Australians at War Film Archive

My pleasure.

I was born in Townsville

north Queensland. I was the middle one of three. I have an older sister and a younger sister. Both my father and mother were veterans of World War 1. My father served with the Light Horse. My mother served with firstly the Scottish Hospital at Mons in 1914 and later with the Queen Alexandra’s Royal Military Nursing Reserve I think it’s called. They were known as the QA’s

and then subsequently to that she worked on an ambulance train which was a privately owned train that ran across France bringing wounded people back to England and she worked that ambulance train for a year or so, so she had quite a varied experience.

No, we left Townsville when I was six, lived in Cairns for a couple of years

then in Charters Towers. At that stage the family split. My father remained in Cairns and my mother and the children went to Charters Towers which was the schooling centre of north Queensland at that time. Stayed there till ‘36 and then came to Sydney. I was the age of 12 then.

Yes

I was still at school when war broke out, had two years of schooling still to go. During that time I served with the school cadet corps, got a commission there and also I belonged to the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] Aircrew Reserve which was a sort of pre enlistment arrangement we had in those days. I think we had to be 17 to join it and we did a

correspondence course in theory of flight, radio procedure, Morse code, all the sort of things an aspiring young airman might need, and finished school and the trick was to stay out of any occupation where you might be classified as indispensable until you got your aircrew call-up, usually at the age of about 19.

Like the best laid plans of mice and men, that fell apart because one of the best ways to stay out of the reserved occupations was to go into the army and the air force could claim you from the army and you went straight into air crew. That backfired on me because when my call-up came I was the age of 18 and the rank of corporal, I was training recruits

in a training battalion down in Victoria and the commanding officer blocked my transfer to the air force and didn’t tell me about it till I got a telegram from a friend of mine from Bradfield Park saying “Why aren’t you here. Your name’s been called on the roll?” so I shot up, went to the CO and he said “No, I decided you’d be better here”.

Yes,

called up in June ’42 into CMF of course, went to a training school in Tamworth. Actually before that, as a member of cadet corps, I was offered and took an opportunity to do a LHQ [Land Headquarters] school at Cowra and I did the small arms school up there which was fantastic experience and all this was aimed of course at following on cadet corps,

aimed at infantry training, so when they called me up we did aptitude testing. Wherever I met an aptitude test they always tried to stick me in the engineers and I didn’t want to be in the engineers so as a compromise they put me in signals, where all my infantry training, it only got me into a training battalion as an instructor but we did the recruit course at Tamworth and the whole training school

moved to Victoria to Bonegilla where we had the Australian Signal Training Battalion. I finished my training there and then was posted to a beach signal unit which was ship to shore landing, the signal unit. That’s where I picked up my stripes actually and then all of a sudden they said, “Oops, all you blokes under 19, out

back to the training battalion,” because the unit had to be prepared to move at any time. In actual fact they didn’t move until later and I could have been with them but that was unknown. I went back to the training battalion with my two stripes up and got to be an instructor, waste of six months, teaching potential signalmen how to stick bayonets into sandbags and straw bags. Actually the bayonet assault course was quite interesting

because the NCOs [Non Commissioned Officers] used to take two recruits through and we’d take them through three times at which stage they were absolutely wrecked for the day and we’d do that, another two and another two so when they went through three times, we went through about eight or nine times. We were just so jumping out of our skins; it was unreal but it wasn’t…

When I was blocked from the air force, the CO [Commanding Officer], fellow called Major G E Every MM [Military Medal] and God help you if you forgot the MM. He was a World War 1 digger, warrant officer by rank and acting rank of major, he was the Commanding Officer of the Training Battalion and he, by way of placating over this air force thing, said, “Well you stay right where you are laddie, we’ll give you a kind of stripe and then you’ll do another

six months with us”. The Manpower people used to come around occasionally and you could get paraded before them so I got down to see them and said “Righto, I’m 19, I’ve joined the AIF [Australian Imperial Force] and if I can’t go to the air force, at least I’ll be a soldier but I don’t want to stay in the training battalion”. They said, “There’s two ways out. You can volunteer for paratroops or the spotters”. Well paratroops meant

another six months or a year in another training camp so I wasn’t going to do that and I nominated to go to New Guinea Air Warning Wireless Company.

Limited. The war was well in hand by the time I got there at the end of ‘43.

The tide had started to turn. The Japs had been turned back at Milne Bay. They’d been turned back at Kokoda but they were fighting a rear guard action and the whole north of New Guinea was still full of them and when I arrived Christmas ‘43 we went up to do a signal school at a place called Koitaki where it rained every morning at dawn and every night at sunset and some days it forgot to

stop in between. It just rained like you would not believe. We were in this deep ravine, instruction quarters down there and our living quarters up there. We literally slid down the hill in the mud. We were already trained signalmen. At this stage I had a trade grouping of wireless telegraphist and but learning the conditions in the tropics was something else again, coping with the rain

and the mud and the difficult terrain and the difficulty of sending wireless signals in that terrain and that was our course at Koitaki. I then went to join the unit at Nine Mile. It’s nine miles back from Port Moresby. The big aerodrome was at Seven Mile and we were over the hill. There I for a while worked the

control centre. Our home station was VIG. VIG was quite a historic station and I was operator on that for a while and then one day they called me up and said, “Righto, you’re ready for a turn going spotting”, so they introduced me to two fellers I’d never met before and this was the beaut thing about our unit. I s’pose when I joined them there’d be 300 men in the unit. There wouldn’t have been more than 30 in the headquarters camp and the others were in the field.

Most of them didn’t know each other. They didn’t know us. We were just all voices on the other end of a radio so I met up with two fellers called Frank Parmeter, a sergeant with a military medal, fellow called Bruce Broughton, known as Dusty who was a signalman and I had the rank of corporal and we set off together to go up to…the American 5th Air Force took us over to Lae

then we moved from there up to Saidor where the Americans had a recently established bomber strip that was getting a hell of a pasting from the Japanese which was why we were going further up to give, 10 minutes I believe it was, flying time from our station, warning of Japanese planes coming in to bomb Saidor because the trick by the Japs of course was to try and catch the Americans with their planes all

on the ground and so our trick was to give them 10 minutes notice and give them a change to get in the air. From Saidor the Yanks took us in a barge to a place called Bogadjim. That’s how the Australian news people always recorded it, Bogadjim. In fact the natives called it Bogadi or Bogadjim. It had been the scene of some pretty hectic

fighting. There was a lot of, big Japanese encampment there. I think they were the 7th division troops had had some bit of fighting going on there. The stage we went in, we were advised the Japs were withdrawing from Bogadjim going north somewhere and nobody knew quite where. It was all right except that we were going to Bogadjim and we were going north

too. Dreadful landing at Bogadjim. The fellow driving the barge dropped the gate a bit early and dumped us well and truly in the surf with about half a tonne of radio equipment and three months rations and all wet. Actually we were fortunate the set wasn’t damaged.

I’ll tell you about those sets and about VIG later.

Bogadjim, we did have a fourth fellow with us. We’ll just know him as Snowy, extremely white hair. Snowy wasn’t considered to be an asset

to the group.

I’ll tell you about Snowy. Frank Parmeter stood him for less than a day and turned him round and sent him back, wouldn’t have him. Parmeter was a bit of a law unto himself but I’ll tell you about him later too. We moved from there, Bogadjim we got into, we went in, or the Americans, the 5th Air Force put us in there, American 5th Air Force and we understood we were going in alone.

To our surprise when we got there, there was a couple more barges full of fellows came in too and they were an advance party for the 5th division headquarters. It was raining as usual. We were all wet. We spent most of the time collecting what we could from our stores and getting them up onto the beach and covered. Then somebody came and said “the 5th division over there are having trouble getting their radio going. They can’t get their signals through, can you help?”

We thought, “Oh, didn’t want to start unpacking a radio in the middle of the night”, so went over to see what was happening and it was a mate of mine from school, was the corporal in charge of their wireless set and in fact we’d been in the training battalion together in Bonegilla. We were on the draft together to New Guinea and he fell out in Townsville ‘cause he got the measles. I lost track of him after that until he turned up at Bogadjim in the middle of a wet night with a radio set he couldn’t get going.

Between the two of us we got him on the air; sorted out.

We were only there for three or four days. I’m not quite sure why we were there because we didn’t get our set on the air. We did a patrol of our perimeter which is the usual thing when you arrived anywhere and kept our set packed up except we had the receiver going. The second day a crowd of

Australian infantry arrived. They’d gone up the Markham Valley, Ramu Valley and over the hills and come down from the mountains to join us at Bogadjim and they were fascinated by the fact we had a civilian radio set with a receiver and we had…we were camped in a native hut and we had it really jammed pack there. Everyone came in to hear the ABC news ‘‘cause they hadn’t heard the news for months. We had a New Guinea newspaper called Guinea

Gold, from memory. Guinea Gold was the local newspaper and it was a small, less than tabloid size sheet that published bits of Australian news, but to actually hear the news broadcast was quite a treat for these fellers. One of the company commanders for that unit was in Greece and Crete with the infantry with Frank Parmeter

and he hadn’t seen him since Crete and so they had a great old chinwag together. That was one of their highlights. After a couple of days they put us on a barge and took us up, further up the coast to Madang. At this stage we’re getting a hundred mile or so up from Saidor which was the strip. All we knew about the Japanese was they had withdrawn from Bogadjim, I would say

certainly at the most a day or two before we got there and the camp was still fresh. There was all sorts of stuff there. One of the things we picked up was a box of Japanese hand grenades, a lot of stationery which was handy, Japanese rice paper which was handy ‘cause all ours had been wet. We moved on by barge then up to Madang which had also just been evacuated, not a soul there.

There was a truck and we got it going, a Japanese truck. We were very tempted to go for a ride down the airstrip but we noticed the little holes in the airstrip that obviously looked as though the bloody thing had been land mined so we decided we wouldn’t go driving in trucks on a land minded strip so we, from there we walked with our gear, native carriers, up to Alexishafen and beyond there

crossing about probably half a dozen or so rivers and we came to a place called Mugil which had been a big plantation just beyond it, Meigar Harbour, which was to be our site and we were just onshore from Karkar Island, couple of miles out to sea which was also part of our watch. Then there was a couple of police boys and we established ourselves at Meigar

Harbour which was…they called it a harbour; it was little more than a lagoon. It was only a bit of a pond with coral shoals out both ways and a tiny little entrance and we camped just back from that, under the coconut trees in an old native hut, set up our radio and started watching for the bombers which we had to report going into Saidor and also we reported the American planes going back home but never going out of course.

We didn’t know where the Japanese were. We had been advised that they were pulled in from Bogadjim, Madang, Alexishafen and were reassembling in a unit somewhere to our north west in the foothills. Well that wasn’t very far back from where we were so fortunately they didn’t find us and we didn’t disturb them because our war

was one of observing, reporting, not getting mixed up with the infantry duties. We had a bit of trouble with Frank. He was an infanteer from way back and he wanted to charge out and do a few, you know do a little fighting on his own account but we all recognised that we were there not to fight a war but to save

a few American planes from being bombed.

No, no didn’t. Actually we stayed on that station for some months. I don’t keep a diary. I don’t know the exact dates but it was four or five months we stayed in that spot.

During that time the war moved on. The Japanese regrouped and they were going to put a last ditch stand up at Sepik River. They moved north. I think they probably went past Sepik and to Hollandia where they met the Americans; when they invaded Hollandia. We were still at Meigar Harbour. We didn’t, only found out

the Yanks had made an invasion up at Hollandia, quite by chance which is another story. We met a crew of Americans who didn’t know we were there and we were a surprise for them.

We were called back to headquarters so we walked back to Madang, which had been a deserted village a few months before.

The 5th division headquarters were there. The whole division was there virtually. There’d be 20 or 30 ships in the harbour. The place was alive with US Air Force, Royal Australian Navy, army. It was a very busy military, almost unbelievable really, where’d it all come from? But there it was and we

were a bit dishevelled. We were perpetually wet. I remember my hat was largely rat eaten. It looked a bit priceless but it was still a hat so I wore it. We were unshaven. We were untidy. We were, literally clothes rotting on our backs. We met some fellow who insisted we didn’t look at all soldierly and we should report to him in the orderly room, bathed and shaved in 10 minutes. During that time we found

some obliging navy fellers who had a destroyer, the Vendetta, and it was about to leave for Finschhafen so we said, “Can we come?” and we put our radio set and ourselves, didn’t have much else and we spent the night at sea in the Vendetta or on the Vendetta. I remember sleeping on the deck of a destroyer at sea which is not very far out of the water, with a line of rivets across my back and I got a good night’s

sleep, much to the amazement of Dusty who couldn’t get to sleep at all but from there we got aircraft to Lae. We had trouble with the pilot. He didn’t really want to take us when he saw how much gear we had and he added up the poundage on his manifest and decided there was a few things that weren’t going and particularly “those drums of petrol weren’t going with us”. He landed at Nadzab and we met some of our fellows on the

aerodrome. We said, “What are you blokes doing here?” They said, “We live here now. This is headquarters” and headquarters had moved from Moresby to Nadzab and we weren’t even aware of it so we found ourselves back home and mid, about June ‘44, the unit was still active up in Dutch New Guinea but most of the stations from Papua New Guinea had been called back in.

We had nothing much to do there except get into mischief. They gave us leave. A couple of leave parties went down. I got two or three weeks leave. I’ve forgotten how much it was, back home and then back to New Guinea. We arrived back there and they said, “We’re going home. You blokes are on the rear guard party, you pack up the camp”, so the unit went home and left us up there to clean up what was left of it but in actual spotting terms, oh, we did a patrol up the Markham Valley at one stage.

That was before we went out to Nadzab, out from Nadzab out to Meigar Harbour but Meigar Harbour was actually the only spotting station where I personally attended.

Well we got back to Australia about three weeks

behind the unit and there again the whole unit looked pretty much as I’ve described us, when we arrived back in Madang. There was a major there; I should remember his name. He still looks kindly upon us and comes and talks to us occasionally on Anzac Day and his job was to sort of knock us back into shape and he wanted everybody kitted out in a new kit, which he got. You know your hat had to be on the right angle, the chinstrap right and the buckle

in the right place and the boys are saying, “Cut it out major, you know that’s not our sort of soldiering”. He described us as a “wild mob of bushman led by that rebel, Irish rebel, Murphy” and Murphy was…I spoke to Murphy on the phone this morning. He’s still alive although he’s not well but he was sort of the leader of the push. All our officers had been taken out of the unit and the unit dumped there. When we got back

a few weeks later, some of the fellers had already been posted elsewhere. The hospital had ballooned overnight. They had rows and rows of tents full of spotters with malaria and we soon joined that mob and did our few days in hospital with malaria. By the time we got out of there the unit was pretty well disbanded. I was posted to, heaven help me,

an artillery signal unit. Well I’d never heard a gun fired in all the time I’d been in the army and all of a sudden I find myself Headquarters Corps Artillery Signals in Atherton. We’re up in the Atherton Tablelands. Getting up there was quite a trick. That’s a story in itself. When we arrived at Atherton, most of the unit had gone onto Borneo

and once again we were cleaning up the camp, taking the gear and off to Borneo. Got involved in a game of football and ended up in hospital with a knee that had been troubling me all the time I’d been in New Guinea and I didn’t ever get to Borneo ‘cause whilst I was still in hospital the war ended. VJ [Victory over Japan] Day.

I was in a camp hospital at a place called Rocky Creek. I think it was a general hospital. It was quite a sizeable hospital but it was located at Rocky Creek up in the northern, up in the Tablelands and…

There’s another story. We got out according to a points system,

your age on enlistment, your length of service, determined the speed at which you got out of the army.

My points weren’t good and I wanted to get out and go to Sydney University and do engineering. To achieve this I had to get out in time to start and enrol February, March and I wasn’t due to get out till about June,

couldn’t do anything about that. The die was cast. Then the last week in June they started discharging blokes like crazy, enormous numbers of blokes getting out and the theory was, held by the soldiers, it may or may not have been true, that we were only tax free till the end of the financial year so there was a vested interest in getting rid of as many as they could in June. There were all sorts of tricks involved

in staying on for a few weeks. At this stage we were well enough aware of the fact that there were a whole lot of ex soldiers out there looking for jobs and there weren’t jobs and the scene wasn’t good at all and I didn’t mind being a soldier and I couldn’t get out to go to university, so there was no point in my getting out and being unemployed so I signed on for six months and with all that

experience in infantry and signals, they sent me to a field survey company, the drill hall in Chatswood. No first of all they sent me to the signals at Middle Head that’s right, put me in charge of a transport section which included a bunch of couriers. They were led by a wild villain named…well I was in charge of them. I wasn’t their leader. They had a wild bloke.

I’m having trouble with names, but he was a well known Sydney Speedway rider and he had achieved the ride from Victoria Barracks in Paddington to Middle Head in six minutes on a motorbike on a Sunday morning. Victoria Barracks, phone in from the gate. You’d hear the motorbike take off and, Orb Lawson. Lawson had done this in six minutes and all the

boys were trying to beat his record so I think I had five bikes in workshops, six couriers in hospital. I ended up in a jeep running around delivering the documents myself.

Yes, yes but after I got out of signals at Middle Head they sent me to field survey up at drill hall in Chatswood which wasn’t bad because it was only about five or ten minutes drive from home and I brought myself an old motorcar

and life was easy for the last few months in the army.

Roseville.

With my mother, yes, and Willoughby is, well Roseville, Chatswood, Willoughby, couple of miles.

I had decided against engineering. There was a fellow named George Lloyd

who was Nuffield’s personal representative in Australia. Nuffield used to stay with him and he lived just up the street from us and I went up and said to him, you know “I was considering engineering as a career”. He said “Peter, I’m a salesman. I employ dozens of engineers”. He said, “I wouldn’t advise it at all”. I thought, “I don’t know that there’s a message in this”, so the new profession at the time was physiotherapy.

It sort of blossomed during the war particularly in military hospitals and I’d seen the physios, the military physios at work in the hospitals and I decided to give that a go so I enrolled and did physiotherapy. In those days it was a Diploma Course. You worked at Sydney University and Royal Prince Alfred Hospital at Camperdown. It was a three year training course and I got through that and worked at Royal North Shore for a year and then into private practice.

I came down here to Wollongong in 1951 and I’m still here. The only time I’ve ever stayed still anywhere in my life has been in Wollongong.

Yes, yes 53 years ago. I retired, it’s hard to say when I retired. I sold half my practice to a guy in

1986 and I sold him the other half in 1988. Then he said, “Would you work for me part time?” so I worked three days for him in my own practice for a year. I thought now I’m really finished. Then he said, “Look I want to do a computer course at university. Would you mind doing Monday’s for me?” so I did a day a week for him for another year and I sort of progressively retired between ’86 and ’90 and

or ’89 I think I finally gave up. The last year I was in practice, after I’d worked for him for two years, I’d served out my contract where I wasn’t allowed to go and work for him for two years. I did a bit of private work for while. The last year I was registered, my insurance cost me more than the fees I earned for the year so I gave up and disappeared into retirement which had sort of crept up on me for some years

I met my wife on Christmas Day at the end of first year. That would be 1949. We became engaged in April and married ’48. Christmas Day ’47 I met

her. We were engaged in 1948. Then we were married on the 8th of January ’49. At that stage I was just going into second year. No, I was going into final year so I’d had a year on the course without June, a year on the course courting June and trying to make peace with her father.

His main objection to me was that I used to park a bright yellow taxi cab in his gutter from about eight o’clock at night till about half past 10. I was driving cabs at the time and in those days students expected to work for their money, not like today when they expect to be kept. We had no, well as returned soldiers we had a living allowance of three pound five a week and they paid most of our fees. We paid some of our books and equipment

but we generally got a fairly fair ride through, much as the students get today but you couldn’t live on it so we all had jobs and mine was driving a taxi. When I finally turned up one night and said, I’d quit my taxi, I’d retired from that, he said, “Good, now we’ll open a bottle” and after that I was very acceptable to Arthur Spooner but not when he had a yellow cab in his

gutter. He did not like that at all.

Children, yes we came to Wollongong in ’51, April the 1st 1951 and at about that time, I don’t know if it was just before or just after, my wife announced she was pregnant and we had a son, subsequently Stephen. He’s now 52, 53

and then couple of years after that we had twin sons so we’ve three sons and I now have three grandsons. They each have one son and seven granddaughters and five of them live just over the road. Three more live over there and the rest are in Wagga Wagga so we’re still a very close family.

My son over the road, one within a few hundred yards and the fellow who’s in Wagga works in Sydney three days a week and comes down and stays with us two nights a week so still got all our sons around us on sort of a daily basis and an invasion of grandchildren whenever it’s convenient.

I have no complaints at all. None of them get into any sort of trouble. They’ve all been reasonable scholars. They’ve all got some tertiary

education and kids are following the same pattern, a bit boring really. Nobody smokes funny cigarettes or wears earrings or anything.

I have very good memories. I’ve got a good long term memory. We had a privileged childhood. My father had a good job. He was sales manager of Burns Philp which was

the biggest business in Townsville by a very long way and we lived in a very nice house, had a nice car and about as popular as pork chops in a synagogue because it was the middle of a Depression and we were a generation that spent our childhood in a Depression and our teenage in a war and then our highest earning years in days of 60 percent tax, 60 cents in the dollar tax and political

upheaval but back to the childhood. Yes we saw the Depression happening all around us but it was something that was happening. It didn’t happen to us, went to school there. One of my early memories, we had a maid. I believe she was Fijian but she was a black girl with an enormous

head of hair and my mother and father both having spent a good deal of time in France, particularly my mother, they spoke fluent French and when they had anything to say that they didn’t want the kids to hear or the maid to hear, they spoke in French and after some months the black girl said “Mrs Swan I think you should know, I speak French” so that sort of…

Dad got to hear about that and we got a new maid who was a young Italian girl and she stayed with us when we moved to Cairns in 1930, where my father got the job of manager of Burns Philp there and she stayed with us until ’32 when my mother and the kids packed up and went to Charters Towers, where we attended school.

The house in Townsville was not a company house. My father owned it was, you know Townsville? There’s a bright pink rock, Castle Hill and then a talus slope and the flat of the beach. Well Stanley Street goes up and across the base of that rock. In those days there were

about six houses up there and we were, that pink rock was in our backyard. In fact there was a waterhole at the bottom of it where we used to swim as kids and later on during the war they extended Stanley Street around the hill and the road actually went to the top but in those days there was no way to the top and out the back of that rock, we had some friends named Garbutt who owned a property out there and

we used to go out there a lot. I can remember tea and jam scones and things on the verandah with my father and Garbutt and a few of their mates sitting on the front verandah with their shotguns potting the ducks as they came up from the pond and that property is now Garbutt Field. It’s the Townsville aerodrome. Our house in Townsville was still standing a few years ago and my eldest son went up there and photographed it. It was a big old Queenslander,

high stilts and verandah all around and all designed to catch the breeze and had wooden louvres to keep the cyclones out. In Cairns we had a very nice high on stilts house down on the flat in Cairns. The whole of Cairns is on the flat of course, king tide of five feet and the townspeople are going around in rowing boats down the street, including my father. He used to row his boat down to the office when the king tides were in

around Christmas time. Once again we were not short of money and we were school kids and very much aware of the distress and poverty around us and also in Cairns particularly an enormous population of unemployed people just moving north, looking for jobs and they came to Cairns looking for cane cutting and cane loading, seasonal work. The cane industry is, the milling industry is busy for a few months and

then it all packs up and they all came up looking for that seasonal work because they were all, itinerant workers used to work the sugar industry and they camped in the showground and there were thousands. Well there seemed to be thousands, there must have been hundreds, far more people than there were jobs and anything that wasn’t nailed down, disappeared, you know. You’d put the washing on the line and you sat under the washing and waited till it dried, otherwise they’d over the fence and take your washing but once again we weren’t all that popular because

my father owned a brand new Marquette car. Have you heard of a Marquette? It was a light weight six cylinder Buick and it was a Depression model they built and had two of them in Townsville. He had one. That was just circumstance. We didn’t seek to be more affluent than the others but he just had a job that survived the Depression.

You know “rich kids” and you get the first mango thrown at you. These ecumenical days, I don’t know what the kids fight about in Cairns but in those days on the way to school we’d always pick up a few of the rotten mango’s and we got to the Catholic school and there’d be a fight between the Catholics and the publics with rotten mangoes thrown left, right and centre and we were the publics.

These days there’s not that schism, there’s not that feeling. Nobody cares whether you’re a Catholic or a public any more.

We were the publics. We were at the public school and we were on the outside of the fence for the mango fight, which happened most mornings.

I don’t know if they still do it. I’d be interested to know if they still do it. No, the southern states they used to throw barbs. They all had little rhymes like “Catholic, Catholic ring the bell, all the Protestants go to hell” and we’d have some other sort of rhyme that we’d throw back but there wasn’t the physical mango throwing that was copped in the north.

I was just part of it. We went to school. We learnt our stuff. We learnt everything by rote. We learnt to read and write and I was only six, seven at the time, schooling wasn’t serious, got more serious when I went to Charters Towers. We had an Intermediate certificate. No, they called it the Junior Certificate in Queensland. We had Junior

and Senior and that was only a four year course through secondary school. Then when we moved from there down to Sydney we went to private schools in Sydney and we were in seventh year, which we did the scholarship exam at year seven in Townsville. Then when we came down here it was

the Qualifying Certificate which was at sixth year but we weren’t allowed into secondary school until we passed the QC so after about one term lesson or term at school we sat for the QC which was a year below us frankly, with all the work we’d done and I ended up with a rather good pass, more because of my being one year advanced

in education than for any other reason, which landed me into an A upper grade at school, which I had trouble maintaining. I ended up in A lower which was about my level. I was not a brilliant student. I had a memory that was good enough to pass the exams without doing any work, so that’s what I did.

I was never a great student and a great scholar. I had to buckle down a bit when I went to university and do some homework but prior to that it just didn’t worry me.

