Dad to see him again, and that was all

the gold there was, they hadn’t found any more. So.

He said “I know where to look for gold, it’s not the underground it’s growing above the ground.” I said “What’s that?” He said “Huon pine, we should go and cut a bit of pine.” I said “right-oh mate.” So we went up the Franklin River and looked this stand of pine, he said “you’ll have to go and get a license to cut it because

you can’t just cut it anywhere now.” So I went to Hobart and got a license to cut pine and we started saw milling, logging.

Great. Great, it was great. We were friends, we felt like friends and we were friendly and it was good.

No, it still seemed to be the same. Change was still coming, it come not long after it started to change, but at that time it was still the same. It started to change say four or five years after the war.

Tassie’s a bit remote from the mainland and things that happen here don’t happen so quick down there.

We had become closer together. I was more sympathetic towards my father, the boys and my brothers were

more respectful of me. I can say that work, but I don’t know whether that’s the right word or not. We became a family which we had never really been before.

No. No way. He wouldn’t talk about his war and I never talked about mine.

We talked about pine and selling it and where to get it and where to go next, all sorts of things but not wars.

I’d assumed that he’d had problems yes.

I think so.

I think it might have done. I think it made him and I better friends. He understood more what it was like than the others did. He understood my feelings towards certain things and I think he was definitely more sympathetic to life than

the others. It’s a shared experience, which is a pretty rough experience to share.

Into life? I didn’t trust authority in any form.

I didn’t trust the government. I didn’t trust policemen. I didn’t trust anybody really, in anything. Forestry officers anybody, I had no trust in them and no respect either.

I had a fight with the Secretary of Forests because of the way they were treating me and the way I suspected they were treating me. And one morning I picked him up and stuffed him head first into the waste paper basket and that didn’t make me very popular. But they got a policeman to come in and do something about it.

And he listened to all sides of the argument and he said “I don’t think I’m really needed here,” he said “I suggest you give it a bit more understanding.” And he really put them on the right track. They understood really more what I was doing to them if anything and from that time on I got on all right with them.

It was so slow, so slow. It happened so slow the changes. I reckoned I’d never forgive the Japanese

but I more or less have. That’s taken 60 years. And I don’t know, I don’t know if it should really take that long, you should perhaps forget and forgive a lot quicker than that but I couldn’t.

I think so. I think, I’m not really sure. I think so.

I have tried to. I don’t hate all Japanese that’s for sure. Though there’s still a few I probably dislike especially when they do this hai har! and ho ho!, I could cut their bloody throats then.

Life would be pretty miserable if you can’t. I’d like to be forgiven for some of my sins. I’ve had sins that I should be forgiven about, I hope I will be forgiven. I wish and hope that I can forgive.

Better understanding of people I think. I’ve also got more religion now. I go to church now. I’ve accepted community life more now.

Yes.

I don’t know, I distrusted it. I distrusted almost everybody I distrusted.

My brother and my

one of my partners in the bush went fishing, cray fishing of the coast of Tasmania and we fished that for ten years and then I built, took over a cray fish processing factory and I managed that for about ten years. And then I sold that, no I didn’t sell it, I sold my shares in it and we

went to Queensland, Yeppoon, my family and I and.

Second time? At a dance. We were doing a barn dance. You know the barn dance do you? It’s where you get to dance with every girl in the hall and I put my arm around her and she felt that bloody good I

said “Can I take you home?” She said “Oh yeah, right-oh.” And she felt good all the way home and she’s felt good ever since.

Not real quick but quick enough. I suppose we were married within 18 months or two years weren’t we? You know, how long after we met we were married? It must’ve been.

12 months was it? So there you are see. Seemed a long time.

Well I asked my sister-in-law, I said “I want to marry Dulcie Culham, what do you think?” She said “What a rotten question to ask me. For me to judge.” She said “I’m not a judge.” She said “I’ll tell you one thing, Dulcie’s got a lot of love

in her, if you can get that out you’re made for life.” And I did. She was right.

I’ve got three beaut kids, had four, still got three. They’re really not kids any more. That was one which rang up our 48

year old Zelda. But you can’t have children and not fall in love with the world. They’re the most marvellous thing, their little tiny fingernails and play with them. Yeah, they’re great. Once you’ve got one or two of them around you, you’re hooked. Yeah. You’re gone. And you wouldn’t

have it any other way, yeah. I don’t know what it is about them what they’ve got. They looked like you or me and now they’ve grown up and boy they look a lot different to when they started off.

Not much. They don’t ask me about it do they Dulce? But they want

to know about it. They know I went to one but that’s all they want to know.

Oh yes, I loved it. Oh yes.

I can’t remember the first one but I became

President of the local branch for quite a long number of years.

Mateship. Mateship. Remembrance Day, it should be Remembrance Day not Anzac Day. It’s Remembrance Day.

Just all my old mates.

What a shame it was they didn’t live. What a terrible shame and what a terrible waste and what a terrible tragedy. There was a little ship pulled them on to the Daimaru a Japanese ship, taking prisoners of war back from Rabaul to Japan. She was sunk by an American submarine. 850 of our men died on it. That’s the 22nd Battalion,

our blokes. Of our unit of 150, 160 men, six survivors. All my mates gone, they’re all dead. What a terrible waste, all of them young men, all of them. Bloody hell, I still can’t get over that, such a shocking waste.