He was, when I was born, he was the Sales Manager. He’d started with WD & HO Wills as a young man and studied accountancy while he was there and he came back from the war and he didn’t want

to do accountancy and he got this job in sales which he did rather well. He was a man with great charm, a complete photographic memory, an extraordinary memory and that served him well in business, the combination of the charm and knowing everybody by name and never missing, a wonderful asset and he did sales manager at Townsville, manager Cairns and whilst there, during the Depression, he

founded a business called Pennies. A bloke who owned three grocery shops and he owed them so much money that they couldn’t afford to write it off, so they took over his grocery shops and called them Pennies and the slogan was “Pennies save you pounds”. Well that went right through Queensland. It was a chain store like Selfridges or Coles or Woolworths. He founded that and he came back to Townsville…

1936 from memory. He was General Manager at Townsville and the South Seas which was an enormous organisation, BP’s Townsville. He was a director of Queensland Insurance which was owned by Burns Philp. He boasted, and it was true, that from his warehouse in Townsville, he could supply anything from a needle to a locomotive. Certainly his locomotives were little puffing billy cane trains but he had them

there, in stock, needles and locomotives and everything in between. It was an enormous business. The South Sea Islands company which was governed from Townsville, worked right through, well the whole of the south seas really and they were agents for 14 lines of ships and however many airlines were flying at the time, it wasn’t many and he stayed there until he retired and he went to live in Mackay,

south of Townsville, where he died at the age of about late 60’s, 69 I think he was.

He was fun when he was there and he wasn’t there a lot. I guess he wasn’t really; he was very good to us. He used to take us on picnics and

teach us swimming and all that sort of thing which fathers do but his interests were many and varied. I think he owned the fastest racehorse and the biggest car and smoked the biggest cigar and wore the largest diamond ring in Townsville. He was a show-off and my mother got sick of that eventually and we moved to Charters Towers but

he supported us ‘in absentia’. I don’t think he was very pleased about it but he paid all our bills, including school bills and he did reserve the right at one stage, just at the beginning of the war actually, my last two years at school, he decided that I was living in a house with a mother and two sisters and he felt that a boy should have more male

company, so he insisted I go to boarding school. Well I was at a day school and so I had to change schools and my best friend at school was also changing schools to go to boarding school ‘cause his father was a Brigadier with the sixth division and his wife went over to Cairo there. Those blokes in the early AIF in the Middle East, their rank had its privileges and they had their wives as “Red Cross” workers or something or working in Cairo and so Bob and I went together to boarding school.

He used to come down to Sydney periodically, had a few holidays up there, used to go up for the Christmas holidays. I got along quite well with him but, well, let’s say I’m not the sort of father that he was.

It was a great shock to my sisters.

It didn’t surprise me at all. I had seen some of the arguments and heard some of the arguments to which they were not privy and it didn’t surprise me when she said, “Well we’re going to Charters Towers so you can go to school”. “Oh yes,” and “Daddy’s not coming”. It didn’t surprise me one little bit really. My sisters went to boarding school in Charters Towers and I lived

with my mother in a hotel actually, at the Crown Hotel, went as a day boy to school.

Very strong, very strong. I used to look like her in the days when I had black hair. She’s of Cornish stock and some of the Cornish people are, they look very Spanish, compliments of Mr Drake and the

armada. There are dark skinned, dark haired people all along the south coast. The Welsh have the black Welsh and the southern Irish they all show the traits of this Spanish ancestry and my mother’s family were of this dark brown eyes, black hair, olive skin complexion. She was born up north of

Quorn at a place called Skillagalee. That’s nearer to Woomera than it is to Adelaide. It’s up on the edge of the desert and they were Cornish free settlers. They were miners. They came out to mine lead and zinc in South Australia. Her father was mining in Broken Hill at one stage when he married but they were just wild

bush kids. I’ve seen pictures of them going to school, four little bodies all bareback on a pony going off to school. She had two brothers and two sisters. There were five of them. She was in England when the war broke out and she joined a unit from the Scottish Hospital there which, this was in 1914

and it was an entirely female hospital. Even the doctors were ladies and they were in an old chateau just near Mons where the battle was raging within earshot and then they announced, “We’ll get out of here. The Germans are coming”. She actually got a ride down to the coast from there on a London bus, red double decker bus, sitting on a case of ammunition,

she tells the story. They were evacuated across the channel, got torpedoed, got ashore a bit wet, joined the QA’s [?] and was back in France for Christmas 1914. Then she served with the QA’s and then later with, was Lady Dudley I believe, the lady, very wealthy English lady, her effort to the

war effort was to buy a train and pay for all its costs and ran as an ambulance train from wherever the fighting was in France, back to the coast, take the boys home to England and she was nursing on that train. She had a brother who had a military medal at Gallipoli and he also fought in France, another brother who was the Royal Flying Corps, a brother in law who won a DCM in France,

also a Cornishman from South Australia. They weren’t aggressive people but they weren’t about to be pushed around either. The war came and they all joined up, all except the youngest daughter who was too young. The others all went nursing or soldiering or something. My father and his three brothers, their father was a solicitor in Brisbane and

father had two brothers, all joined up. One of them, Charles, was killed right on the end of the war, late in 1918. Percy, that’s my father and Ted survived and the youngest one Leslie was not of age when the war ended but the three boys all served in France and here again they weren’t necessarily warlike people. They were just, heard the call, you know,

as we did a generation later.

I was proud of them. My mother used to wear her 1914 star which is gold, was a silver rosette on her…1914, 1915-1919 star I think they called it. A red, white and blue ribbon and the 1914

as well, a gold rosette which she always wore with great pride. I remember at Anzac Day one day in Sydney, the Governor came over and spoke to her. She was tickled pink but she was one of only five Australian nurses who qualified for that star and two of the others were friends of hers. When the war come along we just assumed we

would do something and so I opted for air force and did never get there.

She was horrified, absolutely horrified at the thought that I would go to war. France was mud, blood and murder really. You know they’d lose thousands of men in a night and she saw all the results of this carnage and

imagined that all wars would be like that. The casualties in World War Two were nothing like the casualties in World War 1. They didn’t get involved in the silly trench slogging it out business. It was almost without exception, a very mobile war. There was more efficient armament, efficient aircraft, just an entirely different sort

of war and in New Guinea it was different again from anything anywhere else in the world because it was a country with no roads. You either walked or you sailed around it or you flew over it but there were no roads and there was no serious casualties. I think the biggest casualties were probably navy and air force,

certainly in the Pacific.

I remember my father talking about being in the trenches shooting at Huns and I didn’t know what Huns were. It didn’t occur to me that they were German soldiers wearing “God with us” on their

belt buckles, which is an interesting thing about wars, everyone leans on God. He seems to have ignored us. It wasn’t till I saw a training battalion in action and discovered that they actually were shooting at other men. That’s a very early childhood memory. I was probably about three or four, probably four, when I discovered that the Huns were actually human beings

and soldiers who were fighting for their country, as much as our blokes were fighting. In retrospect it all seems like a ridiculously unnecessary war. I mean for heaven’s sake the Kaiser was the King’s cousin I think. How those two guys couldn’t get their heads together and solve the whole problem, Lord knows, but politicians and professional soldiers and

royal families and the end result it’s…the war is fought by teenage boys, a very large part.

She always went to the Anzac march in Sydney. Her favourite spot, and I used to go with her, her favourite spot was outside the GPO. We were about…our spot was on the steps. Billy Hughes, the ex Prime Minister used to sit

on a chair just down there, “Hi Billy”. He didn’t know who we were but he waved to everybody. We watched all the people march through and then we went home again. A child doesn’t have much comprehension of what’s involved in war and it was a different war from anything that had been fought before. I mean the Australian troops for instance were actually involved in a

cavalry charge, you know, 1915. I mean cavalry charges still; the last of them was Beersheba in Egypt. I think we probably got more education about the war from films like Chips Rafferty and the Forty Thousand Horsemen which was filmed in the sand hills at Cronulla

and it was quite a classic Chips Rafferty film and it showed a whole lot of the humour in an Australian soldier’s life, particularly humour at the expense of the English officer corps, who were something else again.

School, football, swimming, athletics, didn’t have a lot of cricket, too slow. I got my athletic colours for shot-put, was a male runner but we had a better one at school and I didn’t make the team as a mile runner. I made it as a field games, got my colours at football, got my colours at swimming,

cadet corps. They were the main extra curricular activities. That was until we discovered girls, then the world changed a little.

No, we had a fellow in our class at school who was a radio nut. He used to make his, build his

own sets and everything. He built this amplifier, turntable and he and the girl next door formed the harmony club, which was a crowd of about a dozen of us. There were 12 in the harmony club, that’s right, and each of us had to organise an event once in the year. I remember on one occasion we hired a yacht and went sailing on Sydney Harbour, but more often than not, it was a dance party

somewhere and just the club and the girls and invitees, just teenage social life. The important thing about it in retrospect was that we made it ourselves, even to the extent of building the amplifier and providing the records and providing the suppers. I’m amazed when I hear young people these days expecting the government to do something to amuse them and entertain them. This was completely foreign to our

thinking. If we had a party, we ran the party and I don’t think we knew what a gatecrasher was. It just didn’t happen. I didn’t discover gatecrashers till 19; I was engaged to my wife. We had an episode with some gatecrashers one night but that was a very much an isolated event; life was simpler somehow. We were nicer to each other than young people are today.

We were trained to be polite to each other and to everybody else. There was very little aggression in our lives at all. I think we sort of took that out on the rugby paddock but our social life was rather I s’pose sweet and innocent.

Two guys from school

bloke called Taylor was the fellow who built the amplifier. He lived in Killara. His father ran a factory that made fishing reels. Yeh he made fishing reels. Zane Grey who was the world famous fisherman at the time, used to come to Sydney and have Taylor build the fishing reels for him. He’d specify exactly what he wanted and

this old man in his little factory would build the most enormous gear and reels. Everything that Zane Grey could think of he wanted in a reel, Taylor could build it and he was obviously doing very well or doing very well at it because he had three sons at school, private schools. Bob Allen, whose father was the Brigadier I mentioned of the 6th division, he was one of them. John Perry who served in the RAAF, he was a bloke who got

his call-up and got short circuited. Steve Ferguson, also a pilot in the RAAF. They were our friends.

My girlfriend at the time was next door neighbour to Taylor.

I s’pose I met her through him. That was a sort of friendship. We’d get to the pictures on Saturday night and on Sunday evening I used to ride up to her place on a bicycle and we used to sit and listen to the Lux Radio Theatre. That was a live theatre show that went every Sunday night and one of the ladies on the show, a teenager, with a beautiful young teenage voice

was a girl called Myrna Dodd and I’ve heard Myrna Dodd. She’s gone off the air now. She’d be my age but she was still working the nightshift on Christian Broadcasting Association, was it 2CBA Christian Broadcasting Association until quite recently. She and Roger Climpson were the two mainstays on the announcers up there. She was one of our group. She was Bob Allen’s girlfriend.

A girl down the road used to go with John Perry who lived a bit further down the road. They were, I s’pose they were mainly friends and neighbours of ours and our sisters, their sisters were in the club.

Roseville, we lived in Roseville. The whole group were based in Roseville, Lindfield, Killara,

middle north shore. I s’pose we were, well it was still the later years in the Depression, there wasn’t a lot of affluence around and I think we were probably regarded generally as a privileged set I suppose, private school kids and

so on, pretty wealthy. I remember one bloke turned up with a new car, registration New South Wales 8. It was a six cylinder Packard. For a school boy that was really a chariot but that number plate sold recently at auction sale but I don’t know how long it got out of his family but lost track of him. We lost track of a lot of these guys during the war and you didn’t like to come home and,

I made the mistake once of turning up at a friend’s place and asked, “How is he?” and they said, “He’s dead” and I got a bit shy about saying to people, you know, “How’s your brother?” and “How’s so and so?” and in those years we grew from school children into quite worldly adults quite quickly. Got out of the services, went about our various careers. When I got out of the

army I didn’t seek to maintain any connection at all. I sort of put that behind me and I got on with university and a career and a marriage and a family. My wife often used to say to me, “Why don’t you go in on Anzac Day?” and I said, “I wouldn’t know any of those fellers” because it wasn’t until we got together to come home from New Guinea, that we started meeting blokes that we’d known of or worked with like on the other

end of a radio link with and we had no faces to go with the voices and I had a few friends when we came down on a leave party and a few friends when we stayed behind in the rear guard but for the most part the unit was scattered. The history of the unit is the history of the war in New Guinea. We were everywhere from Hollandia to Milne Bay and up through the islands and

all out anything up to a hundred stations out at the same time and there wasn’t the cohesion that normally exists in a military unit. Anyhow I eventually found a book. My cousin sent me a book and it was the history of our unit and I looked through and kept coming up with this name “Mulligan, Mulligan, Mulligan,

Mulligan” and there was a reunion of the unit at Queanbeyan or I happened to be going down to Wagga for some other reason and on the way back went over to Queanbeyan, dropped in and found there were half a dozen fellows there that I actually knew and they’d had a very strong association and still were a very strong association. This is going back 12 years now and they’d all stuck together, meeting regularly, having reunions regularly,

maintaining contact with the various widows who were very much a part of the unit and still are to this day and I found out I’d missed out on a whole comradeship that had gone on from 1945 to 1960, ‘70 probably and I’d been out of touch and during that time this

book had been printed in which we’re all mentioned but the anecdotes of the various experiences on the stations. The rule of the guys who compiled the book were they had to have two blokes to confirm every story or they wouldn’t print it. Broughton died. I don’t know when he died. We lost him. Frank Parmeter was there and I was out of touch so the only bits of the book that refer

to us are the bits about Frank Parmeter who was a larger than life character anyhow. I s’pose these days he’d be…I think Sergeant Rambo would be about a good description of Parmeter. He was just larger than life in everything he did.

She was pretty much a full time mother. We lived on the money that my father sent us. We lived in a rented house in Roseville. She made all my sisters clothes. She made all the curtains for the house. She did all the housekeeping. In fact she pretty much devoted her life to us and her one charity, the Crippled Children’s Society and that’s about all she did.

She was yes, she was always very close to the church. She was a regular churchgoer and she used to attend St Andrews in Roseville and then occasionally, or quite frequently, in at Christ Church St Laurence. North Queensland of course is very high church Anglican. We lived quite close to the cathedral. My father, later when he got a company house,

lived quite close to the cathedral in Townsville and there was a Friday night poker game which included my father, Monsignor McLachlan from the Catholic Church, Archdeacon Malene who was later Bishop of Perth from the Anglican church and Arty Fadden who was the Prime Minister, for about a week or two, he was Prime Minister of Australia. He was our local member and this odd collection of businessmen, clerics and politicians used to play poker regularly

at our house on Friday night. Some years later when I told that to an Anglican cleric in Wollongong, he could barely contain himself. He didn’t ever speak to me again. It wasn’t his sort of scene at all but we had a very different view of, from the extreme high church in Townsville to the extreme, for want of a better term, low church

in Sydney diocese. My mother always managed to support both the local Anglican Church but she used to love to go to Christ Church St Laurence ‘cause it was not part of Sydney Diocese. It was independent and a very high church and candles and angelus bells and all that sort of thing, which just doesn’t exist anywhere else in Sydney diocese.

Well she was hardly seen at all. She dedicated her life to just raising us. When the war broke out she went along to join the army. I don’t know what she was going to do with us, leave us in boarding school I s’pose but she tried to join up and they said “No, she was too old”. I remember her quote on that

saying “I’ll have trouble laughing this one off but,” she said, “laugh I will”. She then joined the Voluntary Aid. VADs, the Voluntary Aid Detachment and she was commandant at the Lindfield branch and she had all these young ladies training, basic nursing, first aid and she was perfectly competent to train them all in that and they opened the air force camp at Bradfield Park. Now Bradfield Park was an area of bush when

we were kids and as part of the Lindfield scouts, we went down and we cleared that Bradfield Park for a jamboree, 1938, ’39, just before the war started and this bush was absolutely cleaned for a big scout jamboree. Within the year the air force had taken it over and it was Bradfield Park recruit

training for the air force. At that stage they had a hospital of course, camp hospital and at that stage the air force didn’t even have it’s own nursing service so she’d have gone in as field VADs down there and she was de facto unpaid matron of the camp hospital and staffed it with the VADs and that persisted for a couple of years and she maintained her VAD status all through the war but their actual, the big effort

was manning that hospital in the days before they had their own nursing staff.

Both my sisters were in the VADs. My elder sister joined the Red Cross as a full time Red Cross social worker. She worked in the hospitals in Melbourne.

That was unpaid. She did that as a voluntary occupation for several years. My younger sister, who’s nearly two years younger than me, wasn’t 18 till the war ended so she was actually a bit underage for the VADs but she was a mature looking lady so she got away with it. I think she officially put her age up or something but she stayed with the VADs and stayed home. My elder sister worked with the Red Cross.

When they did the ABC [Australian Broadcasting Commission] show of “50 Years after the War” and there’s the title came on. There was a very pretty girl in a felt hat. That was my sister and the ABC actually had her on that title page. I don’t know what they call it in television terms but she was a particularly beautiful young lady and she’s still not a bad looking girl at 81,

still gives a good account of herself, yeh.

No, no, my father did, twice. He met his second wife who had two sons

and she was one of the Garbutt family I spoke of earlier with the aerodrome. She wouldn’t put up with his antics either and she left him after a while and he married a lady who was a chartered accountant from Mackay, a German family there and I s’pose he had matured a little in age and he married a mature lady and they seemed to get on very well and that marriage lasted

until he died. He retired, went to live down at Slade Point near Mackay and seemed to be quite happy, brought his wife down here to Wollongong once and I met her. Surprised me really, she wasn’t his type at all. She looked like a chartered accountant. It was a surprise to us.

Yes.

Sydney Grammar yes.

They had a cadet corps but I was too young to be in that so I did never get involved with their cadet corps although I did meet some of the…later on in the war

I met one or two of the guys who had, you know were a year or two ahead of me at school and had served in that cadet corps, quite by chance. You know you’re always meeting different, meet different people every day when you’re moving around with an army. It wasn’t till I got to, till I, Dad wanted me in boarding school and he wanted me at Kings and I objected to changing my colours within the GPS [Greater Public Schools]. I mean Kings are the enemy on a football paddock.

You couldn’t turn around and join them. Eventually we settled for Barker College at Hornsby which was where Bob Allen was going. I don’t remember if we even discussed that we’d be going to the same school. I think we were quite surprised to find we were both doing the same thing. I became involved in the cadet corps at Barker, got my commission in my second year there and

started serving my time in the air force reserve there so I was sort of, I was going to the war and that was it. My mother had different ideas about me going to the university and doing medicine but I said “We’ll worry about that after the war”. By the time I got out of the army I was nearly 23, stone broke, single and didn’t feel like taking on a six year

course. I was happy to cop three or four years but not six.

It was full of infantry training. Apart from arms drill, shooting on a rifle range, we did map reading, in fact everything you’d learn at an infantry training school.

Drill and more drill and more drill and a bit of shooting. They actually gave us some live ammunition at one stage or you could do cadet camps. I would say after a year in the cadet corps at school you’d be where you’d be after six weeks in an infantry training camp and as a cadet under officer, they call them now. We were second lieutenants in those days

cadet lieutenants. Also learnt a little bit about command and instruction and it all seemed to come pretty naturally.

In cadets? How old was I when I was in the cadets? I was in the cadets at the ages of 16 and 17.

I obviously took to it very well. I got a commission without applying for it. It was wartime, soldiering was a known profession. I was headed to air force myself but I didn’t, I quite enjoyed the military discipline side of it and I think all young men have a fascination with firearms

and we were very fortunate. We learnt to use them with complete safety, which unfortunately a lot of men don’t.

Glenfield there was a big agricultural high school there. Glenfield? Out near Ingleburn, I think it was Glenfield we used to go but we moved into the, it was a government

boarding establishment and agricultural school. Well these occurred in school holidays. They were away and we sort of moved into their barracks and used the farmland and the surrounding bush as our training ground. we had, fellows used to come and they were old world war one diggers. They were warrant officers first class and they belonged to the Australian Instructional Corps and the bloke who stopped me going to the air force eventually, George

Every, was one of those AIC men. They stayed on after World War 1 and their whole life was training soldiers and but they were automatons I s’pose you’d…and they were, you know they’d give a demonstration of throwing the grenade. “The Sergeant Major will pull the pin from the grenade. The Sergeant Major will throw the grenade into that 44 gallon drum” and in it’d go into the 44 gallon drum. They were just extraordinarily precise,

accurate. They were walking textbooks, their own little specialty of infantry training and old George Every was one of them and he’d won his military medal in World War 1 and he served in between time. I don’t know whether those men were full time instructors or whether they were part time but whenever we saw them they were first class warrant officers instructing cadets and they were all returned soldiers of course.

Didn’t tell you any tales. You stood to attention and said nothing when they were around. The class amongst them was a class amongst themselves. We were just school boys and they were instructors and never the twain shall meet. Our own officers, we had a Commanding Officer who was a captain and a 2IC [Second in Charge] who was a lieutenant. Well they were a history teacher and a geography teacher and in the case of the geography teacher,

also our football coach and so we had a relationship with them but these strange warrant officers with everything was so precise and when they finished their instruction they retired to their offices mess wherever that would be. We didn’t get a look in there so one would never say, you met them, yes, but you wouldn’t ever know them. They were quite a breed apart.

Yes.

Well at the beginning of second year they just post it up and “the following will be officers. One, two, three, four, five, six” and I was the bottom one on the line so I was sub lieutenant and in charge of a platoon and in those days we had four ranks, just before we got into three ranks. The platoon was four ranks. You had the sergeant, corporal, two lance corporals

and about 30 men and that was my command and we used to put them through all their recruit training, teach them how to slope arms, how to march without falling over their feet and…

I was 15 yes, 15 and, September

3rd of September wasn’t it, April, September, 15 and five months.

We were going down Bathurst Street, Sydney and seeing the Sun newspaper placard and in those days, things weren’t as dramatic as they are now. You know the big

headline would be two inch print and these placards simply said war, W A R, three letters and they filled the whole placard, ‘cause we were all expecting it to happen and I think I was probably too involved in doing my Intermediate Certificate, which I passed and my mother

gave me a Rolex watch which I wore through the rest of school and all through the war, through most of my life really. I think she probably dug really deep to the bottom of her kitty bag but I passed the Intermediate Certificate. I think at that stage she was buttering me up to stay out of the war. She was steering me towards medicine

but apart from war, the other thing she had an absolute horror about was motorbikes and she even tried to bribe me at one stage saying that she’d buy me a new Rudge motorbike if I promised I wouldn’t join the army or the air force so I said, “Well I’ll wait for my motorbike later”. In fact I learnt to ride motorbikes in the army and I rode BSAs at the army’s expense, not at mine, army’s expense and risk.

I think we were probably too involved at that stage, people were saying, “It won’t last”. You know, “It’ll be over by Christmas” and all this sort of nonsense. I think when it broke out in 1939 we probably didn’t think we were going to get to the stage of actually going. By the time we were in, two years later the war had gone pretty seriously against us in North Africa and Europe.

We began to realise that it was going to be going and that were going to it and that’s when Perry Ferguson, myself, those three and a few others decided we were going air force. Bob Allen of course went army ‘cause his father was a Brigadier and he lived and breathed army so that was the only way for him to go but it was in our final year at school we realised that it was going to be on, it was going to be on for a

long while and we were going to be in it so that’s when I had the commission in the cadet corps and the aim of being a multi engine pilot. Strangely enough I was one of the few guys who joined the air force who didn’t want to be a fighter pilot. I wanted to fly a big one. I don’t know why it’s just, in fact one of the lads, Max Roberts. Not Max Roberts, Mark Roberts, one of our crowd at school

who did join the air force. He did fly bombers and after the war he flew for Qantas and ended up as their senior pilot. I didn’t ever see him after the war but I was aware of where he was and any time I got on a Qantas aircraft I’d look to see if Mark was flying it but he wasn’t. I did never catch up with him again but I was aware that he got to be, he was the route captain. He was the guy who’d get on any aircraft

without notice, sit behind the pilot and watch him, you know just to make him nice and nervous. I s’pose they were checking that, you know, checking officer really, but he spent his entire life flying, starting from school.

I couldn’t conceive of any young man who didn’t want to fly an aeroplane in those days. You know they were the golden years of aviation and particularly having lived in Charters Towers, Qantas started in 1927. We moved to Charters Towers in 1930, ’27, 1930, Qantas was only three years old when we moved to Charters Towers. Out at Longreach they were building their own aeroplanes. They imported

Oregon pine from America, silk from Japan, engines and all the fittings from Lockheed in England and they built their own aircraft out there and as I mentioned earlier, we lived at the Crown Hotel, my mother and I. When Qantas came into Charters Towers, the pilots always stayed at the Crown Hotel and

being my mother, she had her own table at the hotel and the lady who owned the hotel had her own table next to us and nobody was seated at those two tables without permission and my mother used to allow the Qantas pilots to eat at our table so as far as they were concerned we were just an old lady, or middle aged lady and the kid but they were very nice to us. I remember

Lester Brain and his brother who flew Qantas. Most of those guys were World War 1 pilots. They were flying string and wire aeroplanes, wooden frames and fabric covered. Charters Towers was a dirt strip a few miles out of town. If the

Qantas pilot was running late for some reason or other and he wasn’t going to make it by dark the whole town would turn out and park cars along the aerodrome and light the landing field with car headlights. It was quite an event actually. I think we all enjoyed it. I don’t know if the Qantas blokes enjoyed it but they used to land on this dirt strip there. They’d come in and I remember saying to one of the pilots one night

“We were out there helping you land tonight. We were out there with the Shultz’s in the big Plymouth turning on the lights for you”. “Oh” he said “good, I’ll wave to you in the morning as we take off” so he took off and disappeared out over Mosman Hill, forgot to wave to us. We were all, kids were all standing on the balcony. He turned around and came back, you know. I s’pose I was thinking flying

when I was 12 and younger, eight or nine. I was crazy about aeroplanes then. On my 10th birthday I spent every penny I had at Townsville at an air show. I flew in a Southern Cross with Kingsford-Smith, 10 shillings. For a 10 year old boy that was a lot of money, was all I had and I went broke. That was the first time I went broke. There have been other times, yeh

and I always wanted to fly and a couple of times I actually got as far as taking a flying lesson, after the war. One time I was quite serious about it and I went broke then too. I found a Bentley motorcar I just had to have, an old 1923 model, so that postponed that flying episode and I didn’t ever really get to fly. I flew in a Tiger Moth up at Camden

a few years ago, fellow gave me the controls for a while but he wouldn’t let me land it. I thought I knew how but I just always had a head full of flying I guess and an ambition I didn’t ever realise.

Dreaming,

yeh we used to dream. I used to dream of flying Qantas aeroplanes. We moved to Sydney and in Sydney we used to go out to Richmond, the aerodrome there, an RAAF aerodrome there and watch them flying Hawker Demons. Now the Hawker Demon was a very gutsy little aeroplane and they had a number of them at Richmond, three or four I think. All the pilots and people were simply weekend airmen. They had jobs

during the week and they used to go and fly these things on the weekend. I think they trained on Gypsy Moths in those days. It was before the Tiger Moths and then they got to flying these Hawker Demons. The Demon was gradually developed on and became the Hawker Hurricane which was the companion to the Spitfire in the Battle for Britain, Spitties and Hurricanes. We used to go out and watch them fly those. I s’pose if peace had

if peacetime had have continued, I’d have probably gone on and joined them I think. I certainly had the ambition to fly always, since I was about eight and now I have to pay to get on an aeroplane, sad.

Yes, you went along to the recruiting office in Woolloomooloo. They offered you a colour blind chart. If you passed that you were then allowed to go for a medical exam. If you didn’t pass the colour blind test you didn’t even get in the door. You were out before you started and went right through a complete medical.

I always used to play rugby league on Saturday morning and rugby union on Saturday afternoon and jumping out of my skin and perfectly fit. I had no trouble with that and so then they enrolled us in this, I think it was called the RAAF Air Crew Reserve and they used to send us all these brochures and text books and stuff we had to learn and know. I s’pose we passed exams.

I s’pose we did exams although I don’t have a clear recollection of that but I remembered, you know a lot of the stuff, theory of flight I had already absorbed as an amateur interest, you know flying magazines and a physics student at school. I at least knew what made an aeroplane stay up in the air which a lot of people today still don’t know. Did you ever hear of Bernoulli's principle?

It’s the principle by which sailing ships sail and aeroplanes fly, described by an Italian physicist, Bernoulli. Well I knew all that as a student at school so theory of flight was dead easy. I already knew Morse code from boy scouts. I had the signaller’s badge in the scouts.

Had to learn about the, radio speak. They’ve now changed it but we used to do, the A to Z alphabet we had is different from the one they use today but the principle was the same, had to spell everything out in letters which were in fact words.

At the same time as, and I’m not sure if we were actually there together, I rather fancy we were, a fellow called John Perry who was a neighbour and close friend and member of our old harmony club. We joined about the same time. John got his call-up, and Steve Ferguson was the other one. We were all going in together. Now whether we went in physically and presented at the same

time is a detail I’ve lost. I’ll deal with John, and strangely enough whilst on the Air Crew Reserve, I got my call-up and went to the army as a safe way of not, you know being able to get into the air force, I went for my army medical and the doctor who examined me was John Perry’s mother. She was a lady doctor and she was examining recruits for the army.

“What are you doing here?” “I’m just filling in time till I get my air force call-up” so she said “You look pretty fit. I know you are fit. Through you go” and I don’t think, she may have listened to my chest. I don’t know but she just knew me and knew I was a fit young fellow and passed me in.

Yes, it was purely correspondence and we didn’t have a class

as such. We didn’t go to lectures. We had to work our way through these various booklets they sent us and I don’t recall doing an examination. I s’pose they did and I don’t ever remember going to an examination hall so they probably sent us a questionnaire examination we passed but, you know we had to know the stuff and

the idea was when you got to Bradfield Park all you’d do was march and slope arms and get straight into these lectures where you’re already familiar with a lot of the material.

At boarding school most of it, still at school and you could join it at 17 so I’d have joined it in ’41, in April ’41 in

my last year at school. I did most of that course concurrently with my leaving certificate. It’s a bit vague now. It’s a lot of years ago.

Yeh.

I was a physics student

and I was also blessed or cursed with this high mechanical ability which showed up whenever I went for an aptitude test and although they had aptitude tests in the army I was never going to make infantry. They just saw the mechanical aptitude, the technical aptitude. It was engineers or signals and I got signals.

It’s a very busy year, very busy year. Schooling was different. We handled our subjects differently. Things that were honours subjects when we were at school are now axomatic things that the kids just accept in fifth

year, you know. Calculus and things like that were almost an impossible challenge to us whereas nowadays they just pick it up in their ordinary course. I can remember the length of time in the industry that went into proving Pythagoras’ theorem. Nowadays they just say, ‘This is Pythagoras theorem. Square’s on the, adjacent sides are equal, the square on the hypotenuse, that’s our cube, axomatic, move on”. They don’t ever learn to prove it. They just accept it as axiom. With the amount of knowledge

that’s available now for the students to absorb, they just can’t do the same sort of detail that we did. Some years ago I went to a conference in Tasmania and the speaker there presented on the board, and he was a mathematician, and he presented a long multiplication, long division, few sums like that and the next line he presented a

far more complicated mathematical problem and then the third one was gibberish and he said, “That was from the Melbourne university’s matriculation exam in 1936, that was Melbourne university’s matriculation exam in 1946 and this matriculation exam”, he said, “I can’t even understand the question, let alone know the answer”. Education’s just changed so much. Mathematics,

well, ask any father can he help his kids with their homework and I look at my grandkids. They come over here. We’ve got a good set of encyclopaedias there and we do a few school projects together. In fact we won a science prize just recently with one of them. I just always love the technical subjects, you know technical, is a lot of study. I was never really headed towards the humanities. It was always going to be technical

and I just found that stuff remarkably easy to learn and interesting to learn. French on the other hand, great difficulty. Couldn’t see any reason in the world why I should speak French so I didn’t, you know.

I left school. I spoke of Mr Taylor with his little factory that made fishing reels. He’s my friend’s father and

I went in there for a while and I was feeding stuff into an automatic lathe that was making the top end of spark plugs, the electrode post in Edison spark plugs and this little thing used to click away all day and all I had to do was feed it new bit of steel when it got hungry and occasionally they’d send me out go somewhere and pick up a set of dyes or something. Then he suddenly pointed out to me I could be grabbed for being in a

reserved occupation, ‘cause what I was doing was contributing to war production, so I got the hell out of there. Then the opportunity came up in April, May, school holidays finished about February, worked with Mr Taylor for probably some weeks. Then the opportunity came up to do this LHQ [Land Headquarters] school.

I don’t know how it happened. I ended up I was the only cadet lieutenant on the school. The others were all commissioned officers up to the rank, anything from a lieutenant to major, in the training course. There were running two courses up there. One was a physical education course and the other was the small arms school. That was at Cowra, April, May. Sleeping at the showground at Cowra in May is a bit cool.

Riding that train down through Harden and Blayney at four o’clock in the morning wasn’t funny either but I enjoyed the small arms school. We fired a lot of weapons that were World War 1 stuff, things I’d never seen or heard of before, things I didn’t know existed and we spent eight weeks up there playing with all these lovely toys. The famous Owen gun,

it was a nine millimetre gun and whenever you fired it, it used to climb. I had a 45 calibre one that was designed to take Thompson gun ammunition which is at least twice the weight of a nine millimetre. The thing was absolutely and totally unmanageable but it was a prototype they’d built and they decided they couldn’t use that for that ammunition, apart from the fact you couldn’t carry enough of it, the gun was totally unmanageable. See whatever Owen invented was an

adapted 22 rifle and he had that firing as a machine gun but when you go from a 22 which is just a tiny little slug of lead, up to a 45 calibre which is a really heavy piece of equipment, it just didn’t work and there were others, we fired a gun up there called an Austen. The British were using the Sten gun. Somebody set up a company in Australia to make it, called it an Austen gun and I don’t think they ever

went into serious production and they were certainly never issued to the army but there were prototypes there. We did fire them. Hotchkiss guns, Lewis guns, Bren guns, Vickers guns. Anti tank rifles, that was an interesting job. Just an enormously magnified military rifle, same bolt action and same everything except it fired a slug about that big with armour piercing for a tank and the trick was, when you fired it you took your elbows off the ground. If you didn’t, you

had no skin left on your elbows ‘cause it would push you backwards every time you fired the thing but that was all wasted because I didn’t ever go into the infantry see, so they wasted their couple of months training there but…

No, I was the only cadet officer on the course. I don’t know how it came about. They wrote to me and told me the course was

available to me as a cadet lieutenant and, as I say, I was playing the game of keeping out of the reserved occupations until you turned of age and I was, I think I was 18 and two days when I went into that force. That was April, May. Then I got my call-up 1st of June so I, between

school and army and that six months, I had a school holiday, played around in a fishing reel factory making spark plugs, then the LHQ small arms school and then I was in the army as a recruit. Well I’d been training recruits the year before so that was a piece of cake, took to wireless operating without any trouble, Morse code,

get our speed up and you got an extra two bob a day for being a trade group two operator.

It made everything far more urgent and it was obvious that we were going to have a lot of flying and

all through the early part of it, it was assumed that we’d go into the Empire Air Training Scheme. Young people these days, in fact some of the historians who are rewriting history, talk a lot of nonsense about the British taking Australia’s young men over there to fight their war, the British war. Particularly this is prevalent down in ANU in Canberra. They’re rewriting the whole thing. We were born British citizens.

There was no such thing as an Australian citizen when we were kids. If we had passports, they were British passports. We were part of the British Empire and the King was our King, and the fact that war was over there in Britain didn’t really make any difference at all to us. We were British subjects and some of the training here, some of it in Canada and then off to where the flying was in Africa or Europe or

England or elsewhere and then all of a sudden it was obvious the flying was going to be starting here and in fact Pearl Harbour was bombed December ’41, our unit was formed a few weeks later in January ’42. We had spotters in the field and we were able to report the bombers coming in to the first air raid on Port Moresby and the air raid

on Townsville. All of sudden with the Japanese in, the war was on our doorstep. We were talking the Brisbane line. If the Japanese invaded, we’d give away Queensland and the Northern Territory and just defend from Brisbane south, ‘cause that’s where 99 percent of the population were, all sorts of political theories of how we should do it and whether we should be there and whether we should have conscription

but, yes, we did have conscription. Yes, we didn’t have to defend the Brisbane line and it was much more degree of urgency of it. I think this was about the time my mother offered me that Rudge motorbike, beautiful bike a Rudge, but no, we were the generation that was going to the war and that was it. I didn’t ever get to fly. Considering the casualty

rates, I may not have been sitting here if I’d been a pilot, although most of my friends who did fly, survived and some of the fellows I put through the signal course, the training course in Bonegilla, one fellow in particular—I remember his name was Jock Scott—he was a Scots College boy and I remember him going through as a recruit in the signal corps and he told me then he was on the Air Crew Reserve and he got called up to the air force

on the same course I would have been on and I didn’t get my call-up. I later saw a notice of call-up addressed to me. I have the private suspicion that it was sent to my home and my mother forgot to pass it on to me.

I didn’t ever get to the bottom of that. What concerned me at the time was soon as I heard that Jock and Perry and Ferguson and these guys were on the course down at Bradfield, forgotten which one of them sent me the telegram—rang my mother, got my address and sent me a telegram—and I think it might have been Steve Ferguson. It was one of them. I shot straight up the orderly room and got paraded to the CO and he just told me he’d blocked it, that was it. Well, as an 18 year old kid

I was a bit in awe I s’pose of majors with military medals on their chest and I sort of accepted it as inevitable. I think at a more mature age, I’d have kicked up a far greater fuss and demanded a lot more inquiry into it but to say that an 18 year old recruit instructor, as I say, mucking around on parade grounds and route marches and bayonet assault courses, to say I was essential personnel in the army was absolutely ludicrous but that’s what he said.

Yep, Tamworth in the showground.

Tamworth in June, like any other inland spot, sleeping in their showground is a very miserable and uncomfortable experience, particularly ‘cause it was raining quite a lot and right next door to us

was an airfield of Hudson bombers that used to take off over our heads at dawn and our tents are flat with their slipstream. I didn’t learn anything there. I’d already been there with all the basic recruit training. I already knew my Morse code. We hadn’t at that stage seen a radio set. I think we were only there for about four weeks.

They transferred us down to Bonegilla where it was a properly organised training, was when we got there that we started seriously working in Morse code units and studying the operation of radio sets. I s’pose that was probably, I was probably there for about, think it was six or eight weeks in the army when I went to this

1st Beach Signals. There were two sections, first and second and we trained together, very small unit, highly specialised. We were the guys who were to go ashore first and maintain communications shore to ship. That’s what we were training for. Middle of winter, Bonegilla,

dressed up in a raincoat and a small rowing boat and a large military set, running around the lake, which is the Hume Weir, in the middle of the night, doing playful landings. It all seemed a bit ridiculous. You know we knew it was going to be a tropical landing, we knew it was going to be a beach but there we were, paddling around in the middle of the night in the Hume Weir. I don’t think I’ve ever been so cold in my life and that includes down at Kosciusko and I

started skiing there when I was 13 I think. I thought I knew what cold was but not till I got on Lake, Hume Weir. It then became apparent that there was going to be an invasion in which the beach signals were going to be involved. As a reaction mainly to the fact that the militia had some, mostly 18 year olds and some 17 year olds,

militiamen in the Kokoda action and the militiamen bore the brunt of that Kokoda action. The AIF from the Middle East came in later but it was the militiamen, the 39th battalion and the 52, 53 battalion I think. They were all 18 year old boys and there was quite a lot of political backlash to this and the government of the day said, “Right, nobody joins the AIF or goes overseas under 19”, which

at this stage I was committed to being a soldier because, no I wasn’t at that stage. I was still playing with air force. Anyhow out of that and back into the training battalion, we’d already finished the course and I’d picked up two stripes. I was a corporal with the, or acting corporal in the Beach Signals so I was wearing two stripes when I got back to the training battalion and they said

“OKAY you’re an instructor”. Well I’d been an instructor before. In cadet corps days it was a piece of cake and that’s when the CO blocked my transfer to the air force so I joined the AIF on my 19th birthday and decided if I was going to be a soldier, I was going to be a soldier and I, as I said earlier, I wasn’t interested in sticking bayonets in hay bags.

No, army. I didn’t ever get into the air force itself.

No that was the army signals training battalion.

With the beach signals? From memory, there were about 50 of us in each section, very small and

we didn’t seem to belong to anybody. There was no such thing as an independent…they were just a specialist unit, small group of guys who were trained to do a particular job. I think they probably hadn’t given much thought to what we’d do after we’d finished that because they weren’t anticipating a lot of us would finish it. In actual fact the unit I later joined, was involved in that landing at Lae. We had four spotting stations went ashore

with the first wave of troops in but that was, Lae invasion, September ’43 and I didn’t get to New Guinea until a couple of months after that.

It was a bit remote from the Hume Weir.

It had been farm country. There were cows in the paddocks in most places around us. We crossed a bit of farm land to the banks of the Hume Weir and we used to go swimming in the Weir, was only a matter of probably a hundred yards from the camp, was just bare, barren, dusty ground. We were all in military huts. There were

no tents. There was a big hospital there, the 2nd General Hospital was well established there but most of the camp was just signalmen in training, was quite a large section of AWAS [Australian Women’s Army Service] there, many of them training signals, many of them training for clerical duties. They had their own little department further back in the camp. About the only time we saw them was

church parade on Sunday; as well they had a dance in the unit hall on Saturday night but apart from that, the girls were completely remote. They were just there. We didn’t see much of them. We were just in our own little compound of recruits coming in. A rather unusual bloke, Captain Wainwright, he was the Adjutant. George Every was the CO.

This is quite aside from the training. I went up one night to get a leave…went up one day to get a leave pass from Captain Wainwright, so he took out the form and wrote NX161793. I said, “How do you know my army number?” He said, “I know the number of every man in this unit”. I think he must have been a spare parts man in civil life or something, but he knew everybody’s army number. He didn’t have to ask, a photographic memory obviously.

Nice guy, Wainwright, but we had them, used to get them in. First week they came into my hut. “Who smokes before breakfast?” “Down the other end of the hut”. So I had it organised that those who, and we all smoked but it was a matter whether you smoked before breakfast ‘cause if you don’t smoke before breakfast, it’s dreadful to wake up next to a man who’s lighting up a cigarette, so we put them down the other end of the hut and it was their second

day in the army and we taught them how to slope arms and the third day in the army we saw them wince when they whacked that rifle onto a very sore shoulder. Teaching them just arms drill and marching. Later on I got moved from there into the third week of camp and we did the bayonet assault course. From memory I think it was about four weeks they did on

what we call “bull ring”, drill and bayonet assault course and by five o’clock at night they were thoroughly tired. Final parade at five o’clock, sergeant major would say “Back on parade at six o’clock. Full marching order” so out you went. Six o’clock, rifle, pack, the lot, 24 hour route march. March all night and come back in the morning and it would be good to get into bed, “No you’re on parade again”

and we got used to this. It didn’t worry us but the recruits, it used to nearly kill them but they were all soft and they were there to be toughened up and that’s what we were doing. When they survived about four weeks of that, they started onto signal training to be radio operators and…

Pretty much by the book. I didn’t ever do an NCO’s school. The army didn’t ever teach me how to be an infantry instructor, the cadet corps did. I knew all that stuff from cadet corps days, which was only six months earlier and apparently I was pretty good at it, ‘cause the CO decided I could have another six months and be a sergeant. I said “No thank you. I’m out of here”.

I think there was a certain satisfaction in watching guys who come from knowing absolutely nothing and being totally unfit, to at the end of two or three weeks, being quite fit and looking like soldiers and acting like soldiers. Day one on parade you can

pick them out “Which cadet corps were you lad?” “Scots”. “Where were you?” “Shore.” You know you can pick the cadet corps boys the minute they stepped on the parade ground. They knew what they were doing. The rest didn’t have a clue. They’d never seen a rifle before, their boots hurt them.

Well we all wore our own distinctive uniforms in cadet corps. I mean, Scots, they wore kilts and at Kings School they wore their school uniform which was also their, it was a military type uniform, still is, same uniform as they have now. My own three sons went through the cadet corps at Kings in the 50s, in the 1950s, yeh. No, just the way the bloke

wore his hat and managed not to point the rifle at his feet and, you know immediately obvious the fellows who had worn a military uniform and handled a rifle before. They just stood out so far from the rest, quite unreal and the same thing applied in the air force. There was a theory that if you were a private school boy, you’d graduate with a commission once you started to fly and that,

the, where was I?

Yes, in actual fact I had the opinion from my own guys, my own recruits. The cadet corps blokes just stood out so far

from the others. They were soldiers on day one and the others weren’t soldiers till about six weeks later and the air force must surely have had exactly the same experience of the blokes coming in. Although they’d all done the air crew training, the reserve training, they knew their theory of flight, Morse code and radio procedure and all that sort of stuff, they still didn’t know how to look like soldiers, except the cadet corps boys and so they sort of stood out from day one and I think that must have made a difference

in their mustering them, deciding who’d be a pilot, who’d be a bombardier, who’d be a wireless operator, who’d be a tail gunner and also I thought quite unfairly, a percentage, probably 30 or 40 percent of them would be my guess, of guys when they got their flying wings, got a commission and a lot of these were the GPS boys. The blokes that didn’t get a commission said “Oh that’s just because they’re GPS”. The answer

is no, it’s they were cadet corps boys. They looked like soldiers from day one.

No trouble at all, no trouble at all. You were all nothing. You were all nobody, down the…and you were a recruit, take orders from everybody and give orders to nobody.

It was very satisfying to see these guys come in completely or almost completely uncoordinated, unfit, boots that hurt them and feeling desperately sorry for themselves and wishing they could go home to mum, and see them over a course of six weeks, trained up to the point where they knew how to handle a rifle, a bayonet, jumping

out of their skins with fitness, could work all day, march all night and come back and work again the next day. You were achieving that from…looking back to six weeks, what they were like when we got them. It was just unbelievable, the difference in them.

The fact that I knew I was stuck there. These guys were going through their training, going on, going to units somewhere. In the case of Jock, I mentioned earlier, going onto air crew.

He flew Kittyhawks in New Guinea. These guys were going through and we were stuck there and I had a pal there, Bruce Curtis, Sydney Grammar School boy, a year or two ahead of me at school and he was the only soldier I ever saw in the AIF with RAAF pilot wings up. He did his flying training, graduated as a pilot

and then by his description he “flew a Tiger Moth into a hangar and the door wasn’t open”. He sort of bent their Tiger Moth and their hangar rather badly, got himself grounded permanently and at that early stage of the war, for an airman with “grounded permanently” he could take an optional discharge, which Bruce did. He took his discharge and joined the army. Later on they, most of them if they

dropped out of flying for any reason, bad record, accident record or something, they made them, whether they were officers or quarter masters or something, they kept them in the air force and used them as, you know basically trained officers and in a non dangerous area where they couldn’t bend any of the equipment and a friend who was a partner of mine in physiotherapy many years later, came into that category. He failed his flying and became a meteorologist

but Bruce came into the training battalion as a corporal instructor with his pilot wings up, which was quite odd really and I met him again later in New Guinea. I s’pose the only thing I didn’t like about the training battalion was the knowledge I was stuck there for six months. Ways out were to

volunteer for something and ‘course it became effective after you served your six months but I served my time and I was offered further time and they had Manpower people who used to come round and check what everybody was doing. I think probably what they were doing were looking for guys who were drawing army pay and making it their business not to go anywhere. They seemed to have

authority above and beyond the unit and they could, they’d call people up for interview, find out who they were and how long they’d been there and why they were there that long and all that sort of thing and you could ask to go and be paraded before them, so I went down and saw them and said, “They’ve banned me from the air force and I’ve had enough of this training and I don’t want to be a sergeant in Bonegilla, thanks very much” and so they offered me paratroops. I think I mentioned this before to Chris [interviewer], yes,

paratroops or New Guinea on air warning wireless. I knew of New Guinea air warning wireless although it’d supposed to have been secret at all times. If you’ve got a hundred wireless sets in New Guinea with guys going on the air in plain language and reporting aeroplanes flying over, and your name is New Guinea Air Warning Wireless Company, you can hardly be secret. I mean the Japanese were, they were pretty good soldiers. They were a fairly efficient army. They had some antiquated equipment, some very poor intelligence but

that is not in intellect, army intelligence, but to say we were secret was, that myth was blown open in 1943 when Damien Parer took a photo of Salamaua aerodrome from one of our stations, sent the film down to the Department of Information in Sydney who released it to the Sydney Morning Herald, while the guy was still up the tree at this Salamaua aerodrome.

The next day the Japs arrived looking for him of course, knew exactly where he was and he destroyed the set, took the crystals with him and ran for his life and got back to Mubo but he lost all his equipment. I keep wandering off what you were talking to me about, don’t I?

Good, you do your job and I’ll do mine.

This is the unit I joined in New Guinea, New Guinea Air Warning Wireless?

Was a signal

training battalion, pure and simple. We were training them from civilian to radio operator.

It was in two distinct parts. You did your basic military training,

even the cook is a trained infanteer. Everybody in the army is a trained infanteer at first, with very few exceptions, medical officers and dentists and, you know professional people who joined, did a quick course in how to look like a soldier without any experience at all and so they turned a dentist into a commissioned officer in a matter of a few weeks. Well, they didn’t get much infantry training at all, nor did they need any but every other man who went into the army did basic military training. It was,

you’re no good in the army if you couldn’t handle a rifle or a bayonet and perhaps an Owen gun or mortars, two inch mortars, three inch mortars. They were all basic infantry equipment that we had to handle and so you spent four or five weeks doing that and then went on to the, about week six you went into wireless telegraphy. Well they moved then into a different division of the training battalion.

They were in specialist training. They had to send and receive Morse code, learn your Morse code and I always felt the army taught it the wrong way round but they wouldn’t listen to me.

The army would teach you A “dit-dah or dot-dash”, then when you hear it on the air, you hear “dot-dash”

and you say to yourself A “A dot-dash” and write down “A”. If you were trained the other way, “dot-dash A”, you’d hear “dot-dash” over the air and you’d automatically write down “A”. It’d make you a much faster operator if they gave you the code first and then the letter or numeral but they’ve always given the numeral and then the code for it so you sort of did this double take mentally to get a series of dots and dashes

through a lot of static usually, into a pair of headphones and it was coming in at 25, 30 words a minute when you’re at trade group standard and it was coming in pretty fast and you don’t really have time to double think it so after a while you learn to hear the code and write the letter down without thinking, but this thinking process, I always maintained slowed down the learning of the code and the reception of the code.

I mean what they give you is “dot-dash” and you’ve got to write down “A”, seems to be that’s the way you should learn it “dot-dash A, dah-dit-dit-dit B, dah-dah-dah-dit C” and so on right through to “dah-dah-dit-dit” which was Z but nobody ever listened to me. We also learnt operating telephone exchanges. We had a portable exchange, think it held about

10 lines, was a fairly big exchange. It was a metal box, far too heavy and you hooked up all your telephones wires to it and it was the old exchange where you pull out the plugs and put them into the holes, you know. They were known as a Telephone UC, universal call, switchboard. We had another name for them. We had a lot of names for them. They were devils of things to…

boring as hell…sitting under a haystack somewhere answering telephone calls and plugging them in and not my idea of soldiering at all. Then they’d say, “Righto, move” so you’d have to pick this damn thing up and cart it up a mountain and install it up there and there was some pretty steep hills out at Bonegilla and they used to take us out on bivouacs with this equipment. When we got into radio equipment and very often in mobile vans with radio sets, life changed a bit. One of the dodges used to be

working in the field, you’d have your set and get all established communication, give your position and then move, establish communication you know, give your position. I remember on one occasion giving about three or four artificial moves without moving from the pub at Yackandandah. We were parked outside the pub, get on and tell them we were somewhere else

but

Yeh, we got caught eventually.

No, no I didn’t suffer any reprimands or punishments. I remember we got a hell of a rousing. I think it was probably recognised as one of the things that soldiers did.

The sergeant wouldn’t let us get away with it. Been a commissioned officer, we’d have ended up in jail probably. There was always that unwritten code between non commissioned ranks. You know, keep the officers out of the action, you were all right. That’s when it came to mucking up.