Well we didn’t do anything did we?

We didn’t do anything, we just went over there and got killed. We really didn’t do anything.

Maybe it was I don’t know. In the long run probably it was. I’d hate to think that we were mastered by the Japanese and live under the control of the Japanese which is what we would’ve done had we not put in the effort.

So I guess in that way the effort was worth while. But my part of it was so, so little, it counted so little it doesn’t really matter. I think I told one of you people I’m no hero, I never was a hero. I don’t know many heroes, only one and he’s gone.

He was so marvellous. Yeah. Awful things you go through for nothing. That’s what the are isn’t it, go through for nothing.

Well they spoke a different language for a start, they spoke Queensland Australian, which is very strange to a Tasmanian. Everything was different. I had been bitten by mosquitoes and sandflies in Tasmanian but they never brought sores out on me like they’ve done in Yeppoon.

Eels in Tasmania, you skin them and eat them but up in Yeppoon you’ve got to be careful or they bite your head off. Oh dear. Different names for things. What was a port? Suitcase, became a port. Kleenex tissues, you’d go into a shop and ask for a packet of tobacco and

a book of tissues, that’s right, to roll tobacco. Gave me a packet of tobacco and book of Kleenex. I said “What the hell am I going to do with a book of Kleenex? They’re no good to roll my cigarettes in them.” “Why didn’t you ask for papers then?” Simple isn’t it. Cordial soft drink. It was a long long time before we got used to drinking soft drink and cordial. Sharks,

boy. I bought a factory you see. A bloke come in and said “you want some shovel nose shark?” I said “are they any good?” He said “Oh yes they’re good, you won’t like the skin you’ll have to clean them.” I said “right-oh, bring some in I’ll try them.” Well you don’t skin them, you don’t fillet them, you dissect them. You’ve got to, it’s like a surgical operation to part with his skin and his bones and everything. Once you do it it’s good meat.

Nothing like a hammerhead shark. You get one of them you’ve got to chuck another ten pounds, it’s too tough you can’t eat it. A lot of things, a lot of things are different. But…

Twenty years. Twenty-one years. Yeah.

We didn’t talk much about them to anybody.

Not much, not much. Eric and I was talking about it a bit, about our experiences, about things that happened, not to us particularly but to other people.

I don’t think it’s something you can talk about really.

Probably 20 years ago. About 20 years ago.

Amazement.

Why should I think of that now? Why is it coming back now? It still amazes me as to why it comes back now. Why should it? Bloody stupid. I guess it’s something to do with getting older, I am getting older, whether I’m going senile in my old age or not I don’t know. That’s probably what it is then, account for it. But other than that

I don’t know. Crazy world. Crazy world. Yes.

No I didn’t see him escape, I just knew he’d escaped. I didn’t see him escape.

No. No. I was just amazed when I found that they had.

I’m still friends with one of them. He’s stayed at my house in Brisbane

and I was talking to him about four or five days ago on the phone. He’s living in Sydney.

Yes.

Oh no, I’m getting a bit confused, David’s not a survivor of Tol, he’s a survivor of New Britain with me. There are no survivors of Tol alive now.

I never had anything to do with them after the war even, I didn’t know them. They lived in Sydney, I lived in Strahan. Never the twain shall meet.

No, especially when we realised that a big city it was only a lot of little cities joined together. We enjoyed it then. We never went into the city, we lived in New Market. Lutwyche City was our shopping centre, that was out at the sheds at Wilson. That was our area

we never went anywhere else. Or Mitchelton, because our daughter lived at Mitchelton, but that was it you know. The city wasn’t a big city at all, it was only a lot of as I said, little towns joined together. Where do you live?

Do you go out to other places very often?

Other suburbs?

Oh you do. Oh.

Oh yeah, yeah. I used to but

they told me to get rid of it.

Coming home on the Lorabana.

That was, that was heaven. That was all good things wrapped up in one. I was 19 the day they picked me up you know. It was a great birthday present. Yes. Out of all the other things, and there’s so many of them, that one can’t be taken away no matter what.

Important or were memorable? Important. The atom bomb, that was important, it had to finish.

The atom bomb. Showed the finish

of the war, that was important, and memorable.

No I didn’t know, I didn’t know at all. I didn’t know what would happen to our future, I had no idea what it could mean to our future. I had no idea just what the atom bomb was, I just knew that it stopped the war.

I hate it, I hate it,

I wish it’d never been found but I’m still pleased it was used. I mean, if it hadn’t been used I wonder how many hundred thousands of Americans would’ve been killed, how many more Australians would’ve died. How many more native people would’ve died in different places, how many Japanese would’ve died? A hundred thousand died in Hiroshima, it could have been ten million died if they hadn’t have stopped the war then. So I know it was a terrible way to stop the war but my God

it stopped it and that was the important thing as far as I could see. They never would’ve surrendered you know, not in an easy way. It wasn’t in their nature to surrender. They were given orders to defend the island of Japan to the very bitter end and that would’ve been the bitter end for millions of people. Look at Hiroshima, look what happened there, took a terrible, terrible toll on people didn’t it?