At first I was there, I did my radio training there. I then did the landing craft, signals bit, rowing round in the rowing boat but after I got out of that, for being under 19 I was back into there. In there I was purely on infantry training drill. I trained them from day one in the army to the day they, different stages. They used to swap us round a bit, till the day they marched out at the other end, off to learn to be a signalman,

having spent about six weeks learning to be an infanteer.

Had no option, but just cop it and get on with life so I decided if I was going to the war as a solider instead of an airman, I was going to the war as a soldier and that was it but I wasn’t going to hang around that training battalion any longer than I had to. That was, just the fact that you were stuck there was, dead soldier story I s’pose but

yeh.

At our rank, that’s all there is. They’re just destined to go into a

signal office and receive the traffic and I learnt a bit of cipher work. Cipher was a specialised job. They had a group called the ASWG [Australian Special Wireless Group], was a special wireless group. They used to specialise in Japanese Morse code and intercept Japanese messages and we had our own cipher group too, something quite apart. They, our signals used to come in, in groups of

five letters or five numerals, depending which code they were using and so you’d get a whole message form full of “five, five, five, five” all numbers, and they would take this and do whatever cipher guys do and come out with a language, a message in English on a message form in a remarkably short time and send it off to wherever it was going. Then there were lower grade ciphers which we used to use. Trend Code was one I remember.

The basic form of cipher is a single transposition. You just take all the letters and decide the code for the day “S means Q” and “A means Z” and so on and so you’ve just got all these numerals, so you just transpose and put the right letters in the right order. Then we got into Trend code. That was a double transposition cipher and it had an estimated time in the enemy’s hands of about 10 minutes to break a message

and that was used for fairly low grade work but then we were dealing with fairly low grade work in the field. When they got up into senior echelons where you’re dealing with the big secrets of the war office, they were in these high codes that we just didn’t ever see or understand. They were specialist code merchants but the low double transposition

code which we used was used rather to advantage by the spotters. That was the code operated by NCOs, not by signalmen and so when we went out in the field, you’d go out as corporal and two signalmen. Out there you’re an acting sergeant and two acting corporals which we always thought was a bit of extra pay for risk pay and we were rather glad of it but it was a technicality that we were using the code, therefore we were required to be non commissioned rank.

So you’d go from signalman one day. You’re out in the spotting station, you’re a corporal. You come back and you’re a signalman again and I, was by this time, a substantive corporal. They had never dropped me to signalman. They just left me as corporal.

At Bonegilla I went down and saw the Manpower people and told them I’d been blocked from the air force and I was sour about that and

I was 19 years old, I belonged to the AIF and I was ready to go. They offered me paratroops or New Guinea Air Warning Wireless. I took the latter, with my friend Bruce, here with the pilot wings. He finished his term of instructor at the same time. We went up north together and we got to Townsville and

Bruce got the measles and went into hospital and I got on a troop ship and went to Port Moresby.

It was the only good thing about the training battalion. We got leave five days every month. I’ve forgotten. You know we just got used to it except one Christmas.

Our mate George Every, the Commanding Officer, decided it wasn’t fair to let some of the men go on leave for Christmas while the others didn’t, this was Christmas ’42, to let some of us go on leave would be unfair so we had a closed camp and nobody got leave. Boy did we go down to the canteen and get ourselves well and truly stinking, made an awful noise and it was sort of

an alcohol led revolution. I felt awful the next day. I decided from that, from Boxing Day ’42 that I would never drink in an army canteen again and I never did. I’d have a drink when I went on leave but I’d never drink in camp. I came to the conclusion that it was a waste of time and a waste of money and I’d rather go down to the Salvation Army hall and play snooker if I had the evening off

but generally that was our…you know it was predictable. We knew when we were getting leave. It was five days in the month and then back to work.

Bonegilla’s on the border at Albury. I think we were about…used to catch a train at night. I’d finish a days work down at Bonegilla and I’d be home for breakfast in the morning in Sydney, travel overnight on the troop trains and going back, very much the same

procedure, catch the train at night and be on parade in the morning. Now I don’t think we did anything special about leave. I think I just got the usual five days at the end of the month, got my transfer and off I went up to Townsville. My father was resident in Townsville and whenever I got into Townsville I’d ring him up and he’d say, “Where are you son?”

and I’d tell him where I was. “You just stay there”. He controlled all the Scotch whiskey in north Queensland from his little show so he knew every officers mess in the north including all the staging camps. It’d be about 10 minutes and I’d get called on the amplifier to go up to the orderly room. “You’re Swany’s son? Here’s a leave pass for a couple of days off”. This was routine on three or four occasions I went through Townsville and back again.

The first occasion I went up to the orderly room and there was a fellow standing outside the door and he said “hello Peter” and I said “Hello, who are you?” He looked vaguely familiar. He said “I’m Jack Overend”. Now Jack Overend was a lad I knew at school in Charters Towers, 1932. It was 10 years later and Jack was a state ward and he and his brother lived

in this shed behind this dreadful looking old house in Charters Towers. It was an old mining town and the place was full of dreadful old houses and these kids lived in a shed out the back and they got fed the crusts from the pie or the crusts from the bread and I used to take two lunches to school. We were living at the hotel and I used to take two lunches to school every day, one for Jack and he’d share that with his young brother. It was as the only decent feed

they got was half a sandwich lunch. Anyhow when he heard my name called over the amplifier, he shot up to the orderly room and I spent a few moments with him and went our own ways. Although he was a great mate at school we sort of found ourselves standing there with nothing in common really, other than unpleasant memories of the past and so I sort of agreed “it was nice to meet and I’ll catch you again somewhere”, took my little leave pass and went into town.

He was always pleased to see me, delighted yeh and in his house I met the American Provost Marshall who’d taken over the rectory next door and that was his military police headquarters. The same guy got himself transferred up to New Guinea

and when I was at the Koitaki School of Signals, two large American military policemen arrived in a jeep one day and identified me and “get in the jeep, the Provost Marshall wants to see you”. “Are you sure it’s me, it’s not me?” “Yes it’s you”. Got down there, there’s Dad’s mate from Townsville. He thought I might like to spend a couple of days down there as his guest. I ate a lot of good food and drank a bit of good Scotch whiskey and I said, “Look I think I’d better go back. I’m supposed to be in an army up there”. I learnt to play softball and I had a few days

down at the Provost Marshall’s camp and got a few days behind in my training at Koitaki but at a certain rank and at a certain level of supplying Scotch whiskey to the officers’ mess, it’s a slightly different war at their level but so I went through Townsville, left Bruce behind, went up on a London Liverpool cattle boat

called the Gorgon.

At one stage she took a holiday and came down to Albury, booked herself into a hotel there for a week and I used to get an evening leave pass and go in and see her and we’d go to the pictures or something and

but generally speaking, it was just go home for five days in the month and look up a few friends and drink a few beers, have some home cooking, spend a bit of time with Mum, my younger sister if she was home. My elder sister was at this stage off with the Red Cross. Just go home for five days and back to work for another

twenty-three.

Well it was a simulation of moving from one trench or position to another

and encountering a few of the enemy along the way. First of all with your fixed bayonet, you charge up to a chafe bag hanging up in a frame and you bayonet that in the correct way and withdraw the bayonet in the correct way and you go along and the next thing was a hairy series of logs and some barbed wire. I s’pose it was about that high from the ground so pack and all, bayonet,

rifle, down on your belly and crawl under all this. You’d just get out of there, then you’d find there was a ditch full of mud that wasn’t quite wide enough to jump and so they landed in that and we then had a log wall, used to have to climb up and scale over. Then from memory some more, we had a barbed wire fence that we had to get over in the approved manner.

Then some more skewering, a few more chafe bags then you were at the end of the course you see and you doubled round and did it again and then again. At this stage the recruits were [panting] and we were ready to take the next bunch through. It all seemed to me pretty futile although I

enjoyed being enormously physically fit. I was probably never so fit any other time in my life, even including my football.

I think we felt we were playing with toys as much as anything. As far as I was personally concerned, all I was ever doing was sticking a bayonet in a chafe bag. I didn’t

ever convince myself that that was actually a, you know a blood and bone entity and when you’re crawling under all this thing. Yeh they had a little habit occasionally of throwing a stick of gelignite in the mud pool just as you got in there. That was always interesting. It was just a test of physical fitness as far as I was concerned. I don’t think it did anything for my aggression or

as a radio operator, I didn’t ever see myself in a hand to hand warfare situation. Not to say you couldn’t get into one and the spotters, it was, it happened, you know but it didn’t ever, at the time, ever occur to me that I was building up any sort of personal aggression.

They found it physically exhausting and quite hated it. I don’t think I ever struck

anybody who said, “That was good fun. Can we do that again?” you know. It was just something they had to tolerate; something they had to do in order to get through that week and get onto the next week and learn something else. I think next week was grenades and mortars from memory.

There was no doubt about that. It was about killing or being killed. I don’t think we dwelt greatly on that. When you’re 19 you’re very fit, I think, didn’t hold any

morbid fears or lose any nights sleep over the fact that sooner or later you’re going to do some real soldiering. That’s just it’s there. That’s a matter of fact. You’ll deal with it when it happens. I don’t think I ever found anybody in any way mentally disturbed or distressed during training. There were guys who were, who got too much of action in the field, who were very seriously distressed.

A bit later on I’ll tell you of one of our blokes who was in continuous action for six weeks in Kokoda. He came home into Callan Park and didn’t ever get out again. There were others, his mate who was also in Kokoda and also won a military medal with him, I was speaking to on the phone this morning and he’s as chirpy as a cricket. He came home and became a bank manager, horses for courses.

Just accepted it, it was inevitable. It was part of what we were doing. There was a war on and we were part of it and that’s what we were to do and I think during training you sort of come to a realisation that dying is what soldiers do for a living.

They put it as a matter of light hearted jest but that’s basically true.

Training accidents? The only form of training I know that was highly accident prone was paratroops and you see them in the back of a 30 tonne, 30 hundred weight truck

travelling along at 30 mile an hour down the road and the sergeant would blow his whistle and they’d all jump out, bowl along like little pebbles. At that stage they were still jumping in army boots and the broken ankle rate was just enormous. Later when they got proper jumping boots with very thick rubber soles and higher lacing and better fitting equipment, but that was the most dangerous form of training I saw in terms of

the actual return of guys into hospital from a training exercise but if you jump out of the back of a truck onto a tarmac at 30 mile an hour, you’re going to hurt something. The answer, trick was to learn how to fall because a military parachute isn’t like a civilian parachute that comes down nice and slowly and you land on the marked X. You can’t afford to come down that slowly if you’re a soldier. You’re a target while you’re up there and they’re much smaller chutes and they come down much faster and hitting the ground

in a light breeze is the equivalent of jumping out of a truck at 30 mile an hour and that’s what they were learning to do. I didn’t ever want to do that, for some reason. Mainly I think my main motivation not wanting to go there, was that it was just starting another form of training and at this stage I felt I was trained up to there, you know. I was ready to go and do something real.

I s’pose I did really. Although Air Warning Wireless was supposed to be highly secret, we all knew about it.

I think in 1942

about May, which is about the time I had lost my air force and I was in the AIF, a picture appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, taken by Damien Parer of one of the spotting stations. You might have seen that little book I had here, the front cover, there’s a picture of a soldier with a pair of binoculars with his Owen gun and everything, looking over an air field. Well that was Ross Kirkwood

and Parer took his picture and moved on. Matter of fact Parer went to Kokoda where he really brought the war home to the lounge room, as far as photos of Kokoda, are just sort of legendary but over that one that the Herald released, we damn nearly lost Kirkwood. We lost a wireless set and Parer was so furious about the whole thing that he resigned from the

Department of Interior where he was paid a salary and assured of rehabilitation benefits and all else, he resigned from them and went freelancing, just selling his stuff to newspapers wherever he could. I don’t know quite how war correspondents gained and maintained their accreditation but he did maintain an accreditation. He did go on as a war photographer and was finally killed in the field but he did stay on as an accredited war correspondent, even after

he left the Department of Information and we were all aware of that. We all knew the story. The public all knew the story. We knew there were spotters. We knew they were there. We knew they were in the thick of it and so I thought “That sounds like a reasonable job”.

You don’t know till you get there. A lot of stations, like the one I was on, once we were on the station, we just stayed there and we did our job. The Japs didn’t find us. We didn’t find them.

I guess it was up to a, I guess we had a glamorous

impression of it. It was real soldiering and operating a wireless set isn’t real soldiering, you know. Yeh, sure you’re in the battlefield, you might get a bomb or two thrown at you but you’re not there as a fighting soldier. They’re support troops. You’re part of the organisation that passes information backwards and forwards but it’s not, there’s nothing adventurous

or glamorous or particularly threatening or desirable about being a signalman. Signalmen in the infantry carry a wireless set on their back. Well they did in those days. Now everybody carries something about the size of a mobile phone but the signalmen in those days would carry a wireless set about this big on his back. Well you go into the field an infantryman and one of them is carrying that, he’s the bloke who’ll get shot first so infantry signals

wasn’t good. Once you get into signal corps, you’re using bigger radio sets and they’re mounted in a truck or in a pokey hole somewhere and you’re there to one, stay alive, and two, pass information ‘cause you don’t pass much information if you’re dead. Being a spotter on the other hand was really active soldiering and I s’pose that was the attraction of it.

When you’re 19 you think you’re 10 foot tall, fire proof and it can’t happen to you. They’re the things that happen to everybody else and 19 year olds today are the same when they get behind the wheel of a motorcar. They’ve got exactly the same attitude. You know “it won’t happen to me, oh no”.

That was down at Bonegilla. That was the time when old George closed the camp for Christmas. We all got dreadfully drunk. I think it was the first time in my life I ever got drunk and I haven’t been that drunk ever again. There were ridiculous scenes. I mean it was a big, open hall of a place with a bar in it. I remember there were beams across and like church halls in the country with the beam across and the bars of iron that hold it up and

the light hanging there. I remember one guy crawling along the bar trying to blow the electric lights out and he was about 10 feet above the deck. They were absolutely hopeless and it had been raining and we had slit trenches around the camp which was standard around every camp. We lost one fellow and we didn’t find him till the morning. He was in the mud down the bottom of a slit trench and he spent the night there. Anyhow I decided that I wasn’t going to do that. That was a waste of time

and a waste of money so at that stage I had my stripes and I was on 10 shillings a day. Soldier’s pay is six shillings a day, 60 cents. As a wireless operator, qualified, you got 80 cents, as corporal you got 10 shillings a day so I figured I could live on four shillings a day and I allocated six shillings a day direct to my bank account, didn’t ever come through my army book. The army paid it straight into my bank

and it mounted up rather nicely. I remember towards the end of my time there, they used to come around selling war bonds. They were selling war bonds to everybody. Anybody who’d put money into a war fund was financing the war and they used to sell them in the army camps too and so I went up and said “I’d take a hundred pound bond” and got out my cheque book and wrote them a cheque and next thing I know I was up before the CO. “This your cheque book?” “Yes”. “You got a hundred pounds in the bank?” “Yeh”.

“You want to put it here?” “Yeh”, most surprised and apparently I was the only guy in the whole unit who put in a hundred pounds but you get six bob a day, seven days a week, it mounts up and even before I got out of the army I was able to draw that deferred pay and I bought myself a motorcar so I had a car before I got out of the army and I’ve never been without at least one car ever since and that was four bob a day

I’d have spent boozing, you know sixpence a beer, two bob a day perhaps and I just didn’t do it and got my car as a result and I paid two hundred and 12 pounds for a 1928 Vauxhall. It used too much juice so I sold that and brought a 1935 Austin Seven which I had for many years but that was

Yeh.

It was automatic. Apart from the fact most of us used to have the odd fag at school, you know we weren’t sort of strangers to tobacco but I didn’t smoke regularly until I did that school up at Cowra, when everybody else was smoking, so you just smoked. I came home, my mother found I smoked and she had a fit so I gave it up and a couple of weeks later I was in

the army anyhow and there’s a lot of wasted time, particularly when you’re a recruit. You know you’re going out to the showgrounds and report in and you’d bring two cut lunches; all recruits had to go in with two cut lunches. We didn’t ever discover why the second cut lunch because the first day you were there, you were busy getting your boots fitted and your uniform fitted and your names tattooed on your kitbag and all this sort of thing and the blokes conceive

well you could miss a meal but by night time when that was all finished, you went up to the mess hall and had a meal anyhow. So the second cut lunch, I didn’t ever meet a recruit who used his second cut lunch. Why did that come up? How did we get onto cut lunch?

A lot of wasted time, you’d wait for your boots and then when you got your boots you’d go and wait to go to the next queue and you were just sitting around waiting and this goes on right through

the army all the time you’re there and it’s easy to just sit down and light a cigarette ‘cause everybody else is sitting down lighting a cigarette. During the training course, you’d work 55 minutes in the hour, didn’t matter whether you were drilling, marching or anything else, five minutes knock off, “men may smoke” and there was permission given to smoke, five minutes in every hour and all the other blokes lit up so you lit up too. The stuff was dirt cheap. I think we bought our cigarettes for about threepence a packet

or something in the canteen or we rolled our own cigarettes. There was, paid no tax on the tobacco so it wasn’t very expensive but when you get in the field they actually issued cigarettes in a field pack which was a tin about that big with three meals in it, included a packet of 10 cigarettes, something for breakfast, something for lunch, something for dinner and all packed in that big, plus the cigarettes. In our case going out on a spotting station, they used to give us three

months supply of tobacco.

Anything that would burn. We got with the Americans, we used to buy Filipino cigars for a threepence, beautiful cigar they were too. I brought a pipe from the American PX [canteen unit] and we were smoking American cigarette, cigars,

tobacco whenever we could get it and that was far more poisonous than the stuff we were smoking. It was, the cigarettes were unbelievable. It’d just be there in your hand and it’d go pst, fizz, it’d flare up, something in the paper that made it highly combustible I think it was. We always reckoned it was saltpetre. I don’t know if it was but they had some dreadful chemicals in all their smoking products but somehow or other it was more attractive than the old log cabin tobacco that we used to buy

in the canteen and so by the time I got out of the army I was smoking a pipe, cigarettes, cigars, anything you like. You name it, I’d smoke it and that went on, I think I gave it up when I was 61, 62. I decided, you know this stage we’d, in those days smoking was considered to be harmless and in fact I think the army encouraged it in a way because it was supposed to be a way for a soldier to relax,

sit down and have a cigarette with his mate and the injured soldier in the field, the classic mental picture always drawn is one of his mates offering him a cigarette, you know so he could die happy. Well it wasn’t considered harmful. It wasn’t until the 50s that we started to really get the message that, you know we were killing ourselves with this stuff and we

gave up.

About the Gorgon? It was a cattle boat, a new ship, painted white, didn’t look like a troop ship at all. It wasn’t. It had no cattle in it, no accommodation at all. It had cattle holds. It had no cookhouse. It had no mess deck and so you got in a queue and went right around the deck and you got a meal,

camp cooking on the deck, usually stew so you ate that then you got back in the queue. If you stayed in the queue you’d pick up two meals in the day. You get out of the queue you’re only likely to get one. We slept in the cattle hold on the bare deck and fortunately we were only at sea…. what from…. we got on the Gorgon

…..I did another trip later on the Taroona, the Melbourne ferry. It was even more uncomfortable. The first trip we did on the Gorgon we went out of Brisbane to Port Moresby. I think we were at sea for two nights from memory but later on when we came down on leave, the second time I went back to New Guinea it was on the Taroona which is a flat bottomed thing that was built to run up the Derwent River which is a very shallow river

and we were going along, we had the Canberra on one side of us and the Ormiston, a Burns Philp ship on the other side of us…. AUSN ship on the other side of us but they were sitting like ducks on a pond and we were on the Taroona rolling like this. The damn thing would roll on a calm sea, very uncomfortable, over crowded. I think it was designed to take about 80 people. We probably had 300 onboard. You slept wherever you could find a space enough to stretch out.

We went from Townsville around to Lae on that one.

Overseas yes, but we travelled quite frequently on ships. Burns Philp had 14 lines of ships and whenever we moved from Townsville up to Cairns or down to Brisbane, for any reason at all. I remember going once to Brisbane down to an eisteddfod because the school choir went and on school holidays

when we were in Townsville, we’d go to Cairns and up to Lake Barrine for our holidays or over to Magnetic Island but if ever we moved up and down the coast, we always travelled by steamer, the Orungal or the Ormiston or on one occasion, sugar boat called the Fiona and we just travelled on ships. We were used to them so…only time I travelled on a cattle boat though.

Well we sighted land and the next thing we knew a flight of three aircraft come in. It looked as though they were going to strafe us but they’d come out to identify us so they were all right. They were friendly, American aircraft, and we went into an established port within a base area. I mean Port Moresby had at that stage overcome its savage air raiding

and the Japs were busy elsewhere. They were very busy on the north side of the island and weren’t raiding Moresby so it was just another port. Off the ship onto the wharf, more waiting, more smoking, on trucks out to Nine Mile where the, no we went first of all to Murray Barracks. Murray Barracks was the old civil administration headquarters. Mr Murray I think was the administrator and they built an army camp around this and that was the basic staging

camp so we went there and hung around and waited and eventually they said “So you’re Swan. You’re going to New Guinea Air Warning Wireless. That truck over there, you see?” and so that’s about all I saw of Port Moresby in the town itself, put us on a truck and sent us out to Nine Mile. I didn’t ever get to see the town of Port Moresby again until 1984. Nine Mile was just a camp out in the bush. We were all

under canvas. We had a substantial building with an iron roof which housed VIG which was the very famous station. VIG was the AWA [Amalgamated Wireless Australasia] wireless station before the war. Where we had pedal wireless in Australia, they had battery wireless in New Guinea. They had all these AWA sets and they worked back to AWA stations and that was VIG and that was my first job up there

was operating on VIG, the night shift.

Yeh I went out to, from memory went to Nine Mile first and from there they sent us to Koitaki. Koitaki was a specialist signal training school. They used to run courses there for officers. I remember our Commanding Officer went there at one stage for training

in signals. Updated onto military equipment, they were specially tropically designed and the care of operation of the equipment was very much oriented to mud and rain and difficult terrain so we learnt to cope with all that and just brushed up on our radio skills and convinced them that we were in fact achieving the speeds we were supposed to be achieving.

It seemed to me a bit of a waste of time for a couple of weeks. That’s when I got hauled down to see the Provost Marshall in Port Moresby, gave me a few days break from that but apart from that there was nothing terribly exciting about Koitaki and we just sort of converted from non tropic radio sets on rowing boats in the Hume Weir to real tropical radio sets in the tropics. From there

we went back to the Nine Mile to the Air Warning Wireless Company. I didn’t ever see another military set. We operated civilian radios all the time. That was all we had.

In 1940, January ‘42

two or three weeks after Pearl Harbour, the Japs had busied themselves. They had bombed Madang and they’d bombed I think Salamaua. It was obvious that they were going to start on Port Moresby. The entire signal corps in New Guinea at that stage, New Guinea was occupied by

militia, 18, 19 year old kids, not very many of them. The entire signal service in New Guinea consisted of 67 fellows from memory. I think it was 67 and a Major Don Small moved up from the Tableland and was appalled at just how little equipment, how little we had in the way of equipment and men but he said “he wanted a string of radio stations up in the hills behind Port Moresby

to warn of oncoming raids”. A young corporal from their signals group, they didn’t have any spare signalmen or any spare equipment. They sent a young corporal named John Marsh down to Murray Barracks where there was a crowd of infantry, reinforcements had come up to join the 39th battalion and

he was just told, “Get me 30 men”. I think the figure was 30, give or take a few “who are capable of doing this job” just I think the term was “ensure that the men are of the right calibre”. John being a very practical sort of guy, called for volunteers who had either worked on a farm or ridden a motorbike or both because one of the things about being a spotter is you have to charge the batteries. You charge the batteries, a little two stroke battery charger

and if it doesn’t start you’re in diabolical trouble so you had to be the sort of guy who could pick up a set of spanners, take out a spark plug at least. Anyhow he got his volunteers, took them back to Moresby, found bits of civilian radio equipment wherever they could ‘cause there was no spare military sets and they put their ring of stations around Port Moresby

and they were actually there in time to report the first Japanese raid on Port Moresby which saved a lot of equipment and a few lives, quite a few lives and it became immediately obvious that the warning time was not enough so they decided on a ring of radio stations out a hundred mile circle right round Port Moresby and remember that hundred mile ring was about 12, 14 stations and they were on points on the coast, on the

top of mountains, wherever you could get a view and see who was flying into Port Moresby and this turned to be completely successful. By the time the Jap bombers got into Moresby, the fighters such as they were and they were mainly Wirraways with an old World War 1 machine gun on them, shortly after that Kittyhawks, but at least they were in the air and there’s nothing more useless than a military aircraft on the ground. It is totally useless. It cannot do a thing except

burn and so by the time the Japs got in, the air force would be up and waiting for them. When they got coming and they used to come through the hundred, they recognised where they were being spotted, probably listening in on our “secret” frequency and they’d get in the hundred mile ring and they’d change course, fly somewhere else and come into Moresby from a different angle and so the next thing to do was the 30 mile ring. There was a hundred mile ring and a 30 mile ring.

This stage Port Moresby was for the time being, quite secure. The operation was so successful it became obvious that they had to do similar spotting stations around any target. By March, they started in, I think it was last day in January they called for volunteers. They went out on the 2nd of February. By the end of March they’d reached the stage with spotting stations and they were bringing in recruits on almost a daily basis.

They were getting tele radio sets wherever they could from AWA, from any plantation that was, had been evacuated. Very shortly the evacuation of New Britain and Rabaul, a lot of the guys getting out of there, military and civilian, brought their radios with them and down to Samurai down near Milne Bay and gradually as the sets became available, they went straight out into the field and

it became virtually a network of 3B radios. Now the 3B was an AWA radio that was developed in New Guinea for use in New Guinea by amateurs and that’s what we were. We were amateurs. I say “we” collectively. I wasn’t there myself. I was still down south but we, the spotters collectively, acquired these civilian radios which are ideal for the purpose. They consisted of three units

so big. The receiver weighed between 30 and 40 pounds in a steel cabinet. The transmitter weighed between 30 and 40 pounds. The third unit was a box which housed the speaker and it held your cipher box, your documents, your spare crystals. These were crystal controlled frequencies which military sets weren’t, Morse code key, stationery, every,

all the workings of a station and that weighed something a bit over a hundred pounds. What’s a hundred pounds in kilos? About 55, 56 pounds. This was driven by 12 volt radio batteries. They looked like car batteries and in fact internally they were slightly different, but for all practical purposes, they were car batteries, two of those, two of 12 volt batteries and they weighed about a hundred pounds each

and you had a two horse petrol engine generator, 12 volt generator and they were either Briggs and Stratton or Johnson Chore Horses. It didn’t matter much. They were both good units and they weighed about 150 pounds so you’d get two men, a few hundred pounds worth of equipment and about two days instruction on how to do it. Nobody knew Morse code. They got basic instruction on very simple cipher

and very little in the way of rations, very largely they were living off the land. They had a beer bottle full of quinine which is supposed to last two men a month. Later on we had a more sophisticated medical kit but, so these guys who’d volunteered, sat themselves up in the bush, a bit lonely

a bit at sea, with equipment they didn’t really understand, two days training in how to be a signalman was, I’ve just described to you six weeks training down at Bonegilla and they were in business and from there on it just grew. The corporal, young Corporal Marsh soon became a sergeant who was commissioned in the field. We had another Sergeant Pud Arnold who was an amateur radio operator.

He was able to help, he and John between them actually built a lot of the sets that went out on the early stations, built it out of any radio gear they could get their hands on, was also commissioned in the field and stayed with the unit. We didn’t have a lot of officers but three of them were blokes who were just our own people, commissioned in the field. We had nine officers in all, about 300 men, which is

a lot less than you’d have in an infantry unit and a hell of a lot less more than you’d have in a normal signal unit but we managed.

Yep, by then it was highly organised.

New Guinea is not a very big place but it’s very difficult to move in but in terms of flying, you know you can fly from one end of it to the other in an hour or so, from Milne Bay up to the Dutch border. We had approximately a hundred stations operating. We could see and report everything that moved, flew, walked or sailed in New Guinea and the surrounding islands.

If it moved, we could see it from one or other of our stations and very often two or three stations. We had it pretty well covered. The Japs could not move without us knowing and reporting them, providing the sky was clear but when it was all clouded in at night, very little night flying. There still isn’t in New Guinea. The rule up there is “no see, no fly”. Night time, nobody flies. The Japs used to fly at night a bit on reconnaissance

particularly when they were looking for spotting stations.

At the centre of it was this very old VIG station at Port Moresby. It was the AWA station that used to work Port Moresby to Townsville and all the outlying stations and we virtually based our network on the AWA network. Instead of having plantation owners and police magistrates and

patrol officers and those sort of civilian people, they were all replaced by spotting stations, manned by our fellows, using the same civilian radio sets. We’d work back, for instance when we were up at Meigar Harbour we were working back to Nadzab which was a sub sector, who reported back to Port Moresby because it wasn’t always possible to get a sig wave over the Owen Stanleys, unless you had a more substantial set.

There were sub stations at Bena Bena, Gusap, Milne Bay, a number of sub sectors but these moves developed and were recalled depending how the war moved but before the Japanese started moving on the land, we could see them. When they came into Milne Bay for their little invasion

there, I think we had six hours notice. Somebody spotted the convoy from one of the islands. Buna, Gona, which was a big invasion. The troops that came over the Kokoda Trail, track, it’s now called a Trail. That was never an Australian term. It was always the track, the infantry, Japanese infantry had landed

at Buna and Gona, had a map of New Guinea showing the track and they were under the impression it was a motor road and they didn’t know it was a weeks walk over the mountains to get to Port Moresby but we had stations at Gona and Buna who reported their landing and reported their every move all the way up the Kokoda Track.

I had a very big transmitter, a number of receivers because we had these crystal operated sets. To change the frequency on your transmitter, you pulled the crystal out and put another one in or later on with the CB, as I said you could switch over from one to the other and you had your various crystals in but we had a daytime frequency, which didn’t work at night ‘cause the static was too bad so we had different night time frequency. Then we had X frequency which we didn’t know, was just

crystal marked X and that was the secret frequency and we didn’t know what the frequency was. Tokyo Rose knew. She used to talk to us from Tokyo. She called us her “golden voices”, a name she first gave to a bloke called Lee Vile who was an air force officer, ex New Guinea volunteer, rifles. He was a local and he did a lot of good work. He was one of the very first spotters up there and she listened to Lee Vile first of all. She called him the “golden voice”

and then as we multiplied we were all the “golden voices” and she used to play some good music. She had all those American records up there, or made up, up to the beginning of the war and we used to listen to her program, then she’d give us all these silly messages about, you know “Don’t sit out there in the bush, you fellows with the golden voices. Just go home. Down south the Americans are taking your wives out on dates,” and all this sort of, you know patently foolish propaganda which frankly we regarded as

a real giggle.

The rain? In the fortnight or so we were there it never failed. At dawn it started to team down. It absolutely pelted down. The noise of rain in New Guinea, particularly with the banana leaves round, is quite deafening. Living and working in the jungle, you

might think is necessarily a quiet place, but it isn’t. In terms of decibels, out in a suburban street of traffic, you might get 60 decibels. I would say the rainstorm in New Guinea it would be twice that level of sound, quite deafening, particularly heavy raindrops on banana leaves and there were bananas all through the camp at Koitaki so at dawn this great, crashing noise and that would go for probably half an hour, then it would switch off as suddenly as it started

and then at sunset the same again, every day. The only variation was that somedays it didn’t stop. It just went all day, the whole, dawn till after sunset but the noise was horrendous. We were able to move. We were able to light fires, do our cooking and all those things, after dark and generally speaking the jungle held enough noises

particularly if there was a flowing stream nearby, to quite hide the noise of a two stroke battery charger running and we had to run them for many hours to keep our batteries charged up but I think Koitaki was the heaviest rain I’ve ever experienced in my life and it was just so deadly, accurate on timing. It was quite extraordinary but other places, I heard rain on banana leaves in the Markham Valley and we were trying to sleep under a banana leaf. The banana

leaves up there are about 10 foot long and so wide. You put the banana leaf under and the groundsheet over in which case you get deafened or you put the banana leaf over, the ground sheet over you in which case all the mud comes through and fills the banana, sleeping out in the Markham Valley wasn’t fun.

We didn’t. We were just permanently wet. Our boots were full of mud. Our uniforms, if they weren’t wet with perspiration

they were wet with rain. They literally rotted on our backs and at night the rats used to come and eat everything. They’d chew at our boots and our hats and the things that make noises in the jungle, particularly if you’re living under a grass hut. One of the noises is a centipede, probably 12 inches long, bright yellow with brown legs and they can make an incredible amount of noise crawling

through the bamboo, at least palm, they were palm fronds they used for the roof and these things used to crawl through it and make quite a lot of noise but everything that flies and chirps and bites and, all make a noise at night and the decibel level would have to be well over the 60 mark when things were quiet.

We got an idea from Koitaki but if

you haven’t seen the jungle in New Guinea, it’s quite unbelievable. Well it would believable places like, well people who have walked the Kokoda Track will tell you this. You can step three feet sideways and you’re vanished. You’re just not there. It’s very easy to hide troops in there in the jungle, particularly if you’re lying in ambush. My spotting experience was on the coast

where we were generally in coconut plantations or under coconut palms most of the time. We only moved the station a couple of times from one native hut to another native hut but we got ourselves a bit of jungle, always when you establish a station you have to patrol around your perimeter to just find out who’s there. We knew there were roughly a battalion of Japanese in the area but we didn’t know where so we went off along the track to find out who was there. This is at Meigar Harbour with Frank

Parmeter. Dusty Boughton; Dusty was one of the originals. He was one of the volunteers in January ’42 from the infantry battalion. Parmeter was a Middle East soldier. He was an infanteer and he still thought he was an infantryman. He had the capacity to make things happen, which weren’t always a good idea. In Nassau Bay he took out a little one man expedition, ambushed three Japs,

killed one, wounded one, took one prisoner and brought him back with him and this sort of heroic doings was Frank Parmeter which was great if he won and he usually did. The worry of being in the station with him was, particularly if there was about a thousand Japs in the area and three of us, was Frank would find them and take a pot shot. He managed to do the unorthodox always. We had a spotting station, had an establishment. We had an Owen gun

and 600 rounds, a rifle for each junior NCO with 30 rounds, which is not a lot of ammunition if you have a little war but still that’s all you, you had to carry it you see. That was our armament and somehow or other Frank managed on our station to have a box of grenades and I’ve never heard of another spotting station that had a box of grenades but we had one and we also had some Japanese grenades we found in Bogadjim in the camp that they’d vacated in a hurry

and apart from that he carried a very large American 45 revolver which was not normally issued to NCOs but Frank had one. He was a sort of, he was a one man Rambo squad and to go out on jungle patrol for a few days around our area we said to the natives “nobody touches the garamut”. Garamut’s a big hollow log drum and they signal and you hear this, they’re gone now. You see a few of them lying around in motels

as tourist pieces but in those days every village had its garamut and they had a system of beating a rhythm which conveyed the message. “Nobody touches the garamut. Dusty’s there to guard it. Nobody says we’re out on the track” and not a mile down the road and we hear, out goes the signal “Kiap’s coming”. We’re telling everybody within earshot that we were out on the track and so we couldn’t do anything about it. It was too late

then. The native drum signals had taken over and the whole district knew the kiap [a white patrol or police officer] was coming from somewhere to somewhere but we just hoped that, well the Japanese would be most unlikely to decipher the signal and we just hoped that if there were any in earshot that the natives wouldn’t interpret it for them. Generally speaking, the natives in that area were very anti Japanese. They handled the natives quite badly. For instance our little fellow, he got

to be quite a friend of mine, a little cook boy, a boy I s’pose 15 or 16. He didn’t know how old he was. All he knew was he was a cook boy and the Japanese put him in a carrier line. Well cook boys don’t carry. Cook boys are, you know they’re allowed in the master’s house. They’re somebody quite different and the Japanese just treated them all as labourers and natives. We had the advantage of some training, some knowledge. We had in our ranks quite

a lot of New Guinea volunteer rifles. They were the local militia and as soon as war broke out they said “Righto, you fellows, you’re in the army”. NGVR [New Guinea Volunteer Rifles]. We were given their average age as 35 years and some of them were clearly underage, they were only boys and the others were bank managers and all the local citizenry. The younger ones stayed with us for, you know right through. One guy, Gilchrist, he was in just about every sort of fight there was

on the north side of New Guinea and he won a mention in despatches up there. Then he was in the Lae landing where we had to put four stations in with the landing at Lae and Gilchrist had one of them and he had to move his station ‘cause they were having trouble with the Japanese. He hid his station in the bush and he went on a wreck and he got up in the crows nest of the wreck with a telephone line and reported everything he could see from up there.

But Gilchrist was one of those soldiers who was everywhere and when he wanted to move his station, he didn’t have time to put anything in code and so he just said to Frank Parmeter, who had one of the other stations “I’m going out for the day and taking my lunch. You look after the shop”, went off the air. Frank took over running that sub sector of four stations until Gilchrist started up somewhere else and he put on quite

a heroic and very useful performance at Lae and won a military medal. He was one of the very few guys we had that had two decorations. John Marsh that I mentioned to you, the corporal who went out and took, got the original volunteers, he later got an MBE [Member of the British Empire] and was mentioned in dispatches and commissioned in the field and from 1942 to 1944 he rose from corporal to captain and commanding officer of the

unit but Gilchrist was one of those guys who was everywhere and also in the right place and did the right thing. He was just a magnificent soldier. Parmeter was in the same sort of places but Gilchrist you could rely on to keep his head down but Frank you couldn’t, so having beaten the drums, we had to go around and then we do a tour around the mountains, visit all the villages. Each village, small villages have a “tultul”. He’s the government appointed chief man. He wore

something like a tram driver’s cap with a single red band on it or a “luluai” who is the chief of a group of villages or a larger village, wore two red banks and kiaps were the patrol officers mainly. I mean any white man was master in those days. It doesn’t happen now but the kiaps were the patrol officers. They were government officers and we were automatically assumed to be kiaps because one, we didn’t carry our own loads. They didn’t understand

soldiers carrying their own packs. That was foreign to them, white men just don’t carry packs in their little world so I think they sort of…was some respect but they regarded them a bit as like kanakas, you know carrying their own loads but we didn’t carry our own load. We simply carried our rifle or Owen gun and we spoke Pidgin English and we were in a government uniform so they just assumed we had taken over the role of their patrol officers

and we were kiaps. Well then when the kiap arrives at the village the luluai’s out to meet him. There was a “house kiap” was kept always empty for when the kiap comes, was cleaned out and you’re made to feel welcome there. It’s a grass hut about the size of a small tent and a bare floor but it’s clean and it’s house kiap and so what, we were kiaps and we did a round all round and we had a police boy with us. We had several police boys which was standard practise when you went into a

station which could be trouble, they’d have a few police boys. One of the police boys pointed out to Frank the number of the natives who were wearing Japanese jackets or hats or some Japanese gear and to impress upon them the fact that that had all finished and it was worthless, Frank collected all their gear and burnt it and I thought “Oh my God, we’re going to have a revolution on our hands” but he was a man of such self assurance and presence

and air of authority, that he got away with it completely. They just put all their stuff on the fire and they all had Japanese money which was printed on cheap paper and the coins were printed, stamped out of aluminium and it was all phoney stuff and we had to impress upon them that it was useless, it couldn’t be honoured, would never be honoured, the Japanese had defrauded them and that all the Japanese stuff may be burnt but we didn’t get any sort of an uprising. We got away with burning the thing and my estimation of Parmeter went up a little but

I always still had, always had the feeling that he’d lead us into a fight if he could ‘cause that was his reputation. He’d done it before. Anyhow we found our perimeter clear and we didn’t run into any trouble. We got back two or three days later and at this stage, Dusty Boughton, the one bloke who was back guarding the station with one police boy was bored to tears and pleased to see us back home and even when there weren’t any Japanese on the ground,

they were moving by, particularly at night. See they’d been run out of the Markham, Ramu Valleys and over to the coast…were very largely disorganised. They were at the end of their lines as far as supplies were concerned. Places like Lae were being supplied by submarine, with a spotter up on the hill telling them when the barges were going out, when the submarine surfaced and of course the air force would come in and strafe them but they were hard pressed for rations and they were regrouping

and moving north to make apparently what was to be a last ditch stand of some sort up in the area of the Sepik River just short of the Dutch New Guinea border and they were there. We used to hear them at night. One of them actually came into our hut one night. We assumed it was a Japanese. It was a man in boots and there were only two men in, Parmeter went back. He only stayed with us a couple of weeks and they called him back so Dusty and I had the station to ourselves

but a man in boots came into our hut one night and I said, “Is that you Dusty?” and he said “No”. With that the bloke in boots ran up the pathway as fast as he could, Broughton sending a round, a few rounds of Owen gun after him but didn’t hit him. He disappeared but they were there but they weren’t an organised military force out searching for us. They were trying to get back to form this new unit so we didn’t attract them all that much but our main contribution there was warning

Saidor of any planes going back that way, theirs and ours. It was always important to tell the Yanks when their own planes were coming over because they were a bit trigger happy and if they weren’t expecting something, we were likely to get shot at.

They varied. We ran out of our usefulness at about five months up there. By that time the Americans had

invaded Hollandia. They put an interesting station just off Hollandia, a place called Hadki Island. There was just a coral island and the Japanese had bulldozed it and tamped it down and it made a perfect airstrip, just offshore.

Frank and Dusty, yes.

We were there all the time. We lived there. That was it. We were, no the only times I left there was to go on patrols around the perimeter which we had to do occasionally, even with only two of us. Another time I developed a ridiculously painful toothache. It was sensitive to heat, it was sensitive to cold. It was a real worry to me so I coded up a signal and sent it back to headquarters saying that “I was in trouble and I needed a dentist”, got a message back saying that “on Thursday next week” or whatever day it was

“there’d be a travelling dentist show in Madang” which was only six river crossings and a day’s march down that way, so I went in one day to see the dentist and he said, “That’ll be no trouble son”. I could feel it. It felt like a hole that big. I could feel it with the tip of my tongue and he took a piece of sandpaper and he polished the top of a filling and said “It’s all gone”. My first, my only real experience with psychosomatic pain

because I was worried about it, it got serious, it got very painful but the dentist just polished the top off it and I got a day’s march back again, back to home but apart from that and another time on a patrol I did north, there was something going on up there. We didn’t know what it was. I went up to have a look and Dusty stayed at the station and I came out of the jungle and there were white men swimming in the sea and an ML [navy motor launch]

which is a Fairmile, was about 90 foot long and it was a wooden power motorboat. The navy had quite a lot of them. They were built in Wollongong many of them and they were plywood boats, armed, depth chargers. They had an anti submarine function but they had nothing like the power of the American torpedo boat although they were about the same size. Anyhow these guys were hiding out behind this island. They had their boat so I went in for a swim with them. They said “Who are you?” and I said, “I’m Pete, who are you?”.

“Come onboard. Skipper would like to meet you” so I went onboard and all of a sudden I discovered I wasn’t free to leave. The Skipper wanted to know who I was, how the hell did I know where he was? I said, “I didn’t know. I came across your boys swimming so I joined them”. Anyhow he made me his guest in the wardroom and I said “Well I’d better get going now. I’ve got to get back to Meigar Harbour before sunset”. He said, “No, you’re not going back to Meigar Harbour. You come with us.

We’ll drive you back in the morning. We’re going down that way”, so I said “Do I have any choice about this?” He said “No” so I spent that night up off Hansa Bay I think it was and Hollandia and that area chasing submarines. I was most uneasy. I didn’t like it. You’re sort of, a wooden boat out there in the middle of the sea and you’re looking for submarines and presumably submarines were looking for us and I kept thinking, “Gee it’d be nice to get back to our little bit of jungle in the coconut plantation”.

Anyhow in the course of conversation I noticed they had a nice little dinghy and they mentioned they were looking for an outboard motor for it and I said, “I’ve got an outboard motor back at Meigar Harbour” and we had a Japanese thing, big four cylinder thing, a very big motor and it seemed to be going. We hadn’t actually started it but it wasn’t seized up and it was attached to the back of a barge which was sunk on the river just south of us.

So it was something to do during the day when there were no aeroplanes. We used to have to report the weather every four hours. Every station in New Guinea reported the weather every four hours, the Met people, two air forces, two navies and a couple of armies, knew exactly what the weather was anywhere in New Guinea at the time which is terribly important up there where the weather is so lousy and you’re so dependent on it but apart from that we had time on our hands so we stripped down this motor and cleaned it up and got it all ready to go

just for the fun of it. Anyhow the navy blokes said they’d like to have a look at it. I said, “It’s far too big for that. If you put it on that it’d sink, but you’re welcome to have it if you like”. They said, “Yeh we’ll have it”. Next time I saw it, it was driving quite a big boat down in Madang Harbour when we were on our way home and our friends from the ML had taken it down and swapped it over for a little one to put it on the back of their dinghy but that’s, I’m jumping ahead of myself. He actually

insisted on coming down to Meigar Harbour with me and delivering me to the station and coming ashore to see what our station was ‘cause he’d never heard of us. He didn’t know we were there. We didn’t know he was there. How he got up there, he must have been way out at sea to get in behind this island. We didn’t know he was there and but he, sub lieutenant and he was being very conscientious in establishing that I was who I said I was. Who else I would be, up in the middle of New Guinea, a couple of hundred

miles from the nearest white men or a hundred miles from the nearest white men, I haven’t the faintest idea, but he was going to check me out, took me home, we got a feed of bacon, bottle of beer, gave him the trans, gave him the thing. They put it in the dinghy which was right down to the gunnels and one of the guys had to swim behind the dinghy because if he got onboard the whole thing would have sunk but that was my experience with the Royal Australian Navy. I didn’t like going to sea and I decided I wouldn’t do that again from choice. I was

a land soldier and I was happy to stay there. What else happened there? Nabess. Nabess was our little cook boy and he’d been the planters’ cook at the local Mugil plantation, I’d estimate 15, 16 years of age, absolutely spotlessly clean, pale green lap-lap, no tattoos, no beetle nut,

no rashes, no scurvy, no nothing, perfectly clean, handsome young man and he would be our cook boy so we made him our cook boy and I think we paid him one shilling and three sticks of tobacco a week. Tobacco, trade tobacco, I’ll describe that to you. I had lost my mess gear in the fiasco back at Bogadjim where they put the barge into the surf and

my mate Dusty had a dixie and a knife and fork and a spoon and I was eating off a banana leaf with a piece of bamboo you see and after about a week Nabess said to me if I promised to look after it and give it back to him, he’d get me some cutlery so I said, “Oh yes I’ll look after it. You can have it back” and so it appears that he had all Master Charlie’s stuff hidden somewhere. On his day off from us he used to go up, wash all the linen, dry it out,

pack it up, provided it wasn’t raining, which, or when it wasn’t raining and he had all this household linen stuff up there and he brought me down a beautiful set of cutlery, you know top class knife, fork, spoon and plate so I was a jungle soldier with Master Charlie’s personal cutlery.

Didn’t ever find out, he was just Master Charlie. He was the bloke who owned the plantation, or managed it, probably owned it.

I did never find out his name but he was just Master Charlie and Nabess often spoke of him. Nabess was very loyal. He was a mine of information. He’d advise us “to stay out of sight, Sepik native walking through” and the Sepiks, you couldn’t quite trust them. I lot of them were a bit pro Japanese. They were all from up the Sepik River, up near, on the border of Dutch New Guinea.

Michael Somari’s father was a Sepik police boy and police boys were absolutely trustworthy always but the Sepik bush natives would sell you to the Japanese for the price of whatever they could get for you and Nabess always knew when there was a Sepik around and we’d see him go through the camp and manage for him not to see us and in this way Nabess kept us pretty secure and out of trouble. He could never understand why I just didn’t send a signal down to Sydney and get him a stove so

he could cook properly. He was cooking on a, you know bit of iron on top of some old rocks and the nearest thing he had to an oven was a four gallon drum with a clip-on lid. That was his oven and he could never understand why I wouldn’t just ring up Sydney and get him an oven. Sydney was just a long way over there somewhere and white people had endless amounts of money and got anything they want just by ringing up Sydney, you see and this was his entire knowledge of being a white man in a black man’s country.

We spoke it to each other all the time. The day I walked into camp they were all talking Pidgin English to each other. It’s a very simple language, only has a couple of hundred words in the vocabulary. I think somebody later wrote a book on it and I think they identified about 400 words but with a few words and a lot of waving

of the arms, you can make yourself understood quite easily. I think the classic example is “balus, B A L U S”. A balus is anything that flies, except a pigeon. A pigeon is a pigeon but everything else is a balus and you have a balus comes in full of goods and chattels, it’s a transport aeroplane or a balus [indicates machine gun action], you know or a balus [indicates slap on the hand] and so where we’d have half

a dictionary full of words, they just use one or two. “Belong” is one “man belong Japan, balus belong Japan, master belong Australia”. “Belong” is sort of a joining up word that joins everything to everything else. “Banis”, a banis is a fence. It’s also a belt. It’s also a piece of string around a parcel. If it encircles, it’s a banis.

You think how many English words you’d have to learn to get all those interpretations but banis with an action tells a story so it’s not all that difficult to learn. There are variations. Pidgin started in Australia. In the days of the Kanaka labourers, south sea island labourers came in as indentured labourers for a certain amount of time and they all spoke their own languages.

There are a few words of German in it ‘cause that was a German protectorate up there. There are a few words of English. There are a few words from just about every language in the Pacific and they formed this language amongst themselves really but there are variations. You can ask for “coolau” in one part of New Guinea and get sweet potato, you asked for coolau in another part you’ll get a coconut. You just have to sort of swing with the punches a bit.

Nabess? In Pidgin. His Pidgin was just a little bit more Anglicised than others ‘cause he lived in a house where English was spoken but generally speaking the natives were discouraged from speaking English. In any community of young people you get the odd upstart, you know the smart alec.

Well so they had them too and they would choose to speak to you with a few words of English they knew and they were just being superior and showing off. Report them to the ANGAU [Australian and New Guinea Administrative Unit] officer and they’d get in a carrier line going that way, but we communicated with Nabess in Pidgin and learnt a lot of Pidgin from him I s’pose ‘cause when I went out there I’d only been a few weeks in New Guinea but mainly speaking,

we got into the habit of speaking Pidgin amongst ourselves. I think Dusty and I spoke Pidgin as much as we spoke English.

By and large in that area good and with Nabess particularly good ‘cause anybody untrustworthy, Nabess would finger him straight away. We’d know that you don’t trust that feller and that feller. The police

boys we had with us, they stayed for about three or four weeks. When it was apparent we were in no immediate danger they choofed off back to Madang and wherever else they came from I don’t know. Police boys wore navy blue lap-laps with a red fringe around the bottom and that was their badge of rank and they carried very old World War 1 303 rifles and their word was absolute law. The police boys told them “jump”, they just

said “Yes sir, how high?” You didn’t argue with police boys and most of them were from tribes who were a bit good at providing some physical force shall we say and to this day in New Guinea, I’ve been back to New Guinea a few times since, the Chimbus, [warrior tribe] who are a native tribe, they’re ferocious warriors but very nice people when they’re not at war and nobody argues with the Chimbu.

I’ve been down to the yacht club in Lae, the car park with perhaps a hundred cars, everybody inside having a party and one Chimbu on guard outside and nobody touches a car. You just don’t argue with a Chimbu and so it is with the police boys. They were tough. They were well trained and a very strict code of honour and a sense of duty and they were absolutely trustworthy and as I say, if they told the

natives “jump”, the natives jumped. I went back to New Guinea, I’m darting around a bit now, in 1984. My son was working up there and where we used to have the garamuts, they were all wandering around with two-way radios. Where we used to have to go and find them in their little villages all round the hills in their little native gardens, they’re all living along the coast and driving around in

four wheel drive trucks and where we used to cross all the rivers to get to and from Madang, we just drove over all the bridges and we got to level with Karkar Island and I said “This is about here. We were spotting around here somewhere” and June said “Ask about Nabess”. Someone said “Oh he’d be dead, long gone now” ‘cause they

don’t last a great age. They all have all the tropical diseases. They get a very distended spleen and I think that’s from chronic malaria and, you know they just don’t live to a ripe old age. Anyhow I asked a fellow by the road “One man named Nabess, he stop?” “Yeh, he stop”. “Well, where he stop?” “Over there”, pointed out to a little village out on the headland and we drove in,

my wife, myself, my son and his little son, little snowy haired feller about this big and we, just like turning the clock back 40 years. The village was deserted except for one old man and two big, strong men as any village we went into, that’s how we were greeted, the luluai, two big warriors, nobody else in sight. Once they identified you, they started to come out from behind the huts and out of the bush and all of a sudden you had the whole village full of people

and this happened right before our eyes. One of the most emotional days of my life I s’pose and the little old man was Nabess. I said to him, “How old are you Nabess?”, you know, “How many Christmas you?” because they count their age by Christmases. He said, “Me think four 10’s” so he was 40.