So I don’t regret the dropping of the atom bomb but I wish in hindsight that they’d never have discovered it. Making the atom bomb. But who knows the trip to the moon has found so many good things for us, we’ve got so much good, that thing you’re using there come because of the trip to the moon. Miniaturisation and

digitalisation. That’s because of space exploration, that’s the only reason they discovered that stuff. It was to make space education, space exploration more feasible. Teflon frying pans, just because of the trip to the moon they Tefloned the ship so it would slip through the atmosphere, that’s why they’ve got Teflon. I mean there are all sorts of reasons why you should or should not embrace

science. I can’t knock it from a scientific point of view, I can just knock it because it’s terrible loss, terrible waste to see them poor devils, them young ones and the women, oh God strewth.

Tol.

That’s the worst. Because those men that surrendered hadn’t been captured, they surrendered. That’s a terrible thing. That was the bitter end as far as I’m concerned.

Yes.

Terrible thoughts. Some of me nightmares. And if you were to ask me where some of my friends are, I couldn’t take you to them because I don’t know where it is. Where they died or where they lay. I don’t know where it is, I couldn’t tell where Slim Richmond died,

I don’t know where it is. It’s in the bush somewhere in New Britain.

Terrible, I don’t know what to think. Awful. Your friends have died and you can’t even, you don’t even know where they are. That’s awful. Maybe I’m soft.

Anyway. The world goes round. Now we’ve got another stupid bloody war now in Iraq. Yeah.

No.

You see the First World War was the war to end all wars wasn’t it. 25 years later there was another one worse. And there’s never stopped being a war since. There’s been a war every year since the war ended, there’s been a war, somewhere. Look in Africa will you, would you look in Africa? And see what’s happened in Africa. All the way from the Mediterranean Sea down to South Africa, all the way down,

millions and millions of people. When you said have we won peace, those poor buggers have never known peace yet. And in India, Indonesia, New Guinea. It’s terrible over in New Guinea now, Papua’s worse. The Solomon Islands have gone to pieces.

“Peace in our time.” I think that Attlee [British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain] said that didn’t he. That was Chamberlain standing off the aeroplane waving that piece of paper around and said “peace in our time.” Then old Germany invaded Poland. Not much peace. What do you do about the poor Jews, built Israel. They started Israel,

give them a homeland. But they took the Palestinians’ homeland off them to give it to the Jews, now what the hell do we do there? How are we going to do anything about that? It started before Christ was born and it’s still going on. I don’t know any answers, I don’t think anybody does.

Only my personal life post war we didn’t talk about that that much and in wartime we discussed that pretty fully. Pre-war,

there’s a bit more about pre-war that’s to me is important.

I’ve got them all written down there. First, I don’t know if, I don’t think there’s much to really worry about. You can condense a whole lifetime into what, four or five hours. It’s not bad is it?

Well I wouldn’t advise young people to go to war. But, if you’re country’s threatened, if your lifestyle’s threatened,

and somebody’s threatened to take off what your family has got, you’ve got to defend it. I don’t know how you do it but you’ve got to defend it. That’s what we were doing whether we knew what we were doing or not. That’s why we done what we done. We wanted to defend our way of life. I think you’ve got to do that, if you think you’ve got a good way of life you’ve got to defend it. Can’t just walk away from it and let somebody else have it. If you’ve got to defend it, defend it.

Yes.

Because I think now, we would’ve either been under the Japanese or the German rule. The Germans are only nice now because they were made to be nice. The Japanese are only nice now because they were made to be nice. They didn’t actually become nice because they wanted to. They were made to become nice. I have my doubts about the Japanese, whether they would revert. If there was a change in relationship whether they would revert back to what they were or not, I don’t know. But, I’m

fairly glad that our people stopped them at the Kokoda Trail and there wouldn’t be any of you young people about hearing how lovely young people got stories all about if they hadn’t done. So, I think you’ve got to lift your lid [raise your hat] to a few of them young fellas that went up there. That’s for sure. Marvellous young men.

And they were not innocent young people like I was, they were, some were experienced soldiers from the Middle East. They’d been through a war already until they went up there and done that, what they’d done up there. So don’t anybody let you talk to them and tell you they were silly boys went up there, they were experienced men who knew what they were doing. And they went up there to defend their life, or their lifestyle.

I think if it happens again under the same circumstances, I think we should do the same again. Put it forward, defend your lifestyle. And that’s the only way you can do it. It’s a terrible thing to have to do isn’t it. I don’t know any other way. I don’t really know any other way. It’s all very well to say I’m not going to be a war-monger, I’m not going to be a fighter, I’m not going to be this, but if you don’t fight

and defend your life and your rights, your home, who’s going to? Nobody else will, take it off you that’s all they’ll do. There’s not a lot of people like to take your lifestyle off you, you know. Yes. We’ve got a marvellous life. My wife and I sit in this little cabin and we are very lucky.

We eat three times a day, sometimes four and enjoy it every time.