I said (in pidgin), “I was here 40 years ago. You would be at least 55”. He was absolutely amazed and he couldn’t see me very well, had cataracts obviously. We took photos, promised to send him some photos, introduced me to his daughter who was literate and articulate, mission educated girl and all his grandsons and I introduced my grandson and we went down to the trade store and

bought him a carton of cigarettes. Well, if there’s such a thing as apolitical communism they have it. If he gets a packet of cigarettes, the whole village owns the cigarettes. They’re not his. They belong to everybody. You know and saw this carton of cigarettes go up in one enormous puff of smoke, the whole village lit up. Anyhow when I was leaving I said to him,

I didn’t really believe I was going to find him and

Well my son asked me that and I said “well he used to keep us alive for a shilling and three sticks of tobacco a week”. I was genuinely fond of him I s’pose and he thought the sun shone out of me. When we left there he wanted to come with me. You know he started to say he was going to come with me and I said “No, you can’t come with me,

going somewhere else to be a soldier. You can’t come”. Anyhow I said… (my wife could probably dig this photo up too. It’d be a tiny little photo). If I’d realised he was going to be alive I should have realised he was going to give me a present and sure enough when I identified myself, he yabbered away and all the natives and everybody came out of the huts and they all stood around and everyone was happy again.

We’d established the intruders’ identity. He went in and he got dressed up in his very best lap-lap and brought his meri [indigenous woman] out to meet me and she was a tiny, they’re only little people but she was tiny. June said, “It’s the only time she ever felt like Margaret Whitlam”. She felt herself towering over this little lady. I said to him, “Nabess, I’d like to send you a present. What would you like?” and he’d like a watch. He was quite specific. He didn’t want any batteries

and he didn’t want any numbers there. He wanted hands that went around and it had to say “tick tock” and it had to light up at night so I said, “Right, you’ve got it. What about your meri?” “She’s cold at night. She’d like a woollen coat.” Well, it’d be like buying a woollen coat for a second year school girl, you know. Ended up at a store back in Lae and I found a woollen cardigan that would be about ankle length on her and

I found him a watch and it wound up and said “tick tock”. It lit up at night and I wrapped these up and sent it on to him by post and got a very nice letter back from his daughter Jenny, the one who spoke English, telling me how Nabess had never learnt to read and write but he would like some of the photos, like to see some of the photos and so when we got back to Australia, I got him some prints and sent them up, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to see them but everybody else would be able to see them

and explain to him what was in them and you know those things they have for reading telephone books? The sheets, I tried everywhere to get one of those. If I could send him that, he could have seen the photos but I sent them up anyway and I got a letter from Jenny saying how grateful he was and I didn’t follow the correspondence on ‘cause I thought, you know, I sort of didn’t want anything coming back to me saying, “Tough luck, he died since you were here last”, so we sort of parted company and left it there but it was

really a most, quite an exciting and touching day. Our actual spot where we had the station set up most of the time was inside, in part of an enclosure. The area had gone back to being a commercial coconut producing show and this was in the work area where the material was stored ready for shipment and that sort of thing so we couldn’t actually get onto our site but

It had been, yes. We were on the edge of a plantation.

Meigar Harbour. The plantation is known as Mugil. The area is known as Mugil. Meigar Harbour was less than half the size of this block of land, the harbour, was the same with the coral, out to a very small entrance and the shore

was all rocky. What use it would be as a harbour I don’t know. You couldn’t imagine anybody going in there for any reason, particularly if the tide was out. You couldn’t get in and out for the coral.

The day we arrived. He arrived and he was just so clean, just so outstanding from the rest of them. “What name you?” “Nabess.” I said, “You cook?” he said, “Me cook boy”. “Okay, you cook for us?” “Yes”.

A contract just like that. I think he had a friend we also employed. Don’t know if he was a friend. He was probably a relative. It may have been an uncle, an older man called Zeck who was a yardman and so he sort of came along with the deal. We put him on too and he was our house boy, just kept the place tidy and did a few odd jobs, peeled a few coconuts or got us a bit of firewood or something but Nabess being cook,

he didn’t do any of that sort of thing. He stayed at home in the kitchen. They had a definite pecking order and the cook boy was the top of it as far as we could see, in plantation life. In government life they had the tultul, the luluai system and they were a bit temporary too. We went into a village where we’d been before, where we’d been with Frank on our first patrol and tultul was a strange man. I said, “Where’s tultul?” “Oh, him he die, finish. Me

tultul now” so he died and somebody else took his hat and put it on and made himself the village chief. I s’pose he had their…it was all arranged within the village but, you know people died and getting buried and handing their caps on. It’s all sort of routine stuff to them, no great drama. Birth, death, marriages, they’re all pretty routine

occurrences. I can remember seeing them go past our hut on the way out to the…they all had their little village gardens with these stones around them as is described in the Mabo case which, you know decided we were not terra nullus, don’t want to go to the politics side of it but they all had their little gardens and see them go out in the morning, very pregnant lady,

couple of older kids, Dad following along behind carrying a large machete and we’d see them come home at night, a very pregnant lady with the kids in tow and a bunch of bananas and whatever else, she did all the carrying and the father came along with the knife. That’s just their way of doing things.

The lady who was going out, the pregnant lady and the kids and Dad swinging the knife, then they came back from the vegetable garden this day and Mum’s carrying the bananas and the kids trailing behind and a, what do they call them, they’re little carry bags? Anyhow she had the baby with her.

She had the baby during the day and she just walked home carrying the baby and the vegetables and Dad walking along behind carrying nothing, which was natural to them. It’s their way of life. Ladies did the cooking and the housework and the gardening and Dad was the warrior.

Yes.

Are you familiar with the term

“wontok”?

Wontok spelt W O N T O K, Wontok. It is one talk. There are an estimated, approximately, as nobody is ever quite sure, 400 different languages spoken in New Guinea and a language is just the place talk of a village, perhaps only a few hundred people and they have a language which if they go five miles up the

road, they are speaking a completely foreign language and this is why Pidgin was spread right through New Guinea from the black birding days in Queensland back to the islands and right through, particularly in New Guinea because of this local dialect, local language really. South of the Owen Stanleys in Papua, they all speak Motu, one language, but north of the Owen Stanley, all these little,

and anybody who comes from your village, speaks your language, is a “one talk”. Now they don’t move around a lot amongst themselves. They don’t move very far from home. They have no reason to. They have sort of small, insular communities and they can move into the next community, say a few words in Pidgin, sit down beside the fire, smoke a cigarette and say something and move on again.

That’s all right but if there is a war for some reason, usually over somebody stealing pigs which are valuable meat and valuable currency and part of the bride price system and pigs are a very important part of their economy and were particularly in those tribal days. A stolen pig would be enough to start a whole war between two villages. When we went back in ’84, the first newspaper

I saw there was some firm in Lae advertising Japanese trucks, whether Daihatsu or Toyotas and if you brought a truck you got two free pigs with it and this struck me as rather amusing that these poor primitive people are still stuck with their pigs even when they’re buying a truck, pigs part of their deal. We went to see one of the hospitals, this is’84, one of the hospitals in Lae, patient

in bed, wife and kids and pigs under the bed, in the hospital and I said to the feller, “How do you cope with this?” He said, “Well you cope with this or you don’t run a hospital. That’s all there is to it”, so they had this peculiar mixture of ancient and modern which was quite different from the days when I was there 40 years previously. Nobody was called masta’ anymore. Children were no longer ‘monkeys’. They’d become piccaninnies.

Now why in New Guinea a child, a piccaninny which is a south United States term for babies but the political correctness was creeping in even then, 20 years ago. Nobody was called ‘masta’, nobody was called ‘boy’. Meris were still meris and boy or man was, they were all men then and, as I say, they used two

way radios, they drove trucks and got a free pig thrown in if they brought the right brand of truck.

We didn’t know what the locals were saying to each other unless they spoke in Pidgin. If they spoke in their place talk, we were quite relaxed with our local natives

where we were. They didn’t appear to be any threat to us. They showed no animosity. They were nothing but cooperative. In another area, for instance one of our crowds went in one night into a strange area, found a clearing. It wasn’t a vegetable garden. It was a clearing so they camped in it and they found the natives very nasty and very aggressive and didn’t know why, couldn’t speak the local language. The locals refused to speak to them Pidgin or anything else,

just made threatening movements and made them feel most unwanted and eventually he gave them a bunch of green bananas then one of the fellers tumbled. He’d heard this bunch of green bananas, it’s “get the hell out of here or you’re in trouble”. It was the message, green bananas, you’re gone and it appears they were camped on a local burial ground, which was most offensive to the natives, but no communication

on the subject at all. Now we didn’t have any of that sort of problem. If they spoke place talk amongst themselves and Pidgin to us, it didn’t worry us.

Yep. Tobacco is part of currency as well as a part of smoking. It’s part of wages. It came in caddies. I think there were gross

sticks of tobacco to a caddy. It was a tobacco leaf dipped in molasses and twisted till it wound up on itself, as a twisted item does and then it was packed and they were all crushed in together in the form of, this roughly rectangular in section, twist. It was foul smelling, filthy looking stuff. It was absolutely dreadful stuff and yet they

smoked it. When we first arrived if we had any newspapers, for some reason or other we had amongst our possessions an old copy of the Women’s Weekly. Don’t ask me how, I don’t know. It was there. One of us had it in our kit. We were probably reading it when we were on the transport waiting to get up there but this was greatly prized. It made wonderful cigarette paper.

Women’s Weekly was wonderful stuff. We had very little stationery. We didn’t ever try them on signal forms because we had very few signal forms. We had a lot of Japanese paper which we’d souvenired in Bogadjim from their camp there and the natives wouldn’t touch it at all. They would not even use it to wrap their tobacco in. It was rice paper. I’d have thought it’d be good cigarette paper but not to their taste. They used to break this half sticky, half

hard mess up into little bits and pieces and roll it up in something and light up and puff away and it gave them some pleasure but always they were very keen to be given a Capstan. All white man’s cigarettes were Capstans. It was a popular brand in those days and I would never let Nabess have a Capstan. That was not done. He had trade tobacco. He earnt it, it was his and he could do what he liked with it. I don’t know, he didn’t seem to smoke

very much at all, probably went into the village pot and they all smoked it.

From Port Moresby out to, yeh, we had about a quarter of a ton of radio equipment and probably half a ton of rations, munitions, ammunition and stuff like that, including

Frank Parmeter’s special issue of grenades and 45 pistol ammunition.

In Papua, we had a Papuan administration unit which was an army unit set up to take over from the civil administration and then later over in New Guinea we had ANGAU. Now ANGAU was the Australian New Guinea Administration

Unit and it had taken over from the patrol officer service and they were responsible for everything to do with the natives and in a sense they were responsible for us, particularly us because when we first started this spotting game, if I may flash back to the early business, and “we” collectively means the unit, not me personally, anybody who was there and could function on a radio set was a spotter.

They were priests, they were missionaries, they were couple of miners over on Woodlark Island who said “You can carry on with your war, we’re sticking here with our mine”; virtually anybody who was able to work a transmitter was coopted and became a spotter. A lot of these people were from New Guinea Volunteer Rifles. Some of them were from the infantry battalions. They were volunteers. A lot of them were New Guinea Volunteer Rifles,

local residents, as was Vic Gilchrist, the bloke with the military medal and the mention in despatches. We had a network of…we got up to 80 to a hundred stations. We had infanteers. We had 2/5, 2/7 Commando Company blokes, the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles, the manager of Burns Philp in Lae, just about any human being who could function a radio was coopted into this radio

network because they soon weeded out all the civilians and replaced them with military personnel but we had this great network of stations going. We were giving a service but we didn’t have a unit and so they said, “Well some belong to sigs, some belong to…”, a dozen different administrations so they gave the whole lot to Papua Administration Unit, PUA and we didn’t

ever see them then; they didn’t ever work together. A few guys from the administration came to the spotters, stayed for a while and went back to the administration in those formative days. One of those blokes we still see regularly at lunch at Kingsgrove now. We started in February. In October they decided it was time we were a unit so they gave us a name, New Guinea Air Warning Wireless Company and we were Number Four

Company of the L of C [Lines of Communication - signals], the lines of communication, signals. L of C, the established communications….in a military area and so we became Number Four Company there and it was yet another year later before we became an Independent Company so the administration of the whole thing was just crazy. I don’t think anything like it has ever been done before in the Australian Army and certainly hasn’t been done since. It was just an odd-ball unit that was, grew up like Topsy

in a hurry because there was a need and John Marsh, sticking to his original advice from Major Small was “find men of the right calibre” and I guess he did.

Yes, that’s right. I got off the track, didn’t I? Bit good at that.

Right so a sergeant, two corporals as we were, an Owen gun

and 600 rounds, two rifles and 30 rounds each. Frank’s private arsenal was on the side. The three piece radio set, about 150 pounds, battery charger well over a hundred pounds, two batteries over a hundred pounds each. We’re getting up towards half a ton, boxes of tinned vegetables. You were likely to get a whole box of cabbage to last you three months,

enough food, estimated, for three months. Our flour was in four gallon drums, like the merchants nail tins. You know the bulk nail tins with the clamp down lid? Our flour was in stuff like that, was in clamp down lids. Our sugar and tea was packed in sandbags. That’s another story, was part of the same story. After that’s been dunked in the sea, you’ve got some pretty lousy tasting salted tea and the sugar of course had vanished,

so we were stuck with this stuff, tins of pork and beans which were notoriously 10 percent pork and 90 percent beans, bully beef, biscuits, certain amount of flour. No baking powder. I don’t know what you do with all that plain flour but it came in handy. If you caught a fish or something you’d roll it in it before you threw it in the fire.

What else? But roughly three months reasonable rations, uninteresting stuff, very often boring stuff and as I say if you got a case of vegetables, it was all tinned cabbage, well that was it. You were tin cabbage camp.

5th Air Force, we were all kitted out in Port Moresby, 5th Air Force flew us over to Lae; my first experience of American soldiering

was breakfast in Lae. We had bacon about that thick, beautifully grilled with lashings of marmalade all over it. If you liked you could have with your hotcakes and maple syrup, a scoop of ice cream. This is breakfast and these guys used to do a day’s work on that stuff, absolute mush. Oh, hash browns. I hadn’t met hash browns till Lae. Then they put us on a barge and sent us up to Saidor

which was the air field we were about to defend. Saidor had only been going a few weeks. It was copping a hell of a pounding but it didn’t stop them. They had an ice cream factory, a soft drink factory and a motion picture show. This is soldiering the American fashion. It was completely foreign to us.

US Air Force. Basically

did most of our work with the US, the 5th Air Force. They were the predominating force there. The RAAF flew, had some fighter aircraft, particularly Kittyhawks, some Hudson bombers, a whole lot of DC3s. They formed very much a transport function but the US Air Force just outnumbered us in equipment, men, every other way. They sort of, they were the rich uncle, we were the poor relatives I s’pose

and our communication, anything we sent back went to Port Moresby, went immediately by runner to US headquarters, air force headquarters, army headquarters, navy, Australian Army, Australian Navy, Australian Air Force, any message. We used to work in coded messages for administrative purposes, like reporting that we were out on patrol and

the result of patrol, “all clear” that sort of stuff. It was all coded. My business with my teeth. That all, sort of thing all went as coded messages but aircraft flying, we went onto X frequency, which was that mysterious frequency that we didn’t know but the Japanese did, our secret transmission. We’d go straight on the air and say, “so many bombers, so many fighters, such and such a height, south west” and switch off you see, ostensibly so that

they wouldn’t have time to find out who we were or where we were because they soon put together that every time they flew over a certain spot like Lae Pit , which was there for nine months sitting up in the hill behind Lae reporting everything that happened, they soon realised what we were doing. The problem is they couldn’t find us. We were too small. When Jack Bartlett and Bill English,

a couple of ex 2/5 commando blokes, were looking after Lae O Pip [observation post], when they arrived they got a signal saying, “There’s a patrol out searching for you. It’s about a hundred men strong”, so they’re sitting up on the top of this little ridge up the back of Lae with binoculars, counting the aircraft and telling them everything that’s happening in Lae. One of the earlier spotters there was the manager of Burns Philp in Lae, so Lae was no secret. The boys in our pit knew all about it

and…

No, we were travelling with the US Air Force and was just the three of us. We were transported up there in a barge all by ourselves and the next morning from Saidor, further up to Bogadjim in another barge, once again American crew, American barge and as far as we knew we were

it but unknown to us the Australian Army had sent a group of blokes from 5th Division headquarters on the same night and so we thought we were going to be there all alone and there we were with company and then the next night the infantry came down from the hills, having fought their way all through the, I said it earlier, Markham, next Valley. They’d fought

their way overland and arrived there. Ramu. We found ourselves with quite a corroboree in Bogadjim and we’re just sort of settling in there and they put us on another barge up to Madang. From there on we just got native carriers and paid them, went our way up the coast.

Yes.

Well

as a 19 year old who’d never been on a landing expedition before, I’d been in a barge the last couple of days and we didn’t know what we were going into. We knew it was Japanese territory. We weren’t expecting any of our people in there at all. The 5th Division were a complete surprise to us. I think it was probably about a platoon of guys. There weren’t many, 20 or 30 of them and we’re just waiting to hit the beach and the barge,

the front to drop and he dropped it out before he hit the beach and the next thing we knew we were up to our waist in salt water and a bag of sugar soaked in salt water and we’re keeping our radio sets up and out of the water so we got off through the surf up onto the beach and started stacking stuff and carrying it off as fast as we could, put a tarpaulin over it. Next morning one of the 5th Division blokes went down to get something. I don’t know what he was looking for but he lifted up our tarp and found a Japanese soldier

under there with a bayonet so probably took him prisoner and he was a very worried little man. He thought we were going to torture him or put him to death or something. In fact all we did was gave him some mess tins, put him in the line and took him along and gave him a feed with the rest of us, handed him over to the intelligence fellers who put him on the next barge back to Lae.

There were still fresh

boot marks around the camp. Now that doesn’t last from one rainstorm to the next so they would be out of there say 24, at the very most 48 hours when we arrived in. They left there in rather a hurry. The camp was an absolute mess. As I say, we had a box of grenades just left there for the taking, quite a lot of

stationery.

He was the fourth member of our party.

Yes, well he came in and reported to Frank in a hurry that there was Japanese footprints right outside. Frank rushed out there of course and he was looking at his own footprints. He was just not very bright.

Amongst other things, there was a deep pit, Japanese latrine which was not a very pleasant item to have in the middle of your camp site or anywhere near your camp site, so Frank said to him, “Get a tin of kerosene and throw it down there”, just to kill the thing off and blanket the smell and traditional method of deep pit latrine is to throw kerosene on it. He couldn’t find the kerosene so he

threw down a tin of petrol, a large tin of petrol, then he put a match in and caused the greatest volcanic eruption of Japanese sewage you can possibly imagine, so we had to move the camp site a little bit away from there but, 24 hours then Frank said to him, “You, on that barge, you’re going back”, sent him back. In fact he did end up at Bogadjim with another station a week or so later. He got back about as far as Lae

I think and they said to him, “Well there’s another spotting station, you go with it” and sent him up again.

Frank was a sergeant. Frank was the sergeant and even if he hadn’t have been, he would have put himself in charge. He was a very dominant personality, domineering personality and as I say he had a military medal for being very brave up at Nasau Bay and he was very brave, and he was also very brave in the landing at Lae.

The two boys who I was telling you about who went up at Lae with the hundred soldiers looking for them, lasted there for about three months and then got up one morning and gave a ball to ball description of the great American/Australian invasion of Lae, more ships than they’d ever seen in their lives before and they had barrages and landing barges and people rushing ashore and they gave a ball to ball description of it to General Blamey who was back in Port Moresby in the headquarters. This went on for a couple of hours,

a ball to ball description of the invasion of Lae and they’d waited there three months for that, both got military medals.

Yeh.

I was a new boy. It was my first station. Dusty was one of the original

volunteers from Murray Barracks. They put out the first ring of stations around Moresby. I don’t know where we got Frank; somewhere along the line but there was no doubt. The guy knew no fear at all which made him a very good soldier but it didn’t make him a very good spotter because our war has been described as the private war. We went out there and kept our heads down and our information flowing, be it weather, aircraft

movements, shipping movements, whatever. Our job was not to engage the enemy. It was the very opposite, to avoid them and that was contrary to Frank’s nature so in that way he was a worry. Dusty and I were quite pleased when he was called back to headquarters after about three weeks I would guess. I don’t keep a diary of it but once we established that the fact the station was in and it wasn’t subject to any immediate attack,

no station was immune from attack but it was fairly well known the ones that were likely to be and first Frank was back and then a few weeks later the police boys went back and then Dusty and I just had it to ourselves for a few months and it was one of the…as most stations were at some stage, dull, lonely. You get to the stage where you think, “If I’ve got so spend another day with this guy I’ll wring his neck” but you just learn to swallow it and don’t ring anybody’s

neck. You live alone with another guy in the bush just because that’s what the job requires.

Yeh.

When we got back into Nadzab I went on the leave party.

Dusty didn’t, he went on the next leave party but we went back to Nadzab together and to headquarters and I didn’t ever see him again. I didn’t ever communicate with him again. Now I quite liked the guy but we didn’t form any life long friendships. Parmeter I saw later on. I caught up with him at reunions and things when he was…he was somewhat older than the rest of us. He’d have been the best part of 10 years older than me I s’pose

and

He was from Melbourne. He was a bank clerk, Commonwealth Bank who got a call-up, posted to New Guinea, was some months older than me. He was posted to New Guinea with the infantry, volunteered and did the whole bit right through, the binocular

force, binocular force was the big landing at Lae. He was on one of the four stations there. Vic Gilchrist had one, Frank Parmeter had one, Dusty was on one of the others. I’ve forgotten their names. They were all under the command of a US Air Force captain called King and the stations were known as Binocular, Kings 1, Kings 2, Kings 3 and Binocular

was the one that reported back and the others all reported into Binocular. Dusty was part of that and they went in into Japanese occupied territory and off on the first barge and he just regarded that all as pretty much routine. He didn’t think there was anything…I guess he’d seen so much of the work here. He just got a bit immune to it all.

I don’t know what we talked about, s’pose we didn’t’ talk very much.

Actually we were a very good combination ‘cause we didn’t have a cross word in months. I was a full corporal. I was a substantive rank of corporal. Dusty was only acting corporal. Technically I was senior to him. I didn’t ever presume to be the senior

on the station and Dusty didn’t ever make it clear that he was the senior on the station either. We just worked together as a team. We were a couple of corporals sitting out there waiting for something to happen, hoping it wouldn’t. The other station, the next one, for a long while we were the northern most station, we were the station closest to Tokyo until one night we’d been at Meigar

Harbour for quite a while, and I explained to you the coral reef; one night we heard a barge motor coming, thought, “This might be trouble” and all of a sudden the barge turned in and came straight through our little coral thing. We thought, “Oh God we’re in trouble here. This is the Japs. They’ve woken up to where we were” and was just enough light to see the American flag on the barge so

the conundrum was—we had to make up our minds in a hurry—what do we do, because if we did anything that could look hostile, we were likely to get shot up with a Browning machine gun. If we ran for the bush we then had to get back into camp and they’d be in our camp. Once again armed to the teeth and so we made the quick decision we’d sit right where we were beside the fire and so we had our little cooking fire going. I think we probably had a cup of

coffee or something and we just sat there and waited. The Yanks come up, “My God, Aussies where did you come from?” “We live here. Where’d you come from?” “Oh, we’ve been putting some troops in up at Hollandia.” And we found out from them that what they had done was put in one of our spotting stations up at Hadki Island which was the coral island I described earlier. We had another station Col Stuart, Bill Niesch, Ron Walker

four of our guys, six American guards and that was significant when the Yanks had some guards in one of the stations. This Rumbibi Island which is in the river couple of hundred miles beyond Hollandia and they were definitely nearest ones to Tokyo after that and once again, could you trust the natives? Some natives came ashore on the little island and said they were there looking for coconuts, didn’t seem to be taking much interest in coconuts or didn’t

pick any and they went off again and Col Stuart reported this to headquarters that, you know was suspicious action and headquarters said, “Do you feel safe?” He said, “Yes we’ll watch it, but we’ll stay” and that night they got an invasion party of 40 Japs. Ron Walker was on guard. He got cut up by a captain with a sword.

Col Stuart was cut by a sword. Bill Niesch got his kneecap blown off with a hand grenade. It was all hell let loose and the Yanks, I think there were about half a dozen wounded in all from out of the 10 and they took one prisoner who, a lieutenant, and they shot some of the others on land and some of them in the water. They

knocked off 39 Japs. Took one prisoner without the loss of man, which is, you can be on a quiet station. You could be there for six months and then one night boom. Now they’d only been there a few weeks and obviously the natives told the Japanese where they were. The lieutenant they took as a captive spoke English. He had, he was an intelligence officer.

He spoke English with an American accent. I’m not sure if he was from an American university but he’d been educated by Americans and he spoke English with an American accent. They sent him back and screwed him for some pretty good information but it’s what can happen on a spotting station. As far as you know, you’re 200 miles from nowhere and all of a sudden boom.

Any soldier who tells you “he’s never scared” is kidding himself or kidding you. It can be frightening at times, like the night the Yanks come in when we thought the Japs had come to get us. You can be very scared of nothing. I earlier described how I was scared of a hole in my tooth that didn’t exist. Things start to get at you a bit but people react differently. The two guys at, Spud Murphy and Clive Turnbull, at Kokoda

were sent up there to relieve a party. That was, Kokoda was one of the early watching stations guarding Port Moresby and these two guys had just come out of hospital, had been suffering from dysentery and they put them in to Kokoda the day before the Japanese arrived. Well, they were in the middle of the action for six weeks. They moved their set several times a day. They followed the action all the way up and down the trail. They were providing…

they worked pretty well 24 hours a day. One or other was on the air passing all the infantry messages because they could get through on their 3B sets, where the military sets couldn’t get through. After six weeks of that they got out, both got military medals. Spud came home and got to be a bank manager. His mate was sent home to Callan Park and died there, didn’t ever get out. Yes, two men, identical situation,

Turnbull in charge, Murphy a signalman acting corporal and Murphy survived as far as you could see without a scratch physically or intellectually. The other bloke, it just wrote him off so you never know what the circumstances are going to be or what your reactions are going to be. Now had I been in a station in that situation, I don’t know whether I’d have been a Murphy or a Turnbull but I was a bit stressed when I got home.

The thing that we had to get used to was the loneliness. If you didn’t get used to that, you’d be nutty and when I came home my mother said, “I’ll take you into town. I’m going to buy you a present”, so we got on the train at Roseville, got off at Wynyard and I saw the crowds of people. I said “I can’t do this”. I got on the train and went back out to Roseville, could not stand a crowd of people milling in a disorganised fashion.

I’d been in a camp with soldiers. I’d been in a staging camp with soldiers but I suddenly found myself at Wynyard and I just knew I couldn’t do it and I was diagnosed as, one where you get a fear of crowds. It gradually tapered off but it wasn’t

until very recent years that I could get myself to go to the Sydney Show, couldn’t go to the Olympic Games, just crowds are not my scene, just not my scene at all. I, once you get used to a situation, university and they’re all other people and they’re all students and they’re all doing the same thing and in some way they’re organised, you get to accept that because you have to and that gets to be part of the normal but to suddenly find yourself

in the middle of an undisciplined crowd is just quite a foreign experience. It happened to me after the war. It didn’t happen to me before the war. Now I didn’t rush in and claim a pension or a TPI or anything as happened with later soldiers, who are the sons of our boys. They knew all the lurks about getting pensions but we didn’t, but I think most of us, the ones, blokes with whom I’m in contact now,

settled down to normal lives and married and had families and one didn’t ever marry but most of us sort of settled back to ordinary civil life. As I say, Murphy joined the bank and rose to be manager and he’s as sane as anything to this day. Nobody knows until tested, how they will react and

in fact, Blamey was highly critical of some of the lads who escaped from the Kokoda stunt. He made a most unfortunate reference to “running dogs” or something and for which Blamey was hated forever after and I mean he was talking to a bunch of 17 year old kids who found themselves up there on day one, opposed to about 5,000 seasoned Japanese troops

who’d been on the warpath since 1936. Those guys at Kokoda had been through Korea, right down through China, down through Malaya and over to Buna and they were tough, seasoned soldiers and our boys were a bunch of 18 year olds and some of them, you know Bruce Kingsbury was the guy who picked up a Bren gun and charged headlong into them, firing, was killed and got a VC [Victoria Cross]. Others

found themselves cut off from their unit and they took to the scrub and went bush. I don’t think anybody, any sane one would blame them but it was an awful test for a bunch of teenagers.

Earlier you asked me a question about our affect on the war in general. Major General Simpson who was the Signal Officer in Chief said, amongst other things, “It can be accepted as successful ‘cause the war could have been seriously delayed if not greatly prolonged if this unit had not operated so efficiently”. That’s from the major general himself. He thinks we made a difference.

The War Memorial on the other hand doesn’t think we made much difference at all, can I tell you about that?

Yep.

I think we had just enough activity so as not to

die of boredom. With being lonely, I consciously made a decision. I consciously made a few decisions, including a religious one which I won’t bring into this interview. I took stock of the situation and said that the jungle…

and by this stage, it doesn’t take long for a jungle to creep in on a plantation which isn’t being worked. Although we were in a coconut plantation it was still pretty scrubby. I came to the realisation that the jungle was not my enemy but my friend. You could dive into it and disappear and I think that helped me overcome the feeling of being lonely and isolated. I

naturally, you think in that situation, there’s nobody here to help me but me and then you realise that the jungle is your friend. It’s not to be feared but to be treasured. I think that helped a lot. I remember asking myself who was looking after me from on top but came to the conclusion that I couldn’t find anybody answering the phone at the moment

I s’pose we talked about stupid things. One day Nabess came in and said, “The whole lagoon is full of fish”, an enormous collection of fish and the tide had gone out and they were captive in this lagoon and so, could he have a hand grenade? He never had anything to do with a bomb, how to fish out of the lagoon so we offered him a Japanese

hand grenade but oh no. Japanese grenades were quite dangerous. Ours was a spring loaded device which when you released the mills bomb, when you released the handle, pin went down, set the action going. You had four seconds or seven seconds depending on the sort of fuse to get the bomb where it was going. The Japanese one you started it going by striking a plate. It’s like a mushroom on the end of this cylinder with a wooden handle and you struck it on a rock or something solid

and that fired the pin and the fuse then was presumably burning inside, then you threw the grenade. If you hadn’t struck it hard enough, the other fellow could pick it up and throw it back to you and if you struck it too hard, it’d go off in your hand and Nabess had obviously seen these things before and he was not about to touch them at all, so we got out of our chest, a little box of tricks, one grenade and bowled them into the lagoon. Well, the natives thought it was wonderful. They all dived in together

barefoot. They’d go rushing over these jagged rocks and coral and they’re pulling out stunned fish and they lined them up on the bank and there must have been probably 50 of them and they just lined them up all day and looked at them and I said to Dusty, “What’s going on?” He said, “I think you’ll find they’re your fish”. “Oh,” so I went along and inspected them like the general inspecting the troops and nominated one particular fish for Nabess to take off and cook for us and

then I said, “Have the rest” and they came from everywhere. I never saw what did they have, shoal fish I s’pose, it disappeared so quickly, in all my life. All the natives in the village ate fish that night but it was significant that none of them moved to take a fish, “my bomb, my fish” and nobody moved to take one until I said they could have them, little incidents like that, our meeting with the navy,

the outboard motor. These were the little items that just bobbed up. You know it wasn’t all total endless boredom. We’d always find something interesting happening somewhere.

Daily routine? Six o’clock in the morning and I explained to Nabess how to tell six o’clock. We had a watch mounted on the front of our wireless set. That was issue, a watch, rather a nice watch and I

explained to him how to tell the time. So at six o’clock in the morning, cup of tea. This was this black, salty stuff that we had left over from the landing, dreadful and one morning a bit before six I was awake and watching Nabess. He had his fire going. He was watching Karkar Island and as soon as the sun came over the tip of Karkar Island, he made our cup of tea but he wasn’t using the clock at all. He was using the sun rising over the island,

so that was our first call. We don’t have long evenings. You don’t have a variation in day lengths down here. Well in the tropics up there you, very little difference between summer and winter. In fact there’s not really a summer and a winter. There’s only the wet season and the ordinary season, one being a bit wetter than the other and six in the morning, we kept schedules, six, ten, two, six. We’d go on and we’d report the weather, what percentage of cloud, how much wind, the height of

the cloud. You look at the sky, it’s very rarely zero. There’s usually a cloud somewhere but clouds are anything from 99 percent to zero, from one percent to a hundred percent cloud but they wanted to know if it was raining, if there was visibility, if there was cloud how high it was, what the wind was, which direction and these things were reported every four hours. We’d come on, we kept a schedule.

The radio station would come on, our control station back at Nadzab, and call each spotting station in turn. We’d answer back and give them our weather report and that was done on one of our normal communication frequencies. The information would probably be of some assistance to the Japanese if they cared to listen to it in English but it was in plain language, English, and at least all the flyboys knew exactly what the conditions

were right over New Guinea ‘cause the danger there is you can fly into one end of a valley and it’s a nice, clear, sunny day and before you get out the other end, you’re in dense cloud and crashing into the wall somewhere and the air force has to know these things so that was probably, it was a commitment we had. Any other messages we got from headquarters had to be decoded and coded and answered.

The weather schedules, yes, those six times, four hourly. We gave a complete weather picture. At other times the navy would just go on and call up the, with a coded message, just go on and call up the station either in Morse or plain language, depending on how the reception was. You can get Morse code through all sorts of hash that you can’t get a voice through and I was

a code operator. Dusty wasn’t. He’d never learnt to be a signalman. He was still an infantry volunteer and spotter but that…you know we mightn’t send ordinary traffic in more than a few times a week. You’d send them in to signal and do a bit of a bitch about, you know “we haven’t got our Christmas mail yet and we’re out of razor blades and we’re out of rations and can somebody drop us something” and hoping that the biscuit bombers might come over and

bring us some mail, which is the thing we missed most and they didn’t ever drop us anything. The Christmas mail was still there in June when we got back.

No, well, we wrote letters home regularly. That was something to do, apart from anything else. We had no stamps.

We had no envelopes so we used to write our letters home and wrap them in this Japanese paper, usually glued up with some sort of, anything sticky we could get out of a tree that would stick the paper together. I still have some of those letters. My mother kept them all. A police boy passing through was trustworthy, the day the navy visited us, the night the Americans visited us in their barge. We’d always have a

letter on hand to say, “Post that for us when you get back”. People were remarkably good about it. A lot of our letters home did get through but of course we could say nothing in them that was of any interest. We couldn’t tell the people where we were or what we were doing. They assumed from the name New Guinea Air Warning Wireless that we were out there somewhere giving warning of bombers. So much for secrecy, you know,

fancy calling a unit New Guinea Air Warning Wireless and saying, “Now sshh don’t tell them what you’re doing”. What do they suppose we were doing? Anyhow most of these letters got through.

My mother, my sisters, a girl called Margaret who was

a girlfriend, not in the sense that they have a girlfriend today. She was just one of our mob from the social circle who was, sort of we were a bit keen on each other but I wasn’t the only soldier she was writing to nor did she pretend that I was the only one she was writing to but it was just a bit of social contact but we tried to get one home, you know write one a week to our mothers,

our parents and sometimes it’d be two or three weeks before we got an opportunity to get them out. Other times we…the time I went through to Madang to see the dentist, took the opportunity to post my mail and Dusty’s.

Yeh.

A hundred percent, that’s all it was, a filling the surface of which had gone a bit rough and all the rest of it was in my imagination and this pain for anything hot or anything cold would give me this instant pain, disappeared the minute the guy polished the filling and reassured me there was no hole there and it’d gone. I was absolutely amazed. I didn’t think I was, well I’m sure, I s’pose we’re all a bit neurotic

in the circumstances but the fact I felt I couldn’t, we had a first aid kit and it was quite a comprehensive first aid kit including a…we used to get morphia needles, packets of morphia needles in little wooden boxes in case of, you know extreme circumstances but I wasn’t going to start taking morphia or anything. I just wanted to get my hole in my tooth fixed

and it wasn’t there. It was all in my imagination and it wouldn’t have happened had I been, I’m feel sure it would not have happened if I’d been in town with a dentist round the corner. I just felt a rough filling. I can feel 10 or 15 of them at the moment. I’ve still got all my own teeth, a lot of fillings and just knowing that the service was not available, knowing that I couldn’t do anything about it and that built up

this whole worry of pain.

The one that really shocked me was when I couldn’t stay in Wynyard station ramp. I mean I knew the Sydney subway. I used to go up and down Wynyard or Town Hall every day of my life on the way to school. That area was not strange to me. It’s just that I suddenly found I couldn’t

bare to be in a crowd and I could only attribute that to the, getting used to the isolation. I spent a bit of time in the country as a kid and it’s not a joke that a man would get on a horse and he’d ride a few miles to go over and stand on a verandah with his neighbour and say “Gidday” and “Gidday” and smoke a cigarette and “Is it going to rain?” “No, don’t think so.”

“Well better be off home,” and get on his horse and ride back again. This was quite common amongst the people of the bush. They didn’t feel the need to talk to each other so much as to experience some human company and they’ve been all sorts of funny stories and jokes written about these sort of conversations in the bush but they were real. They used to happen and so it did with us. One of the things we used to do

particularly if we’re all waiting to do our weather schedule, of course it was strictly forbidden, but for some reason or other the patrol station was a bit late coming in, the boys would get on the air and send personal messages to each other and I remember one of the blokes down at Bogadjim, which was a few days march away. I think it was Gordon Beatty, one of the boys on Bogadjim

said, “Are you guys right for fresh fruit up there? We’ve got plenty here,” and we said, “No, we’re right. We’ve got bananas everywhere,” and this sort of thing, personal chitchat just for the sake of breaking the rules and talking to another human being in something other than Morse code or weather hieroglyphics. You know it was, I s’pose they were all cries for personal contact and we used to get reprimands

for going on the air in plain language and discussing nonsense but there was some quite priceless, funny remarks made, most of which I couldn’t put on that film but…

Aircraft, aircraft, aircraft. There were two things and there was a reason

we were put onshore from Karkar Island and that was our instructions when we went out. We found it was Meigar Harbour. One of the things a station had was an area map. Well, there weren’t any maps of that area in New Guinea so we were just told “From Bogadjim, go up to onshore from Karkar Island and find a spot”, so that’s where we went. Karkar Island was significant because the Japanese had quite a substantial

base up in Dutch New Guinea. Obviously they were still getting food supplies that way. Lae was cut off. Any shipping that moved in there got bombed immediately because the Lae OP would report it. They were feeding the blokes in Lae from submarine until the spotters started reporting that but Karkar Island and then further down was another island called Long Island

which was a bit peculiar because it was perfectly circular. It was an old crater, volcanic crater sitting up out of the sea and it was this big pond with a fringe of rock around it, out in the middle of the ocean. The AIB [Allied Intelligence Bureau] the intelligence bureau had a station on Long Island and they were reporting back to VIG but the Japanese on barges were running food from Hollandia,

down the coast as far as helping to feed their guys on New Britain and it was the New Britain bit that interested the intelligence bureau. That’s what they were watching, any signs of Japanese troop movements to New Britain and we were just watching out for Saidor but these barges we would hear them at night, start up on Karkar Island and disappear and next night some more. They were coming in by night,

hiding out in Karkar during the day, dodging bombers and things. I don’t know how they were camouflaged. Our blokes didn’t ever bomb them. They’d sleep during the day and then travel by night down to Long Island and the next night on, down to New Britain so we were reporting that. We knew

there were motors. We didn’t know if they were submarines or barges ‘cause the Japs were using submarines in the Pacific quite a bit and doing a lot of damage with them. We lost a few aircraft carriers to submarines up there but mainly we were there for the purpose of reporting any bombers which were going over fairly frequently when we first got there but as the war moved further north, the Japanese withdrew further up to Dutch New Guinea and the Americans invaded Dutch New Guinea and

the Japs had lost a lot of aircraft in Lae, thanks to our Lae OP and they lost a lot in Salamaua thanks to our OP there. They were caught on the ground. As soon as the bombers would land to refuel, the spotters would say, “so many bombers on the field”. The Yanks would come over and destroy them or damage them so towards the end of our stay there, we were doing very little in the way of aircraft reporting ‘cause the Japanese had run out of aeroplanes

virtually. We were there more for any troop movements, which we didn’t find and weather reporting. Towards the end there I s’pose our main function would have been the weather reporting.

X frequency, our mysterious “we don’t know but they did”. You’d go on the air immediately, describe what the aircraft

was, how high it was and where it was going, which is all the air force needed to know. It was a bomber and it was 50 feet or five thousand feet. They wanted to know its height. They wanted to know its direction. They wanted to know if it was supported by fighter aircraft and there was one occasion down at Moresby where they reported 57 bombers with approximately 30 fighters in the escort going in on Moresby. You know that’s sort of, pretty

heavily raided. That raid was warned from the hundred mile ring and from the 30 mile ring and by the time they got to Moresby the whole air was full of our aircraft waiting for these guys who are busy trying to bomb a target, then they’re being harassed by fighters and they broke up the whole raid. They shot down a lot of aircraft. The spotting stations all up and down the mountain were reporting, “damaged bombers lifting back, flying low, engines missing” and all sorts of things,

reporting the damaged blokes going back but that was only possible because the spotters gave them warning at a hundred miles and again at 30 miles, they had about 80 enemy aircraft overhead and you could almost predict to the minute and that made them sitting ducks.

About eight bombers I think it was, eight bombers heading towards Saidor.

Daily we had the bomber squadron at, very rarely saw American fighters up there, it was nearly all the light bombers, the Bostons and the Mitchells and they were flying out of Saidor and they would go every morning up and do a bit of bombing up at wherever, whatever was available up around Hollandia, go up and drop their load of bombs and come back again. We used to have to report them on the way back, never on the way out of course but always on the way back in

so that they knew what was coming and if they were damaged and, tell them “they’re yours fellers, don’t shoot them down. They’re Mitchells” but…

Pretty unimaginative really. I s’pose

having a cook boy was a bit of a luxury but we kept him there because of his intelligence value, his local knowledge and knowledge of who was going through. I think we had fried bully beef and stewed bully beef and horizontal bully beef and vertical bully beef and sometimes hot, sometimes cold. He used to cook fish beautifully. He’d wrap the fish, only after we told him how we’d put flour on them and then he’d cake them with mud,

wrap them in a banana leaf, put them in the fire and leave them there and when you opened the banana leaf and cracked open the mud there were scales flying everywhere, but this beautifully cooked fish which had already been scaled and skinned and he was very good at that. One of the things we did, we got from the old plantation a large demijohn [fermenting container with "ear" handles]. I don’t know what it had held

but Dusty said “jungle juice”, so coconut milk, some wild pumpkin and we had some raisins and raisins are quite good, have quite a lot of yeast on the skin so with a few raisins in this mixture of pumpkin and coconut milk and all in the demijohn with the stopper in and tied down and wired down, we were looking forward to quite a

brew of, not quite a home brew, a jungle juice or moonshine, whatever you’d like to call it and everything was going well and then one day it exploded and the whole cookhouse, or the little area we called our cookhouse, was full of this fine, white froth and Nabess saying, “me savvy, me savvy, me savvy” and he’s running around scooping this up and mixing it with flour and he made a loaf. It was

natural yeast and somewhere before he got to know something about yeast and he recognised yeast when he saw it and we lit up the fire under our little four gallon drum and he cooked the most beautiful loaf of bread and so we didn’t get anything to drink. I wasn’t all that keen on alcohol up there anyhow and certainly not jungle juice but I think the boys made it out of devilment more than anything else. A lot of these things were done out of boredom rather than need

and we got this magnificent fine, white bread and we thought, “Oh this is good. We’ve got enough here, the loaf will last us a week” and if we brew something, we had to find something to replace the demijohn but it all worked out. We were going to have fresh bread, ‘cause as I mentioned we had a lot of plain flour and no baking powder and it was beautiful and the next day it was sour and dreadful. It was just absolutely inedible from day two so we had fresh bread for one day and we decided well

it’s not worth trying to find anything else to make jungle juice that would make bread for one day but it was an example of Nabess’ experience at cooking. You know he recognised this and knew how to make a loaf of bread, but cooked fish… He used to make us all sorts of things but basically his important one for me was that cup of tea in the morning and the cup of coffee at night just before he knocked off. He was there from six in the morning till about eight or nine at night.

Noisy, noisy, noisy. My first experience of it was at Bogadjim. We did a patrol around our perimeter and it was not only jungle but it was a sago swamp. We were in slush about 12 or 18 inches deep. I s’pose it was pretty scary.

The thing that amazed me was the amount of noise. Apart from rain on leaves, all the insects, animals, birds, everything that made a noise was always squawking at night. As I say, we could quite happily run a two stroke battery charger. That probably kicked up about as much noise as a Victa lawnmower and we could run those at night without fear of them being heard by the enemy. We did take the precaution, we’d dig two pits,

put the battery charger in one, send the channel through. They had a flexible exhaust with a pepper pot muffler on the end and so we’d put the pepper pot muffler in a pit, cover them both over and so you got a sort of a muffled sound. It was not possible to say “it’s coming from there”. You’d know it was there somewhere but you couldn’t determine where or if there was a running stream, which we didn’t have at Mugil, but that was standard procedure, to put them next to a running stream

because the noise of the stream, and the attendant birds and insects and animals and things, we just got away with it.

The volume of it, we haven’t had them so much recently although we have had it this summer in New South

Wales, our friends the cicadas, what a lot of noise that little insect can make. One cicada can make half that noise you hear going out there now. Can you hear those? If you had hearing aids, they’d be giving you trouble, believe me. All sorts of crickets, most of them unseen insects but they were insect noises

You know the sound of a cricket. We didn’t actually have cicadas as such, but they’re an example of a noisy beetle and there’s a lot of them in the jungle.

A scrub turkey occasionally, it was fun catching them. They were dreadful eating but

no, most of the…we found a wandering cow. Lord knows where it came from but we came to the conclusion there would be no point killing it because two of us couldn’t eat much of it and there was nobody to share it with so we just wished it well and it went on its way. Lord knows where that had escaped from. The Japanese had some ponies they used to use as beasts of burden.

Some of our fellows rounded some of them up one day and made them into pack horses and they had a lot, couple of the bush boys had a lot of fun rounding up the ponies and breaking them in and but basically the animals were scrub turkeys and things like that, there were pigs and there were reptiles. The pigs are only little fellers and noisy, very noisy, squeaking and squawking and carrying on

but there were no predatory animals up there, nothing that was a predator to a human anyhow, apart from the pukpuk, the crocodiles, and Nabess told us where the crocodiles were and where they weren’t and we just didn’t go near streams where they were. The natives all know where they are and if they like you they’ll tell you but they think it’s quite a joke to let you cross a stream and then tell you later “plenty pukpuk he stop”.

“Oh thanks very much.”

We all suffered very badly from malaria; if you were dead unlucky, with Black Water. Black Water because your urine was black. I don’t know much about the pathology of Black Water. I’ve only known it from New Guinea but it is a risk in heavy malarial areas and the whole of New Guinea was just loaded with the

anopheles mosquito. We all suffered quite badly from malaria. We used to take Atebrin tablets which were a bright yellow little tablet and you could pick a bloke who was just down from the island. His skin was yellow and we just looked, you know we were all a crazy colour but we got used to it and the public got used to seeing a percentage of the soldiers were bright yellow and you knew they were just back from New Guinea. It was

a suppressant of sorts but we still got bouts of malaria. You couldn’t do much with them. We had mosquito nets but it was generally too hot to sleep under them and you couldn’t spend your whole day and night under a mosquito net anyhow. You know you had to move around so we just got bitten and we got malaria. Sandflies were another enormous problem but strangely enough you developed an immunity. You’d move into a new area and the sandflies would get you.

You’d be itchy and welts all over your skin, well and truly bitten by countless bites and after about two weeks, suddenly stop. You developed an immunity and after that they just fed on you and didn’t leave any after effects but you’d developed immunity to them but we all suffered badly from malaria and you just hoped that you didn’t both get it at the same time.

Malaria? Sudden, very high temperature and with the shakes, temperature’s way up, headache, general feeling of malaise. There was only one thing to do, was lie down and wait for a couple of days till it all went away again, wrap ourselves up in everything we could get to, we all carried half a blanket

and the nearest you could get when you had malaria was to wrap yourself in the blanket, you had head and shoulders out one end and your feet out the other but it was, covered, was enough to keep you warm and we’d just lie there and sweat it out. Half a blanket was because you didn’t really need the warmth of a full blanket in New Guinea. It didn’t get that cold and if it got wet, you had to carry the damn thing and a wet blanket

is a wet blanket so we’d just wrap ourselves in a half blanket and ground sheet and hit the cot and stay there. One thing about being a spotter was once you got onto a station, you didn’t have to sleep in the mud. We were always able to get some timber and make some sort of a platform bed. The natives would make them for us and made your bed and lay in it I s’pose.

Back to headquarters, amazement. Fellers making acquaintanceships out of the blokes who’d been in the same unit, a fairly small unit for two years, two and a half years and never met each other and it was suddenly “Oh, so you’re Charlie

are you?” The Commanding Officer, John Marsh, he was the corporal who picked up the recruits from day one at the barracks and who was our Commanding Officer with an MBE [Member of the British Empire] and a MID [Mentioned in Dispatches] when we hit home, rank of captain said there were men in the unit he had never met. Now in a small unit, that’s quite extraordinary but if John were off on an

expedition establishing a network down at Milne Bay or up at Hollandia or somewhere, he might be away from headquarters for two or three weeks, then a spotter would come in, clean himself up, get his new gear and go out on a different station and it was quite possible to be in the unit for a couple of years and never meet the Commanding Officer. Some of those guys, I was talking to one fellow recently who told me he’s trying to trace his father’s

movements and he was out on stations continuously for 18 months. I don’t know how nutty he must have been at the end of that. It’s a long time to be in a lonely situation out in the bush but that’s where the job was and that’s where we had to be.

Have a bath, get a new hat, simple things, get a razor with sharp blades in it, kit ourselves up, clean ourselves

up, talk to some fellows. There was no booze in New Guinea in those days. That didn’t happen till right at the end, right before we came home. They started to beer ration in New Guinea but that was a different set of adventures. We got back at headquarters after the…just the joy of being back and being with other people again and we had little to do. The officers used to say, “Well, we should have a parade and you should learn how to stand to attention

and salute”. We hadn’t saluted an officer for years. You don’t salute officers in the field. That’s a good way to get them shot if you salute them so you don’t do it and they sort of started trying to make us look like soldiers again but the boys were busy with other things. The air force had been camped next door to us. They just got a beer ration, two bottles per man in the unit.

With 300 men in the unit and only about 50 in the camp, tremendous beer ration, so we used to take it down to the air force and get them to fire a carbon dioxide fire extinguisher into it to cool it but an air force medical evacuation unit from next door moved out and there was a nice little freezing room, with its own motor and everything, about the size of a butcher’s freezer, that they used for keeping the medical stuff the air evacuation squads have, medicines and equipment, and they moved

out and there was a little freezing room so we got some coconut logs and a jeep and put the logs on the ground and tied the jeep on the, we hauled it from their camp back over to our camp, built a grass hut around it and we had our own freezing room to cool the beer. It only lasted about two days and the service police arrived and wanted to know where their refrigerator was and took it back from us. The other activity, which I didn’t get into myself because I was on the leave party that came down here, the Americans

at the time were just starting to use gliders and they had these big gliders, hold 20 or 30 soldiers on the ground with a lasso of some sort and the DC3s would fly over, pick up a loop and on this great elastic bungee jumping rope sort of thing, they’d just fly over and pick up the glider on the end of this elastic rope and take off and they were training on Nadzab strip with those and the boys used to go over and ride them just for ballast. Well

it was a pretty hair raising and dangerous sort of ride but, as I said before, 19 year old kids and you offer them a thrill that’s a bit dangerous and nothing’s going to happen to them so that’s what they were doing, till the CO found out he was providing ballast for the Americans to practise on.

Nadzab. Nadzab’s up the Markham Valley about 50 miles from Lae and it had the only known road, apart from the road from Port Moresby that came out 12

miles from Port Moresby heading inland and our headquarters was at Nine Mile, the only other road in New Guinea was from Lae to Nadzab, was the queen of the Valley Highway. It was 50 miles long. We had other stations up the Markham Valley but Nadzab was the one closest to Lae and it was the one which had a pinnacle mountain in this valley and we had a spotting station on top of that

mountain and the other thing up there was an enormous iron cross that had been put up there by the Lutheran missionaries and we had the top of the mountain and the Japs had the valley and that was a very useful spotting station. We had others further up the valley but after they cleared the Japs out of the Markham and Ramu Valleys, they developed it into a four strip aerodrome. We had the commercial flying, the DC3s were in and out, bombers

were in and out, fighters were in and out and we moved our headquarters from Moresby, at this stage it had gone very quiet and we took up Nadzab as our headquarters.

Yes, came home on leave, back to Nadzab at which stage determination had been made that the company would come home. Now during our absence down here on leave our commanding officer at the time, one Major Cumpston was in liaison with the American 5th Air Force

for us to move on up through the islands because they went up to Japan because their own experience of training, equipping and operating spotting stations had not been good and our reputation was excellent so we were to go on. All of a sudden Cumpston disappeared. He was posted to Washington. John Marsh was made commanding officer and told “That’s it, you’re going home. You’re not going on with the Yanks.

They can manage by themselves”, so the Americans went on with their war. We bailed out by mid, late ’44. We really ceased to function about July ’44 and by the end of that year we were all home and disbanded and went other places but that period when we came in from our various stations back

to Nadzab, as I say, the boys were just entertaining themselves, getting into an enormous amount of trouble. They were building stills and making jungle juice and flying in gliders and amongst other things, we had a couple of wild jeeps that somebody had, fellers had brought a wild jeep. The Yanks didn’t like the chilli con carne and all the soft muck food they used to get. They used to love to get their hands on some bully beef and biscuits and so for a case full of bully beef, you could buy yourself one of Uncle Sam’s jeeps and all you had to do was hide it in the lines of

the other jeeps and you had your own private transport. All this sort of mischievous nonsense was going on at Nadzab. I sometimes wonder if that’s why they sent half of us on leave, just to get rid of us.

Three weeks I think, about three weeks.

Yes. I had malaria during that leave. I had malaria back in New Guinea. When I came home, posted to

the artillery. When I got out of the army I was still getting malaria. I would say I’d be a week in the…we had a hospital out in the Sydney Showground and when we got malaria we’d report to the Sydney Showground. We’d be in there for a few days sweating it out and then a heavy dose of Atebrin and we were in for about a week and we’d be out for three weeks and we’d be back in again so we were spending about one week in four, the bad malaria

sufferers of whom I was one, for about 18 months. We’d be one week in four in the hospital. We sort of, you know, you got to set your social program by it. “No I probably won’t be able to come that week, I’ll be in hospital.” You just knew that you could last three weeks, get all this Atebrin loaded into you and you could last about three weeks and then you’d get it again and then one month it just didn’t happen, didn’t ever happen again. I just grew out of it but I was 18 months home before I was clear. It was a dreadful

disease, it really was.

Yeh.

Wrapped ourselves up and laid down and sweated it out. It was a hazard on all the stations. You know there was usually one or other guy down with malaria. If you were lucky or unlucky you were both down together, in which case somebody had to get up and do the weather schedule

but in that case Nabess and old Zeck would look after us and bring us food in bed and that sort of thing but it was miserable to see. You got a very high temperature and headache and you felt really rotten and the last thing you wanted to do was get off your bunk. That was our side of it. The other side of it of course it was quite a dangerous disease. There are more people in the world die from malaria than any other known

disease I believe, to this day. It can be quite a fatal disease if you get it badly enough and often enough and are not treated adequately.

Weight?

No I didn’t seem to lose weight. In fact I was quite amazed when I did get home and I weighed myself that I didn’t seem to have lost any and might even have put a little on.

At Meigar Harbour we ate very well. We had a lot of fresh vegetables. We had a lot of fruit. We had a lot of fish, in addition to our own and now that the war’s over I can tell you we weren’t beyond selling a bit of bully beef and biscuits to the natives who used to love it and a tin of bully beef and a few biscuits would get you a scrub turkey or a leg of pig or, so we did get rather more fresh food than a soldier would normally get, just because

of that particular location. The fishing was good and the natives were friendly.

Yeh, clunk on the ground in the middle of the night. They used to fall. You’d get used to hearing them. Learnt not to sit down under a coconut tree and get hit on the head. Got hit with a coconut in Saidor one night but, it damaged my knee. I stayed on duty

and I’m still looking forward to, or not looking forward to, replacement of that knee to this day. It’s never been good. On the other hand, I’ve managed a fairly active life with it so…but coconut, you know you get a coconut on your head, it’d kill you. They’re big heavy things and they fall without warning. You learn, watch where you’re walking between the trees. Yes, I think I could peel a coconut in about 30 seconds or less

and when I went back up to New Guinea 40 years later, the first thing I wanted to do was peel a coconut so I rushed outside and got one. Before I got half way through the first husk I was a bath of perspiration and I went inside for a cold drink. I’d forgotten how energetic it was to peel a coconut with your bare hands.

Well, by the time we got back from leave the remainder of the guys had come down on their leave and were staying down. They had come home. From memory we had about a party of about 20 of us, had to get all the trucks back to ordinance store and lose the few wild jeeps that we weren’t supposed to have and the proceedings and all this. We had a three tonne truck and

a cat had kittens in it and she refused to get out so we got an identical three tonne truck and we put the cat and all her kittens in that so we could return this one to ordinance. By the time we’d gone and got our paperwork ready, that cat had her kittens back in the truck, so she went off to ordinance with them but just cleaning up the camp site and getting rid of all the stores, packing up and sending home to Australia anything that the unit had to bring home but mainly it was weapons, ammunition, vehicles

and that sort of equipment.

No we walked away and left that. Our camp was in tents. We had no military building there and our mess hut was just tall sticks, brown paper and tar. I’ve forgotten what they call it, a laminated brown

paper with tar in it [sisalcraft] and fibre in there, dreadful stuff but it came in rolls and we just had, was tall sticks with an iron roof and this brown tar paper around the sides and open from there to the roof but it was fairly well damaged because one of the fellers had gone troppo and came in there with an Owen gun and shot hell out of the place, poked holes in the roof and everything. They put him in a straight jacket and sent him off back home.

He was a big, strong man and it took quite a number of the boys, I was there but I wasn’t involved trying to… It took quite a few men to overpower him and we got the Medical Corps, took him away and he just went nuts. People do up there. World War I had its shellshocks and World War

II had its troppos and Bill was troppo. He turned up many years later at a reunion, somewhere in the ‘70’s, late ‘70’s. He said, “I believe I put on a good show at Nadzab” and we said, “You certainly did”. Fortunately he didn’t aim at any of us but he discharged the whole magazine from his Owen gun. I don’t know how he got his hands on an Owen gun for that matter, but he did. Interesting fellow, when he got out of the nuthouse he used to spend most of his

life at his local RSL [Returned and Services League] club and his wish when he died was to be buried in the rose garden at the RSL club but at the end away from the building. At the far end he wanted to be in their rose garden and we said to him, “Why Bill?” He said, “Because the dogs pee on the roses down this end” and so eventually Bill died and he was buried in the rose garden at his RSL club but he was many years off the planet before he sort of…

his sister still turns up occasionally on Anzac Day. We have a ladies day once a year and those of us who are left and a few widows, we get anything up to about 20 people. We’ve had a lunch each year, for some years now. I got to be President of the Association about six or seven years ago on the grounds that I was the youngest one and therefore likely to live the longest; therefore it’s your job. You know it was one of those sort of democratic elections where I didn’t get any choice and so we put on this,

my wife and I put on this luncheon at the Automobile Club every year. They used to turn up and Bill’s sister used to come along and she’s a nice lady, quite a lot of widows and just recently, just this year we’ve moved from the Automobile Club. The price was going up. The place was getting more crowded. It was a less suitable venue so we moved our little operation out to the Kingsgrove RSL. We have a fellows’ luncheon out there three or four times a year and the ladies luncheon once a year there now

but, you know the group’s down to about 10, getting smaller.

Yep, unit was disbanded. We had a major down there whose job it was to make us all look like soldiers again. He found that a very frustrating task particularly as most of us were in hospital most of the time with malaria. We came home, went straight down to Balcombe in Victoria where it was cold and as soon as you

hit the cold the boys were going over. The local hospital couldn’t hold them all. We had tent lines in the hospital grounds all full of malaria patients. Our officers had all gone off and been posted elsewhere.

Just before we came home, I think probably before

they had decided to take us with them. The idea was we’d train a few of their people how to run spotting stations, wasn’t personally involved in it. It started when I was up at Meigar Harbour. We started to get a few American voices on the air and I think they had two stations operating but the Americans, their equipment was heavier. It was bigger. It was more powerful. It was probably technically a much better station than we had but it was

also heavy. It required a vehicle and that required a driver. You know by the time you got all these people and a driver and a cook and they didn’t have a bugler but they had a lieutenant and the stations just got to be too big and too unwieldily. Then they tried to run it on our minimal staff of two or three and found that it was not manageable with the equipment they had, vastly superior equipment to ours, but just too big and heavy. Anyhow they operated a few stations, two stations I think for a few months

and then decided it was not the ideal thing to do. The thing was to take us with them and, as I say, Major Cumpston the CO was negotiating that, didn’t have a lot of CO’s. Major Cumpston was I think the third, second or third and then Jack Marsh, John Marsh at the end. I don’t know how they got on after they moved on from Hollandia. They were at Aitape, Hollandia. We were out and they went

on without us and we all came back home but it was something that was peculiarly Australian. I think it was probably to our advantage that we weren’t trained signalmen. I think the fact that we were, there were a lot of trained infanteers there rather than trained signalmen but it was just such a polygot lot of people and we didn’t have a name or a commanding officer or anything. We just had a system that grew and

it was so busy nobody had bothered about the details and they gave us to Papuan infantry [actually the Papuan administration]. Eventually when they gave us a name and decided that we should be an independent company that was October ’43. Well, we’d been in operation then nearly two years and so we got a commanding officer, a bloke called Major Guiney. Prior to that John Marsh was just, he was the boss. We did everything he said but he didn’t hold any

rank or station or anything. He was just, you know the chief spotter. He did a magnificent job but he didn’t have any, we had no war establishment. All units have a war establishment. It’s a paper formula by which you exist. You have so many platoons to a company and so many companies to a battalion and so many battalions to a brigade and all this is laid out on paper but it was never anticipated there’d be anything like the spotters. There was a need. There were the volunteers.

We got them started. “We” collectively, I was, as I said, later but by October 1943 they decided we were an independent company and Major Guiney came along as our commanding officer. he was the first commanding officer and John Marsh was just John the boss. Everybody did as John said, took Major Guiney around the camp and introduced him to Corporal Townrow who was the cook.

Townrow was a very good cook and he was very proud of his being a corporal and he liked to be addressed as Corporal Townrow so John Marsh took the Major in and said “Corporal Townrow, this is our new Commanding Officer, Major Guiney” so Major Guiney said “How do you do Townrow?” and he said, “I’m fine thanks, Guiney” and of course the major was technically out of line by not

addressing the corporal by his rank and the corporal took him to task by addressing him as his surname, but no rank. John Marsh spent many months trying to get these two to settle down and actually speak to each other. The CO wouldn’t talk to the cook and the cook wouldn’t talk to the CO and it was sort of a comic incident. Eventually Guiney moved on and we got a new CO, Major Cumpston who was, as I say, towards the end of the war posted off to Washington and John Marsh

himself took command and he brought us home.

We knew we were contributing all right.

We were, the unit was constantly in the field and working for nearly two years. Well, normally a unit is in the field for a few weeks and they’re pulled out and relieved by another unit and rested and this sort of thing and whilst some of our individual stations were pulled out and rested, many of them stayed in the field for a whole year at some of the stations but generally speaking, three to six months was a stint on a spotting station. It depended on

a lot of things, how well you were, how well you were performing, how easy it was to get you in and out. See some of these stations you would be on foot going overland for two to three weeks to get there. There was one station early in the piece…they’d been going out about a fortnight to get out where they were going, established their set, came on, gave their call sign

and said, “Wait” and we’re still waiting. They vanished.

That’s right, which was to great advantage. It’s a lot easier to cater for two or three men. If you’ve got 20 men, you’ve got a truckload of food to get in to them

whereas you’ve got a very small team, it’s easier to cater for them. It’s easier for two men to survive if they’re living off the land.

40 Japanese disappeared on one of our stations one night. Soldiers disappear. That’s part of what soldiers do.

Well I s’pose, I don’t think we had any direct order. It was a matter of commonsense. It was laid on the line to us, “You’re not going out there to kill soldiers. You’re going out there to spy on them for that matter” and in fact the Japanese, when they took some of our earlier stations, took the view that they were spies and executed them, particularly the ones who weren’t in uniform like one station that

I can name amongst other people, a missionary. They just vanished. We heard later that they’d been beheaded. Another mob disappeared and the story that came back, some of these stories were able to be confirmed after the war but most of them not. There was one bunch of fellows alleged to have been locked up in a shed and machine gunned. They’re pretty cruel people the Japanese and you

tried very hard not to get into their hands. On the same token, two men here and two men there, well two men at Lae they had a company of infantry up there in the mountains searching for them for months and couldn’t find them. It’s very hard to find two men in that wild country. I mean the mountains are like that [indicating very steep] and the ridges are just incredible. A lot of places there’s just room for a man to walk single

file along the top of the ridge and it falls away like this, down. It’s very hard to operate a large body of troops out searching for a station. The Japanese used to fly, particularly they’d fly a lone aircraft at night and they’d just circle over an area waiting to see who switched on and reported them. Now they either had sufficiently accurate direction finding equipment to get the actual line on it but they learnt where the areas were they could most likely get a bomber through without being detected

but they couldn’t get very far. If it flew over New Guinea, our stations saw it and reported it. Very often a flight of aircraft or convoy of ships off the coast and the coast watchers is something we haven’t discussed. They were another part of our existence but…

It’s a bit of a sore point with our people.

Eric Feldt was a navy lieutenant commander who in 1939 was posted up in the islands and he went round and he engaged a lot of people, particularly planters and particularly out in the Solomon Islands and New Britain area, out on the small islands, where there was a shipping channel called the Slot and it was the logical place for shipping to come in and out and he organised that

any shipping that came through his Slot was reported back to VIG, the station in Port Moresby which the AWA, the wireless company had handed over to the navy. Then Eric Feldt was back in Townsville. His coast watchers, thanks to a book he wrote himself, became quite world famous for what they were doing, which is as civilians

spotting; as they got into trouble, the navy pulled them out. Some of them they gave commissions and sent back in again. Others they just repatriated and put in naval personnel or a combination army and air force personnel and the same with the spotters. We had a few air force personnel attached to our various stations at times, simply because they were available. Anyhow Eric Feldt discovered that we had a network far bigger than his and far more extensive. We weren’t just concerned

with coast watching. We were watching the land and the air, the whole mainland of New Guinea as well as all the islands and so he started making enquiries about “what was our spotting strength and what was our distribution?” and put a submission to the army that he should take over the Air Warning Wireless Company too and the Air Warning Wireless Company wasn’t even a company at that stage, kicked up a terrible fuss about it and Feldt found himself

posted back in Townsville with a flea in his ear, not only he didn’t’ take over the army network, he even lost his own network because he was pigeon-holed down in Townsville, a military officer was put in charge of the coast watcher network. Well now the coast watchers today are universally known, mainly through the book and they have quite a heroic

charisma about them. They’ve got great displays of the people and their work down at the National War Museum, which is one of our sore points. We have young people going down there looking for their fathers or their grandfathers unit. “Where was Papa during the war?” you know and not a sign of us. There’s nothing on display down there, no colour patch, no, we know they’ve got things. We know they’ve got one of our radio sets down in the basement.

I hope it’s not getting too wet and rusty. They’ve got quite a lot of photographs including the one that Damien Parer took that they published in The Herald. We lost that station. We saved the man but lost the station. There is a history of the unit written by a lieutenant, Ray Clarke I think he was [actually Ray White].

Ray, he was always known as Knocker and Knocker wrote a history of the unit right through, detailing all the things we had done, [indicates]copy of it there. Ray was in charge of our technical maintenance division. All these radio sets and battery chargers needed repair from time to time and these guys used to come out, single handed, sometimes weeks on the track to get to a spotting station to repair or replace the equipment, come back again. Then Ray and his boys

gave us that field service and repaired all the equipment. He wrote this record in New Guinea up to the time we disbanded and came home. Captain McGarrigle who was one of our early officers had a copy of it and it’s down in the War Museum under McGarrigle’s name. I asked for a copy of it, couldn’t have it, copyright, had to get Mrs McGarrigle’s permission. Mrs McGarrigle had died many

years before, couldn’t find anybody in the electoral role named McGarrigle and they still said, “No you can’t have it” and I said, “All I want to know is does it start with this paragraph and end with the paragraph?” ‘cause if it does, I’ve got a copy of it anyhow” and so while they’re guarding theirs as copyright to hell, I’ve got a copy right here that I’ve run through the roneo and circulated amongst the boys.

But this information is in the War Memorial but there’s no display and if the

person going in there makes an inquiry, including one of our very early spotters, Max Youngman, who was one of the first blokes who went out, the first troops who went out to put that warning system in around Port Moresby, went out on a Sunderland flying boat and Max was one of those and he personally went to the War Memorial and said, “Where’s the display of New Guinea Air Warning Wireless?” and they “Uh?” Nobody knew. There’s no public record

but if you happen to get the number of the file you can ask for McGarrigle’s documents and they come back and they’ll show you a photo of the Koitaki school of signals with McGarrigle in a crowd of about 40 other officers but even the ones we’ve published in our own spotter’s book, we have the War Memorial’s number of the negative. We still can’t get access to it.

Those of us who were in it were quite satisfied that what we did, we did well and we finished the job and we, although we didn’t have any companionship much during the war, there’s a network of friendships that’s persisted to this day.

I think we personally are satisfied but I think it’s a bit sad that the younger people who seek to study the history of their forebears and the military history and there are still people searching for their grandfathers in Boer War and World War I. It’s part of what museums do. I feel that particularly in view of the fact that they’ve given so much space and publicity to the coast watchers

we were no more secret than they were. We were far more in numbers. We were far, far more in terms of the job that we did because we were operating land as well as sea; air, land and sea. We’ve started a little campaign over the last few years to try and get somebody at the War Memorial to listen and say that

our children and grandchildren should be able to come along and find where we were and they can’t do that and I wrote this in a letter to the Minister, Dana Vale, and I have a copy of our, that book “The Private War of the Spotters” which is written by our own members and is our own story.

I’ve sent this to the Minister and said “Can we get something going at the War Memorial?” She didn’t even answer me so I’m now going to write to her and say “I wasted a good book. It was the last available

one. Please send it back. There are lots of soldiers whose families don’t have a copy of that” so we’re getting nowhere with it although I do have a hope at the moment. I found a magazine called “War Time” which is published out of that museum by a couple of war historians. A fellow called Robert Nichol; Dr Nichol is the editor and I was put onto him by a researching historian down there, a fellow called Professor Clarke and they said “well write us a story,

we’ll publish it in our magazine” so I might have somebody down there in the name of historian at the War Museum who’s interested in listening to us but I say to the boys, “What can we do about this?” and they say “Oh let it go. We know the story” and then one of them finds that their grandson can’t find about it so they say, “What are we going to do about this?” but we’re all getting beyond the age of, I suppose I could go down and knock on doors and stamp my foot and demand to see things in the

War Museum but at 80 years of age just going down to Canberra to the War Museum itself is a major task. That’s why I’ve tried to do it on the computer, on the internet from home and when I get to putting the acid on them really “Why can’t I have this?” It’s not McGarrigle’s stuff. He can’t have put a copyright on it. It’s army property and he shouldn’t have it anyhow. If I’d been the commanding officer at the time I’d have souvenired it too, but why can’t I have it? And then the correspondence ends. They stop answering me,

difficult.

I think we were adventurous young men who did a job that relied mainly on initiative and succeeded probably because of its

lack of rules rather than because of its rules. It was the lack of rules that allowed us to do what we did. If you went to the army for the right authority to assemble a company to do this, you’d never get it off the ground. It was just that they just said to a corporal “get me some blokes up in the mountains with radio sets” and that was so immediately successful it took off and so we met a demand. We

delivered the goods, most of us survived, not all and we’re quite happy with what we did in the circumstances but it is a bit sad to see this great hole in the history, or in the publicly available history.

We didn’t have any set of rules to say that

John Marsh had to ask the adjutant’s permission to be paraded before the commanding officer to ask permission to put a man with a civilian radio set out in the bush in the middle of a war. You know, armies are just not gauged to handle that sort of deal and John just grabbed the fellers and put them out there and we did it and after we’d been doing it for 17 months somebody just decided, “Well for heaven’s sake give them a name”, because they were a corporal from the

New Guinea Volunteer Rifles, an aircraftsman from the RAAF, a flight lieutenant up in the bush with a radio set, soldiers of all rank from private to major and it was, in the true sense of the word, an initiative.

It couldn’t be anticipated that the need would occur as it did. I don’t think the Australian army has ever fought in a territory which is mainly vertical. I mean there are literally places, I have flown in New Guinea from one airport to the other, flying time 40 seconds, from this ridge to that ridge, walking time, two days, down the mountain and up the other side. It’s crazy country with no roads, which meant no

army trucks, no tanks. British Protectorate, full of Japanese; “get in there and do something” and I don’t think that sort of circumstance has ever risen before, may never arise again. It was just a unique set of circumstances and a unique handful of men, principally John Marsh, Vic Gilchrist, the New Guinea Volunteer

Rifles, a handful of volunteers, wherever they could grab a bloke who knew something about wireless sets, he had an amateur radio operators license, “you’ll do, you’re in too”, the volunteers, all. It was an initiative. Now I don’t know if I can give you a better description. May I read something to you?

This is on the cover of our book. This is Sir William Keys AC, OBE, MC, past National President of the RSL: “Men of the Air Warning Wireless Company operated in small numbers, two or three personnel isolated from supply lines, medical treatment, protected only by their own initiative and courage often completely surrounded by the enemy, they suffered the harshest of conditions”.

None of that is an exaggeration. That’s pretty accurate. Major General Simpson, the Signal’s Chief: “I can only express my highest admiration for the bravery, sacrifice, courage and fortitude of those who served in this famous signal unit”. “Famous signal unit!”…for a number gave their lives. They gave outstanding service to Australia by giving warning of enemy air raids, enemy movements by land and sea and thus enabling our allied air force to take necessary security action to protect our

planes to counter these raids. It can be accepted the successful course of the war could have been seriously delayed, if not greatly prolonged, if this unit had not operated so efficiently”.

Well that’s what a few blokes of general rank think about it and I can’t disagree with them.

With a lot of pride and some humility I think they’re pretty well spot on. That’s who we were. That’s what we did. I think it’d only be possible with a bunch of harem-scarum 19 year olds. I think an established military unit with enough of the wisdom that seems to come with age may not have done it nearly so well or so successfully and certainly not so quickly but our lack of establishment that when we say to somebody

“Why aren’t we on the War Memorial, lives lost, where are the spotters?” They’re parked in with ANGAU because nobody owned them at the time. I mean they were out there. They were working; they were dying but nobody owned them so they just got plonked in with ANGAU and it’s very hard to compile the history and, although the work’s there and it’s in the Museum but nobody’s been sufficiently interested

in it to make it into a military, a museum version of the history. It was written by a lieutenant who was in the tech maintenance section. There was another book published in the early 60’s by a sergeant, once again from the tech maintenance and they were the ones who knew all the stations and all the equipment, ‘cause they serviced it. They were only a small section and then a few of the boys, a group got together

and called for all these spotters to give the story of their own station and so that book contains stories of some of the great escapades about the Lae OP , the Salamaua OP, the Kokoda operation. They’re all in there, told by the fellers who were there and did it and that book is in the War Museum too, but try and find it, ooff. It’s recorded. It’s history. It’s in the Museum but it’s not available for the public and

that is my little campaign. Make this stuff stick together. Acknowledge the fact that we did become a unit after most of the action had gone on. We did achieve the war “establishment”. Somebody gave a description, mainly Major Guiney’s work I think and he got to describe exactly what we were and how we fitted into the army and put it all on paper and that constituted a war establishment but the Museum seems to take

the attitude “Oh that station up there. That was an action by the air force and that one was by the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles and it’s hard to make it all stick together and convince somebody that it was one unified, very, very unified movement, mainly through the military genius of John Marsh.

What a pity. I’m enjoying it.

Yes. War Museum, if you are tuned in and I know I shouldn’t speak to cameras, if you are tuned in, get your act together and write our history and make it public please, while there are still a few of us alive to help you. That’s about how I feel. I don’t know how long our Association will last.

We say jokingly, “We’ll still keep having our lunches while there are still two of us left” and hopefully we’ve got a few more years yet but we’re getting less and less inclined, less in charge to take our aching joints and our coughs and things and go and splutter round Canberra trying to talk to people who are living in an ivory tower. I’m just hoping that I can find an energetic historian who will pick up the cudgels and run with it.

Kathy [interviewer], it’s been a delightful experience for me too and thank you and Chris, sitting over there quietly in the corner watching the camera.